In addressing the exile studies of one of Karl Mannheim's students, our topic is the ambiguous conjunction of autobiography and sociological theory. In other words, we are interested in self-reflection on exile as a constituent of scientific clarification and innovation in its study. Reflexivity and selfdistantiation were central motifs of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and, quite apart from his well-known call to self-knowledge among those he classified as intellectuals, he repeatedly applied the concept not only to the position of women, but also to the situation of the exile. Writing about himself in the early 1920s as an exile in Germany from Horthy's authoritarian regime in his native Hungary and again in 1944 as a ‘refugee’ in England from Hitler's Germany, he claimed that persons in that marginal situation could bring unique insight to their hosts but only if they first became fully aware of who and where they themselves had come to be. Understanding presupposes a measure of distance from oneself as well as from the external contextures to be understood. There is an attractive self-evidence in such a claim, familiar to sociologists from Georg Simmel's seminal work on “the stranger,” but in this paper my aims are not only to secularize the concept of productive reflexivity, to ask what remains if we do not imagine (with Mannheim's early mentor, Georg Lukács) that the insights to which it refers operate in the manner of a dialectical Aufhebung, but also to raise some questions about situational and psychological limits on such reflexivity.