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Man and Society. A review of Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, by Karl Mannheim
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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- Additional Information
London: Kegan Paul, 1940. Pp. xxii + 469.
Dr. Karl Mannheim is a sociologist, indeed, one of the most distinguished of living sociologists; and this massive work has the inexorable formality and complete apparatus (with seventy-three pages of bibliography) that one expects of continental scholarship. It is also difficult reading; though the difficulty of Dr. Mannheim’s style is not due to any imperfection of English, and not, as with much American writing in this field, to the employment of a technical jargon. The vocabulary is that of any educated person. The difficulty of reading is due rather to a conscientious thoroughness, which prevents the author from passing any point until he has considered it from every aspect, and keeps the impatient reader marching at his own slow pace; it is also due to a judicial and remarkably impartial temper of mind, which refuses to present the difficult as if it were simple, or to allow prejudice or emotion to usurp the province of thinking.
It would seem at first, therefore, that this book is one which should be reviewed only by a professional sociologist for the benefit of other sociologists. If that were so, it would hardly be reviewed in these columns, and certainly not by this reviewer. This is, in fact, a book which everyone seriously interested in the future of our society ought to read; and being the work of a mind not only powerful and learned, but intelligent and widely cultivated, and possessed of urbanity and wisdom, it is profitable reading quite independently of our prejudices either for or against the science of which the author is an exponent. The value of reading it is not dependent upon our accepting any particular conclusions, but resides rather in giving us a widened consciousness of the contemporary situation; this is, indeed, one of that small number of books an acquaintance with which becomes “experience.”
I cannot attempt any account of the whole field that the book covers; the most that one can do is to suggest the assumptions from which it starts. The dilemma of modern society is the apparent necessity of choice between freedom and organisation. The future of totalitarian society may seem very doubtful; its structure may be very brittle, its cohesion superficial; its ability to preserve even the level of civilisation which it inherited may vanish; but it has undoubted advantages of efficiency in the present, and might conceivably succeed in bringing all other forms of social order to its own condition, even though that condition be deplorable. To Mannheim, as to many other thoughtful minds, the totalitarian order is only a local attempt to cope with a malady which infects the whole world; it is a specific which only alters the phase of the disease. Society cannot be restored to the nineteenth-century situation; it must alter its aims. Society cannot return to any earlier degree of simplicity; it can only proceed to a more intelligent and thorough organisation. But freedom of some kind is also essential for human beings; so the problem is, in what areas of life are we to have organisation and control, and in what areas are we to have freedom of action by voluntary associations and by individuals? Hence the phrase, which Dr. Mannheim has put into currency, “planning for freedom.”
Such is a very crude summary of the premisses of the book. Incidental to their elaboration is a great deal of very penetrating analysis of the contemporary situation and its origins. The first impression of...
