SOURCE: "Man and Society," in The Spectator, Vol. 164, No. 5841, June 7, 1940, p. 782.

In the following review of Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, Eliot praises Mannheim's insight and intellectual honesty.

Dr. Karl Mannheim is a sociologist, indeed, one of the most distinguished of living sociologists; and this massive work [Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction] 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...