SOURCE: "The Sociology of Knowledge and Its Consciousness," in Prisms, translated by Samuel Weber and Sherry Weber, The Mit Press, 1981, pp. 35-49.

In the following essay, Adorno focuses his discussion on Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction.

The sociology of knowledge expounded by Karl Mannheim has begun to take hold in Germany again. For this it can thank its gesture of innocuous skepticism. Like its existentialist counterparts it calls everything into question and criticizes nothing. Intellectuals who feel repelled by 'dogma', real or presumed, find relief in a climate which seems free of bias and assumptions and which offers them in addition something of the pathos of Max Weber's self-conscious and lonely yet undaunted rationality as compensation for their faltering consciousness of their own autonomy. In Mannheim as in his polar opposite, Jaspers, many impulses of Weber's school which were once deeply embedded in the polyhistoric...