SOURCE: Review of Ideology and Utopia, in Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 103, No. 1, Winter, 1973, pp. 83-9.

In the following essay, Shils discusses the social and historical circumstances under which Mannheim wrote Ideology and Utopia.

Karl Mannheim was extraordinarily sensitive to his national and continental environment and to his own time. He read widely; he had a lively curiosity and a quickly moving imagination which enabled him to respond to many kinds of events. From 1914 until his death in 1947 at the age of fifty-four he had only about a decade of relative calm: 1925 to 1929 in Germany and 1933 to 1939 in Great Britain. The rest of his adult life was spent in the midst of war, revolution, and uncivil commotion. A sociologist of such a sensitive imagination could not have avoided perceiving these unrelenting and pitiless conflicts and making them into a theme of central...