SOURCE: "Politics as a Science," in Karl Mannheim, Ellis Horwood Limited, 1984, pp. 14-32.

In the following excerpt, Kettler, Meja, and Stehr focus on the political aspects and implications of Mannheim's sociological writings.

Mannheim and Liberal Political Thought

Karl Mannheim often commented on the social condition of the outsider, who stands on the margin of an integrated social field, or on the boundary between two or more. No condition could have been more familiar to him. While the position of a Jewish student and young intellectual in the Budapest of 1910 may have been 'marginal' only when viewed from the nationalist perspective easy enough for this circle to dismiss, he twice in his life underwent the experience of exile and twice had to find a voice and a language appropriate to a newcomer. He left Hungary in 1919, after the failures of the progressive liberal and Soviet regimes; and he fled...