SOURCE: "Mannheim's Historicism," in Social Research, Vol. 19, No. 3, September, 1952, pp. 300-24.

In the following essay, Wagner analyzes the concept of a "sociology of knowledge" as developed in Ideology and Utopia.

With increasing recognition of the need for broader theoretical orientations, American sociologists have become increasingly interested in the problems of a sociology of knowledge. In pursuing this interest they have not fallen back on earlier American "armchair" traditions—on such heritages, for example, as Summer's theory of ethnocentricity, Keller's evolutionary extensions of it, Veblen's combination of class interpretation with a theory of social-evolutionary stages, Robinson's critique of social conceptions and thought control. Rather, attention has been fixed on a series of European theoreticians, among them such positivistic thinkers as Pareto and Durkheim and such "idealistic" philosophers as Scheler. The dominant influence, however, has been that of karl Mannheim.

Actually, this influence stems from but one publication, the three...