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Portrait of Karl Mannheim

Unknown author · Public domain

Karl Mannheim

Hungarian-German philosopher and sociologist

1893 – 1947aged 53

A Hungarian sociologist who helped found the sociology of knowledge, arguing in Ideology and Utopia (1929) that all thought, including one's own, is shaped by social position — a claim that unsettled easy distinctions between objective analysis and self-interested belief. He distinguished ideologies that prop up existing arrangements from utopias that imagine transforming them, a framework still taught in sociology and political theory.

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