Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia has been a profoundly provocative book. The debate about politics and social knowledge that was spawned by its original publication in 1929 attracted the most promising younger scholars, some of whom shaped the thought of several generations. The book became a focus for a debate on the methodological and epistemological problems confronting German social science. More than thirty major papers were published in response to Mannheim's text. Writers such as Hannah Arendt, Ernst Robert Curtius, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Helmuth Plessner, Hans Speier and Paul Tillich were among the contributors. Their positions varied from seeing in the sociology of knowledge a sophisticated reformulation of the materialist conception of history to linking its popularity to a betrayal of Marxism. The English publication in 1936 defined formative issues for two generations of sociological self-reflection. Knowledge and Politics provides an introduction to the dispute and reproduces the leading contributions. It sheds new light on one of the greatest controversies that have marked German social science in the past hundred years.

Preface; Part 1 Introduction; Chapter 1 On the sociology of knowledge dispute, Meja Volker, Nico Stehr; Part 2 The Sociology of Knowledge: Early Statements; Chapter 2 The sociology of knowledge: formal and material problems, Max Scheler; Chapter 3 The ideological and sociological interpretation of intellectual phenomena, Karl Mannheim; Part 3 The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute; Chapter 4 Competition as a cultural phenomenon, Karl Mannheim; Chapter 5 Discussion of Karl Mannheim's 'Competition' paper at the Sixth Congress of German Sociologists (Zurich, 1928), Alfred Weber, Werner Sombart, Robert Wilbrandt, Emil Lederer, Adolf Löwe, Alfred Meusel, Norbert Elias, Hans Jonas, Paul Eppstein, Karl Mennheim; Chapter 6 On Ideology and Utopia, Paul Tillich; Chapter 7 Sociology - and its limits, Ernst Robert Curtius; Chapter 8 Problems of sociology in Germany, Karl Mannheim; Chapter 9 The sociological method and the problem of truth, Herbert Marcuse; Chapter 10 A new concept of ideology?, Max Horkheimer; Chapter 11 The sociology of knowledge and Marxism, Ernst Lewalter; Chapter 12 On the so-called 'existential connectedness' of consciousness, Günther Anders; Chapter 13 Philosophy and sociology, Hannah Arendt; Chapter 14 Sociology or ideology?, Hans Speier; Chapter 15 Knowledge and society, Karl August Wittfogel; Chapter 16 Ideology and science, Eduard Spranger; Chapter 17 The conception of ideology and its vicissitudes, Helmuth Plessner; Chapter 18 The sociology of knowledge and epistemology, Ernst Grünwald; Chapter 19 The sociology of knowledge and methodology, Alexander von Schelting; Part 4 Epilogue; Chapter 20 Relativism and the sociology of knowledge, Nico Stehr, Volker Meja;