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This book consists of three essays written by Karl Mannheim in 1933, before he was forced by the Nazis to leave Germany. The first paper, 'Towards a Sociology of the Mind', consists of a
closely reasoned approach to the study of the Sociology of Culture. In the second two essays Mannheim uses the tools which he has forged so carefully in the first essay, and applies them to the task of elucidating the two main theses of which the remainder of the book consists, namely the historical rôles of the intelligentsia and the problem of democratization.
In the first essay Hegelian Philosophy is shorn of its unrealistic overtones, and is used to further the author's penetration into the study of mental processes and their significance in their own indigenous social context. This paper is difficult to comprehend, and in some ways it is better to read it both before and after reading the second and third essays. In this way its essential usefulness as a conceptual framework can be more fully appreciated.
In the second essay, 'The Problem of the Intelligentsia', the author begins by referring to the early outcropping of intelligentsia in certain cultural milieux. Both the frequency of such occurrences and the numbers involved have vastly increased in the past few centuries. Mannheim goes on to state that in his opinion a single human being becomes sociologically significant only through multiple involvement with various social groupings. The process of individuation takes place through the impact of conflicting social groups upon the person, the metamorphosis which thus ensues being analogous to that undergone by a metal when it is being tempered. Mannheim emphasizes the importance of the coffee house as a training ground for a somewhat different type of intelligentsia in the seventeenth century in Europe, but more especially in England, where the coffee house developed into an important social institution. In it the premium was on the spoken word, and thus a much grea