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The three essays contained in this volume were written during the last years of Karl Mannheim's life in Germany (before 1933). They extend, elaborate, and attempt a new departure from 'Ideology and
Utopia', his principal study in the field of the sociology of knowledge. He incorporates the disillusionment over the excessive claims of German idealism into a sociological theory of thought. He criticizes the overestimation of the role of ideas in human affairs, and he assumes that concepts which emerge in various periods of history evolve from one another in logical continuum. Ideas are functions of social involvement. Once the image of an autonomous evolution of ideas has been abandoned, the exploration of the relationship between thought and its social milieu becomes feasible.
As may be expected, Karl Mannheim is more concerned in relating his conceptual structures to Hegel, Marx, and Max Weber than to Sigmund Freud.
The editors (Ernest Manheim and Paul Kecskemeti) had to rethink the original text and succeed in doing so without distortion of the author's intentions. They have succeeded in the even more difficult task of making the meaning and import of Karl Mannheim's Essays comprehensible in another idiom than the one in which it was written, and understandable to the readers of a different generation, raised in a different national tradition.