David Kettler – författare

This book focuses on the important work of Karl Mannheim by demonstrating how his theoretical conception of a reflexive sociology took shape as a collaborative empirical research programme. The authors show how contemporary work along these lines can benefit from the insights of Mannheim and his students into both morphology and genealogy. It returns Mannheim's sociology of knowledge inquiries into the broader context of a wider project in historical and cultural sociology, whose promising development was disrupted and then partially obscured by the expulsion of Mannheim's intellectual generation. This inspired volume will appeal to sociologists concerned with the contemporary relevance of his work, and who are prepared for a fresh look at Weimar sociology and the legacy of Max Weber.

In a series of focused studies related to the event that has generated the richest literature in exile studies – the intellectual exiles arising out of Nazi rule – this volume reconsiders a number of issues raised by that literature, notably the multiple, complex and changing negotiating processes and bargaining structures constitutive of exile, especially as the question of return interplays with the politics of memory.

This book focuses on the important work of Karl Mannheim by demonstrating how his theoretical conception of a reflexive sociology took shape as a collaborative empirical research programme. The authors show how contemporary work along these lines can benefit from the insights of Mannheim and his students into both morphology and genealogy. It returns Mannheim's sociology of knowledge inquiries into the broader context of a wider project in historical and cultural sociology, whose promising development was disrupted and then partially obscured by the expulsion of Mannheim's intellectual generation. This inspired volume will appeal to sociologists concerned with the contemporary relevance of his work, and who are prepared for a fresh look at Weimar sociology and the legacy of Max Weber.

To reflect on Karl Mannheim is to address fundamental issues of political enlightenment Mannheim's driving determination "was to learn as a sociologist by close observation the secret (even if it is infernal) of these new times." Mannheim's aim was "to carry liberal values forward." His problem remains irresistible to reflective people at the end of the twentieth century. Mannheim attempted to link social thinking to political emancipation despite overwhelming evidence against the connection. Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism is a sympathetic biography of Mannheim's paradoxicalaand paradigmatica'project. The book covers a wide range of European and American thought, including Mannheim's dealings with Georg Lukacs and Oscar Jszi in Budapest; with Alfred Weber, Leopold von Wiese, Franz Neumann, Paul Tillich, Adolph Loewe, and his students in Weimar Germany; with Louis Wirth, Edward Shils, and other major figures in American sociology; and with social analysts and religious thinkers in England. The analysis is informed by dilemmas of history and theory, science and rhetoric, freedom and technical controlathe themes of liberalism. Kettler and Meja carefully depict each stage of Mannheim's life as a sociologist and explore his influence on leading social thinkers. Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism combines significant biographical information with insightful sociological theory. It will be a vital resource for historians, sociologists, and political theorists.

The thought of Adam Ferguson generated great excitement among many of his philosophic contemporaries in the late eighteenth century, and it continues to inspire the modern reader. This major study by David Kettler is an ideal introduction to Ferguson's life and thought. The new introduction to this first paperback edition discusses Ferguson's work in relation to his better-known contemporaries David Hume and Adam Smith, while the afterword offers an in-depth reconsideration of Ferguson's most renowned work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, with emphasis on present-day disputes about the concept of civil society. Ferguson welcomed the advent of critical and analytical philosophy as an ally against superstitious credulity and confused obscurantism, but he was afraid that it might also dissolve into incomprehensible technical complexity and ethical relativism. He was attracted by the manifest practical accomplishments of modern science, as well as by its masterful ordering of natural phenomena into a unified theoretical structure, but he feared that its adherents would debase the notion of man to that of a machine at the mercy of mechanical forces. Ferguson thought well of ambition, but he also believed that a frenzy of ambition and frustration might tear at man's self-respect and peace of mind. The decisive phenomenon manifested by Ferguson's writing is the emergence of an intellectual's point of view toward the conditions of modern society. Many of the questions that he posed have been restated in more profound ways, some of the questions and most of the answers have been eliminated or transformed beyond recognition; and all of the issues he raises are now expressed by others in harsh, new words. But, however formulated, Ferguson's concerns clearly foreshadow the problems of over-rationalization, dehumanization, atomization, alienation, and bureaucratization that have been repeatedly canvassed by intellectuals in our time.

To reflect on Karl Mannheim is to address fundamental issues of political enlightenment Mannheim's driving determination "was to learn as a sociologist by close observation the secret (even if it is infernal) of these new times." Mannheim's aim was "to carry liberal values forward." His problem remains irresistible to reflective people at the end of the twentieth century. Mannheim attempted to link social thinking to political emancipation despite overwhelming evidence against the connection. Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism is a sympathetic biography of Mannheim's paradoxicalaand paradigmatica'project. The book covers a wide range of European and American thought, including Mannheim's dealings with Georg Lukacs and Oscar Jszi in Budapest; with Alfred Weber, Leopold von Wiese, Franz Neumann, Paul Tillich, Adolph Loewe, and his students in Weimar Germany; with Louis Wirth, Edward Shils, and other major figures in American sociology; and with social analysts and religious thinkers in England. The analysis is informed by dilemmas of history and theory, science and rhetoric, freedom and technical controlathe themes of liberalism. Kettler and Meja carefully depict each stage of Mannheim's life as a sociologist and explore his influence on leading social thinkers. Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism combines significant biographical information with insightful sociological theory. It will be a vital resource for historians, sociologists, and political theorists.

The Hungarian-born Karl Mannheim became recognized as a pathbreaking sociologist in Germany when he published 'Ideologie und Utopie' (1929) and in the English-speaking world upon publication of 'Ideology and Utopia' (1936), a book in which he explored the possibilities of an approach to political thought by way of sociology of knowledge. Eighty years later, and viewed from varied substance-rich perspectives worldwide, the many facets of Mannheim’s original work are examined in their bearing on numerous other questions in political theory, cultural studies and social analysis. 'The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim' is an international collection of original articles on the classical sociologist and documents the current revitalization of the reception of this social thinker. Using “learning from Mannheim” as their motif, the chapters in this volume favor fresh negotiations with his works, including the writings published posthumously in recent decades.

A labor lawyer and publicist of weight in the Weimar Republic, Franz Neumann devoted his 21-year exile, after 1933, to understanding the failure of arrangements supposed to be in the line of social progress. He sought to delineate a new conception of democracy as a vehicle of social change. A remarkably effective teacher in the last years of his life, Neumann was also a gifted learner, whose negotiations with a series of forceful thinkers enabled him to work toward a promising intellectual strategy in political thinking. Learning from Franz L. Neumann examines Neumann’s social and political theory in the context of his career as a practitioner, learner and teacher

In the study of the National Socialist State and its aftermath, two unusual aspects continue to occupy historians and social science commentators. First, a factor important enough to enter into the very definition of totalitarianism is the thoroughgoing mobilization, coercive if needed, of the population of writers, teachers, professors journalists and other intellectual workers, securing cooperation – or at the least passive concurrence – in the mass-inculcation of the population in the destructive Fascist ideology. Second is the central place of dissident members of these populations in the exile. Since webs of communications with others, the majority of whom had remained in Germany, had constituted their own memberships in the populations at issue, the question of their roles in the post-war era depended importantly on the ways and means by which they restored – or refused to restore – communications with those who had remained.