Joseph Gabel - Böcker

This remarkable work situates the great Karl Mannheim not only in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but in Hungary and especially in the intellectual fever pitch of pre-war Budapest, with its plethora of revisionist Marxists, anarchists, and intellectuals from a variety of areas who brought radical ideas into the mainstream of biological and social sciences. As Gabel reminds us, Budapest provided a special environment in which the cross-currents of Europe met, and was uniquely devoid of the xenophobia and militarism of so many other parts of Europe.The volume serves as a useful introduction to the force and character of Marxism in Central Europe. Gabel covers not only key figures but major concepts associated with Mannheim and the sociology of knowledge: ideology and false consciousness; the socially unattached intelligentsia; and the utopian conscience. In addition, we are given a tour of the work of Mannheim as seen in Germany, France and England. Gabel's has a unique mastery of the major languages of Europe, and this gives him the potential for a reinterpretation of Mannheim that reveals the author to be a talented thinker in his own right, and not simply a chronicler of the work of others. His final chapter on Mannheim, comparing him with Lukacs as well as Marx, is central to our understanding of sociology.In raising the importance of the role of consciousness in the study of society, Mannheim overcame what Marx and Engels, no less than many of his followers understood to be an essential weakness in the so-called economic interpretation of history. This book, linking Mannheim to the Hungarian climate, helps us appreciate how this sociological synthesis came about in a specific social setting.Joseph Gabel was born in Hungary, and educated in French universities. He is the author of False Consciousness (1962); Sociology of Alienation (1970); Ideologies, Vol. I (1974); Ideologies II (1978), all in French. His book on The Forms of Estrangement (1964) was published in German. His shorter articles have appeared in Kolner Zeitschrift for Soziologie und Sozial-psychologie, and the Newsletter of the International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge.

Thirty-five years ago Joseph Gabel pub­lished a modern masterpiece, which in 1975 appeared in English as False Con­sciousness: An Essay on Reificalion . Combining his special knowledge of existential psychiatry, axiology, Marx­ism, and political history, Gabel pro­posed the utterly novel idea that victims of serious mental disturbances (espe­cially paranoia and schizophrenia) re­produce those distorted thought pat­terns commonly associated with ideo­logical beliefs at the collective level. Such beliefs initially had been laid bare in the 1920s by Gabel's intellectual progenitors, Karl Mannheim and George Lukacs. Gabel's remarkable innovation was to transfer the private crisis of mental collapse into the analytic frame­work previously reserved for ideological critique, making him an expert on what was later called "the micro-macro prob­lem."Ideologies and the Corruption of Thought includes Gabel's essays over the last 40 years, characteristically treating micro and macro theoretical matters simultaneously. Originally writ­ten in French and German, they have been recast in idiomatic English and bibliographically updated. Using a unique mode and vocabulary of analy­sis, Gabel offers theoretical investiga­tions of McCarthyism and Stalinism (original and more recent types), as well as Althusser, Orwell, and Jonathan Swift in his capacity as a psychiatric theorist. He also explores anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and a fascinating case study of a paranoid who regarded him­self as the pope. In addition this volume includes a range of general commentar­ies on ideological "thought," utopianism, and false consciousness.This rich feast of social and political analysis and theory illuminates a range of contemporary concerns - racism, Utopian fantasy, ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, the interplay of social struc­ture and mental illness, and ideological transformations of social life - which only Gabel's unique mixture of the clini­cal and the political could achieve. It will be studied with interest by all theo­rists and politically alert readers in the social sciences, philosophy, and related fields of study.

This remarkable work situates the great Karl Mannheim not only in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but in Hungary and especially in the intellectual fever pitch of pre-war Budapest, with its plethora of revisionist Marxists, anarchists, and intellectuals from a variety of areas who brought radical ideas into the mainstream of biological and social sciences. As Gabel reminds us, Budapest provided a special environment in which the cross-currents of Europe met, and was uniquely devoid of the xenophobia and militarism of so many other parts of Europe.The volume serves as a useful introduction to the force and character of Marxism in Central Europe. Gabel covers not only key figures but major concepts associated with Mannheim and the sociology of knowledge: ideology and false consciousness; the socially unattached intelligentsia; and the utopian conscience. In addition, we are given a tour of the work of Mannheim as seen in Germany, France and England. Gabel's has a unique mastery of the major languages of Europe, and this gives him the potential for a reinterpretation of Mannheim that reveals the author to be a talented thinker in his own right, and not simply a chronicler of the work of others. His final chapter on Mannheim, comparing him with Lukacs as well as Marx, is central to our understanding of sociology.In raising the importance of the role of consciousness in the study of society, Mannheim overcame what Marx and Engels, no less than many of his followers understood to be an essential weakness in the so-called economic interpretation of history. This book, linking Mannheim to the Hungarian climate, helps us appreciate how this sociological synthesis came about in a specific social setting.Joseph Gabel was born in Hungary, and educated in French universities. He is the author of False Consciousness (1962); Sociology of Alienation (1970); Ideologies, Vol. I (1974); Ideologies II (1978), all in French. His book on The Forms of Estrangement (1964) was published in German. His shorter articles have appeared in Kolner Zeitschrift for Soziologie und Sozial-psychologie, and the Newsletter of the International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge.