Quotes from Karl Mannheim

Behind every rational and irrational force in human society there is a social mechanism which determines where it is to appear and what forms it is to take.

ideology signifies a phenomenon intermediate between a simple lie at one pole, and an error, which is the result of a distorted and faulty conceptual apparatus, at the other.

Hence insight may be regarded as the core of social knowledge. It is arrived at by being on the inside of the phenomenon to. be observed, or, as Charles H. Cooley put it, by sympathetic introspection. It is the participation in an activity that generates interest, purpose, point of view, value, meaning, and intelligibility, as well as bias.

The works of the past appear to the scholar as pictures in a gallery - an array of discrete entities. The temptation to construe this array as an organic and continuous growth is well-nigh irresistible to those who confine their interest to the historical records of creative expression. What is ignored in this imagery are the intervening areas in which men act and react as social beings.

The distrust and suspicion which men everywhere evidence toward their adversaries, at all states of historical development, may be regarded as the immediate precursor to the notion of ideology.

For progressive people the present is the beginning of the future. For conservative people the present is the end of the past.