The Institute of Social Research 157The claim that the task of sociology is to scrutinize critically all exist-
ing world-views so as to expose their ideological content and, at the
same time, to offer a guide to meaning and action was the central asser-
tion of Mannheim’s successful book Ideology and Utopia of 1929. There
he raised the question: ‘How is it possible for man to continue to think
and live in an age when the problems of ideology and utopia are being
radically raised and thought through in all their implications?’^86 This
question went to the heart of the intellectual debates of the day. World-
views fought one another to establish their exclusive right to explain the
world. The emerging discipline of sociology, which saw itself as the
guardian of our knowledge of society, fell apart in the struggle between
materialist and idealist foundations. Against this background, Mannheim
proposed to make conscious the fact that competition in the realm of
the mind was productive because intellectual competition exposes both
the historical and the social bias of different world-views, and thus
relativizes the different doctrines.
Adorno had worked on an essay critical of Mannheim since the early
1930s, albeit with lengthy interruptions. He focused on the problematic
equation of world-view and ideology as well as, more generally, on the
flaws in Mannheim’s thinking. As he wrote in November 1934 to
Benjamin, it was his ‘most explicitly Marxist piece’.^87 He was concerned
primarily with Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, a book that
had appeared in 1935, after Mannheim had left Germany. Mannheim
had put forward the arguments it contained in a lecture in London at
which Adorno had been present. He wrote a critical commentary on it
which he then read out to Mannheim in person. Adorno claimed in a
letter to Horkheimer that for the first time Mannheim ‘was somewhat
disconcerted’.^88 Like Horkheimer earlier on, Adorno again reproached
Mannheim for being insufficiently radical in his social criticism as well
as for his neutrality on matters of ideological commitment, both of
which were linked to his self-imposed restriction to ‘formal sociological
description’. Instead of employing dialectical concepts to help make
transparent the antagonistic laws governing social dynamics by testing
them out on such questions as class distinctions or the formation of
monopolies, Mannheim enters his concepts ‘in a defined system of co-
ordinates’. This means that the dynamic laws governing society appear
‘to be contingent or accidental, mere sociological “differentiations”’.
Such generalizing sociology seems like a mockery of reality.^89 Adorno’s
dispute with Mannheim ended up in a global rejection that was com-
pletely in line with Horkheimer’s: whereas sociology began as a critique
of the principles governing society, the sociology of knowledge limits
itself to reflections on ‘egregious [illustre] social phenomena’.
Adorno’s criticism of Mannheim was not published, as originally
intended, in the last issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung for 1937.
One reason for this was that Adorno did not really add anything to
Horkheimer’s criticism of Mannheim’s concept of ideology seven years