was enshrined in the party’s election manifesto; a manifesto has been submitted
to the electorate, whereas the House of Lords is an unelected body.
Mannheim
Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) was a German sociologist and theorist who, both
before and after the Second World War, developed some of the most pene-
trating ideas on the problem ofideologyin society yet to be published.
Although there areMarxistovertones to his theoretical writing, he was not a
Marxist in any orthodox sense, and provides us with the only powerful non-
Marxist analysis of the social conditioning of thought, and the consequences
for political life of socio-economically derived ideologies. His classic work,
Ideology and Utopia, distinguishes with great care the various ways in which all
people suffer from viewing the world through categories, values and assump-
tions that owe more to their own location in the socio-economic system than
from any really clear observation of reality. It is part of Mannheim’s corrective
to Marxism that he insists that all those with clear socio-economic interests are
liable to a distortion in the way they see the world and understand, for
example, the workings of the economy. Thus there cannot be some especially
privilegedclass, as some Marxists want to regard the proletariat, who perceive
things truly while the bourgeoisie are blinkered byfalse consciousness. He
does, however, grant to one sector of society a greater chance to see clearly.
These are what he calls the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’, who, because they have
no clear economic interest, being neither workers in the proper Marxist sense,
nor capitalists, can hope to synthesize the conflicting world pictures of the two
opposing classes. It was this social group on whom Mannheim placed his trust
for the creation of a new and peaceful Europe after the Second World War.
Not only has the intelligentsia come to be more and more influential in post-
war countries in both Eastern and Western Europe, but they also fit very badly
into most orthodox Marxist class analyses. The declining acceptance of Marx-
ism amongst modern social scientists has not removed the need for a theory of
ideology, making Mannheim even more potentially influential.
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong (1893–1976) can best be characterized with an aphorism that
suits well his own literary style, unusually erudite among modern communist
leaders. He is the man who ruled a quarter of the world’s population for a
quarter of a century. The son of a peasant farmer, he discoveredMarxism
while in Beijing (having already broken with Chinese tradition in disobeying
his father and leaving the peasant life). Mao was one of the founders of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in 1921, and from then until the setting up
Mannheim