Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Baehr, Peter

Titel

The Problem of "Unmasking" in "Ideology and Utopia": Karl Mannheim, Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt

Ist Teil von

• Sociologica (Bologna), 2013-01, Vol.18 (1)

Ort / Verlag

Società editrice il Mulino

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Since the French Revolution, intellectual and popular cultures of the West have beencharacterized by tropes of "unmasking," a kind of exposure that purports to show mendacityand domination operating unseen beneath the surface of human affairs. Karl Mannheim wasa particularly astute commentator on this phenomenon. His Ideology and Utopia (1929) andcognate writings offer an account of unmasking that is detailed, contextual, nuanced and critical.While he grants that unmasking was a condition of sociology's emergence, Mannheim argues thatit has outlived its usefulness for purposes of explanatory understanding. He further decries thedestructive impact of unmasking on political discourse: an openly debunking attitude poisonsthe well of principled dialogue by claiming one's interlocutor to be either a charlatan or a dupe ofhistory. Critics such as Hannah Arendt and her mentor Karl Jaspers went further, condemningunmasking as execrable in principle and depicting sociology and psychology as major casualtiesof its rhetorical excesses - Mannheim's sociology of knowledge included. This article describesMannheim's analysis of unmasking, the rhetorical moves he employed to move beyond theunmasking mode, and objections to his project of Jaspers and Arendt. Mannheim's reception ismuted today while Arendt's is on a steadily rising curve of appreciation. But a reconstruction ofMannheim's ideas on unmasking reveals an author who, at the time Arendt sparred with him,demonstrated a far greater comprehension than she did of the history and stakes of a topos thatpervades modern thinking.