Ideology and Utopia An Introduction to Sociology of Knowledge

Control of the Collective Unconscious as a Problem of Our Age

The original German edition of Ideology and Utopia appeared in an atmosphere of acute intellectual tension marked by widespread discussion which subsided only with the exile or enforced silence of those thinkers who sought an honest and tenable solution to the problems raised.

We are witnessing not only a general distrust of the validity of ideas but of the motives of those who assert them.

The more secularized social and political theory became and the more thoroughly it dispelled the sanctified myths which legitimized the existing political order, the more precarious became the position of the emerging social science.

For thought is a catalytic agent that is capable of unsettling routines, disorganizing habits, breaking up customs, undermining faiths, and generating scepticism.

Nonetheless wherever scientific activity has been carried on in an organized and self-conscious fashion, these problems have always received a considerable amount of attention.

In the realm of the social, particularly, truth is not merely a matter of a simple correspondence between thought and existence, but is tinged with the investigator's interest in his subject matter, his standpoint, his evaluations, in short the definition of his object of attention.

In human life, the motives and ends of action are part of the process by which action is achieved and are essential in seeing the relation of the parts to the whole.

It is the participation in an activity that generates interest, purpose, point of view, value, meaning, and intelligibility, as well as bias.

The most important thing, therefore, that we can know about a man is what he takes for granted, and the most elemental and important facts about a society are those that are seldom debated and generally regarded as settled.

This has led to the introduction of the wiles of salesmanship into the realm of ideas, and has brought about a condition where even scientists would rather be in the right than right.

The widespread depreciation of the value of thought on the one hand and its repression on the other hand are ominous signs of the deepening twilight of modern culture.

Such a task requires more than the application of well-established logical rules to the materials at hand, for the accepted rules of logic themselves are here called into question and are seen, in common with the rest of our intellectual tools, as parts and products of the whole of our social life.

In every society there are individuals whose special function it is to accumulate, preserve, reformulate, and disseminate the intellectual heritage of the group.

When, however, any human activity continues over a long period without being subjected to intellectual control or criticism, it tends to get out of hand.

Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him.

Perhaps it is precisely when the hitherto concealed dependence of thought on group existence and its rootedness in action becomes visible that it really becomes possible for the first time, through becoming aware of them, to attain a new mode of control over previously uncontrolled factors in thought.

One turns from the direct observation of things to the consideration of ways of thinking only when the possibility of the direct and continuous elaboration of concepts concerning things and situations has collapsed in the face of a multiplicity of fundamentally divergent definitions.

The most significant stage of this communication is reached when the forms of thought and experience, which had hitherto developed independently, enter into one and the same consciousness impelling the mind to discover the irreconcilability of the conflicting conceptions of the world.

They simply had the courage to express what every person who was really characteristic of the epoch felt, namely, that the previous unambiguity of norms and interpretations had been shattered...

The second characteristic of this monopolistic type of thought is its relative remoteness from the open conflicts of everyday life ; hence it is also "scholastic " in this sense, i.e. academic and lifeless.

The almost unanimously accepted world-view which had been artificially maintained fell apart the moment the socially monopolistic position of its producers was destroyed.

Only that has validity which I can control in my own perception, which is corroborated in my own experimental activity, or which I myself can produce or at least conceptually construct as producible.

However, the more precise this empirical psychology became, the greater the appreciation of the scope of empirical observation, the more evident it became that the subject was by no means such a safe point of departure for the attainment of a new conception of the world as had previously been assumed.

The aim here was not so much to comprehend as precisely as possible the inner contentual richness of experiences as they coexist in the individual and together operate towards the achievement of a meaningful goal ; the attempt was rather to exclude all distinctive elements in experience from the content in order ... that, wherever possible, the conception of psychic events should approximate the simple scheme of mechanics (position, motion, cause, effect).

But the further men advanced in analysis, the more the goal disappeared from their field of vision, so that to-day a research worker might say with Nietzsche "I have forgotten why I ever began"

Even if all the meaning conveyed by the magical-religious view of the world had been "false," it still served-when viewed from a purely functional standpoint-to make coherent the fragments of the reality of inner psychic as well as objective external experience...

Every concept represents a sort of taboo against other possible sources of meaning-simplifying and unifying the manifoldness of life for the sake of action.

That this psychology actually constitutes a trained incapacity to deal with problems of the mind accounts for the fact that it offers no foothold to living human beings in their daily life.

It has shown thereby that the life of a psychic phenomenon is the phenomenon itself. The meaning of history and life is contained in their becoming and in their flux.

The transvaluation, as indicated in the sentence above, has its roots basically in a group situation in which hundreds and. thousands of persons, each in his own way, participate in the overthrow of the existing society.

In actuality it is far from correct to assume that an individual of more or less fixed absolute capacities confronts the world and in striving for the truth constructs a world-view out of the data of his experience.

Only when the point of view is introduced into the genetic approach from the very beginning, according to which a group of 2,000 persons do not perceive the same thing 2,000 times, but in which, in accord with the inner articulation of group life and with various functions and interests, subgroups arise which act and think collectively with and against each other—only when things are seen from this angle can we achieve an understanding of how, in the same inclusive society, diverse meanings can arise due to the divergent social origins of the different members of the whole society.

The full emergence of the sociological point of view regarding knowledge inevitably carries with it the gradual uncovering of the irrational foundation of rational knowledge.

What the philosophers fought out among themselves in a rational terminology was experienced by the masses in the form of religious conflict.

Without, however, a social life-situation compelling and tending toward individualization, a mode of life which is devoid of collective myths is scarcely bearable.

The result of this amalgamation of politics and scientific thought was that gradually every type of politics, at least in the forms in which it offered itself for acceptance, was given a scientific tinge and every type of scientific attitude in its turn came to bear a political colouration.

Physical repression is, it is true, harder to bear externally, but the will to psychic annihilation, which took its place in many instances, is perhaps even more unbearable.}```of_course_the_quote_is_cut_off_due_to_the_original_text_ending_there_but_here_is_the_exact_verbatim_quote_from_the_text:{

Political discussion is, from the very first, more than theoretical argumentation ; it is the tearing off of disguises-the unmasking of those unconscious motives which bind the group existence to its cultural aspirations and its theoretical arguments.

But in the measure that the various groups sought to destroy their adversaries' confidence in their thinking by this most modern intellectual weapon of radical unmasking, they also destroyed, as all positions gradually came to be subjected to analysis, man's confidence in human thought in general.

The battle rages concerning those propositions in which every concept is meaningfully oriented from the first, in which we use words like conflict, breakdown, alienation, insurrection, resentment-words which do not reduce complex situations for the sake of an externalizing, formal description without ever being able to build them up again and which would lose their content if their orientation, their evaluative elements, were dropped out.

Are not the norms which prevail in this family, and which are intelligible only through meaningful interpretation, at least as much a part of the milieu as the landscape or the furniture of the household?

The disregard of qualitative elements and the complete restraint of the will does not constitute objectivity but is instead the negation of the essential quality of the object.

Those persons who talk most about human freedom are those who are actually most blindly subject to social determination, inasmuch as they do not in most cases suspect the profound degree to which their conduct is determined by their interests.

The sociology of knowledge is, in this sense, the systematization of the doubt which is to be found in social life as a vague insecurity and uncertainty.

This method will have, in addition, the advantage that it will not have to disregard the realm of meaning as uncontrollable but will on the contrary make the interpretation of meaning a vehicle of precision.

Whereas contradictions are a source of discomfiture to the systematizer, the experimental thinker often perceives in them points of departure from which the fundamentally discordant character of our present situation becomes for the first time really capable of diagnosis and investigation.

These distortions range all the way from conscious lies to half-conscious and unwitting disguises ; from calculated attempts to dupe others to self-deception.

These distortions range all the way from conscious lies to half-conscious and unwitting disguises ; from calculated attempts to dupe others to self-deception.

When we attribute to one historical epoch one intellectual world and to ourselves another one, or if a certain historically determined social stratum thinks in categories other than our own, we refer not to the isolated cases of thought-content, but to fundamentally divergent thought-systems and to widely differing modes of experience and interpretation.

Every individual participates only in certain fragments of this thought-system, the totality of which is not in the least a mere sum of these fragmentary individual experiences.

We arrive at this level when we no longer make individuals personally responsible for the deceptions which we detect in their utterances, and when we no longer attribute the evil that they do to their malicious

The human understanding resembles not a dry light, but admits a tincture of the will and passions, which generate their own system accordingly, for man always believes more readily

This was an expression of the increasing degree to which the public was gaining access to the secrets of politics.

This profound disintegration of intellectual unity is possible only when the basic values of the contending groups are worlds apart.

It should be noted, however, that the historically changing nature of mind was discovered not so much by philosophy as by the penetration of political insight into the everyday life of the time.

The result of this dual tendency is that instead of a fictional unity of a timeless, unchanging " consciousness as such" (which was never actually demonstrable) we get a conception which varies in accordance with historic periods, nations, and social classes.

The annihilation is now more thoroughgoing since the attack is made on the noological level and the validity of the adversary's theories is undermined by showing that they are merely a function of the generally prevailing social situation.

The modern conception of ideology was born when Napoleon, finding that this group of philosophers was opposing his imperial ambitions, contemptuously labelled them 'ideologists.'

If erroneous knowledge was formerly checked by appeal to divine sanction, which unfailingly revealed the true and the real, or by pure contemplation, in which true ideas were supposedly discovered, at present the criterion of reality is found primarily in an ontology derived from political experience.

The materialistic conception of history is not to be compared to a cab that one can enter or alight from at will, for once they enter it, even the revolutionaries themselves are not free to leave it.

In contrast to this special formulation, the general form of the total conception of ideology is being used by the analyst when he has the courage to subject not just the adversary's point of view but all points of view, including his own, to the ideological analysis.

What was once the intellectual armament of a party is transformed into a method of research in social and intellectual history generally.

Even a god could not.formulate a proposition on historical .subjects like 2 X 2 = 4, for what is intelligible in history can be formulated only with reference to prob- lems and conceptual constructions which themselves arise in the flux of historical experience.

Deeper insight into the problem is reached if we are able to show that morality and ethics themselves are conditioned by certain definite situations, and that such fundamental concepts as duty, transgression, and sin have not always existed but have made their appearance as correlatives of distinct social situations.

The word binds us to the whole of past history and, at the same time, mirrors the totality of the present.

It is precisely our uncertainty which brings us a good deal closer to reality than was possible in former periods which had faith in the absolute.

Knowledge arising out of our experience in actual life situations, though not absolute, is knowledge none the less.

Thus we are faced with the curiously appalling trend of modern thought, in which the absolute which was once a. means of entering into communion with . . the divine, has now become an instrument used by those who r; ..,, profit from it, to distort, pervert, and conceal the meaning of the present.

He who makes no decisions has no questions to raise and is not even able to formulate a tentative hypothesis which enables him to set a problem and to search history for its answer.

The mystics had already maintained that there are truths and values beyond time and space, and that time and space and all • that occurs within them are merely illusory appearances, when compared with the reality of the mystic's ecstatic experience.

May it not be possible that the ecstatic element in human experience which in the nature of the case is never directly revealed or expressed, and the meaning of which can never he fully communicated, can be discovered through the traces which it leaves on the path of history, and thus be disclosed to us.

The danger of " false consciousness " nowadays is not that it cannot grasp an absolute unchanging reality, but rather that it obstructs comprehension of a re-ality which is the outcome of constant reorganization of the mental processes which make up our worlds.

Antiquated and inapplicable norms, modes of thought, and theories are likely to degenerate into ideologies whose function it is to conceal the actual meaning of conduct rather than to reveal it.

A perception may be erroneous or inadequate to the situation by being in advance ot it, as well as by being antiquated.

If the investigator, instead of at once taking a definite position, will incorporate into his vision each contradictory and conflicting current, his thought will be flexible and dialectical, rather than rigid and dogmatic.

To defend our analysis against the attempt to use it for such propagandistic purposes, let it be said that there exists a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, a blind partisanship and the irrationalism which arises out of mere mental indolence, which sees in intellectual activity no more than arbitrary personal judgments and propaganda, and on the other the type of inquiry which is seriously concerned with an objective analysis, and which, after eliminating all conscious evaluation, becomes aware of an irreducible residue of evaluation inherent in the structure of all thought.

But when the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defence mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions.

The somnambulistic certainty that has existed with reference to the problem of truth during stable periods of history thus becomes intelligible.

Such a solution is strangely like the dictum of the theorists of constitutional monarchy, which states : " The king reigns but does not govern."

Only too often is it found that the synthesis, which is presented with the assurance that it embraces the whole, turns out in the end to be the expression of the narrowest provincialism...

Only too often is it found that the synthesis, which is presented with the assurance that it embraces the whole, turns out in the end to be the expression of the narrowest provincialism...

Crises are not overcome by a few hasty and nervous attempts at suppressing the newly arising and troublesome problems, nor by flight into the security of a dead past.

In a world which is as permeated by a rationalistic ethos, as is our own, this fact represents a striking anomaly.

Political conduct is confronted with a process in which every moment creates a unique situation and seeks to disentangle out of this ever-flowing stream of forces something of enduring character.

The chief characteristic of modem culture is the tendency to include as much as possible in the realm of the rational ·;11 ) and to bring it under administrative control-and, on the other hand, to reduce the "irrational" element to the vanishing point.

Conduct, in the sense in which we use it, does not begin until we reach the area where rationalization has not yet penetrated, and where we are forced to make decisions in situations which have as yet not been subjected to regulation.

So true is this that, in the realm of political and social thinking, we must, in my judgment, recognize actual differences in styles of thought-differences that extend even into the realm of logic itself.

The fundamental tendency of all bureaucratic thought is to turn all problems of politics into problems of administration.

The exclusive concern of the military bureaucrat is military action and, if that proceeds according to plan, then all the rest of life is in order too.

In this sphere, petty textbook wisdom deserts us and solutions to problems cannot be mechanically deduced from premises.

Furthermore, just as parliament is a formal organization, a formal rationalization of the political conflict but not a solution of it, so bourgeois theory attains merely an apparent, formal intellectualization of the, inherently irrational elements.

As sociologists there is no reason why we should not apply to Marxism the perceptions which it itself has produced, and· point out from case to case its ideological character.

Communism for us is not a condition that is to be established nor an ideal to which reality must adjust itself.

A basic lesson derived from political experience which was most impressively formulated by Napoleon in the maxim, "On s'engage, puis on voit," here finds its methodological sanction.

This passion is valuable .only because it makes poss11:>le the fusion of .the accumulated rationality tested out e.l<.pedmemally in the individual experiences of millions.

Sentimental ties are effective only within a limited spatial area, while a theoretical Weltanschauung has a unifying power over great distances.

The moment, however, is nothing more than that irrational element in the ' here and now,' which every theory, by virtue of its generalizing tendency, obscures.

Only through acting in the situation do we address questions to it, and the answer we derive is always in the form of the success or failure of the action.

"To be youthful means being able to forget. We Italians are, of course, proud of our history, but we do not need to make it the conscious guide of our actions-it lives in us as part of our biological make-up."

Fascism regards every interpretation of history as a mere fictive construction destined to disappear before the deed of the moment as it breaks through the temporal pattern of history.

The superior person, the leader, knows that all political and historical ideas are myths. I-:fe himself is entirely emancipated from them, but he values them-and this is the obverse side of his attitude-because f they are "derivations" (in Pareto's sense) which stimulate enthusiastic feelings and set in motion irrational " residues " in men, and are the only forces that lead to political ac- tivity.

It is characteristic of this type of thought and this mode of life that history dissolves itself into a number of transitory situations in which two factors are decisive ; on the one hand, the elan of the great leader and of the vanguard or elites and on the other the mastery of the only type of knowledge which it is believed possible to obtain concerning the psychology of the masses and the technique of their manipulation.

Being psychologically and socially situated at a point from which they can discern only the unordered and unrationalized in the development of society, the structural development and the integrated framework of society remain completely hidden from their view.

They are not primarily interested in overthrowing, reforming, or preserving the social structure- their chief concern is to supplant the existing dominant elites by others.

It seems nothing less than remarkable that man, living in the blinding glare of the irrational, is still able to command from instance to instance the empirical knowledge necessary to carry on his everyday life.

Historical events appear as a process only as long as the class which views these events still expects something from it.

It has become incontrovertibly clear to-day that all knowledge which is either political or which involves a world-view, is inevitably partisan.

To Marxism belongs the credit for discovering that politics does not consist merely in parliamentary parties and the discussions they carry on, and that these, in whatever concrete form they appear, are only surface expression of deeper-lying economic and social situations

All points of view in politics are but partial points of view because historical totality is always too comprehensive to be grasped by any one of the individual points of view which emerge out of it.

If the cleavage in political and philosophical perceptions consisted merely in the fact that each was concerned with another side or section of the whole, that each illuminated only a particular segment of historical events, an additive synthesis would be possible without further ado.

This unanchored, relatively classless stratum is, to use Alfred Weber's terminology, the "socially unattached intelligentsia" (freischwebende Intelligenz).

One of the most impressive facts about modern life is that in it, unlike preceding cultures, intellectual activity is not carried on exclusively by a socially rigidly defined class, such as a priesthood, but rather by a social stratum which is to a large degree unattached to any social class and which is recruited from an increasingly inclusive area of social life.

It remains to be asked, however, whether in the political sphere, a decision in favour of a dynamic mediation may not be just as much a decision as the ruthless espousal of yesterday's theories of the one-sided emphasis on to-morrow's.

It bespeaks a psychic compensation £or the lack of a more fundamental integration into a class and the necessity of overcoming their own distrust as well as that of others.

Thus they might play the part of watchmen in what otherwise would be a pitch-black night.

If the party schools address themselves exclusively to those whose political decisions have been made in advance by parties, this mode of study will appeal to those whose decision remains yet to be made.

The fact that political science in its spontaneous form does not fit into the existing framework of science, as we understand it, and that it is in contradiction with our present-day conception of science does not mean that politics is at fault.

The upshot of this was that the practical man dealing with concrete situations, and applying his knowledge informally, was more intelligent than the theorist who observed only a limited sphere because he was imprisoned by the presuppositions of his science.

Making these two synonymous, however, is not necessarily correct, since it is easily possible that there are truths or correct intuitions which are accessible only to a certain personal disposition or to a definite orientation of interests of a certain group.

An illustration of the first is that only one who loves or hates gets to see in the loved or hated object certain characteristics which are invisible to others who are merely spectators.

When, however, we enter the realm of politics, in which everything is in process of becoming and where the collective element in us, as knowing subjects, helps to shape the process of becoming, where thought is not contemplation from the point of view of a spectator, but rather the active participation and reshaping of the process itself, a new type of knowledge seems to emerge, namely, that in which decision and standpoint are inseparably bound up together.

We cannot emphasize too much that the social equation does not always constitute a source of error but more frequently than not brings into view certain interrelations which would otherwise not be apparent.

To-day we almost take it for granted that science begins when it destroys our original approach ;md replaces it by one which is foreign to living experieun:.

Indeed, historians have even taken pride in the thesis that nothing can be learned from history.

The man who is purposefully active will never ask how some revered leader acted in a past situation, but rather how he would really orient himself to the present situation.

Thus intellect acts upon intellect in a rarified atmosphere detached from the concrete situation.

The workshop brings about a relationship of mutual participation between master and apprentice. Here nothing is systematically expounded to be "taken cognizance of" by the apprentice.

What the studio has meant to creative art and the workshop to the handicrafts, the social form of the club has meant to liberal-bourgeois politics.

Would we not, without further ado, be giving up a significant achievement of history precisely in the critical moment when party machinery threatens to overwhelm us, if we did not make the attempt to strengthen those tendencies which enable us to make decisions on the basis of a prior total orientation?

There is no more favourable opportunity for gaining insight into the peculiar structure of the realm of politic~ than by grappling with one's opponents about the most vital and immediate issues because on such occasions contradictory forces and points of view existing in a given period find expression.

Nothing could be more dangerous than such a one-sided and narrow orientation to the problem of knowledge.

Nothing is more self-evident than that precisely t.he forms in which we ourselves think are those whose limited nature is most difficult for us to perceive, and that only further historical and social development gives us the perspective from which we realize their particularit"y.

Actually it is the one who is ignorant of the significant determining factors and who acts under the immediate pressure of determinants unknown to him who is least free and most thoroughly predetermined in his conduct.

Only those orientations transcending reality will be referred to by us as utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time.

Rather they have always aimed to control those situationally transcendent ideas and interests which are not realizable within the bounds of the present order, and thereby to render them socially impotent, so that such ideas would be confined to a world beyond history and society, where they could not affect the status quo.

To live consistently, in the light of Christian brotherly love, in a society which is not organized on the same principle is impossible.

The representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can in principle never be realized.

Only in utopia and revolution is there true life, the institutional order is always only the evil residue which remains from ebbing utopias and revolutions.

The existing order gives birth to utopias which in turn break the bonds of the existing order, leaving it free to develop in the direction of the next order of existence.

When concepts which are not designed to reveal structures are applied to history, how can we hope to demonstrate historical structures by means of them?

Whenever an idea is labelled utopian it is usually by a representative of an epoch that has already passed.

The extent to which ideas are realized constitutes a supplementary and retroactive standard for making distinctions between facts which as long as they are contemporary are buried under the partisan conflict of opinion.

For in human mentality it is not always the same forces, substances, or images which can take on a utopian function, i.e. the function of bursting the bonds of the existing order.

In the sense of our definition, an effective utopia cannot in the long run be the work of an individual, since the individual cannot by himself tear asunder the historical-social situation.

The innermost structure of the mentality of a group can never be as clearly grasped as when we attempt to understand its conception of time in the light of its hopes, yearnings, and purposes.

The decisive turning-point in modern history was, from the point of view of our problem, the moment in which "Chiliasm " joined forces with the active demands of the oppressed strata of society.

It is at this point that politics in the modern sense of the term begins, if we here understand by politics a more or less conscious participation of all strata of society in the achievement of some mundane purpose, as contrasted with a fatalistic acceptance of events as they are, or of control from 'above.'

The impossible gives birth to the possible, and the absolute interferes with the world and conditions actual events.

For the real Chiliast, the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it.

When this spirit ebbs and deserts these movements, there remains behind in the world a naked mass-frenzy and a despiritualized fury.

Under certain circumstances, nothing contains more irrational drive than a fully self-contained, intellectualistic world-view.

Where it was not possible to follow in this path, as in Germany, the utopia was introverted and assumed a subjective tone'.

Elevated and detached, and at the same time sublime, it lost all sense for material things, as well as every real relationship with nature.

The religious idea of development may be understood as an ebbing away of the Chiliastic impulse-as a process in which abiding faith (Harren) becomes, in the German milieu a "waiting and anticipation," and the Chiliastic time-sense merges imperceptibly into an evolutionary one.

The Chiliastic mentality has, as we saw, no sense for the process of becoming ; it was sensitive only to the abrupt moment, the present pregnant with meaning.

There are, according to this view, times that are pregnant with meaning and times that are devoid of meaning.

It is often possible to trace shifts in social position through the 'angle of refraction' with which ideas are taken over.

Conservative mentality as such has no utopia. Ideally it is in its very structure completely in harmony with the reality which, for the time being, it has mastered.

The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

In conservatism, we find the process of approximation to the 'here and now' completed. The utopia in this case is, from the very beginning, embedded in existing reality.

The inner form of historical individuality existing at any given time, be it that of an individual personality or of a folk spirit, and the external conditions together with the past that lies behind it, determine the shape of things that are to be.

The conception of time here in question has an imaginary third dimension which it derives from the fact that the past is experienced as virtually present.

Even when it is turned inward, ecstatic experience represents a danger to the existing order, for it is constantly under temptation to express itself outwardly, and only prolonged discipline and repression transform it into quietism.

But instead of finding the solution to the problems of right conduct, and instead of history furnishing divine guidance, this inner uncertainty was projected into the world.

In this context, ideas are not dreams and desires, imaginary imperatives wafted down from some absolute sphere ; they have rather a concrete life of their own and a definite function in the total process.

The " material " conditions which were previously regarded merely as evil obstacles in the path of the idea are here hypostatized into the motor factor in world affairs, in the form of an economic determinism which is reinterpreted in materialistic terms.

Bakunin's advance guard, the anarchists of the Jura Federation, disintegrated when the domestic system of watch manufacture, in which they were engaged and which made possible their sectarian attitude, was supplanted by the factory system of production.

A veritable Copernican revolution occurred when man began to regard not merely himself, not merely man, but also the existence, the validity, and the influence of these ideas as conditioned factors, and the development of ideas as bound up with existence, as integral to the historico-social process.

Historical experience becomes thereby a truly strategic plan. Everything in history may now be experienced as an intellectually and volitionally controllable phenomenon.

The broader the class which achieves a certain mastery of the concrete conditions of existence, and the greater the chances for a victory through peaceful evolution, the more likely is this class to follow the road of conservatism.

We do not hold up to the adversary that he is worshipping false gods ; rather we destroy the intensity of his idea by showing that it is historically and socially determined.

This submission arises rather from the insight that every former intellectual certainty has rested upon partial points of view made absolute.}.

Whenever the utopia disappears, history ceases to be a process leading to an ultimate end.

And in all these questions we sense the optimistic undertone : I need not worry about the whole, the whole will take care of itself.

Would not this elimination of all tension mean the elimination also of political activity, scientific zeal-in fact of the very content of life itself?

Their situation always becomes questionable, however, when the group with which they identify themselves arrives at a position of power, and when, as a result of this attainment of power, the utopia is released from politics...

Such a removal of the Chiliastic element from the midst of culture and politics might preserve the purity of the ecstatic spirit but it would leave the world without meaning or life.

We could change the whole of society to-morrow if everybody could agree. The real obstacle is that every individual is bound into a system of established relationships which to a large extent hamper his will.

The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing.

The sociology of knowledge is concerned not so rnnch with distortions due to a deliberate effort to deceive as with the varying wavs in which objects present themselves to the subject acconling to the differences in social settings.

The emergence and the crystallization of actual thought is influenced in many decisive points by extra-theoretical factors of the most diverse sort.

Competition controls not merely economic activity through the mechanism of the market, not merely the course of political and social events, but furnishes also the motor impulse behind diverse interpretations of the world which, when their social background is uncovered, reveal themselves as the intellectual expressions of conflicting groups struggling for power.

But the latter, in turn, are invisibly guided by the antagonism and competition between concrete, conflicting groups.

It is precisely these factors which are responsible for the fact that two persons, even if they apply the same formal-logical rules, e.g. the law of contradiction or the formula of the syllogism, in an identical manner, may judge the same object very differently.

In brief, even in the formulation of concepts, the angle of " Yision is guided by the observer's interests.

Hence to speak here of conscious deception in the sense of creating ideologies is out of the question.

It was probably due, furthermore, to a subconscious reluctance to think out the implications of a concretely formulated insight to a point where the theoretical formulations latent in it would be clear enough to have a disquieting effect on one's own position.

It shies away from dealing historically, concretely, and individually with the problems of society for fear that its own inner antagonisms, for instance the antagonisms of capitalism itself, might become visible.

They overlook the fact that their antagonist differs from them in his whole outlook, and not merely in his opinion about the point under discussion.

That which within a given group is accepted as absolute appears to the outsider conditioned by the group situation and recognized as partial.

Relationism does not signify that there are no criteria of rightness and wrongness in a discussion. It does insist, however, that it lies in the nature of certain assertions that they cannot be formulated absolutely, but only in terms of the perspective of a given situation.

The function of the findings of the sociology of knowledge lies somewhere in a fashion hitherto not clearly understood, between irrelevance to the establishment of truth on the one hand, and entire adequacy for determining truth on the other.

We are dealing here with a case in which the pure determination of a fact (the fact of the partiality of a perspective which is demonstrable in concrete assertions) may become relevant for determining the validity of a proposition and in which the nature of the genesis of an assertion may become relevant to its truth...

The result is that one fails to see that this theory of self-sufficiency, this gesture of self-preservation, serves no other purpose than that of a bulwark for a certain type of academic epistemology which, in its last stages, is attempting to preserve itself from the collapse which might result from a more developed empiricism.

The revolutions in methodology and epistemology are always sequels and repercussions of the revolutions in the immediate empirical procedures for getting knowledge.

Thus the concept of tmth has not remained constant through all time, but has been involved in· the process of historical chance.

A position in the social structure carries with it, as we have seen, the probability that he who occupies it will think in a certain way.

Instead, there would have been a series of gradations between these two poles, in which such intermediate cases as "being invested with meaning" and "being oriented to meaning" would have found a place and been incorporated into the fundamental conception.

Thus we come to the point where the false ideal of a detached, impersonal point of view must be replaced by the ideal of an essentially human point of view which is within the limits of a human perspective, constantly striving to enlarge itself.

Our reflections aim, on the contrary, to show that the problem of knowing becomes more intelligible if we hold strictly to the data presented by the real factual thinking that we carry on in this world (which is the only kind of thinking known to us, and which is independent of this ideal sphere, and if we accept the phenomenon of knowing as the act of a living being.

There is no reason for retaining in our noology the disdain for corporeal, sensual, temporal, dynamic, and social things characteristic of the type of human being presupposed in the "idealistic " philosophy.

Likewise, in our field also, objectivity is brought about by the translation of one perspective into the terms of another.

The corroboration of this contention is found in the fact that the capacity for abstraction among individuals and groups grows in the measure that they are parts of heterogeneous groups and organizations in more inclusive collective units, capable of absorbing local or otherwise particular groups.

In another historical situation, different abstractions would have been found and singled out from the total complex of events, In our judgment the sociology of knowledge, by virtue of its premises, does not need to deny the existence or possibility of formalized and abstract thought.

For in the latter case the measuring instrument is interpreted as an object which itself relevantly influences the position and velocity of the electrons to be measured.

It must emerge from the stage ... where it engages in casual intuitions and gross generalities (such as the crude dichotomy involved in the assertion that here we find bourgeois thinking, there we find proletarian thinking, etc.) though even this may involve sacrificing its slogan-like dear-cutness.

The whole life of an historical-social group presents itself as an interdependent configuration ; thought is only its expression and the interaction between these two aspects of life is the essential element in the configuration, the detailed interconnections of which must be traced if it is to be understood.

He too made sociological imputations, using as his chief categories 'aristocratic' and 'democratic' cultures, to each of which he ascribed certain modes of thought.

VAIHINGER, HANS. The Philosophy of "As If." A system of the theoretical, practical, and religious fictions of mankind.

4. Symbols, Meaning, Communication, and Language

The Meaning of Meaning. A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism.

"Die Objcktivitat sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis," Gesarnmelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. vJ:6-214.

A study of the validity of sociological generalizations.

Das Verhiiltnis der ofjentlichen Meinung zu Wahrheit und Liige irn zo, II, I2 ]h.

BALDENSPERGER, W. Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der messianischen Hofjnungen seiner Zeit.

BORKENAU, FRANZ. Der Obergang vom feudalen zum burgerlichen Weltbild.

The Intelligentsia and Its Role

The Higher Learning in America. A memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men.

LASSWELL, H. D., CASEY, D., SMITH, BRUCE LANNES. Propaganda and- Promotional Activity. An annotated Bibliography.

LIPPMAN., ·WALTER. The Phantom Public. New York, 1925.

ARENDT, H. "Philosophic und Soziologie. Anliisslich K. Mannheim: Idcologie und Utopie," Die Gesellschaft., vii, ~ (t930), pp. 163 ff.

RENNER, KARL. " Ist der Marxismus Ideologie oder Wissenschaft?" Der Kampf, xxi (1928), pp. 245 ff.

Attempts at an Application or Modification of the Method as Presented in this Book in Recent Empirical Research

TRUHEL, K. Sozialbeamte. Ein Beitrag zur Sozioanalyse der Bilrokratie.

Action: and thought, 3·6, 19• 20, 22, 31, 40, 85-7, 95, 126-8, 133-4, 138, 145, 164, 169-70, 176, 191, 238, 246-7, 295-7; revealing reality, 97, 126-7, 133, 169; stabilizing the as- pect of things, 2:::, 176; set- ting new causal sequences in the world, 191

Blocking the answer through the way of stating a problem or through the formulation of the fundamental concepts, 103-04, 195-7, 201-02, 268, 290

Democratizing process, and its impact on thought, 8-9, 36-7, 39, 12111., 16311., 167

Freedom: 48, 189-91, 203, 234, 261-2 n., 273, 278; its bourgeois concept, 203, 278; its conservative concept, 238-9; its socialist concept, 240-1

History: its meaning, as seen by diff. groups, 26-7, 91-3, 94-5, 121·2, 130-1, 134-46 (fasc.), 149, 197-8 (anarch.), 214, 222-3 (Girondism), 223, 224-5 (liberalism), 226, 230-8, 244-5, 246-7, 252-4, 271, ll74;

Knowledge: situationally (existentially) determined, 4 7-9, 51, 78, 79-83, 125-6, 139-40, 164-71, 175, 188, 264-7 (def.), 278-9, 285, 295, 298-9 passim; as a collective process, 29, 129-30, 264-6;

Noology (= the study of the contents and forms of thought in their purely cognitive interrelations)

Perspective, 58, 86, 103-08, 147-53, 160-01, 171, 189, 19(i-8, 209, 251-2, 266 (def.), 268, 271, 272 (dcf.), 273-9, 280-02, 285, 295-6, 297-8, 300-01, 303-06; its enlargement, 189-90, 300-01, its disintegration, 251-2; detach~d, factors making for it, 281-2

"Reflection and the social situation in which it usually emerges, 6, 7, 107-08, 131, 260"

Time: 91, 135, 168; sense and its social differentiation, iw9-11 (Chiliast), 2 u-26 (lib-eral}, 235-6 (conservative), 244-6 (socialist), 228, 256; historical and chronological, 209; 294; see also ecstatic experience; value-generating function of time

Utopian mentality (thinking): 40, 54, 96-7 n., 126, 205-06, 226, 248-50, 252-3, 262-3; its definition, 208-09; its different configurations: (a) orgiastic-Chiliasm, 211-19; (b) liberal-humanitarian, 219-29; (c) conservative, 229-39;. (d) socialist-communist, 239-47; (e) in the present situation, 248-63

Control of the Collective Unconscious as a Problem of Our Age

The original German edition of Ideology and Utopia appeared in an atmosphere of acute intellectual tension marked by widespread discussion which subsided only with the exile or enforced silence of those thinkers who sought an honest and tenable solution to the problems raised.

We are witnessing not only a general distrust of the validity of ideas but of the motives of those who assert them.

The more secularized social and political theory became and the more thoroughly it dispelled the sanctified myths which legitimized the existing political order, the more precarious became the position of the emerging social science.

For thought is a catalytic agent that is capable of unsettling routines, disorganizing habits, breaking up customs, undermining faiths, and generating scepticism.

Nonetheless wherever scientific activity has been carried on in an organized and self-conscious fashion, these problems have always received a considerable amount of attention.

In the realm of the social, particularly, truth is not merely a matter of a simple correspondence between thought and existence, but is tinged with the investigator's interest in his subject matter, his standpoint, his evaluations, in short the definition of his object of attention.

It is the participation in an activity that generates interest, purpose, point of view, value, meaning, and intelligibility, as well as bias.

The most important thing, therefore, that we can know about a man is what he takes for granted, and the most elemental and important facts about a society are those that are seldom debated and generally regarded as settled.

The widespread depreciation of the value of thought on the one hand and its repression on the other hand are ominous signs of the deepening twilight of modern culture.

Such a task requires more than the application of well-established logical rules to the materials at hand, for the accepted rules of logic themselves are here called into question and are seen, in common with the rest of our intellectual tools, as parts and products of the whole of our social life.

When, however, any human activity continues over a long period without being subjected to intellectual control or criticism, it tends to get out of hand.

Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him.

Perhaps it is precisely when the hitherto concealed dependence of thought on group existence and its rootedness in action becomes visible that it really becomes possible for the first time, through becoming aware of them, to attain a new mode of control over previously uncontrolled factors in thought.

The most significant stage of this communication is reached when the forms of thought and experience, which had hitherto developed independently, enter into one and the same consciousness impelling the mind to discover the irreconcilability of the conflicting conceptions of the world.

The second characteristic of this monopolistic type of thought is its relative remoteness from the open conflicts of everyday life ; hence it is also "scholastic " in this sense, i.e. academic and lifeless.

Only that has validity which I can control in my own perception, which is corroborated in my own experimental activity, or which I myself can produce or at least conceptually construct as producible.

It has shown thereby that the life of a psychic phenomenon is the phenomenon itself. The meaning of history and life is contained in their becoming and in their flux.

In actuality it is far from correct to assume that an individual of more or less fixed absolute capacities confronts the world and in striving for the truth constructs a world-view out of the data of his experience.

The result of this amalgamation of politics and scientific thought was that gradually every type of politics, at least in the forms in which it offered itself for acceptance, was given a scientific tinge and every type of scientific attitude in its turn came to bear a political colouration.

Political discussion is, from the very first, more than theoretical argumentation ; it is the tearing off of disguises-the unmasking of those unconscious motives which bind the group existence to its cultural aspirations and its theoretical arguments.

Those persons who talk most about human freedom are those who are actually most blindly subject to social determination, inasmuch as they do not in most cases suspect the profound degree to which their conduct is determined by their interests.

These distortions range all the way from conscious lies to half-conscious and unwitting disguises ; from calculated attempts to dupe others to self-deception.

When we attribute to one historical epoch one intellectual world and to ourselves another one, or if a certain historically determined social stratum thinks in categories other than our own, we refer not to the isolated cases of thought-content, but to fundamentally divergent thought-systems and to widely differing modes of experience and interpretation.

The result of this dual tendency is that instead of a fictional unity of a timeless, unchanging " consciousness as such" (which was never actually demonstrable) we get a conception which varies in accordance with historic periods, nations, and social classes.

What was once the intellectual armament of a party is transformed into a method of research in social and intellectual history generally.

Knowledge arising out of our experience in actual life situations, though not absolute, is knowledge none the less.

If the investigator, instead of at once taking a definite position, will incorporate into his vision each contradictory and conflicting current, his thought will be flexible and dialectical, rather than rigid and dogmatic.

Only too often is it found that the synthesis, which is presented with the assurance that it embraces the whole, turns out in the end to be the expression of the narrowest provincialism...

Political conduct is confronted with a process in which every moment creates a unique situation and seeks to disentangle out of this ever-flowing stream of forces something of enduring character.

As sociologists there is no reason why we should not apply to Marxism the perceptions which it itself has produced, and· point out from case to case its ideological character.

The moment, however, is nothing more than that irrational element in the ' here and now,' which every theory, by virtue of its generalizing tendency, obscures.

Only through acting in the situation do we address questions to it, and the answer we derive is always in the form of the success or failure of the action.

Fascism regards every interpretation of history as a mere fictive construction destined to disappear before the deed of the moment as it breaks through the temporal pattern of history.

The superior person, the leader, knows that all political and historical ideas are myths. I-:fe himself is entirely emancipated from them, but he values them-and this is the obverse side of his attitude-because f they are "derivations" (in Pareto's sense) which stimulate enthusiastic feelings and set in motion irrational " residues " in men, and are the only forces that lead to political ac- tivity.

Rather they have always aimed to control those situationally transcendent ideas and interests which are not realizable within the bounds of the present order, and thereby to render them socially impotent, so that such ideas would be confined to a world beyond history and society, where they could not affect the status quo.

To live consistently, in the light of Christian brotherly love, in a society which is not organized on the same principle is impossible.

The representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can in principle never be realized.

There are, according to this view, times that are pregnant with meaning and times that are devoid of meaning.

It is often possible to trace shifts in social position through the 'angle of refraction' with which ideas are taken over.

Conservative mentality as such has no utopia. Ideally it is in its very structure completely in harmony with the reality which, for the time being, it has mastered.

The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing.

A position in the social structure carries with it, as we have seen, the probability that he who occupies it will think in a certain way.

Instead, there would have been a series of gradations between these two poles, in which such intermediate cases as "being invested with meaning" and "being oriented to meaning" would have found a place and been incorporated into the fundamental conception.

Thus we come to the point where the false ideal of a detached, impersonal point of view must be replaced by the ideal of an essentially human point of view which is within the limits of a human perspective, constantly striving to enlarge itself.

Our reflections aim, on the contrary, to show that the problem of knowing becomes more intelligible if we hold strictly to the data presented by the real factual thinking that we carry on in this world (which is the only kind of thinking known to us, and which is independent of this ideal sphere, and if we accept the phenomenon of knowing as the act of a living being.

TRUHEL, K. Sozialbeamte. Ein Beitrag zur Sozioanalyse der Bilrokratie.