Karl Mannheim (27 March 1893 - 9 January 1947)
Mannheim, one of the pioneers of sociology of knowledge, was born in Budapest. He studied in Budapest, Berlin, Freiburg and Heidelberg. Heidelberg was most likely the place that influenced him most during his studies. There he addressed the works of Max Weber. The ideas of Rickert, Lask and Lukács which greatly affected the Heidelberger Milieu as well as the ideas of Husserl, Scheler and Marx, were ground-breaking for his theoretical thought. After receiving his doctorate in Budapest in 1918, he qualified as a professor in 1926 in Heidelberg where he was employed as an associate professor for four years. Then he was offered a chair as full professor for sociology, replacing Franz Oppenheimer in Frankfurt am Main. After he was given notice in 1933, due to the the national socialist Civil Service Law, he taught for a short while at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. In the same year, he immigrated to England where he first taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science. From 1941 he was employed as an associate professor and from 1945 until his death, he was the director of the Institute of Education at London University. The copies of two original extensive manuscripts from the early days of his academic work can be found in the Archive. They were put in the Archive by the editors, Nico Stehr and Volker Meja. The materials collected and photo-copied for the research project “Karl Mannheim in Exile 1933 – 1947”, financed by the Volkswagenwerk Foundation, have been sorted and catalogued. These materials mainly consist of documents from Mannheim’s work in England, and materials from his collaboration work in the MOOT Kreis amongst others. An index is available.