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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Ideology and Utopia
IT WAS IN 1929, sixty years before the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, when the world economic crisis was picking up momentum and social and political tensions in Germany were rising fast, that the sociologist Karl Mannheim published his seminal work Ideologie und Utopie. Here Mannheim explores the significance of the utopian elements in our thinking and our experience, attributing to them a real impact on people's actions and on social reality. Talking about his own time, he notes a disappearance of the utopian element, an absence of suspense, as politics is reduced to economics, our view of the world ceases to be holistic and is broken up into technical fragments, and creativity is replaced by mere repetition. His treatise ends with a nightmarish vision of a future world without utopias, “eine Welt, die gleichsam mit sich fertig geworden ist und sich stets nur reproduziert” (249):
Das Verschwinden der Utopie bringt eine statische Sachlichkeit zustande, in der der Mensch selbst zur Sache wird. Es entstünde die größte Paradoxie, die denkbar ist, daß nämlich der Mensch der rationalsten Sachbeherrschung zum Menschen der Triebe wird, daß der Mensch, der nach einer so langen opfervollen und heroischen Entwicklung die höchste Stufe der Bewußtheit erreicht hat — in der bereits Geschichte nicht blindes Schicksal, sondern eigene Schöpfung wird —, mit dem Aufgeben der verschiedenen Gestalten der Utopie den Willen zur Geschichte und damit den Blick in die Geschichte verliert.
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