Karl Mannheim

Karl Mannheim was a Hungarian-born sociologist, born in Budapest in 1893 to a Hungarian Jewish father and German Jewish mother, and a founding figure of the sociology of knowledge. His best known work, Ideology and Utopia (1929), distinguished partial from total ideologies and contrasted ideas that support existing social arrangements with utopian visions that propose to transform them, introducing his concept of the free-floating intellectual as a figure relatively unattached to any single class interest. He held professorships at Heidelberg and at Goethe University Frankfurt before fleeing Nazi Germany for Britain in 1933, where he lectured in sociology at the London School of Economics and later became the first professor of sociology at the University of London's Institute of Education. He died in London in 1947.