(Page 1 of 22) - Edward Shils� Turn Against Karl Mannheim: The Central European Connection authored by Pooley, Jefferson.

Edward Shils was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania when Karl Mannheim published

Ideologie und Utopie (1929) [Ideology and Utopia]. “I was dimly aware of the great commotion which it

set going in Germany,” he recalled years later.

By 1932, Mannheim was still “terra incognita” to Shils—

but this would change dramatically, once Shils took up an assistantship under Louis Wirth at the

University of Chicago in 1933. Soon after, Shils became de facto translator of the book, and then sole

translator of Mannheim’s next, Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus (1935) [Man and

Society in an Age of Reconstruction]. Along the way, Shils was, for a time, an enthusiastic adherent of

Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. And, at least until his World War II service in London, he accepted

many of the basic tenets of Mensch und Gesellschaft’s bleak prognosis. Though he never embraced

Mannheim’s urgent call for wide-scale planning, he was, like Mannheim, deeply shaken by the collapse of

Weimar. Shils came to believe, partly under Mannheim’s inﬂuence, that modern societies were threatening

to unravel, and that their precariousness derived, in large part, from a mass populace that had broken free

from its old Gemeinschaft sinews. The basic contours of this view—Mannheim’s view—became, years

later, the gist of the “mass society theory” pejorative that Shils, among others, attached to downcast

intellectuals in the late 1950s. This is not coincidence. Mannheim’s gloomy, dissensual analysis of

modernity—which Shils accepts, then turns against harshly during and after the war—becomes the model,

for Shils, of other intellectuals’ post-ideological deﬂation in the 1950s.

In this paper, I argue that Shils’s rejection of Mannheim drew signiﬁcantly upon a direct and

explicit intellectual assault by fellow emigrés to England. During the war—even while he maintained

regular contact with Mannheim—Shils was exposed to an often vituperative dismissal of Mannheim’s

work by Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, in the pages of the London School of Economics journal

Economica. After the war, when both Popper and Shils joined the LSE faculty—Hayek’s afﬁliation dated

to 1931—Shils’ encounter with their critiques was deepened. And in these early postwar years, Shils

became close friends with yet another emigré Mannheim critic, Michael Polanyi. Combined, these

sustained and sophisticated criticisms helped wrest Shils from his interwar, Mannheim-friendly

intellectual coordinates.

During his undergraduate years in the late 1920s, Shils had already become fascinated with, and repulsed

1. Shils, "Karl Mannheim," American Scholar 64(2) (1995) 221.

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