Karl Mannheim and the intellectual elite.

One of scholar Karl Mannheim's most important conceptions, that of the free floating intelligentsia, can be seen as playing more a normative than a factual role in his thought. This is not to say that Mannheim regarded this construction as having no factual basis. Indeed, throughout his career he held that such a relatively classless stratum of intellectuals existed in the European society of his time. But Mannheim's evaluation of the role this stratum was equipped to play changed radically over the course of his sociological career. His most famous and most thoroughly discussed treatment of the intelligentsia was in a chapter on the possibilities of a scientific politics in the book "Ideology and Utopia." Here his tone was exceedingly optimistic, for he thought that the European intelligentsia might be the bearers of a tremendous political synthesis, a dynamic mediation between the left and right wings of the European political spectrum. In any event, this theme-the role of the socially unattached intelligentsia-will constitute the thread which ties together the various treatments Mannheim offered of intellectual strata generally. The approach of this paper will be broadly developmental, dividing Mannheim's writings into four basic stages. To begin with, there is the material Mannheim published before 1929. In this period, the intelligentsia is seen as relatively unimportant.