Mannheim ＆Benedict

Karl Mannheim (March 27, 1893, Budapest – January 9, 1947, London), or Mannheim Károly in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology. Mannheim rates as a founder of the sociology of knowledge.

He studied in Budapest, Berlin—in 1914 he attended lectures by Georg Simmel—, Paris and Heidelberg. During the brief period of the Hungarian Soviet in 1919 he taught in a teacher training school thanks to the patronage of his friend and mentor György Lukács, whose political conversion to Communism he did not, however, share. After the emergence of the harsh counter-revolutionary regime in Hungary, Mannheim chose exile in Germany. From 1922 to 1925 in Heidelberg he worked under the German sociologist Alfred Weber, brother of the well-known sociologist Max Weber. In 1926 Mannheim satisfied the requirements to teach classes in sociology at Heidelberg. In 1930 he became professor of sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Norbert Elias and Hans Gerth worked as his assistants during this period (from spring 1930 until spring 1933), with Elias as the senior partner.

In 1933, after his ouster from his professorship, he fled the Nazi regime and settled in Britain, where he was appointed a lecturer in Sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE). In 1941 he was invited by Sir Fred Clarke, Director of the Institute of Education, University of London, to teach sociology on a part-time basis in conjunction with his role at LSE. In January 1946 he took up the full-time chair of education at the Institute of Education, which he held until his death a year later at the age of 53.

Mannheim’s biography, one of intellectual and geographical migration, falls into three main phases: Hungarian (to 1919), German (1919-1933), British (1933-1947). Among his valued intellectual resources were György Lukács, Oskar Jaszi, Georg Simmel,Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Alfred and Max Weber, Max Scheler, and Wilhelm Dilthey. In his work, he sought variously to synthesize elements derived from German historicism, Marxism, phenomenology, sociology and Anglo-American pragmatism.

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (born August 26, 1936) is Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University, and is best known for his celebrated book Imagined Communities, first published in 1983. Anderson was born in Kunming, China to James O'Gorman and Veronica Beatrice Mary Anderson, and in 1941 the family moved to California. In 1957, Anderson received a Bachelor of Arts in Classics from Cambridge University, and he later earned a Ph.D. from Cornell's Indonesian Studies program. He is the brother of historian Perry Anderson.