In the 1945– 46 academic year, a loyal one- time Karl Mannheim student, Kurt H. Wolff, offered an ambitious yearlong graduate seminar on the sociology of knowledge at Ohio State University, where he had finally found a regular position after ten difficult exile years in Italy and America. Wolff's design of the seminar was multifaceted, uncompromisingly theoretical and self- consciously reflexive. A noteworthy product was a book- length record (300 single- spaced pages in small type), entitled The Sociology of Knowledge: A History and a Theory (Wolff 1945), comprising not only extensive lecture and discussion notes, but also periodic reports on student research projects and, most important, feedback from living authorities who were routinely sent transcripts of seminar reports on their work.

The most consequential of these exchanges was with Mannheim, whose Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim 1929, 1936) served as the culminating topic of the first semester and as primary syllabus of problems for the second. In the context of the course, Wolff is quite stern with Mannheim, exemplifying his own loyalty by his independence. His exposition of Mannheim's approach is grounded on the article “Sociology of Knowledge” (Mannheim 1931, 1936), published some years after the book in a “handbook” of sociological concepts, which Wolff characterizes as “his latest draft of his conception of sociology of knowledge contained in his Ideology and Utopia” (Wolff 1946: 65). Wolff sums up, with three principal objections, the criticisms that already punctuate his exposition. First, he notes that Mannheim fails to specify the kind of “knowledge” that is comprehended by the “perspectives” subject to the characteristic treatment of the sociology of knowledge, although certain “formal” dimensions appear to be excluded. Second, Wolff follows commentaries in American publications by Robert K. Merton ([1941] 1968: 543– 62) and Alexander von Schelting (1936) in animadversions against the numerous equivocal formulations of “social determination,” ranging from “direct causation” to a “kind of ‘emanationist’ relation between social conditions and thought” (Wolff 1946: 71), with other imprecise possibilities in between. Third, he agrees with von Schelting that Mannheim's “relationism” is, strictly speaking, only a verbal evasion of the relativist vicious circle, but he prefers Merton's more “constructive” “attempt at saving what is valuable and tenable,” and promises to implement a “third attitude,” closer to Merton than to von Schelting, in his own theory (Wolff 1946: 72).