My reading of Karl Mannheim's works has from its very beginning been primarily framed by my interests in methodology, epistemology and elementary theoretical categories as a basis of qualitative empirical research. Thus, it has not been an enterprise of exegesis of a classic in the sense that Niklas Luhmann (1987: 7) described ironically: “The classical authors are classical because they are classical authors; their use today is identified by self- reference. Reliance on illustrious names and specialization in them can be proclaimed as theoretical research.” Instead, in reconstructive research, as I myself understand and support it, the status and the theoretical value of classical authors is defined by the extent to which their theoretical categories and their explicit or implicit methodological directives may give decisive impulses and categorical formulations for actual (empirical) research. My contribution to this volume therefore seeks to be an appreciation of Karl Mannheim's works and not an exegesis in the strict sense of the word. This kind of appreciation has to be always aware of the implications of its own ‘situational determination’” (Standortgebundenheit), that is, its rootedness in the practice of research, in the sense of Mannheim (1936: 239; 1952c: 229).

To ground the appreciation of the works of Mannheim in the context of reconstructive research seems especially appropriate because, as I argue, we should understand Mannheim himself as a reconstructive social scientist. In Structures of Thinking (Mannheim 1982: 56) his own formulation points in this direction: “As science of society, sociology is a fundamental science; as cultural sociology, it is a method.”

Sociology of Culture or Knowledge as a “Method” and the Praxeological Attitude of Analysis

Sociology and psychology will appear as “a method, insofar as one or the other offers points of view for comprehending objects that lie outside of its immediate domain” (Mannheim 1952a: 56). Explaining this by an example from the Sociology of Law—referring to Max Weber—Mannheim differentiates the “immanent- juristic consideration” (1952a: 61) from the sociological consideration with its peculiar attitude of analysis, which he calls the “attunement to functionality” or “the comprehension of functionality.” (1952a: 66 and 70) This attitude is not oriented to what the juristic phenomenon is under the aspect of normative correctness and factual truth but to a consideration of the how of its production or accomplishment.