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Weltanschauung as a priori: sociology of knowledge from a ‘romantic’ stance

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Abstract

In this paper I reconstruct the central concept of the young Lukács’s and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, as they present it in their writings in the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that this concept, namely Weltanschauung, is used to refer to some conceptually unstructured totality of feelings, which they take to be a condition of possibility of intellectual production, and this understanding is contrasted to an alternative construal of the term that presents it as logically structured, quasi-theoretical background knowledge. This concept has Kantian reminiscences: it is a condition of possibility of intellectual production in general. The young Mannheim and Lukács rely on ‘Weltanschauung’ so understood as a phenomenon mediating between the facts of society and individual intellectual production and reception: it is seen as being conditioned by sociological facts and therefore as a historical and sociological category through which, and therefore indirectly, society enters into intellectual production.

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Acknowledgment

I am indebted to István M. Fehér, Ferenc L. Lendvai, and Kristóf Nyíri for helpful comments and discussions. This paper and the collection have been financially supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA 79193).

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Correspondence to Tamás Demeter.

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Demeter, T. Weltanschauung as a priori: sociology of knowledge from a ‘romantic’ stance. Stud East Eur Thought 64, 39–52 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-012-9158-2

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