Karl Mannheim

Mannheim was born in Budapest in 1893. He held academic posts in Heidelberg and Frankfurt but, as a recently naturalized citizen and a Jew, he was suspended by one of the first National Socialist enactments of 1933. Invited to Britian by Harold Laski, Mannheim spent the next ten years as a lecturer at the London School of Economics. Then, in the middle of the war, he was appointed Professor in the Sociology of Education at the University of London. The last of the founding fathers of classical sociology, Mannheim died in 1947 at the age of 53.

The material at Keele consists of some 35 files deposited by Professor W.A.C. Stewart, a former vice-chancellor of Keele University and a research student of Mannheim. These working papers include notes and lecture outlines prepared by Mannheim for his courses in structural sociology at the London School of Economics and in educational sociology at the Institute of Education, University of London. There is also a small amount of correspondence between Mannheim and others for the period 1940-1945.

The material is owned by Keele and there are no restrictions on access.