Conceptions of ideology – Avenues of truth

If it was a ‘Copernican revolution’ to perceive that ‘also the discovery of truth was socially (historically) conditioned’, Marxism can claim only qualified credit for the revolution. There are not only the inevitable forerunners, but what Marx has added in depth and sophistication is least helpful when it comes to explaining with any consistency how and to whom the socially conditioned truth can become accessible.

Mannheim addressed himself to the unfinished business and tried to overcome the inference that because the beliefs and insights of a given period or group are determined by the interplay of economic and social conditions, those who are involved in the life of the period and/or group can have no true notion about the situation they live in. One could wish Mannheim to have been more precise about his classification of conceptions of ideologies and about the degrees of equivalence and distinction between categories for analyzing ideological thought on the one hand, and categories of ideology as they are professed in the actual party struggle on the other. There is, however, no doubt that his conceptions of ideology are intended not to represent a typology of the collective manifestations of ideological thought but to circumscribe supplementary avenues for the attainment of fuller knowledge about social and political life.