Published by Translated from the German by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils.

Karl Mannheim was born in Budapest. He was the only child of a Hungarian father and a German mother. After graduation from the humanistic gymnasium in Budapest, he studied in Berlin, Budapest, Paris, and Freiburg. His professors included Lukacs and Edmund Husserl... Despite an early interest in philosophy, Mannheim turned to the human sciences, coming to be influenced by the thought of Weber and Marx. In 1925 he came to the major intellectual center in Germany, the University of Heidelberg, where he habilitated as an unsalaried lecturer.

Mannheim, a pioneer in the field of SOCIOLOGY , here analyzes the ideologies that are used to stabilize a social order and the wish-dreams that are employed when any transformation of that same order is attempted. Translated and with a Foreword by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils; Preface by Wirth; Indices.