Authority, Culture, and Communication	.
The Sociology of Ernest Manheim
Edited by Frank Baron, David Norman Smith, and Charles Reitz
2005, xxii & 308 pp., pbk. EUR 34,80 ISBN 3-935025-57-2
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Communication and conflict, culture and identity, authority and alienation are the main themes in the sociology of Ernest Manheim (1900–2002). From start to finish, Manheim was preoccupied with the dialectic of the local and the universal, the audience and the speaker, romanticism and modernity, tradition and change.A citizen of the world, both tough- and tender-minded, Manheim thought long and hard about the realistic prospect of a world federally united, a world beyond borders and boun-daries. Born in Budapest, educated in Vienna, Kiel, Leipzig, and London, he contributed subtly, yet significantly, to the deprovincialization of culture in his adopted home. His writing and teaching assisted a generation of younger scholars in the postwar humanities and social sciences to become keenly aware of the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of our political, moral, and academic cultures. In quiet contrast to the logical positivism that had attained a near monopoly in U.S. graduate schools of philosophy and sociology, Manheim offered a critical distillate of European approaches, which brought the insights of phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory from the margins to the heart of intellectual life in this country. His work communicated the vibrancy of both its classical and contemporary German intellectual sources and stressed, in a humanistic and enlightened manner, the essential connection of education to the attainment of man’s social potential. As the essays in this volume make clear, Manheim’s stress on the transformative social logic of the public sphere, his multicultural cosmopolitanism, his opposition to any kind of monoculturalism, and his critique of the patriarchal family remain at the cutting edge of social and cultural theory today. Frank Baron and David Smith are members of the German and Sociology departments at the University of Kansas. Charles Reitz teaches philosophy at Kansas City Community College.
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