Sympathetically re-reading the neglected legacy of Karl Mannheim, Iaan Reynolds shows the untapped potential of the sociology of knowledge to illuminate the perennial issue of the relationship between the genesis of ideas and their abiding validity. Education for Political Life also provides valuable insight into the constructive role intellectuals, if they humbly acknowledge their own rootedness in the world they hope to criticize, can still play in our anti-elitist cultural climate.
— Martin Jay, Professor Emeritus of History, University of California, Berkeley, author of The Dialectical Imagination
This remarkable book is not only an insightful philosophical interpretation of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge—against Popper and Adorno’s misunderstandings—but also an outstanding anti-capitalist cultural-political project, aiming to understand the social world in order to transform it. Discussing standpoint and feminist epistemologies, as well as contemporary philosophical approaches to ideology critique, Iaan Reynolds develops an innovative social philosophy.
— Michael Löwy, emeritus research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, co-author of Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
Education for Political Life is a major accomplishment. The book is a philosophically illuminating depiction of one of the twentieth century’s most under-appreciated minds. Reynolds pays close attention to Karl Mannheim's experimental writings of the 1920s, in which he developed the sociology of knowledge. His interpretation of Mannheim as a philosopher and social and political theorist who attempted to synthesize major trends in inter-war German thought is compelling, imaginative and thought-provoking both for scholars new to Mannheim’s work and for established researchers in the sociology of knowledge.
— Volker Meja, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Memorial University Newfoundland, coeditor of Karl Mannheim's Structures of Thinking and Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge
With an intelligent and detailed analysis of the growing body of literature by and about Karl Mannheim, especially his Weimar years, Iaan Reynolds has fashioned a convincing program for a self-reflexive sociology of knowledge. I highly recommend this book.
— Colin Loader, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, author of The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim