Temporizing with Time Wars

Karl Mannheim’s orientations to time can be plotted between subjectivist and objectivist extremes. The latter corresponds to social engineering, while the former offers the context in which Mannheim uses Hobbes’s primaeval war to imagine the chaotic struggle over time that he hopes to escape. Mannheim’s distinctive achievement is ‘dynamic sociology’, an experimental approach marked by the recognition not only of historicity in social phenomena and concepts but also of the opportunities thereby provided for clarifying meaning on terms congruent with the experiences of contemporary humankind. Mannheim’s initial statement of ‘dynamic sociology’ is refined by his better-known studies of generations, ideologies, and utopias, which specify his awareness of co-existent multiple time worlds. Coordination is left to ad hoc mediation. This does not answer Mannheim’s deepest fears and wishes, but he has the discipline to settle for less.