Indian Literature and Culture

The democratising trend in society, wrote Karl Mannheim in 1933, "is our predestined fate"; the interruption of dictator ships are but fleeting phenomena in social development.' But the concept of what constitutes democracy, while seeming to be universally accepted, is not the same in all societies. The concept of what constitutes democracy is historically determined, country specific. Even the treatment sociology receives at the hands of eminent writers is largely affected by the country of origin of the writer and the treatment of sociology by the intellectuals may differ from one country to another. Ernest Manheim, who has edited Karl Mannheim's Essays, referred to above, in his "Introduction" to the volume, draws attention to the speci-fically German character of Karl Mannheim's thought and writing. The latent conflicts and unresolved problems of Germany in the first three decades of the twentieth century affected Karl's thinking and prompted him to pay attention to broader epochal issues while sociologists in the USA devoted themselves, as Ernest Manheim puts it, "to the methodical study of simple structures and, whenever possible, left the bird's-eye-view of society as a whole to historians and anthropologists". This is true also of what George Lichtheim calls "orthodox Marxism" which was a product of German genius-not only in the sense that two Germans-Karl Marx and Frederick Engels-formulated what has come to be known and accepted as "Marxism", but more so in the consolidation of the various strands of Marxist thought, after Marx's death in 1883, into a coherent theory in the eighteen nineties (1890s) by Frederick Engels and Karl Kautsky-both German.