Abstraction and Self-Alienation in Mannheim and Husserl

In this paper, I explore the approaches to methodological abstraction and self-alienation developed respectively in Karl Mannheim’s early sociology of intellectuals and in Edmund Husserl’s late transcendental phenomenology. In Mannheim’s early and experimental works, the resistance to abstraction and alienation is located in a stratum of intellectuals able to meaningfully combine diverse cultural currents in a social process of cultivation (Bildung). In Husserl, to contrast, this resistance is grasped as a constant crisis in the methods of pursuing philosophical truth. While these approaches seem difficult to reconcile, I suggest in closing that this difficulty can be related to their shared emphasis on a theoretical response to the practical and historical reality of self-alienation.