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KARL MANNHEIM AND ALOIS RIEGL: FROM ART HISTORY TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE
Author(s) -
TANNER JEREMY
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2009.00701.x
Subject(s) - appropriation , interpretation (philosophy) , context (archaeology) , sociology , art history , sociology of knowledge , perspective (graphical) , art , epistemology , history , philosophy , social science , visual arts , archaeology , linguistics
Karl Mannheim and Erwin Panofsky took Alois Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen as their point of departure in the development of the sciences of cultural interpretation. This article seeks to elucidate the very different readings of Riegl made by Mannheim and Panofsky, and to show how the sociological appropriation and transformation of the concept of Kunstwollen was central to the development of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and in particular to the analysis of ‘styles of thought’ in his classic study Conservative Thought (1927). The limited reception of Mannheim's synthesis of sociology and art history is interpreted in the intellectual context of Britain immediately after the 1939–45 war.