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Karl Mannheim's Conservatism is the first significant implementation of the methodology which he called "the sociology of knowledge". A dissertation Mannheim submitted to the Faculty of Arts of the Ruprecht-Karl University of Heidelberg, Conservatism won him a venia legendi in 1926. In 1927, he published two rather lengthy sections of that dissertation, somewhat revised, in Archiv f¨¹r Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, under the title "Conservative Thought". To this day, it is considered a major primary source for any work on the history of conservatism as an ideology. The present Hungarian translation, by Endre Kiss, is of the original text of the dissertation, the relevant parts supplemented with Mannheim's emendations to the version published in the Archiv. The sociology of knowledge is a particular approach to the history of ideas, one that started out as a critique of the Neo-Kantian approach still dominating the discipline at the turn of the century, which, proceeding on the assumption that the history of ideas unfolded as one coherent argument, sought to reconstruct the development of the various disciplines internally, through analyzing their immanent logic.
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