Abstract
THE third Hobhouse memorial lecture, on the subject, “Rational and Irrational Elements in our Society”, was delivered at Bedford College for Women on March 7 by Prof. Karl Mannheim, formerly professor of sociology in the University of Frankfort-on-Main, and now lecturer in sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The main theme of the lecture was the problem created for contemporary society through the disproportion between the range of man's technical knowledge, and his moral qualities and rational insight into the social mechanism which it is the task of members of society to control. Society must break down unless this grave disproportion be remedied. Owing to the correlation of the growth of certain moral and spiritual elements with certain features in society, the problem is amenable to scientific treatment. The question to be answered is what are the elements in an industrialised society which tend to heighten rationality and at the same time to promote irrationality. Two senses of rationality must be distinguished. Substantial rationality relates to thinking and understanding, to the cogitative elements in general; functional rationality relates to the organisation of activities for the attaining of given ends calculated from the point of view of a given observer. Modern industrialised society has revealed the power to plan and control possessed by those who are emotionally primitive. Our society is faced with the problem of planning the man who has to plan men. Its future depends upon the group within society which has the ability to control, and the energy to subdue the irrational elements.
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Science and Society. Nature 133, 410 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133410c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133410c0