Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601/2)
© Public domain
Karl Mannheim identified generalized suspicion as the source of the intellectual and political crisis of his time. Today, a similar crisis of trust seems to threaten our societies.
Karl Mannheim, the main founding figure of the sociology of knowledge, was born in Budapest in 1893 and published his seminal Ideology and Utopia in 1929. Despite the distance in time, the era in which he developed his research program resembles our own in several important respects. It thus seems reasonable to believe that a return to the study of his work could prove highly valuable today, especially regarding the epistemological and sociopolitical challenges we are facing.
Perhaps the most appropriate route for demonstrating the analogies between Mannheim’s problems and our own passes through suspicion. He identified a generalized suspicion: a mistrust of everyone toward everyone, which culminated in a crisis of trust in rational thought itself. One could witness “the collapse of confidence in thought in general”, he wrote. “There is nothing accidental but rather more of the inevitable in the fact that more and more people took flight into skepticism or irrationalism.”1
If this observation seems painfully familiar today (one need only think of the global rise of conspiracy theories and the far right), we must also stress the originality of Mannheim’s sociological explanation. For him, the crisis of trust in thought stemmed primarily from the widespread use of an intellectual weapon: analysis in terms of ideology.
Let us recall the core of Mannheim’s argument. The concept of ideology went through several stages. Originally, only some of a person’s ideas were seen as problematic insofar as they were linked to specific (mostly psychological) interests; for example, when a Christian failed to recognize that behind the ethic of compassion lay a renunciation of the will to power (Nietzsche). Then came the move with Marx from this initial, particular concept of ideology to a total conception, in which the entire worldview of opponents was called into question, as it reflected their overall life conditions. Knowledge, including the structural categories of thought, was presented as a function of the ruling class’s position—and was therefore undermined. The final step, taken by Mannheim, involved a further expansion of the total conception: we stop assuming that only our opponents’ thinking is ideological (that is, bound to specific life conditions) and begin applying the same logic to ourselves. Moreover, we recognize that life conditions are not merely class-based but also generational, cultural, religious, and so on.
It is important to note that this move—which Mannheim highlights and systematizes—is not an invention of his; rather, it is embedded in the social reality and carried by the political actors of his time. This is precisely what explains the scale of the crisis: initially, only the socialist camp wielded the intellectual weapon of ideological analysis, exposing how its opponents’ positions were tied to particular interests, thereby discrediting them. But soon their opponents also adopted this “much too important”, in Mannheim’s words, intellectual weapon and turned it back on the socialists. To the extent that every thought and rationalism was presented as an expression of specific life conditions, the process of reciprocal unmasking led to the diffusion of skepticism.
Mannheim’s effort aimed at finding a way out of this predicament. I will not discuss the successes and failures of his endeavor, based on the idea of an intellectual synthesis of various sociopolitical and epistemic perspectives into a relational whole. Since I only wish to demonstrate here the analogy between Mannheim’s situation and our own condition, I just argue that we too, today, are experiencing a fundamental loss of trust in thought itself.
Although the crisis of confidence in media, political, and scientific institutions is frequently pointed out, the mistrust in the very process of thinking and knowing is rarely acknowledged as such. As in Mannheim’s time, mistrust is not accidental; rather, it is rooted in the political dynamics and material structures of our institutions and technologies, pushing toward constantly uncovering the motives behind the positions of those we disagree with.
Three interconnected intellectual weapons of our era have become widespread, are now used regardless of political affiliation, and tend to undermine knowledge or our commitment to it, leading to a broad epistemological relativism.
Constructivism: The analyses of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, who from the 1960s sought to deconstruct the idea of a timeless and value-free scientific truth, emphasizing the historicity of knowledge, the practices through which scientists do not merely discover but actively construct their objects and the power dynamics involved in scientific processes, may have been a little too successful. Today, it is not uncommon for the dominant views of the scientific community to be presented as mere reflections of economic interests, political games, or cultural hegemonies, not only by the left but increasingly by the right as well, as seen in the debates about vaccines and climate change.
It was precisely this reversal that led Bruno Latour to exclaim, upon realizing that his early constructivist arguments were being adopted by conservative climate-change deniers: “The danger is no longer coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases!”2
Importantly, constructivism is no longer merely an idea in the minds of theorists, but a real social force: discussions around fake news, post-truth, and artificial-intelligence generated content, which problematize the boundaries between the “real” and the “constructed,” confirm this.
Whataboutism: Undermining a position by asking why its proponent did not take a similar stance on some other issue (among the millions we are constantly informed about) challenges the authenticity of any analysis by associating it with ideological or economic biases. Whataboutism is embedded in the materiality of our technological media: the multiplication of information sources and the algorithmic organization of the news cycle. Moreover, it has no political color: the left asks why supporters of Ukraine do not show the same sensitivity toward Palestine; the right asks why supporters of Palestine ignored Cyprus. As a result, all positions and analyses appear equally subjective and ill-founded.
Genealogical Debunking: The philosophical method assuming that the fruits of a tainted tree are untrustworthy is popularized across social media. The handiness of investigating online the funding of a study, product, or service often leads to the automatic assumption that the source of funds directly determines scientific outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic is only one recent example: skeptics highlighted Pfizer’s profits from the mRNA vaccine, while their opponents pointed to the funding sources behind “alternative” scientists like John P. Ioannidis. This practice, of course, goes far beyond the world of science: Instagram accounts, influencers, and members of the European Parliament are all caught in the dance of interests and suspicion, correctly or not.
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All three processes portray thinking and knowledge as unreliable and relative, functioning as expressions of underlying interests and life conditions. None is merely a matter of arbitrary individual choice or abstract intellectual strategy; all are rooted in the material reality of our technologies and social bonds. And, while each one captures something real, when absolutized they lead to a dead end of political and epistemological mistrust—just like the generalized suspicion Mannheim diagnosed about a century ago.
Mannheim’s hope was that he could restore to knowledge its lost objectivity, though redefining its meaning, and help his contemporaries find a way out of the politico-epistemological crisis. Recognizing his relevance, as well as the difficulties he encountered, we can perhaps hope for something similar.
1 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Routledge and Kegan Paul (1979), p. 37.
2 Bruno Latour, “Why has Critique Run out of Steaaåm? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), p. 227.
Yannis Ktenas is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science and History, Panteion University (Athens). He was a guest at the IWM in 2023 and 2025.
