Mannheim did not forget his other students either. The Revue Internationale de Sociologie (1932: 3) announces Professor Karl Mannheim of the Sociological Institute in Frankfurt as a contributor to the section on "I'habitat humaine" at the 1933 Congress of the Institut International de Sociologie in Geneva, with a presentation on "the human habitat from the perspective of the social role of women and the domestic economy." By the time of the meetings, however, Mannheim no longer had an institute or a home. His name appears in the official 1934 report of the Congress, with his new London affiliation, but he was not himself present in Geneva. Two of his degree candidates from Frankfurt appeared in his place: Margarete Freudenthal, whose dissertation research provided the topic Mannheim had originally announced (Freudenthal [1934] 1986), and Norbert Elias, who drew on the just-completed but never-to-be officially recognized Habilitation he wrote under Mannheim (Elias [1933] 1983). Their talks, so far as can be judged from the brief report in the Revue (Duprat 1934: 143-44), brilliantly illustrate how shared beginnings with Mannheim could be developed in quite different, strikingly distinctive directions.

Both undertake to explain "correlations between types of homes and levels of social existence" of their inhabitants. While Elias focuses on the houses of French courtiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and concludes that "the residence represented the rank and function of its owner; it corresponded, moreover, to the nobility's manner of life: their relations of reciprocal hospitality, the requirements of luxury, of staff, of domesticity," Freudenthal contrasts proletarian and bourgeois homes by reference to the respective domestic economies, arguing specifically that "the mode of material existence varies with the economic role — inside as well as outside the home — of the woman." The differences between these two representatives of Mannheim's Frankfurt institute — the one stressing the proprietor's rank and function and the other the household role of women — are not explainable simply by the different historical and social milieux they examine. They typify the diversity of work — and common empirical commitments — generated by study-big with Mannheim in Frankfurt.

source: David M. Kettler & Volker Meja: Karl Mannheim and the crisis of Liberalism. The secret of these new times, New Brunswick/N.J./USA 1995 [u.a.]: Transaction-Publ., pp. 131-132;

 

online: http://wean1.ulib.org/Books-Finished/Karl_Mannheim_and_the_Crisis_of_Liberalism/HTML/00000141.htm - 000142.htm.