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...Karl Mannheim was born in Budapest. He was the only child of a Hungarian father and a German mother. After graduation from the humanistic gymnasium in Budapest, he studied in Berlin, Budapest, Paris, and Freiburg. His professors included Lukacs and Edmund Husserl... Despite an early interest in philosophy, Mannheim turned to the human sciences, coming to be influenced by the thought of Weber and Marx. In 1925 he came to the major intellectual center in Germany, the University of Heidelberg, where he habilitated as an unsalaried lecturer. 

Karl Mannheim left Heidelberg for the University of Frankfurt in 1929, where he was a professor of sociology and economics. With the rise to power of the Nazis, he was dismissed in 1933 and fled to Great Britain, where he became a lecturer in sociology at the London School of Economics. Twelve years later, he became a professor in the university's Institute of Education. During his tenure at Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and the London School of Economics, Mannheim pioneered with systematic efforts in the sociology of knowledge. While in Great Britain, he was also editor of the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction. This contributed to the growth and respectability of sociology in England. 

Early in his career, Mannheim centered his analysis first in problems of interpretation, then in epistemology (the study of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge), and finally in particular kinds of knowledge. As his sociological interpretation matured, he made systematic inquiry into the social forces contributing to the emergence and shaping of certain forms of knowledge. These included (but were not limited to) the impact of generations, intellectual traditions, and class interests on the differing conceptions of truth. 

The modern classic Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge was published before Mannheim fled the Nazis. After the development of this masterpiece (1929-1931), he moved from a study of ideas to the study of social structure. Here the focus was on such issues as the bureaucratization of society, the structural formation of personality, the position and role of intelligentsia, and the relationship between sociology and social policy. His work on the nature of democracy foresaw a coming elite disintegration and irrationality. Thus, before Mannheim's premature death in 1947, he had conceptualized sociology as a means for planning societies to avoid both the dangers of totalitarianism and the class system.