1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Defunct Defunct Free-floating intellectuals or free-floating intelligentsia (German: Freischwebende Intelligenz) is a term from the sociology of knowledge that was used by the sociologist and philosopher Karl Mannheim in 1929, but was originally coined by the sociologist Alfred Weber.
The intellectual floats (relatively) freely above things and tasks and is therefore less tied to ideology than other people.
[citation needed] Mannheim sought a way out of the dilemma that the human mind moves within social bonds and biases in contemplation, reasoning and knowledge, but on the other hand wants to and, in his opinion, can find unadulterated truths.
[2][3][4][5][6] Critics dispute that it is possible to transcend the historical, social, cultural and psychological determinants for a particular group in society.
[citation needed] According to Magnus Klaue, Mannheim called free-floating intellectuals the “milieu that shaped the Weimar Republic, which emerged as a result of the crisis of the educated middle class and in which (even then often unemployed) academics, private scholars, wealthy but professionally unambitious middle-class sons and lumpen intellectuals came together.” He has want to point out both the possibilities of this milieu for social and intellectual independence and the danger that it sees itself as an intellectual avant-garde, rejects bourgeois normality as bourgeois and wants to impose its own moral views on the “backward” majority.