which conducts its affairs in a radically different but apparently effective way. The fiction of Joseph Conrad turns on this disabling contradiction. In this as in other ways, then, the historical emergence of the concept of ideology testifies to a corrosive anxiety -- to the embarrassed awareness that your own truths strike you as plausible only because of where you happen to be standing at the time.

The modern bourgeoisie is accordingly caught in something of a cleft stick. Unable to retreat to old-style metaphysical certainties, it is equally loath to embrace a full-blooded scepticism which would simply subvert the legitimacy of its power. One early-twentieth-century attempt to negotiate this dilemma is Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia ( 1929), written under the influence of Lukács's historicism in the political tumult of the Weimar republic. Mannheim sees well enough that with the rise of middle-class society the old monological worldview of the traditional order has disappeared for ever. An authoritarian priestly and political caste, which once confidently monopolized knowledge, has now yielded ground to a 'free' intelligentsia, caught on the hop between conflicting theoretical perspectives. The aim of a 'sociology of knowledge' will thus be to spurn all transcendental truths and examine the social determinants of particular belief systems, while guarding at the same time against the disabling relativism which would level all these beliefs to one. The problem, as Mannheim is uneasily aware, is that any criticism of another's views as ideological is always susceptible to a swift tu quoque. In pulling the rug out from beneath one's intellectual antagonist, one is always in danger of pulling it out from beneath oneself.

Against such relativism, Mannheim speaks up for what he calls 'relationism', meaning the location of ideas within the social system which gives birth to them. Such an inquiry into the social basis of thought, he considers, need not run counter to the goal of objectivity; for though ideas are internally shaped by their social origins, their truth value is not reducible to them. The inevitable one-sidedness of any particular standpoint can be corrected by synthesizing it with its rivals, thus building up a provisional, dynamic totality of thought. At the same time, by a process of self-monitoring, we can come to appreciate the limits of our own perspective, and so attain a restricted sort of objectivity. Mannheim thus emerges as the Matthew Arnold of Weimar Germany, concerned to see life steadily and see it whole. Blinkered ideological viewpoints will be patiently subsumed into some greater totality by those dispassionate enough to do so -- which is to say, by 'free' intellectuals with a remarkable resemblance to Karl Mannheim. The only problem with this approach is that it merely pushes the question of relativism back a stage; for we can always ask about the

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