Karl Mannheim and the liberal telos of realism
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117819846544 |
| Author | Andreas H Hvidsten |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117819846544
International Relations
2019, Vol. 33(3) 475 –493
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117819846544
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Karl Mannheim and the
liberal telos of realism
Andreas H Hvidsten
Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Norway
Abstract
The renaissance of classical realism in International Relations (IR) has highlighted the close
historical and conceptual connection between realism and liberalism. In this essay, I consider
an underexplored epistemological dimension of this connection using Karl Mannheim’s Ideology
and Utopia – an influential work for classical IR realists and an important treatise on political
theory in its own right. Based on Mannheim’s argument, I make the case that (a certain kind
of) liberalism is the telos of (a certain kind of) realism: that the natural endpoint of the inherent
logic of realism is a form of liberalism. I argue that completing the epistemological and political
critique that leads to realism by also putting the realist position itself under (self-)examination,
unearths a liberal outlook as its foundation. Explicating this dialectic adds a new dimension to
the many other points of contact between realism and liberalism that have been explored by IR
scholars in recent years, and it provides a new link between this scholarship and the literature
on the epistemological foundations of classical realism. Finally, the essay is an argument for a
closer engagement with Mannheim in an IR context, both as a philosopher of knowledge and as
a political thinker.
Keywords
dialectic, liberalism, Mannheim, realism
Introduction
The theoretical contrast between realism and liberalism goes back to the birth of
International Relations (IR).1 As Ian Hall has emphasized, ‘to properly understand [the
rise of] realism, it is necessary to acknowledge that realists responded to the “horrors of
the twentieth century” by blaming them not on nationalist, fascist or communist ideolo-
gies, but on liberalism’.2 However, this relation is not simply antagonistic. Indeed, there
Corresponding author:
Andreas H Hvidsten, Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, MF vitenskapelig høyskole,
Gydas vei 4, postboks 5144, 0302 Oslo, Norway.
Email: andreas.h.hvidsten@mf.no
846544IRE0010.1177/0047117819846544International RelationsHvidsten
research-article2019
Article
476 International Relations 33(3)
has been a re-appreciation of the close kinship between realism and liberalism in IR.3
From the realist side, Michael Williams has argued that realism is ‘in fact, the defence of
a particular kind of liberalism’;4 from the liberal side, Beate Jahn has called realism the
‘dark side’ of liberalism.5
One of the main takeaways from this reassessment, I believe, is an emerging under-
standing of realism and liberalism not as competing theories, but as dialectically
related points of tension within a larger conceptual and historical horizon.6 In this
essay, I explore this dialectic from an epistemological angle using Karl Mannheim’s
Ideology and Utopia.7 My argument has one familiar and one novel part. The familiar
part is the derivation of a political realist position from an epistemological critique of
universalist narratives.8 The more novel argument is that this epistemological critique,
when completed and turned inwards on the critiquing subject, leads (back) to a liberal
position.
After defining what I mean by realism and liberalism, and showing how epistemo-
logical critique can underpin the former, I spend the bulk of the essay exploring the last
link in the chain: the trajectory from the epistemologically derived realism back to the
kind of liberalism delineated in the first section. This is a dialectical movement driven by
an immanent critique of the realist position. Simply put, the argument is that through
understanding the antagonistic nature of political pluralism, realism creates a new per-
spective above this pluralism. This perspective constitutes a political subjectivity9 that is
not itself part of the antagonistic pluralism it understands, but transcends the domain of
the political it has identified and externalized. This subjectivity, I argue, is, in fact, a
liberal subjectivity.
A somewhat paradoxical implication of this argument is that if the realist outlook
universalized itself and everybody in the political sphere became a political realist, the
result would be a liberal political order – specifically, I will argue, a political situation
akin to John Rawls’ ‘reasonable pluralism’.10 This internal dialectic is what I have in
mind when I claim that realism has a liberal telos.
One notable aspect of my argument is that it problematizes the idea that realism does
not conceive of historical movement as ‘achievement of a rational telos, but rather as a
series of successive crises to be negotiated by prudent statecraft’.11 I suggest that realism
does embody a rational telos – an endpoint to historical-political development inherent
in the logic of realism itself – but that this telos is largely implicit and therefore usually
unacknowledged. This is why Mannheim is potentially important for gaining a complete
picture of the realism-liberalism dynamic: his writings represent a way to disclose the
liberal telos of realism through epistemological (self-)critique.
Liberalism, realism and antagonism in the political sphere
I am primarily interested in realism as a theory of the ‘autonomy of politics’12 – a sphere
of action and understanding governed by its own, distinct logic.13 In an IR context, Hans
Morgenthau has given the perhaps most well-known realist formulation of politics as a
realm of social practice separate ‘from other spheres, such as economics […], ethics,
aesthetics, or religion’.14 On this level of generality, as Alison McQueen has recently
noted, the difference between IR (classical) realism and realism in political philosophy
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