Karl Mannheim and the liberal telos of realism

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.