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located inside the state (Konrad and Szelcnyi. l979).

There are two ways of expressing this idea of the progressive intellectual. We can either argue
that intellectuals produce abstract and universal thought (Nettl. 1969) because they are not
attached to a particular social group or social class, or we can say that intellectuals are
progressive because they stand outside society, and therefore do not serve a specific set of
social interests. The classic idea of the free-floating intellectual is in fact a version of Georg
Simmels The Stranger' (1971), and the epitome of the Simmelian stranger is the freefloating urban Jew. It is a matter of common observation that sociology and socialism were
almost entirely produced by Jews from Marx to Durkheim, from Mannheim to the
Frankfurt School and, in our own period, the so-called New York intellectuals, the Budapest
Circle in Australia and Norbert Elias. These intellectuals had very diverse institutional
backgrounds and sources of patronage. The contracts between Daniel Bell as a Harvard
professor, Alfred Sohn-Rethel as a Birmingham school teacher, and Alfred Schulz as a banker
are stark and obvious, but representative: is it possible that their Jewishness alone explains
their alienation and distance from Gentile society? The idea here is that distance (whether
free-floating or outside) produces the sociological conditions that generate radical and/or
universalistic thought. Detachment itself it often seen as the plat~form of sociological
observation' (Sthils, l980: 1).t.
Any reference to progressive intellectuals' in the conventional sociological literature
typically means 'socialis intellectuals', but we should not forget that Mannheims most
sustained study of the intelligentsia was in his essay on Conservatism (Mannheim. 1986).
Where conservatism was a romantic critique of capitalism, then conservatism functioned as a
utopia, not as an ideology. Indeed Mannheim went out of his way to correct the assumption
that an anti-capitalist utopia would be a socialist utopia. The origins of the anti-capitalist
movement lay not with proletarian socialism but religious and aristocratic conservation. We
can think of many illustrations of this romantic critique of capitalism by conservative
intellectuals: the English conservative intellectuals such as the (American) T.S. Eliot in The
Waste Land, the protests against capitalist inauthenticity by the poet Rilke, the romantic
philoshopical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen, at the Stefan George Circle at Heidelberg.
Perhaps Mannheim himself was a romantic critic, in the sense that planning was to restore
order to the conflictual