Need to dissent and innovate, remain separate from class, party, etc. Man and Society in Age of Reconstruction Like Marx and Weber, saw contemporary society having social consequences of the concentration of the means of production and the separation of the worker from those means, but Mannheim also emphasized the separation of the worker from other institutions of society - namely, political and military spheres. Writing after the Nazis had taken power and after the Russian Revolution, he lamented the growing bureaucracy that he saw as undermining democracy. He saw people as being more and more dominated under capitalism and communism, the growing power of the military and the domination of minorities meant that people could now be intimidated, terrorized, and killed by powerful bureaucracies. Humans neither rational nor irrational.
Mass society leads to mass thinking, repressions, and renunciations of individual.
Responsible elites try to think for the rest of us. Conservative Fascism results from the unemployed restless masses coming under the sway of dictators. How much more simple would our lives be if we used social planning. Since intellectuals have no power, the only option open to them is to refuse to become mere ideological spokesmen for one or the other of the parties- become truly unattached intellectuals rather than their spin doctors. Understood Marx s class conflict, but saw the elites as using science and bureaucracy as tools to control the masses.