Born in Budapest, Mannheim was educated at Heidelberg, before becoming professor of sociology at Frankfurt. In 1933 he left Germany and taught at London until 1946. His major work, Ideologie und Utopie (1929, trs. as Ideology and Utopia, 1936) was influential in opening up the sociology of knowledge, or the attempt to relate all modes of thought to the economic and cultural forces surrounding their occurrence (see base and superstructure). His own attempts to explain how objective knowledge is possible despite the matrix of interests that give it its shape have not met general acceptance.