Horkheimer rejected Sohn-Rethel’s work as abstract where Mannheim at least engaged history

Evidence

Horkheimer responded coolly that, although there was much intellectual power behind this dreary sequence of sentences full of words heavy with significance', the work's position with regard to history itself, as it is, is not much different from that of a Jaspers or some other professor’. The peculiar irony of Marx's categories was nowhere at work'; Sohn-Rethel had succeeded in denuding the concept of exploitation of any aggressive content’ in a way that not even Mannheim had achieved. What the author had done, with discoveries which were in no way new ones, was `to gloss over them idealistically, instead of bringing them into focus’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 654

Categorization

• QUESTION: Horkheimer claims Sohn-Rethel’s anti-idealist project was already Mannheim’s — worth chasing how accurate this characterization was.
• XREF: connects to: Horkheimer’s first extended article attacked Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia