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logy without society«.¹⁰ Even Mills at the end of the ’fifties failed to perceive that the functionalist theory resolutely attemps to relate itself to empirical investigations.^u This kind of criticism of sociology is today no longer adequate. Although, far from disappearing, still the most numerous are those investigations which because of their concrete aims, subjected to administrative needs, are carried out wi-thin a very limited theoretical perspective, this is no longer the most important direction of theoretical and methodological endeavours but is increasingly replaced by different variants of the theory of society as a system.

In the critical theory the comprehensive and historical character of the approach to contemporary society has yet another, also very spe-cific function wich is not found in the positivist and statically conser-vative system theories in generał. It is only through such an approach to contemporary society that the theory is capable of determining the social subject of its realization, i. e. the social forces whose objective social situation basically coincides with its interest for a morę rational form of society, and of helping to make it politically conscious. The criticism of ideology as a »socially indispensable illusion« (Schein), of false consciousness which is one of the prerequisites for the main-tenance of the existing irrational form of society, is one of the vital tasks of the critical theory. Without a penetration behind the ideolo-gical faęade, which conceals mechanism by means of which the exist-ing society maintains and reproduces itself, it will not be possible to find out the truth about it and make it the quintessence of enlighten-ment of the theory’s possible social subject. The fact that all the ra-dical representatives of critical thought, e. g. the French philosophers of Enlightenment and Marx, have almost permanently been engaged in the criticism of ideology, and the fact that the tradition of this criticism is being revived in the contemporary critical theory, are due not so much to accidental personal inclinations of these thinkers as they are a constitutional moment in this kind of critical thought.¹² We shall see later how it is related to the conception of experience about society and to the principle of scientific objectivity.

Up to here the programme of critical theory runs parallel with the original idea of Marx about the role of theory in the historical process. From a formal point of view, this coincidence goes one step further -it determines the character of the critique. The latter is not understood in the spirit of philosophical criticism, i. e. as investigation into transcendental assumptions and limits of rational thought; it is not even a vague idea of rejection of everything existing; it is rather concentrated on bringing to light the essential contradictions of the

¹⁰ Institut fur Sozialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse, p. 16. Also sec M. Hork-heimer, »Soziologie und PhiIosophie«, in the book by M. Horkheimer, T. W. Ador-no, Sociologica II, Frankfurter Bcitrage zur Soziologie, Bd. 10, Europaische Ver-lagsanstalt, Frankfurt a. M., 1962, p. 10.

“ C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford Uniyersity Press, New York, 1959, 22-24, 74-75, ch. 2 and 3 passim.

¹² This is underlined by Kurt Lenk in his article, -Dialektik bei Marx, Erinne-

rung an den Ursprung der kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie., Soziale Welt, Jhrg. 19 (1968), H. 3-4.    ^{J 6}

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