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tifold. Not only do some of its protagonists, especially Marcuse, rush headlong into an uncritical acceptance of the contemporary bourgeois ideology’s basie idea about the »affluent society«, to the effect that misery and poverty, in a literał sense, have become quite insignificant in the industrially developed capitalist countries,³⁶ not to mention social ineąualities in some spheres, e. g. education, health, and justice, but also no use is madę of scientifically reliable data about various forms of a wide-spread and latent, although politically impotent, dis-satisfaction. A theory which rightfully believes that pain, suffering and sensitivity to injustice are the main impulses for thought aspiring toward morę humane forms of life, should be morę considerate to the social conditions where pain, suffering and injustice are most wide-spread and most serious. Furthermore, we know that social structure and organization are the object of a very lively theoretical and re-search activity in modern sociology, which is certainly not attributable only to the internal logie of its scientific development, all the morę so sińce in many works need has been stressed for the maintenance of the existing social system. However, the critical theory has not produced any thorough studies of these sociological endeavours. In other words, this theory, although claiming that unity with practice is its supreme principle, makes few efforts to come closer to those into whose con-sciousness it could eventually take root and emancipate a collective spontaneity, thus influencing practice, so that »the world would not only be interpreted but also changed«. Acąuaintance with social conditions in which the negation of the existingr system is most evident, even though it might not be effective, would certainly provide nume-rous impulses to the criticism of its ideology, which some of these thinkers, Adorno in the first place, develop most creatively. Para-phrasing Marx’s well-known thought that »it is not sufficient for thought to aspire towards its realization, but reality must aspire tow-ards thought«, it could be claimed in this instance that it is necessary for thought to show morę will and determination to obtain a thorough knowledge of the real contradictions in the existing world, if it wishes to implement itself in practice. In the contrary case it will remain an incomplete, sometimes even a wrong »diagnosis of the time«, without sufficiently elear and practically relevant ideas.

REASON: UNITY OF THEORY AND PRACTICE

If the representatives of the critical theory have failed to establish a unity with practice, the latter has been almost ceaselessly an object of their thinking. Because the great thought about the unity of theory

community, and thus the category framework for the study of social differentiation resembles morę formal sociology than Marx’s conception of society. As exceptions, which rather confirm the rule than challenge the correctness of the statement that historical sociological institutional analyses have been neglected, refcrence is madę to the studies by J. Habermas. Strukturwandel der Offentlichkcit, H. Luchterhand, Neuwied, 1962; H. Pross, Manager und Aktiondre in Deutscliland, Frankfurter Bei-trage zur Soziologie, Bd. 15, Europaische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt a. M., 1965.

*• About the prevalence, forms and partly also the causes of destitution and poverty in the USA, sec M. Harrington, Other America, Poverty in the United States. (1962).

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