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Critical thought evolves relying on a progressive tradition, because in regressive aspirations there is also a definite continuity which often gives rise to an emulation of the regressive forms of social life from the past.⁴⁹ (2) Yet tradition is sometimes unduly overrated. Habermas seems to see in it the only encouragement for a further development of the critical theory. »Experiences of our age do not support the con-yiction that civilization of humanity is its strongest tradition. It seems though that sociology must see in an ironical repetition, although wi-thout the metaphysical guarantee provided by the natural order, its of criticism only from the conservation of its own critical tradition«.⁵⁰ critical tasks as in fact conservative ones because it draws the motives This proposition would seem to reflect a very narrow, almost pa-rochial view of the history of our age. lf we contemplate contem-porary history from a universal rather than a purist perspective, and if we are not obsessed with the concrete conceptions and expectations of the progressive European thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather creatively continue its tradition, there is really no reason to see nothing but unfulfilment of these expectations in this age; there are also historical breakthroughs which are at least par-tially but not insignificantly in accordance with the earlier progressive expectations and therefore can be very much of an impluse to the development of critical thought. Finally, are not failures also a mo-tive for the search of new opportunities? Belief that reliance on pro-gressive thought from the past is sufficient to develop contemporary critical thought is liable to lead to a special form of traditionalism.

Searching for theoretical support in the conceptions of reason dev-eloped in the progressive philosophical thought, the protagonists of the critical theory devoted their attention to inconsistencies in these

ristics, together with a usually irrational view of the history of other peoples with whom one’s own had becn in a close contact, both of which rendering morę dif-ficult the integration in the progressive contemporary historical trends.

⁴⁹    An even stronger emphasis on progressive tradition was madę by Werner Hofmann, in stating that nothing that once meant a progressive culture is lost for-ever. »A cultural achievement (including morał achievements) of a historical pro-cess is in fact irreversible. Once constructed, the painfully formed image of man with all his possibilities remains, even in the eelipses of history. It may be denied, but never destroyed.« (W. Hofmann, Universitat, Ideologie, Gesellschaft, Beitrage zur Wissenschaftssoziologie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M., 1968, p. 81.) In the Yugo-goslav political thought, the works of Ljubomir Tadić show the value of a cons-cious reliance upon progressive tradition in the development of a progressive contemporary standpoint (see L. Tadić, Poredak i sloboda (System and Freedom), Kultura, Belgrade 1967, passim.)

⁵⁰    J. Habermas, Theorie und Praxis, p. 230. This is not an accidental passage in Habermas’s work; this exaggeration of tradition’s role appears freąuently, so that the mentioned passage has a documentary value for the assumption that such a view of tradition forms the basie, perhaps even pre-theoretical, premises of his thought. In his polemics with H. Albert, Habermas, for example, States that »ima-gination is formed only in contact with traditions which must first be adopted ...« (J. Habermas, »Gegen einen positivistisch halbierten Rationalismus«, Kólner Zeit-schrift fur Soziologic und Sozialpsyckologie, 16, Jhrg. (1964), p. 654.) The exclusi-veness of this view appears to deny that liberation from tradition is a prereąuisite for imaginative comprehension of reality and creation of original visions. It would seem that the role of tradition has also been overemphasized in Habermas’s con-ception of the manner in which experiential, non-theoretical consciousness of social groups is formed.

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