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and man and consequently between man and naturę is differently set up than in the age of domination (Herrschaft) and isolation of indi-viduals (Dereinzelung), that the breach between the subjective and the objective reason will disappear in unity. This requires work on society as a whole, a historical activity. The inauguration of a social situation in which a man does not become the tool of another is at the same time the realization of the concept of reason, which is now threatened to disappear in the rift between objective truth and functional think-ing.«⁵⁶ This rift which engenders an extraordinary increase of functional rationality in natural Sciences and technology, and in recent decades has widened to social Sciences within an irrational social framework of exploitation, domination and oppression, as well as its philosophical justification, were the object of inquiry by many ad-herents of the critical theory. Some reference to this has already been madę in connection with Marcuse’s ideas in One-DimensionalMan and Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason, revealing certain major weak-nesses in their theoretical concepts. No attempt will be madę in this article to discuss these concepts at length, which is indispensable in the sociology of knowledge. We shall only State as a generał observation that these analyses of the development of thought, and especially of Sciences, in the new-age European culture, have succeeded better in perceiving certain basie changes in the internal structure and social functions of thought than in placing this development of ideas, in a historically determined manner, in its appropriate socio-historical context. This context has been very roughly outlined or, as with Mar-cuse, its role has been almost completely neglected; what is morę, the development of Sciences in its latter stages has been derived from the transcendental characteristics of scientific thought. In the sociology of knowledge there are many reliable analyses of the concrete influence of social conditions upon the development of Sciences, their organization and their links with the educational systems in different European countries and time periods, the results of which cannot be overlooked or simply substituted with Scheler’s Husserl’s or Heidegger’s ideas.⁵⁷

⁵⁸ M. Horkhcimcr, »Zum Begriff der Vernunft«, in the book by M. Horkheimer, Th. W. Adorno, Sociologica 11, p. 204.

⁸⁷ The same weaknesses in the approach to some of the major conclusions can be found in one of Habermas’s latest treatises (sce J. Habennas, "Technik und Wissen-schaft ais ’Ideologie'«, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1968, pp. 48-103). Here, for exeample, it is claimed that interdependence between science and technology did not exist until just before the end of the 19th century, and that modem science had not until then contributed to the acceleration of technical development (p. 73), as if Merton’s and other historical studies of sociology of knowledge had not established an active participation of the most prominent scientists and leading scientific institutions in the solution of the technical side of the economic and military problems in England late in the 17th and at the beginning of the 18th centuries. (See R. K. Merton, ^Science and Economy of 17th Century England«, in R. K. Merton’s book, Social Theory and Social Structure, 2nd edition, The Frce Press, Glencoe, 111., 1957.) No less astonishing is the statement that in the industrially developed capitalist countries, science and technology assumed the function of vindicating the system, which had been performed by the pre-bourgeois and classical bourgeois ideologies (pp. 74, 76, 88-93). The fetishization of science and technology is no doubt an important factor in the contemporary techno-bureaucratic and bourgeois ideology, but cer-tainly not the only one. For instance, this fetishization appears indeed as a cora-

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