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The further discussion is limited to that part of critical opposition to the development of European thought towards an increasingly one-sided, although technically morę efficient functional rationalitv, which directly affects the development and defence of the critical theory in social Sciences. Fully aware that technization is making inroads into all theoretical social Sciences, including psychology, and that it is spreading very rapidly, the followers of this school of thought are attempting to explain the meaning of the changes implicit in this process, to dispute its epistemological justifications in the positivist philosophy, and to subject to criticism the methodological principles of technicism in social Sciences.⁵⁸ It is pointed out, first of all, that technicism restricst scrutiny in the study of society to technically usable knowledge which consists in determined regularities between variables, on the basis of which their futurę condition may be anti-cipated; forecasts serve as a basis for technical intervention and con-trol. Social regularities are envisioned to be analogous with natural laws, losing sight of the fact that the relationship between the generał and the particular in society is always historically concrete. Society, as a concrete contradictory whole, remains outside the rangę of methodological approach and theory; it is theoretically presented as a system of mutually dependent functions; the notion of society is only an abs-tract generał theoretical framework of individual investigations serv-ing to relate established knowledge about specific regularities, mainly in order to extend the possibilities of technical control. This concep-tual representation of society disguises its antagonistic character.⁵⁰ The reluctance to see the concrete historical social totality as a problem and disregard for its influence upon all the particular relation-ships and phenomena, which suits a conformistic acceptance of the existing society, has a decisive effect on the conception of the naturę of scientific experience about man and society, on the interpretation of scientific objectivity and the relationship between the existing reality and optimal possibilities, which will be referred to in the next ponent part of the ideology of the »American way of life«, but herc many purely traditional ideological elements play a vital role; one of them is the glorification of the time and spirit of the »pioneers«. In functionalism as an ideology, another basie bourgeois thesis - the principle of the equivalence of exchange in capitalism -appears to survive. Can anti-communism, which from time to time acquircs hyste-rical forms but is a permanent essence of almost all the bourgeois ideologies, be reduced down to a technocratical consciousness? Racialism, too, - in the name of the »latest« and »undeniable« scientific results - has becn spread by many »pro-fessors doctors* in the industrially developed capitalist countrics. Has science herc, too, in its transcendental sense, as Habermas would say, replaced the traditional forms of the bourgeois ideology? At any ratę, a pretty good substitution. (Some interesting critical remarks about Habermas’s use of twe word »transccndental« have been madę in the article by K. Schrader-Klebert, »Dcr Begriff des Transzcn-dentalen bei Jurgen Habermas*, Soziale Weil, 19, Jhrg., (1968) H. 3-4).

^M A description of the outward forms of this process and the cxp!anation of its social backgjound generally agree with Mills’ analysis in Sociological Imagination. Mills’ criticism of the soical roots of the process is morę open and morę resolute, but less philosophically founded.

** This is particularly stressed by Adomo. See Th. W. Adomo, -Soziologie und empirische Forschung*, in the book by M. Horkheimer, T. W. Adomo, Sociologica II, pp. 213-214.

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