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mediated by social relationships, or morę precisely, by the satisfaction of human needs and interests. Practice exists only if there is an estab-lished unity between the subject and object, i. e. if individual and col-lective participants in a mutual relationship and influence are aware of their true significance, if they have comprehended this meaning from the standpoint of their needs and interests, and if they can freely regulate their mutual relationships. Criterion of functional rationality as applied in technology, i. e. an efficient utilization of the means to achieve the subjecfs ends, is in practice replaced with substantial rationality: the emancipation of the participants, their autonomy, ma-turity and individuation. These criteria can only be realized by pro-moting communication in a coercion-free society. Any practical influence must respect the existing practical consciousness of the participants. In social Sciences, if they are to contribute to the development of practice, a hermeneutical approach is therefore indispensable in order to comprehend the actual consciousness of individuals and social groups, which developed in their earlier experience and under the influence of tradition. This does not mean, however, that the establish-ed consciousness should be viewed passively, because individual and collective spontaneity engender a warped consciousness. Criticism of ideology is, therefore, indispensable, but not as a manipulation or in-doctrination; the social medium of enlightenment and emancipation is a free public (Offentlichkeit) where all problems are discussed on which a practical decision is to be madę. This is how Habermas evi-dently wishes to solve Marx’s apparently insoluble problem about »educating the educators«, by abolishing in the sphere of social practice »educators« as a social group with a specific authority, and re-placing them with a collective self-education by mutual communication in a free public.⁶⁹ Thi6 truły democratic idea is, obviously, feasible in inverse proportion to objective ineąualities in a society and contradictions arising from them. A critique of the above idea which would move only in this direction would be, however, one-sided and inadeąuate for as long as the idea of practice is viewed as the opposi-tion of an ideał to a reality in which various technical procedures of domination over men prevail. In the internal relationships of a revolu-tionary movement, which truły fights for a community of free men, such a notion about the method of solving all practical issues should become a norm at the risk of the movement degrading itself sooner or later into its own negation. In the light of this concretization of the method of establishing the unity of theory and practice, the contro-versy about Marcuse’s thesis on external negation becomes much clearer. Without a possibility of being related with a spontaneously arisen collective consciousness which it could develop further, while at the same drawing various impulses from the collective spontaneity

®* Habermas expressed this view about the relationship between theory and practice in several articlcs, which were later collected in the book J. Habermas, Technik und LUisscnschaft ais ’Ideologiebut the basie idea can be found already in his book Theorie und Praxis. We have deliberately omitted here some of the objections that could be madę against certain concepts and theoretical propositions which he madę in developing his thought.

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