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offered by it. Many schools of statically conservative thought do not conceal the role of social compulsion in the establishment of social relationships, in the creation of generał contents of collective con-sciousness and in the maintenance of the system; instead they try to explain and justify them by means of different theories: by infering compulsion from the spontaneously established ideative and value-normative concensus (Durkheim and the spiritualist current in functio-nalism); by an irremovable and radical difference between capabili-ties of the ruling minorities and the rest of society (Pareto and related elistic theories); by immanent imperatives of technology (Gehlen, Schelsky and, although with different historical perspectives, Mar-cuse, and a branch of vulgar Marxism). In the concept of experience which arises in methodological transformations of statically conser-vative theories, generał, esesntial and constitutive in a social pheno-menon is that which is engendered by social compulsion; this concept, however, overlooks the dialectically contradictory relationship between the generał and the particular, society and the individual, which is mediated by the relationship between society and those of its sections to which the individual belongs, and by the individual’s po-sition within particular social groups. The concept of experience, »purified« by theoretical assumptions and research procedures from different concrete social contradictions and tensions, suits conservative practical interest. At the end of the last century Durkheim very con-sistently developed this methodological view about the character of experience of society upon which sociology as a positive science should be built. A social phenomenon is sociologically relevant (»social fact«) only inasmuch as it contains social compulsion: as vis tnajor it stands above individuals, it is independent of them and acts with the inexo-rability of a natural force.⁷⁴ The statical conservative theory of ex-perience is only interested in what is generał in phenomena, in other words in that which reveals the most important prereąuisites of the functioning and conservation of the social system. In its own concept of experience, it seeks to separate the generał elements in phenomena from the concrete manner in which they are expressed. This is parti-cularly evident in a pronounced contempt for individualized forms of manifesting social phenomena. The social is mechanically separated from the individual and the latter is regarded as purely accidental and subjective, hence unsuitable for scientific empirical evidence. Durkheim s conception of scientific experience is in this respet very

»A social fact is to bc rccognized by the power of exleraal coercion which it e.-crciscs or is capable of cxercising over individuals, and the prcscncc of this power may bc rccognized in its tura either by the existence of some specific sant-tion or by the resistance offered against cvery individual effort that tends to vio-late it. One can. however, define it also by its diffusion within the group, providcd ihat in conioriuity with our previous remarks, one takes care to add a second and esscntial charactcristic that its own caistence is independent of the individual forms u assumes in its diffusion... Gcnerality combincd with cxtcrnality may, then, be easier to establish*. (E. Durkheim, The Rules o/ Sociological Melhod, quoted ac-cording to the book by M. Brodbeck (cd.), Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, New York, 1968, p. 250.)

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