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clearly defined.⁷⁵ It is therefore understandable why Adorno on sever-al occasions illustrated his critiąue of the statical conservative con-ception of scientific experience and objectivity by using Durkheim’s methodological ideas.⁷⁶

There is another variant of the statical conservative approach to society and to the conception of scientific experience. It relies upon nominalist tradition and tries to compose society from common cha-racteristics of individuals, overlooking the decisive influence of the social totality and its various mediations in the creation and preserva-tion of the common features of the inidvidual. The conservative cha-racter of this school of thought, which is prevalent in the contemporary sociological empiricism, consists in a primary interest for that which in the behaviour and consciusness of individuals suits the normative re-ąuirements of the existing society, and particularly the needs for the functioning of its various institutions. At the same time effective pro-cedures are being sought by means of which it would be possible to bring back within the limits of thus outlined requirements that which departs from them in individual behaviour. Objective conditions of the life of men and they themselves as human beings are taken into consideration in investigations only to the extent desirable for ensur-ing the technical efficiency of the intended intervention. The limits within technical efficiency is expected to move are a priori determin-ed by tolerance for departures in different areas of structure and or-ganization of the established society. In investigations which are di-rectly subordinated to administrative needs, these limits are usually outlined by the terms of reference, so the investigator does not have to examine them theoretically. We must not take this schematically and overlook cases in which, following the results of earlier investiga-tions, often commonsense notions about the limits of tolerance are changed, which means that the role of investigation does not always consist in finding out morę effective methods and forms of action within a fully static structural-organizational framework. New and morę efficient methods of action invariably demand at least a partial change in the conditions of their implementation. This partial, technical or descriptive form of sociological empiricism is content with a substantially narrow, and in terms of time restricted experience about

⁷⁵ »It remains for sociology to make the same advance, to pass from the sub-jective stage, which it has still scarcely outgrown, to the objective. Fortunately. this transformation is less difficult to effect here than in psychology. Indeed, psy-chological facts are naturally given as conscious States of the individual, fromwhom they do not seem to be even separable. Intemal by definition, it seems that they can be treated as external only by doing violence to their naturę ... Social facts, on the contrary, qualify far morę naturally and immediately as things ... By their very naturę they tend toward an independent existence outside the individual cons-ciousnesses, which they dominate*. (E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, quoted according to M. Brodbeck, op. cit. p. 253—4.). The following methodological principle is therefore a logical conclusion: »We may lay down the principle that social facts are all the better suited to be objectively represented as they are com-pletely freed of the individual facts which manifest them«. (E. Durkheim. Les r4g-les de la methode sociologique, 7. ćdition, F. Alcan, Paris, 1919, p. 55.)

⁷⁸ See Th. W. Adorno, »Zur Logik der SoziaLwissenschaften«, p. 261; »Notiz iiber Sozialwissenschaftliche Objektivitat«, Kólner Zeiłschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 17. Jhrg. (1965), H. 3; Negatioe Dialektik, p. 342.

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