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sence. The applicability of this law runs counter to the princłple of individuation; that which despite everything cannot be just glossed over, namely that men are not just ordinary specimens of their kind.«⁷⁹ Adorno, like Durkheim, believes that whatever is generał and common in social behaviour is a sequel to social pressure.⁸⁰ He, howe-ver, does not regard the situation as a natural one but as a condition of a bonded society whose antagonistic relationships hinder the indi-vidualization of men and reproduce in individuals its own irrationa-lity.⁸¹ We have seen earlier that Adorno believed that in contempo-rary society, which is moving toward totalitarianism, dominance of society over the individual is increasing. This however, does not occur smoothly, without opposition and without tragic consequences. In so-ciological generalizations about various regularities, which overlook the antagonistic character of society as a whole, and the manifestation of which is separated from the context of the life of individuals in a biographical sense, actual social contradictions and antagonisms re-main very largely hidden.⁸² Therefore, what Durkheim put forward as a principle, which would ensure greater objectivity of scientific ex-perience, is being criticized here, on the basis of a dialectical concep-tion of relationships between what is generał and particular in an antagonistic social totality, as a distortion of reality and regarded as a major index of the inobjectivity of research proceedings. The pos-sibility of avoiding this distortion lies in a complex structural and genetic investigation of the conditions- of life of individuals and groups whose concrete behaviour or consciousness are under scrutiny, without ever losing sight of relationships with social totality.

Another domain in which partial agreements and differences between critical and static conservative theories of experience are also evident is the interpretation of social consciousness. Durkheim, like all sociologists who have accepted Mannheim’s thesis on total ideology. could fully endorse Horkheimer’s explanations about the double social determination of experience, because of (1) socio-historical formation of objects under scrutiny which had arisen in social practice, and (2) historical development of man’s cognitive apparatus and technical means serving to widen the field and increase the accuracy of expe-rience.⁸³ Differences arise in trying to explain the role of various forms of consciousness in social life, their relationship to the existing social condition, and their role as a source of information about society. Into the discussion of these problems of scientific experience, the critical theory introduced the ideas of the criticism of ideology. Whereas according to Durkheim and the spiritualist faction in func-tionalism, the ruling ideas about society are a spontaneous and ade-auate expression of the social being, the followers of the critical theory believe that in an antagonistic society they are mostly ideo-

^7J Th. W. Adorno, »Soziologie und empirische Forschung«, p. 214.

^8B »Dic Gemeinsamkeit des sozialen Reagicrcns ist wesentlłch die des sozialen Drucks« (Ibid., p. 214).

⁹¹ Ibid., pp. 214-215.

⁸ⁱ Ibid., p. 213.

^M M. Horkheimer, »Traditionelle und kritische Theorie«, pp. 255-257.

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