Preface(1944 and 1947/ When we began this work, the first samples of which we dedicate to Friedrich Pollock, we hoped to be able to present the whole book on his fiftieth birthday. But the further we proceeded with the task the more we became aware of the mismatch between it and our own capabilities. What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of*bar- barism. We underestimated the difficulty of dealing with the subject because we still placed too much trust in contemporary consciousness While we had noted for many years that, in the operations modern so ence, the major discoveries are paid for with an increasing" decline of the oretical education we nevertheless believed that we could follow those operations to the extent of limiting our work primarily to a critique or a continuation of specialist theories. Our work was to adhere, at least the matically, to the traditional disciplines: sociology, psychology, and episte- mology. The fragments we have collected here show, however, that we had to abandon that trust. While attentive cultivation and investigation of the scientific heritage-especially when positivist new brooms have swept it away as useless lumber--does represent one moment of knowledge, in the present collapse of bourgeois civilization not only the operations but the purpose dubious. The tireless self-d e enlightenment hypocritically celebrated by implacable fascists and imple mented by pliable experts in humanity* compels thought to forbid itself its last remaining innocence regarding the habits and tendencies of the Zeitgeist. If public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the com- modity, the attempt to trace the sources of this degradation must refuse