Preface(r944 and r947) xv obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world histor If the only obstacles were those arising from the oblivious instru mentalization of science, thought about social questions could at least attach itself to tendencies opposed to official science. Those tendencies, too, however, are caught up in the general process of production. The have changed no less than the ideology they attacked. They suffer the fate which has always been reserved for triumphant thought. If it voluntarily leaves behind its critical element to become a mere means in the service of an existing order, it involuntarily tends to transform the positive cause it has espoused into something negative and destructive. The eighteenth century philosophy which, defying the funeral pyres for books and peo- ple, put the fear of death into infamy, joined forces with it under Bona- parte. Finally, the apologetic school of Comte usurped the succession to the uncompromising encyclopedistes, extending the hand of friendship*to all those whom the latter had opposed. Such metamorphoses of critique Into mation do not leave theoretical content untouched: its truth evaporates. Today, however, motorized history is rushing ahead of such intellectual developments, and the official spokesmen, who have other concerns, are liquidating the theory to which they owe their place in the sun'before it has time to prostitute itself completely. In reflecting on its own guilt, therefore, thought finds itself deprived not only of the affirmative reference to science and everyday phenomena but also of the conceptual language of opposition. No terms are available which do not tend toward complicity with the prevailing intellectual trends, and what threadbare language cannot achieve on its own is pre cisely made good by the social machinery. The censors voluntarily main tained by the film factories to avoid greater costs have their counterparts in all other departments. The process to which a literary text is subjected if not in the automatic foresight of its producer then through the battery of readers, publishers, adapters, and ghost writers inside and outside the editorial office, outdoes any censor in its thoroughness. To render their function entirely superfluous appears, despite all the benevolent reforms, to be the ambition of the educational system. In the belief that without strict limitation to the observation of facts and the calculation of proba bilities the cognitive mind would be overreceptive to charlatanism and