ABSTRACT
The liberal interpretation regards technology primarily as providing relief and safety; it helps human beings to free themselves from the hardships and burdens which they have suffered throughout history. The essence of Jurgen Habermas's criticism of the technocracy thesis as an ideology is not the claim that this thesis embellishes and legitimates an alarming development, nor primarily that it helps to conceal it. Habermas's point is that the legitimation of the kinds of values and objectives does not and cannot belong in the realm of technological rationality. Natural-scientific knowledge, according to Habermas, does not enter the lifeworld as theory, but only in an applied form thereof, through its exploitation for technological purposes. No doubt Lukacs deserves much of the blame for the fact that so much philosophy of technology within West-European Marxism has apprehended technology as the ideal type of the purposive rationality.
