ABSTRACT
One last point needs to be stressed. Modern sociologists have not only purged the fundamental intuition contained in the notion of dialectic of the ideological contamination which in Marx makes it a lay substitute for the notion of providence. They are aware also of the fact that, while it is necessary in sociological analysis to take into consideration anonymous ‘social forces’ and unintentional effects such as the effects of composition, simultaneously one must consider the capacity for voluntary intervention on these social forces which any social system has at its disposal-or more accurately which some of the actors belonging to the social system have at their disposal. Men not only ‘make history without knowing it’, they have also the ability to convert their will into history.
