ABSTRACT
Technocratic theories are symptomatic of a profound cultural crisis, as are anti-technocratic views which accept the idea of a growing dominance of technique and its social bearers or representatives. They have sprung up in the absence of a social theory that would explore systematically and illuminate the relations between industrial processes of production and human social, motivational and political organization. At the same time, they exploit the methodological uncertainties of social science. In particular, there is lacking a sociology of technology which would seek to understand the place of technique, linguistic and social as well as material-instrumental, in human life and history, although of course some progress has been made. Fears of technocracy as well as its advocacy are symptomatic, too, of the defensiveness into which humanistic and literary culture has been thrown by science, and of the mingled sense of promise and disappointment, resentment and enthusiasm which has surrounded the question of the broader cultural meaning of developments in the social sciences.
