that kind, its reception can still render it paranoid. To say in a precise sense that someone holds this or that theory is already to imply the stolid, blankly staring proclamation of grievances, immune to selfreflection. Thinkers lacking in the paranoid element -- one of them was Georg Simmel, though he made of the lack a panacea -- have no impact or are soon forgotten. By no means does this imply their superiority. If truth were defined as the utterly non-paranoid, it would be at the same time not only the utterly impotent and in conflict with itself, to the extent that practice is among its elements -- but it would also be wholly unable to evolve a coherent structure of meaning. Flight from the idée fixe becomes a flight from thought. Thinking purified of obsession, a thoroughgoing empiricism, grows itself obsessive while sacrificing the idea of truth, which fares badly enough at empiricists' hands. From this aspect, too, dialectics would have to be seen as an attempt to escape the either/or. It is the effort to rescue theory's trenchancy and consequential logic without surrendering it to delusion.

Procrustes -- The throttling of thought makes use of an almost inescapable pair of alternatives. What is wholly verified empirically, with all the checks demanded by competitors, can always be foreseen by the most modest use of reason. The questions are so ground down in the mill that, in principle, little more can emerge than that the percentage of tuberculosis cases is higher in a slum district than on Park Avenue. The sneering empiricist sabotage thrives on this, being patted on the back by the budget makers who administer its affairs in any case, and shown the drawn-down, corners of the mouth that signify: 'Knew it all along'. But that which would be different, the contribution the scientists claim to thirst for, they deprecate equally, just because it is not known by everyone: 'Where is the evidence?' If this is lacking, a thought can only be vain and idle speculation, whereas research is supposed to caper like reportage. These fatal alternatives induce ill-tempered defeatism. People do science as long as something pays for it. But they have faith in neither its relevance nor the bindingness of its results. They would discard the whole consignment of junk, if changes in the social form of organization made redundant, for example, the ascertaining of statistical averages, in admiration of which formal democracy is mirrored as the mere superstition of the research bureaux. The procedure of the official social sciences is little more now than a parody of the businesses that keep such science afloat while really needing it only as an advertisement. The whole apparatus

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