Page 152 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

129 The Development of Normative Structures

steering capacities; under certain circumstances they are also signs
that the rationality structures that became accessible in the modern
age have mot yet been exhausted and that they allow for a com-
prehensive institutional embodiment in the form of extensive
processes of democratization.*
These examples have a strong admixture of speculation; for
just that reason they serve to illustrate a class of questions that
are important enough to deserve more rigorous argumentation
and that could be dealt with in a more rigorously argumentative
manner if we did not renounce from the outset the level of
analysis of historical materialism or of a theory of social evo-
lution satisfying its claims. An evolutionarily oriented analysis
of the present that does renounce it has to proceed dogmatically
with the kind of question for which I have supplied examples.*