p Some sociologists see the causes of “social disorganisation" in the social changes themselves not in the objective material conditions that determine social change. Social disorganisation is supposed to be a result of the lag of cultural changes behind all other changes, especially technical ones.

p Ogburn was the first to advance this conception at the end of the 1930s. He saw the cause of social disorganisation in the lag of morality and consciousness and not in the antagonistic contradiction of class interests in capitalist society. He wrote that human nature, which is characterised by impulses of fear, sex, curiosity, new experience, adventure, pugnacity, rage, flight, gregariousness, sociability and altruism, had changed but little since prehistoric times. Civilisation had changed, and modern urban life suppresses some basic human drives and motives and offers inadequate satisfaction for others. That is why human nature and society must adapt themselves to each other anew [see 106; 287].

p Ogburn is considered the originator of the “cultural lag" theory. Unemployment, depressions, poverty, diseases, crime, family disorganisation, etc., all, in his opinion, stem from, the cultural lag.

The theory is in some measure a tribute to “ technological determinism" because it sees the final causes of social disorganisation mostly in technology. In fact, in capitalist society a contradiction between man and technology is, as was already noted, continuously engendered and developed. The level of people’s consciousness (including customs, traditions, etc.) lags behind changes in the material culture 174 conditioned by technical progress. Ogburn has justly ob served certain objective contradictions arising in the development of the productive forces of modern capitalism, but he has stopped half-way and has ignored the fact that the direction and character of these contradictions are determined mainly by the social, and especially, people’s economic relations.