Abstract
The pertinence of questions of social forecasting increases in connection with the development of the revolution in science and technology and with the pressing need to predict its social consequences. The growing attention to these questions in contemporary bourgeois sociology is to be explained, on the one hand, by the need for a theoretical validation of what is termed "social programming" under the conditions of state-monopoly capitalism, by the requirements for a practical elaboration of a technique for predicting the state of the economy and political situations of the future, and, on the other hand, by the effort of bourgeois ideologists to reject the very possibility of any social and historical forecasting requiring recognition of objective laws in history.