92 SOCIAL SCIENTIST strata above him, at the same time, fearful of its identity of being submerged by the working class. What drove not only Orwell but the thirties generation to the despair of The God that Failed* is a question which still begs an answer. Was the reason the 'kind of socialism*, as Alok Rai calls Orwell's socialist ideas, which believes that everybody who is worth something is a socialist at the age of sixteen? This statement also includes that the opposite is true of the believers above the age of sixteen, and it is connected with Orwell's increased awareness of the necessity of a kind of realism, a 'truthful' account of empirical reality. The kind of generational experience of 'The God that Failed* can be seen as directly opposed to the generational experience of the Central-European anti-capitalist intelligentsia after the First World War becoming politicised and to a certain extent radicalised. Here G. Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, Arnold Hauser and Charles de Tolnai could be mentioned. Could this difference be attributed to the British empiricist tradition? In Kant's system of epistomology, a priori knowledge plays thetoost important and empirical data a lesser role. The Kantian notions of 'Is* and 'Ought' played a very important role in the perception of empirical reality by the young Lukacs and his generation. Positivism was also alien to him as a system of thought which overdetermines the individual's relationship to the real. Reading Orwell against the grain and historicising the problematic of 'anti-totalitarian* ideology, both Alok Rai and Akos Szilagyi plead like Ernst Bloch for a belief in the principle of hope. This would entail an openness of thought, a belief in social practice and the necessity of maintaining our critical location in a world.