Given the role that ideas play within the self-constituting of human beings and human societies, what is the social responsibility and what is the moral responsibility of those whose function in the social division of labour is to think, the social engineers of human consciousness?

They cannot claim that the supposed ideal of intellectual objectivity absolves them from social and moral responsibility, if they claim that intellectual objectivity requires them to treat the actual – actual social and moral concepts, actual social and moral values, actual social and moral behaviour – as inevitable, rational and self-justifying.

Thinking in a social context is necessarily moral action, because it is liable to determine the lives of those whose consciousness is modified by that thinking, that is to say, by ideas acting as social forces. Our general social and responsibility now includes a duty to re-imagine the human world and human reality in the light of new ideas and new ideals.