This article was written forty years ago and has never been published. It were the events of May 1968 in France, unexpected both for the public opinion and for the scientists, that served as the cause for the writing of it. It were the “new left”, bearers of “post-material” values, that appeared then in the political scene. This outburst, by nobody predicted, made one ponder over correlation of tendencies of evidently mass character, that are fixed by sociological polls, on the one hand, and historical reality engendered as a result of actions on the part of some or other actors manifesting themselves differently – on the other. The work presents indubitable historical interest as an illustration of the uneasiness of the ways by which the science of society was developing at the Soviet time, and, besides, some of the considerations and approaches the article included, haven’t lost their topicality even today.