DENNIS WRONG
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want to review yet again the concept's intellectual history in Hegelian
philosophy and Marxism: the complex conceptual links among alien–
ation, objectification, estrangement, and reification -
Entiiusserung,
Entfremdung, Verdinglichung,
et al- in the German romantic and
idealist traditions. Neither am I concerned to offer another account
of the specifically sociological adaptations of the concept, its dif–
ferences from and frequent erroneous equation with anomie, let
alone the various efforts to convert it into an empirically testable and
even "measurable" phenomenon. All of these things have been done
before quite adequately by competent and intelligent scholars.
It should be noted, however, that "alienation" was already a
commonplace as long ago as the 1930s among the left-wing literary
intellectuals associated with
Partisan Review.
Its ubiquitous use in
these circles long antedated its postwar appropriation by existen–
tialists, sociologists, and "humanist" Marxists. Yet this early history
is invariably ignored by academic commentators and chroniclers,
as in Walter Kaufman's assertion in his introduction to Richard
Schacht's book,
Alienation,
that "in the fifties a few refugees from
Germany and Austria naturalized 'alienation' in the United States."
(He specifically mentioned Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Erich
Kahler, and Hannah Arendt. ) Yet in the anthology of the first ten
years of
Partisan Review
published in 1946, the single selection re–
printed from the journal's first two years, when it was affiliated with
the Communist Party, was an exposition of the concept of alienation
in Marx's
Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts
entitled "The Philosophic
Thought of the Young Marx." This article originally appeared in
1936, a mere four years after the first publication ofthe famous Paris
Manuscripts in Moscow. So at least one influential group of
American intellectuals was familiar with the young Marx's interest
in the alienation concept barely a few years after the texts revealing
this interest had become known and available.
I recall from my own experience that by the middle 1940s, if
not earlier, the term had become very much an emblem or badge of
identity for people in the orbit of
Partisan Review,
some of them even
occasionally jesting about the extent to which this was the case.
Clearly, alienation was already understood not merely as a painful
affliction but as something of an honorific condition suggesting
superior aesthetic sensibility and spiritual depth, long before it ac–
quired these overtones when popularized two decades later. There
was a widely-repeated tale, probably apocryphal, about a secretary
at
The New Yorker
maliciously asking a secretary at
Partisan Review
if
