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cludes feelings and attitudes. To be sure, it is the
absence
rather than
the presence of something in a person's awareness or consciousness
that is central to Berger's and Lukacs's conception .
Although Berger, with alienation especially in mind, has
argued that "the integration of some Marxian concepts into sociolog–
ical theory [is] very important," he concedes that his own "use of the
concept has 'right' rather than 'left' implications ." This no doubt ac–
counts for his readiness to divest it of any affective overtones which
would endow it with negative or critical implications . Berger's con–
servatism is evident in his insistence that alienation and reification
reflect mankind's universal, even sociobiological, need for order or
nomos,
a view that correctly sees alienation and anomie as opposites
rather than treating them as virtual equivalents like most sociolo–
gists . But one need not follow Berger in regarding alienation as a
necessary bulwark against anomie, nor , for that matter, Lukacs in
seeing it as an obstacle to be overcome by a new world-transforming
historical subject.
Nor should one minimize, let alone reject outright , the implica–
tion that alienation is an unpleasant, frustrating, and even painful
emotional condition, even if it is impermissibly loose to equate it
with any and all unpleasant, frustrating and painful emotional con–
ditions. Alienation as "estrangement"
(EntJremdung)
, which clearly
implies a sense of loss or deprivation, goes back at least to Hegel.
Moreover, the notion of "self-alienation," which unmistakably sug–
gests an undesirable subjective state, was employed by both Hegel
and Marx.
Suffice it to say that alienation has always suggested
both
a cog–
nitive and an affective relation to the world, which is indeed why it
has lent itself to such facile and indiscriminate popularization.
My major purpose is to argue that the essentially cognitive
definition favored by Berger stands in an apparently paradoxical
relation to the more diffuse psychological and political resonances
that inescapably cling to the concept. Put differently , I want to sug–
gest that there is a contradiction between the Lukacs-Berger concep–
tion of alienation as reified consciousness and the more common,
equally venerable view that identifies alienation with estrangement,
with a subjective feeling ofloneliness and homelessness in the world .
The affinity between alienation as a failure to recognize that
the social and historical world is a collective human creation and the
political outlook of the left, grounded in the original ethos of the En–
lightenment , is obvious enough. That "men make their own history"
