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is at the heart of the left's worldview : men can therefore overcome
the historically given, the burden of the past, and recreate the social
world in the image of secular ideals validated by rational moral and
political principles. It follows that the most alienated people of all are
primitive men who do not sharply separate the natural from the cul–
tural in seeing both as pervasively shaped by magical and animistic
forces. Characterizations of primitive societies as changeless or
"historyless," as "cold" social formations in contrast to the more in–
coherent and internally contradictory "hot" societies immersed in
"historicity," or in an ineluctable historical consciousness, are consis–
tent with this view. One of the clearest and least philosophically
pretentious formulations of the difference is that of the anthropologist
Robert Redfield , who maintains that the absence of the idea of
re–
form,
of deliberate attempts to alter received customs and institu–
tions, is the crucial dividing line between primitive - he calls them
"precivilized" - societies and civilizations.
Redfield goes on to observe that the conscious reform of their
institutions is exceedingly rare even in civilized societies, noting its
infrequency until "quite modern times" in both Western and Chinese
history. Belief in the divine origin and legitimation of the social
order obviously inhibits purposeful efforts to change it. Ludwig
Feuerbach regarded religion as the prototype of alienation: the pro–
jection of human qualities onto imaginary beings who were then re–
garded as independent, external powers to whom man must abase
himself. The overcoming of alienation required the rejection of
religious beliefs and authorities in the name of a secular materialistic
humanism.
The young Marx extended the idea of alienation to the state
and the economy, ultimately concluding that economic alienation
was the foundation of both religious and political alienation. Aliena–
tion as a form of consciousness was dissolved into the social reality of
subjection to capitalism and the class domination it imposed . Anx–
ious to repudiate the abstract and mentalistic overtones of the He–
gelian and Feuerbachian conceptions, Marx, not surprisingly, vir–
tually abandoned the term in his later works in which the exploitation
and eventual revolt of the working class became the major themes .
Some sociologists who have revived the concept have echoed this in
making alienation synonymous with "powerlessness," although, in
contrast to Lukacs and Berger, awareness of being powerless is cen–
tral to their definition. It seems, incidentally, quite superfluous to
equate alienation with a sense of subordination, oppression or vic-
