228
PARTISAN REVIEW
timization when we have so many other less metaphysically loaded
words to describe this condition.
What are the features of modern societies that are regarded as
alienating and themselves the products of alienation? One could
hardly hope to offer an exhaustive list, but the following surely in–
clude the major candidates: the division of labor, the rule of the
bourgeoisie, capitalism, the market, private property , the big city ,
bureaucracy, the centralized state, mass society, commercialized
popular culture, the impersonal norms of science and technology,
the machine, domination by "technocrats" animated by "instrumen–
tal rationality" - I don't think I have left anything important out.
Most people are indeed often overawed by and feel estranged
from the massive "facticity" of these ubiquitous social realities. But
do they really regard them as forces that are not manmade , as some–
thing more - or less - than human products and creations? Might
not the very opposite be the truth, namely, that it is precisely the ac–
curate perception of their manmade nature that accounts for their
power to alienate?
If
so, perhaps the causes of alienation as estrange–
ment lie not in alienation as reification, nor in Durkheim's basically
dissimilar notion of anomie, but in what Max Weber described, and
meant quite literally, in the phrase he borrowed from Schiller, as
"the disenchantment of the world."
But before exploring further this possibility, an enormously in–
fluential apparent exception to it, the paradigmatic example of
alienation itself to Marxists, must be considered. The case of the
market, more specifically of commodity production for the market,
seemingly contradicts the suggestion that all of the alienating social
phenomena listed above are generally perceived as human products.
Marx's famous passage in
Capital
on "commodity fetishism, " as has
often been noted, echoes his youthful theorizing about alienation,
although he does not reiterate the term itself. Lukacs singled out this
passage as describing the source and prime exemplar of reification ,
which in generalized form became the central concept in the intellec–
tual tradition of post-Lukacsian Western Marxism, including espe–
cially the Frankfurt critical theorists.
Marx wrote that commodity production, that is, the production
of objects in order to sell them, creates a situation in which the
"social relation" between producers is indirect and takes the form of a
relation between their material products that compete for sale on the
market. "There it is," he goes on to observe in a much-quoted pas–
sage, "a definite social relation between men, that assumes in their
