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criticism. But such criticism is necessarily what Ernest Gellner has
called "second-order" criticism addressed to the model's artificiality
and remoteness from the real world, its seductive adaptability to
mathematization notwithstanding, rather than criticism that indicts
the builders and users of the model for naively believing that they
are describing the world. Thus commodity fetishism as alienation
does not apply any longer even to the abstract thought processes of
economists.
Marx believed that political economy was becoming the "domi–
nant ideology" of emerging bourgeois societies. He was mistaken, for
neither classical economics nor the social Darwinism increasingly
popular during his own most active years ever fully achieved that
status, not even for the bourgeoisie itself. Nor did sociology, for
which Comte and even Durkheim more than a generation later had
such high hopes, achieve such status, although Marxism itself be–
came a coercively imposed dominant ideology for those non–
bourgeois societies that trace their legitimation back to the October
Revolution of 1917. Contemporary sociologists, however, remain
curiously blind to the extent to which the leading assumptions of
their discipline have entered into the popular consciousness over the
past fifty years.
Raymond Aron has written: "To our customs and beliefs, the
very ones we hold sacred, sociology ruthlessly attaches the adjective
'arbitrary'." He quotes an acute observation by Marcel Mauss,
Durkheim's nephew from the generation of sociologists between
Aron's own and Durkheim's, to the effect that "all social phenomena
are, to some degree, the work of a collective will, and whoever says
human will, says choice between different possible options ."
These statements suggest that the view of the social order as ar–
bitrary or optional presented by sociologists may itself be a source of
estrangement from the social order. Not only does such a view disen–
chant the world by ridding it of humanized gods and spirits, but it
also deprives it of the aura of iron necessity and inevitability asso–
ciated with the reign of natural laws. Modern men like all men have
been thrust into an external and constraining society that is not of
their own making, but they are more acutely aware than earlier gen–
erations that this society was made by other men rather than by God
or nature. It often appears to them, therefore, as a world of make–
shift, historically accidental social arrangements in which they feel
trapped precisely because they are so readily capable of imagining
different and more attractive arrangements. The pathos of their sit-
