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or "re-enchantment" of a disenchanted world, appeared to be the real
objective of the protesters.
Hannah Arendt is one recent thinker who understood that
alienation as estrangement may for modern man result from his very
awareness of living in an almost entirely manmade world rather
than from the suppression of such awareness. "The modern age,
with its growing world-alienation," she wrote, "has led to a situation
where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the pro–
cesses of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either
as man-made or as potentially man-made." Like the theorists of the
Frankfurt School whose technophobia she shared, she assigned re–
sponsibility for this result to the triumphs of science and technology,
which have "devoured . . . the solid objectivity of the given ."
As our major interpreter of totalitarianism, however, Arendt
achieved a deeper understanding than the Frankfurt theorists. The
leaders of totalitarian movements, she saw, had grasped that history
could be "made" or "made over," that "everything is possible" and
that their collective will need acknowledge no limits in objectifying
its utopian absolutes after the seizure of state power. For the fol–
lowers, on the other hand, the totalitarian movement was a way of
overcoming their alienation by remystifying the world and endowing
it once again with quasi-religious or quasi-scientific meaning and
solidity. The convergence of these two tendencies gave totalitarianism
its peculiarly modern yet atavistic character as neither a reversion to
past forms of despotism nor, as the Frankfurt theorists thought, as
the culmination and inevitable end product of either monopoly
capitalism or "the dialectic of the Enlightenment." Arendt's ar–
chaism, what one critic has called her "Hellenic nostalgia," was a
source of insights superior to those emanating from the soured and
embittered futurism of the Frankfurt neo-Marxists.
Contemporary critical theorists and humanist Marxists have
an obvious answer to the claim that alienation is not the result of a
mystified or nature-like view of the historical world but stems rather
from the unambiguous recognition that it is manmade. Their argu–
ment is that the very consciousness of the manmade, human-all-too–
human nature of contemporary institutions and the routines they
impose increases the sense of their oppressiveness and their dehu–
manizing effects so long as they are unmistakably not the creations
of a unified collective will, of the "totalizations," in Sartre's phrase, of
a genuine historical subject. Alienation is here identified with a
powerlessness of which its victims are painfully conscious, as in the
