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definitions favored by some non-Marxist American sociologists . The
way to overcome alienation is to forge a new political will, an au–
thentic collective
praxis,
aimed at dereifying what exists and
reconstructing the world anew in the image of left ideals. As Neil
McInnes has remarked, "The Critical Theory of Society generalizes
Marx's revolutionary dialectic into the assertion that, since there is
nothing in our society but our activity and its ephemeral products , it
is all totally plastic and liable to instant revolution at almost any mo–
ment we wish-if only we would wish."
"If
only we would wish" - ah , there's the rub! We are not , after
all, talking about Periclean Athens, a few thousand residents of Pari–
sian
arrondissements,
or even the Red Belt surrounding Berlin in the
1920s, but of hundreds of millions of people of diverse origins and
outlooks dependent for survival itself on a technically complex net–
work of goods and services that is increasingly international and in–
tercontinental in scope. Marx had the realism to specify a tangible
historical agent in the proletariat. The proletariat failed to fulfill the
mission he assigned to it, but a return to the Young Hegelian apo–
theosis of humanity itself as a fictive political actor makes even less
sense today than in the early nineteenth century when there were
plausible excuses for equating world history with European and
Western history.
Alienation as estrangement may be regarded as a normal
rather than a critical condition in the modern world so long as it does
not extend to all of the primary groups and "intermediate associa–
tions" that make up the fabric of everyday life in all societies, and
provided also that we use the term to refer unambiguously to a social
relation distinguishable from "self-alienation" as an individual psy–
chological malady. Richard Schacht and Robert C . Tucker are
scholarly anatomists of alienation who have argued for the necessity
of this distinction. Alienation as a social relation is an inevitable con–
sequence of the disjunction between system integration and social
integration: in less technical language, of the circumstance that we
know our lives to be determined by distant, unknown or imperfectly
understood persons, organizations and "social forces" on a scale that
utterly surpasses our limited capacities for fellow-feeling , group and
institutional identification, and personal responsibility. Redfield had
in mind at least one major aspect of this disjunction in regarding the
separation of the "technical order" from the "moral order" as a major
feature of the emergence of civilized societies from contacts between
