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previously isolated, small and homogeneous primitive or "folk"
societies.
The dissociation of system from social integration is greatest
and most salient in modern industrial or postindustrial societies in
which it has been relentlessly increasing since at least the sixteenth
century. Alienation as reification, on the other hand, is concentrated
in primitive and archaic societies and becomes progressively at–
tenuated in the course of rationalization or modernization, a process
that includes diffusion of the disenchanting knowledge of ourselves
provided by the human sciences and the great modernist artists and
thinkers. To a growing extent, this disenchantment includes the
awareness that alienation as homelessness and estrangement is, if
not the human condition, at least inescapably the modern condition.
