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PARTISAN REVIEW
salem were strong collectivists. Thus it is not easy for a modern per–
son to grasp the corporate character of the Greek
polis
or of the
Israelite conception of the Covenant. But it is the
roots
that we must
look for. And the roots of individual autonomy, as we know it today,
are quite clearly on those opposing shores of the eastern Mediterra–
nean. The themes or motifs that began there took many centuries to
work themselves out. In the course of this process, of course, they
underwent countless transformations and permutations.
It
is also
quite clear, we would contend, that the working-out process began
in earnest when the Hellenic and Israelite traditions met in Chris–
tianity .
It
was the Christian synthesis that gave birth to Western
civilization, and it was the Christian version of individual autonomy
that is with us today, albeit very frequently in a secularized form .
Leave aside here the fascinating question of what happened to
this phenomenon during the medieval period in Europe. Both the
Hellenic and the Israelite elements of the Christian synthesis re–
emerged with particular power in the Renaissance and Reforma–
tion. It is these two revolutions that gave birth to the modern world.
By the same token, they originated the specifically modern drama of
liberation and loneliness, both on the levels of ideas and of human
experience. Relentless conscience and relentless reason become the
major agents of autonomization.
If
one wants prototypical figures
for each theme, Luther and Machiavelli readily suggest themselves.
On the level of ideas, there occurred what Arnold Gehlen has aptly
called the "subjectivization" of modern man - in philosophy (begin–
ning with Descartes's
cogito)
,
in morality and political thought (all
those Enlightenment liberations of the mind), in the new sciences of
man (beginning with Vico's
Scienza nuova),
and in the aesthetic and
literary sensibilities of the modern West. These ideas, however, did
not unfold in a Platonic heaven untouched by the mundane forces of
economy and society. On the level of experience, these ideas contin–
uously interacted with all the revolutions-technological, economic,
political, and social- that have transformed the human condition
over the last few centuries. And everyone of these revolutions has
been liberating and "alienating" at the same time.
In view of the Marxian derivation of the term "alienation," we
must be clear, also, about what
Marxfailed
to understand (this does
not detract from Marx's status as one of the germinal thinkers of our
age). Marx's translation of the originally Hegelian term from
"idealism" to "materialism" remains a great intellectual achievement.
It resulted in "alienation" becoming an essentially sociological con-
