1. Alienation Redux: Marxian Perspectives

In the introduction to Richard Schacht’s (1941–…) volume Alienation, Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) observed that it was even “scarcely credible that the modern vogue of ‘alienation’ should derive from such an unpromising beginning”, Walter Kaufmann, “The Inevitability of Alienation”, in Richard Schacht, Alienation, Garden City: Doubleday, 1970, p. XVII.

György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971, p. 83.

György Lukács, Histoire et conscience de classe, Paris: Minuit, 1960.

Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. xxiv.

Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Detroit: Black & Red, 1972, p. 5.

Ibid., p. 28 (trans. modified).

Ibid., p. 59.

In fact, Marx had already used the concept of alienation before he wrote the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In one text he published in February 1844, in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, he wrote: “it is […] the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics”. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction”, in Karl Marx, Early Writings, London: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 244–5.

In Marx’s writings one finds the term Entfremdung as well as Entäusserung. These had different meanings in Hegel, but Marx uses them synonymously. See Marcella D’Abbiero, Alienazione in Hegel. Usi e significati di Entäusserung, Entfremdung Veräusserung, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1970, pp. 25–7.

This elaboration matured also thanks to the influence of the thought of Moses Hess. In fact, in the article “On the Essence of Money” he had argued that religious alienation had its explanation in the economic and social world. Cfr. Moses Hess, On the Essence of Money, Ann Arbor: Charles River Editors, 2011: “what God is to the theoretical life, money is to the practical life in this inverted world: the externalised [entäussert] capacity of men, their sold-off life-activity”, p. 10.

Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988, p. 72.

Ibid., p. 74.

Ibid., p. 78. For an account of Marx’s four-part typology of alienation, see Bertell Ollman, Alienation, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 136–52.

Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, p. 82.

Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill, Éléments d’économie politique”, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume Three, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, p. 228.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, San Francisco: Harper, 1962, pp. 220–1. In the 1967 preface to his republished History and Class Consciousness, Lukács observed that in Heidegger alienation became a politically innocuous concept that “sublimated a critique of society into a purely philosophical problem”. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. xxiv. Heidegger also tried to distort the meaning of Marx’s concept of alienation: in his Letter on “Humanism” (1946), he noted approvingly that, “by experiencing alienation, [Marx] attains an essential dimension of history”, Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, in Basic Writings, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 243—a misleading formulation which has no basis in Marx’s writings.

Appearing immediately after the publication of the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, see for example Herbert Marcuse, “The Foundation of Historical Materialism”, in Studies in Critical Philosophy, Beacon Press, Boston, 1972, pp. 1–49.

Herbert Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics”, Telos 16 (1973), p. 25.

Ibid., pp. 16–17.

Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics”, p. 25.

Ibid.

Ibid., pp. 14–15.

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, Boston: Beacon Press, 1966, p. 45.

Ibid., pp. 46–7. Georges Friedmann (1902–1977) was of the same view, arguing in The Anatomy of Work, New York: Glencoe Press, 1964, that the overcoming of alienation was possible only after liberation from work.

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 156.

Ibid., p. 155.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: Norton, 1962.

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 198.

Ibid., p. 155. Cf. The evocation of a “libidinal rationality which is not only compatible with but even promotes progress toward higher forms of civilised freedom”, p. 199. On the relationship between technology and progress, see Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis, and Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.

Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 100.

Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Seabury Press, 1972, p. 121.

See Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 62.

Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, New York: Fawcett, 1965, p. 111.

Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961, pp. 56–7. This failure to understand the specific character of alienated labour recurs in his writings on alienation in the 1960s. In an essay published in 1965 he wrote: “One has to examine the phenomenon of alienation in its relation to narcissism, depression, fanaticism, and idolatry to understand it fully”. “The Application of Humanist Psychoanalysis to Marx’s Theory”, in Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism, New York: Doubleday, 1965, p. 221.

See Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel, New York: Basic Books, 1969, p. 88.

Cf. István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, London: Merlin Press, 1970, p. 241ff.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 253–4.

Ibid., p. 254.

Ibid., p. 187.

The directors of the Institute of Marxism–Leninism in Berlin even managed to exclude the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 from the numbered volumes of the canonical Marx-Engels Werke, relegating them to a supplementary volume with a smaller print run.

Adam Schaff, Alienation as a Social Phenomenon, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980, p. 100.

Louis Althusser, For Marx, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969, pp. 51 and 53. A few years later, in defending his concept of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s work, Althusser insisted that the discussion on the “Young Marx” was “in the last resort, political. […] This is not a debate about philology! To hang on to or to reject these words, to defend them or to destroy them – something real is at stake in these struggles, whose ideological and political character is obvious. It is not too much to say that what is at stake today, behind the argument about words, is Leninism. Not only the recognition of the existence and role of Marxist theory and science, but also the concrete forms of the fusion between the Labour Movement and Marxist theory, and the conception of materialism and the dialectic”. Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, London: New Books, 1971, pp. 114–5.

Iring Fetscher, Marx and Marxism, New York: Herder and Herder, 1971, p. 314.

Cf. Daniel Bell, “The Rediscovery of Alienation: Some notes along the quest for the historical Marx”, Journal of Philosophy 56, no. 24 (1959), pp. 933–52, which concluded: “while one may be sympathetic to the idea of alienation, it is only further myth-making to read this concept back as the central theme of Marx”, p. 935.

A notable exception to this attitude was the Polish scholar Adam Schaff (1913–2006), who in his book Marxism and the Human Individual, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, highlighted how the abolition of private ownership of the means of production did not lead to the automatic disappearance of alienation, since even in “socialist” societies work retained the character of a commodity.

Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, London: Verso, 1991, p. 53.

Lucien Goldmann, Recherches dialectiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1959, p. 101.

The originators of this line of interpretation were Siegfried Landshut (1897–1968) and Jacob Peter Mayer (1903–1992), shortly followed by Henri de Man (1885–1953).

See Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual, p. 5.

See Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961, p. 168.

After the Second World War, the main figures were Erich Thier (?), Heinrich Popitz (1925–2002) and Jakob Hommes (1898–1966) in Germany and—although they did not clearly endorse the claim to superiority of the 1844 manuscripts—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), Pierre Bigo (1906–1997), Jean-Yves Calvez (1927–2010) and Axelos in France, and Fromm in the United States.

See Henri Lefebvre, Marx, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972, pp. 24 and 26.

Cf. Marcello Musto, “The Myth of the ‘Young Marx’ in the Interpretations of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, Critique 43, no. 2 (2015), pp. 233–60.

Going back to Marcuse or Lukács in German and Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968) or Maximilien Rubel (1905–1996) in French, this approach became hegemonic in the English-speaking world through the work of Robert Tucker (1918–2010), David McLellan (1940–…) and Bertell Ollman (1935–…), then spread to most other parts of the world more widely from the late Sixties on, as the writings of Iring Fetscher (1922–2014), Shlomo Avineri (1933–…), István Mészáros (1930–2017) and Schaff testify.

See the critical points made in this connection by Schaff and Raymond Aron (1905–1983). For the former, “Marx’s texts from the 1840s cannot be quoted indiscriminately alongside those from the 1870s, as if they carried equal weight for our knowledge of Marxism and had an equal right of abode in our analysis”, Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual, p. 28, trans. modified. For the latter, “in the years after the war, during the existentialist period, the Jesuit priests Bigo and Calvez and the existentialists treated the whole of Marxist thought as an atemporal whole, some using texts from 1845, others from 1867, as if Marx’s thought did not develop, as if the rough copy of 1844 (not even finished, still less published) contained the best of Marxism”, Raymond Aron, D’une Sainte Famille à l’autre, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969, p. 223.

Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual, p. 28.

In this context, alienation also became “an intellectual commodity in the academic market”, a very fashionable topic on which to write books and, therefore, an effective and functional tool to make a career in the university world. Cf. David Schweitzer, Fetishization of Alienation. Unpacking a Problem of Science, Knowledge, and Reified Practices in the Workplace, in Alienation, Ethnicity, and Postmodernism, edited by F. Geyer, Westport: Greenwood, 1996, p. 26.

Thus Richard Schacht, Alienation, Garden City: Doubleday, 1970, noted that there is almost no aspect of contemporary life which has not been discussed in terms of “alienation”, p. lix; while Peter C. Ludz, “Alienation as a Concept in the Social Sciences”, reprinted in Felix Geyer and David Schweitzer (eds.), Theories of Alienation, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976, p. 3, remarked that “the popularity of the concept serves to increase existing terminological ambiguity”.

Cf. David Schweitzer, “Alienation, De-alienation, and Change: A critical overview of current perspectives in philosophy and the social sciences”, in Giora Shoham (ed.), Alienation and Anomie Revisited, Tel Aviv: Ramot, 1982, for whom “the very meaning of alienation is often diluted to the point of virtual meaninglessness”, p. 57.

Ibid., p. 9.

Ibid., p. 11.

Ibid., p. 12.

Ibid., p. 11.

Ibid., p. 13.

Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, London: Sage, 1998, p. 191.

Ibid., pp. 195–6.

Ibid., p. 196.

See for example John Clark, “Measuring Alienation Within a Social System”, American Sociological Review 24, no. 6 (1959), pp. 849–52.

See Schweitzer, “Alienation, De-alienation, and Change”, pp. 36–7.

A good example of this position is Walter Kaufman’s “The Inevitability of Alienation”, his introduction to Schacht’s previously quoted volume, Alienation. For Kaufman, “life without estrangement is scarcely worth living; what matters is to increase men’s capacity to cope with alienation”, p. lvi.

Schacht, Alienation, p. 155.

Seymour Melman, Decision-Making and Productivity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958, pp. 18, 165–6.

Among the questions that Nettler put to a sample considered susceptible to “alien orientation” were: “Do you enjoy TV? What do you think of the new model of American automobiles? Do you read Reader’s Digest? […] Do you like to participate in church activities? Do national spectator-sports (football, baseball) interest you”? “A Measure of Alienation”, American Sociological Review 22, no. 6 (1957), p. 675. He concluded that negative answers were evidence of alienation: “there seems little doubt that this scale measures a dimension of estrangement from our society”.

Ibid., p. 674. To prove his point, Nettler noted that “to the question, ‘Would you just as soon live under another form of government as under our present one’? all responded with some indication of possibility and none with rejection”, p. 674. He even went so far as to claim “that alienation is related to creativity. It is hypothesised that creative scientists and artists […] are alienated individuals […] that alienation is related to altruism [and] that their estrangement leads to criminal behaviour”, pp. 676–7.

Melvin Seeman, “On the Meaning of Alienation”, American Sociological Review 24, no. 6 (1959), pp. 783–91. In 1972 he added a sixth type to the list: “cultural estrangement”. See Melvin Seeman, “Alienation and Engagement”, in Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse (eds.), The Human Meaning of Social Change, New York: Russell Sage, 1972, pp. 467–527.

Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964, p. 15.

Ibid., p. 3.

Cf. Walter R. Heinz, “Changes in the Methodology of Alienation Research”, in Felix Geyer and Walter R. Heinz, Alienation, Society and the Individual, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1992, p. 217.

See Felix Geyer and David Schweitzer, “Introduction”, in Felix Geyer and David Schweitzer (eds.), Theories of Alienation, pp. xxi–xxii, and Felix Geyer, “A General Systems Approach to Psychiatric and Sociological De-alienation”, in Giora Shoham (ed.), Alienation and Anomie Revisited, Tel Aviv: Ramot, p. 141.

See Geyer and Schweitzer, “Introduction”, pp. xx–xxi.

David Schweitzer, “Fetishization of Alienation: Unpacking a Problem of Science, Knowledge, and Reified Practices in the Workplace”, in Felix Geyer (ed.), Alienation, Ethnicity, and Postmodernism, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 23.

According to Marcuse, with this choice of field “sociology renounces its point of view. Society becomes a reality to be studied like any other field of scientific investigation […], the broader views of philosophical concepts had to be left aside”. In his opinion, moreover, this was a clearly political position, since “the acceptance of the principle of the invariability of social laws will educate men to discipline and obedience to the existing social order and will make it easier for them to resign themselves to that order”, in Herbert Marcuse, “Zur Kritik der Soziologie”, Die Gesellschaft 8, no. 2 (1931), p. 278.

Cf. John Horton, “The Dehumanization of Anomie and Alienation: A Problem in the Ideology of Sociology”, The British Journal of Sociology 15, no. 4 (1964), pp. 292–3, and Schweitzer, “Fetishization of Alienation”, p. 23.

See Horton, “The Dehumanization of Anomie and Alienation”, pp. 283–4. This thesis is proudly championed by Irving Louis Horowitz (1929–2012) in “The Strange Career of Alienation: how a concept is transformed without permission of its founders”, in Felix Geyer (ed.), Alienation, Ethnicity, and Postmodernism, pp. 17–19. According to Horowitz, “alienation is now part of the tradition in the social sciences rather than social protest. This change came about with a broadening realisation that terms like being alienated are no more and no less value-laden than being integrated”. The concept of alienation thus “became enveloped with notions of the human condition – […] a positive rather than a negative force. Rather than view alienation as framed by ‘estrangement’ from a human being’s essential nature as a result of a cruel set of industrial-capitalist demands, alienation becomes an inalienable right, a source of creative energy for some and an expression of personal eccentricity for others”, p. 18.

Karl Marx, “Wage-Labour and Capital”, in Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970, p. 19.

Ibid.

See for example The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne and Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century.

For a commentary on this relevant, but complex, text by Marx see Marcello Musto (ed.), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, London: Routledge, 2008.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 157. In another passage on alienation we read: “rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons”, p. 158.

Ibid., pp. 461–2.

Ibid., p. 1058.

Ibid., p. 1054.

Ibid., pp. 1005–6.

Ibid., p. 1007. On Marx’s use of this Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) Faust metaphor see the insightful considerations of Siebert S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 325.

Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production”, p. 1054.

Ibid., p. 1056.

On the making of Capital, see Marcello Musto, Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 137–68. On Marx’s magnum opus cf. also the recent Marcello Musto (ed.), Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, London: Routledge, 2019.

Ibid., pp. 164–5.

Ibid., p. 172.

Ibid., p. 175.

Ibid., p. 376.

Cf. Schaff, Alienation as a Social Phenomenon, p. 81.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 449.

Ibid., p. 171.

Ibid., p. 739.

Ibid., pp. 171–2.

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 24, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 85.

Ibid., p. 87.

Ibid., p. 447.

Ibid., p. 650.

Ibid., p. 172.

Ibid., p. 585.

Ibid., p. 172.

Ibid., p. 586.

Ibid., p. 587.

Ibid., pp. 308–9.

Ibid., p. 264. According to Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes, Boston: Extending Horizons Books, 1969, “For Marx, the law of value ‘regulates’ market capitalism but no other form of social production”. Therefore, he held that “socialism was, first of all, the end of value production and thus also the end of the capitalist relations of production”, p. 362.

Ibid., p. 438.

Ibid., p. 346.

Marx, “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63”, pp. 192, 191.

On the life of the so-called “First International” and on the political role of Marx in this organisation see Marcello Musto, “Introduction”, in Marcello Musto (ed.), Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 1–68.

Ibid., p. 173.

Marx, “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63”, p. 390.

Ibid., p. 488.

Ibid., p. 248.

Ibid., p. 652.

Ibid.

Cf. Marcello Musto, “Communism”, in Musto (ed.), The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 24–50.