ALIENATION

Nicolas Marketos
Psychiatrist
nmarketos@gmail.com

Abstract

This essay examines the definition of alienation, in the sense of a subjective state of separation that occurs in human relationships, in the context of relations of production and of economic system, which affects persons life, and psychology. It presents the Marxist analysis of alienation and the relative concepts of 'reification' 'and' 'commodity fetishism' as well as the concept of 'false consciousness'' described by György Lukács. Frantz Fanon, reported the specific characteristics of alienation in the psyche of the colonized peoples. Twentieth-century theorists of Frankfurt School (notably Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Jürgen Habermas) enriched the Marxist theory of alienation, incorporating new epistemologies and extended it to cultural and sociological field. This paper also refers to the approaches of psychoanalysis, systemic and complexity theory to alienation and examines the psychopathological consequences of alienation at individual and group level, as well as the forms of alienation in today's world of globalization and the development of technology and computer technology. It concludes by suggesting ways to cope with the consequences of alienation.

  

Marx's theory of alienation

Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the social alienation of people from aspects of their human nature. Alienation is the systemic result of living in a socially stratified society, because being a mechanistic part of a social class alienates a person from his and her humanity. The theoretic basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine his or her life and destiny, when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of himself as the director of his actions; to define their relationship with other people; and to own the things and use the value of the goods and services, produced with their labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realised human being, as an economic entity, he or she is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value, in the course of business competition among industrialists.

Alienation is a concept, with its roots going back to Roman law, where alienatio was a legal term used to denote the act of transferring property. St. Augustine described insanity as abalienatio mentis; Ludz (1975) has discussed its use among the early Gnostics.

The roots of Marx's critique of alienation may be found, in Hegel's critique of "positivity and the authoritarianism created by unchallenged truths. Hegel's concept of alienation is not only a psychological estrangement, but entails a practical, everyday absence of control in a world where persons have become passive spectators, incapable of themselves achieving their own values by their own efforts.

For Hegel, alienation is inherent in human life which necessarily and everywhere creates the social world by making and using objects, while making and transforming itself in that very process. At some point, however, the object world and the inner world are no longer in gear, and men cease to recognize the object world as having been brought into existence by their own human activity.

Alienation is a basic mechanism whereby being is externalized from itself. It comprehends its own externalization in metaphysical reflection as other and alien. Man (the subjective spirit) finds himself in a relation where he is mediated by his own objectified products (the objective spirit); man has the task of overcoming epistemological alienation by becoming conscious of his identity-in-spirit with his own products (the illusory character of alienation), and thereby also to discover the unity of himself, and the world. This end is to be reached by philosophical knowledge that levels the boundaries between man’s culture and nature.

 Ludwig Feuerbach put forward a materialist analysis of alienation, in arguing that people alienate their essential being by attributing their human qualities to a god who is then worshipped on account of these qualities. Thus Feuerbach argues that religion is a form of alienation which prevents people from attaining realization of their own species-being. Feuerbach’s thinking has been described as humanist in that his theory of alienation is based on a theory of human nature as species-being, as innate to the human species.

 

Marx’s theory of alienation was based upon his observation that capitalism involved ‘’a fundamental change in the relations between men, instruments of production and the materials of production'’. (Linebaugh, 1993). These fundamental changes meant that every aspect of life was transformed.

Men no longer enjoyed the right to dispose of what they produced how they chose: they became separated from the product of their labour. The mechanisation of labour in the factories transformed people's relationship with machines, 'those remarkable products of human ingenuity, became a source of tyranny against the worker'(Capital, op cit, p460).

One of the most important, and devastating, features of factory production was the division of labour. This division of labour meant that workers had to specialise in particular tasks, a series of atomised reiterated activities, which realised only one or two aspects of their human powers at the expense of all the others.

In this system workers become increasingly dependent on the capitalists who own the means of production. Just as the worker 'is depressed, therefore, both intellectually and physically, to the level of a machine, and from being a man becomes an abstract activity, so he also becomes more and dependent on every fluctuation in the market price, in the investment of capital and on the whims of the wealthy' (K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p285). Marx noted:

The fact that labour is external to the worker, does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists it is shunned like the plague.

The development of capitalism proved irresistible and it brought alienation on a scale previously unimaginable. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx identified four specific ways in which alienation pervades capitalist society.
 

The product of labour: The worker is alienated from the object he produces because it is owned and disposed of by another, the capitalist. In all societies people use their creative abilities to produce objects which they use, exchange or sell. Under capitalism, however, this becomes an alienated activity because 'the worker cannot use the things he produces to keep alive or to engage in further productive activity... The worker's needs, no matter how desperate, do not give him a license to lay hands on what these same hands have produced, for all his products are the property of another'(Ollman, 1996). Thus workers produce cash crops for the market when they are malnourished, build houses in which they will never live, make cars they can never buy, produce shoes they cannot afford to wear, and so on.

Marx argued that the alienation of the worker from what he produces is intensified because the products of labour actually begin to dominate the labourer.

Marx's asserts that the alienation of the worker means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power (K Marx, Early Writings, p324). For Marx this state of affairs was unique to capitalism. In previous societies those who work harder could usually be expected to have more to consume. Under capitalism, those who work harder increase the power of a hostile system over them. They themselves, and their inner worlds, become poorer. 'The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. When labor is objectified, something peculiar happens to the worker’s emotions: “The more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things'( Rubin, 1975).

A necessary corollary of assessing human worth in economic terms is the elevation of materialistic values over human values of compassion, skill, or creativity. Thus, “in the capitalistic hierarchy of values, capital stands higher than labor, amassed things higher than the manifestations of life.” Humanity is diminished as qualities such as a person’s energy, skill, personality, and creativity become commodified—assets to be sold on the market of interpersonal relations. Under capitalism, “the market decides the value of these human qualities” with the result that “relations between human beings . . . assume the character of relations between things,” as each person “sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.” (Fromm,  1966).

The labour process: The second element of alienation Marx identified is a lack of control over the process of production. We have no say over the conditions in which we work and how our work is organised, and how it affects us physically and mentally. This lack of control over the work process transforms our capacity to work creatively into its opposite, so the worker experiences activity as passivity, power as impotence, procreation as emasculation, the worker's own physical and mental energy, as an activity directed against himself, which is independent of him and does not belong to him'. The process of work is not only beyond the control of the workers, it is in the control of forces hostile to them. In addition, as Harry Braverman points out, 'in a society based upon the purchase and sale of labour power, dividing the craft cheapens its individual parts', so the bosses also have an interest in breaking down the labour process into smaller and smaller parts. The resulting rigidly repetitive process buries the individual talents or skills of the worker, as Marx described:

Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity... The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together, with that mechanism, constitute the power of the master.

  Modern methods of production have increased the fragmentation of the labour process since Marx's day. The organisation of modern production is still based on the methods of the assembly line. Scientific research is used to break the production process down into its component parts. This has led, firstly, to the deskilling of white collar jobs and to a situation where managers have a monopoly of control over the production process (Cox,  1998). The unity of thought and action, conception and execution, hand and mind, which threatened capitalism from its beginnings, is now attacked by a systematic dissolution employing all the resources of science and the various engineering disciplines based upon it'. (Braverman, 1974). Conditions of work, from the length of the working day to the space we occupy, are predetermined: 'The entire work operation, down to it smallest motion, is measured, fitted with training and performance standards - all entirely in advance'. Workers are treated as machines, with the aim of transforming the subjective element of labour into objective, measurable, controlled processes. György Lukács describes how the increasingly rationalised and mechanised process of work affects our consciousness. As the following extract shows, his analysis was prophetic and gives a strikingly accurate picture of today's white collar work:

In consequence of the rationalisation of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of this process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not. (Lukács, 1971).
 

Human relationships: Thirdly, we are alienated from our fellow human beings. This alienation arises in part because of the antagonisms which inevitably arise from the class structure of society. We are alienated from those who exploit our labour and control the things we produce.

Ernst Fischer (1996) pointed out that because of this we do not see each other 'as fellow-men having equal rights, but as superiors or subordinates, as holders of a rank, as a small or large unit of power'. (Fischer, 1996). We are related to each other not as individuals but as representatives of different relations of production, the personification of capital, or land or labour. As Bertell Ollman wrote(1996), 'We do not know each other as individuals, but as extensions of capitalism: "In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality".

Marx described how mass commodity production continually seeks to create new needs, not to develop our human powers but to exploit them for profit.
We see other people through the lens of profit and loss. Our abilities and needs are converted into means of making money and so we consider other human beings as competitors, as inferiors or superiors.

Human relationships are distorted by the phenomenon of reification. Reification [res: thing] refers to the phenomenon of a “definite social relation between men” appearing in the form of a “relation between things” and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all‑embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people'. The Phenomenon of reification is the central structural problem of capitalist society’.

Reification and alienation are two sides of the phenomenon of commodity fetishism (which Lukács calls the 'objective' and the subjective'): 'Objectively a world of objects and relations between things emerges into being (the world of commodities and their movements on the market). Subjectively, a man's activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to objectivity of the laws of market, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article.'  

The basic principle of capitalist commodity production, 'the principle of rationalization based on what is and can be calculated' extends to all fields, including the worker's 'soul', and more broadly, human consciousness. 'Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man'.

The distinction between a worker faced with a particular machine, the entrepreneur faced with a given type of mechanical development, the technologist faced with the state of science and the profitability of its application to technology, is purely quantitative; it does not directly entail any qualitative difference in the structure of consciousness.

In describing how the laws of the market corrupt personal relations, Fromm concludes that human communication and interpersonal feelings are distorted by the application of a cost-benefit analysis way of thinking to social relationships: in all social and personal relations the laws of the market are the rule. The logic of the exchange economy pervades all aspects of life, because in capitalistic society the process of exchange value has become an end in itself; thus, the whole process of living is experienced analogously to the profitable investment of capital, my life and my person being the capital which is invested.

Our human nature: The fourth element is our alienation from what Marx called our species being. What makes us human is our ability to consciously shape the world around us. However, under capitalism our labour is coerced, forced labour. Work bears no relationship to our personal inclinations or our collective interests. The capitalist division of labour massively increased our ability to produce, but those who create the wealth are deprived of its benefits. Marx's descriptions of this process in the Manuscripts are extremely powerful indictments of the system:

It is true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It procures beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker. K Marx, Early Writings, op cit, p325

Human beings are social beings. We have the ability to act collectively to further our interests. However, under capitalism that ability is submerged under private ownership and the class divisions it produces. We have the ability to consciously plan our production, to match what we produce with the developing needs of society. But under capitalism that ability is reversed by the anarchic drive for profits. Thus, rather than consciously shaping nature, we cannot control, or even foresee, the consequences of our actions. For example, new, cheaper techniques of production may, when repeated across industry, produce acid rain or gases which destroy the ozone layer.

Similarly, when one capitalist improves production in his factory, he is unwittingly contributing to the creation of surplus in market (Harman, 1995). This means that we produce more but what we produce is unwanted. All previous societies suffered from shortages, famines and the failure of crops. Under capitalism recessions mean that workers consume less, not because their labour is inadequately productive, but because their labour is too productive'. There is nothing natural about the economic crises we face: it is our social organisation which prevents us enjoying the potential of our ability to produce.

White collar employees

The American sociologist C. Wright Mills conducted a major study of alienation in modern society with "White Collar" in 1951, describing how modern social division of labor, involve a hitherto unknown specialization of skill: as a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols. This shift in needed skills is another way of describing the rise of the white-collar workers, for their characteristic skills involve the handling of paper and money and people. They are masters of the commercial, professional, and technical relationship. They live off the social machineries that organize and co-ordinate the people who do make things. White-collar people help turn what someone else has made into profit.

 

False consciousness

The concept “False consciousness” refers to the systematic misrepresentation of dominant social relations in the consciousness of subordinate classes.  Marx himself did not use the phrase “false consciousness,” but he paid extensive attention to the related concepts of ideology and commodity fetishism.  Members of a subordinate class (workers, peasants, serfs) suffer from false consciousness in that their mental representations of the social relations around them systematically conceal or obscure the realities of subordination, exploitation, and domination those relations embody.  Related concepts include mystification, ideology, and fetishism.

Marx offered an objective theory of class, based on an analysis of the objective features of the system of economic relations that constitute the social order.  A person's social class is determined by his or her position within the system of property relations that constitutes a given economic society. People also have subjective characteristics: thoughts, mental frameworks, and identities. These mental constructs give the person a cognitive framework in terms of which the person understands his or her role in the world and the forces that govern his or her life.  One's mental constructs may correspond more or less well to the social reality they seek to represent. In a class society, there is an inherent conflict of material interests between privileged and subordinate groups(Little, 2007).  Marx asserts that social mechanisms emerge in class society that systematically creates distortions, errors, and blind spots in the consciousness of the underclass.  If these consciousness-shaping mechanisms did not exist, then the underclass, always a majority, would quickly overthrow the system of their domination.  So the institutions that shape the person’s thoughts, ideas, and frameworks develop in such a way as to generate false consciousness and ideology.

Marx’s theory of ideology is presented in The German Ideology (Marx and Engels [1845-49] 1970).  Marx uses the term “ideology” to refer to a system of ideas through which people understand their world.  A central theoretical assertion in Marx’s writings is the view that “ideology” and thought are dependent on the material circumstances in which the person lives.  Material circumstances determine consciousness, rather than consciousness determining material reality: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist” (Marx 1971).  A system of ideology plays the role of supporting the class advantage of the dominant class, according to Marxist theory.  The concept of commodity fetishism is discussed in Capital (Marx 1977).  Marx uses this concept to refer to the pervasive and defining illusion that exists in a commodity society.  A commodity is perceived solely in terms of its money equivalent (its price), rather than being understood as standing within a set of social relations of production.    Marx believes that this is a socially important form of mystification; the market society erases the relations of domination and exploitation on which it depends.

Twentieth-century Marxist thinkers have given more systematic attention to a Marxist theory of consciousness and ideology.  Georg Lukács introduces the concept of false consciousness into Marxist discourse, based on a brief reference by Engels, in relation to a dialectical theory of knowledge. 

However, the dialectical method does not permit us simply to proclaim the ‘falseness’ of this consciousness and to persist in an inflexible confrontation of true and false. On the contrary, it requires us to investigate this ‘false consciousness’ concretely as an aspect of the historical totality and as a stage in the historical process. Lucacs noted

« consciousness is not only to comprehend the relations of exploitation in society, but is to acknowledge the class historic role. For Marx class consciousness is a ‘practical critical activity’ with the task of ‘changing the world’. The historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness.  The fate of a class depends on its ability to elucidate and solve the problems with which history confronts it……

Ideologically the same growth of insight into the nature of society entails a steady growth in the strength of the proletariat. For the proletariat the truth is a weapon that brings victory. Consciousness approaches society from another world and leads it from the false path it has followed back to the right one. Nevertheless, the bonds connecting the immediate life-interests of the proletariat with society as a whole have not even begun to penetrate its consciousness.  The consciousness of the proletariat is still fettered by reification. The reified consciousness becomes a completely passive observer moving in obedience to laws which it can never control…»  (Lukacs, 1971).

A more sociological treatment of class consciousness was provided by Karl Mannheim in his effort to formulate a sociology of knowledge in the 1930s (Mannheim 1959 [1936]).  The sociology of knowledge attempts to provide a theoretical account of the relationship between knowledge systems and the social conditions within which they emerge; this provides a theoretical framework in terms of which to understand the workings of a system of ideology.  Mannheim supports the idea that the social position of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat deeply influence the forms of knowledge that they embody; and in each case, he argues that these forms of material bias lead to a systematic falsification of social reality.

Antonio Gramsci significantly extended Marxist thinking about ideology and consciousness in the 1930s (Gramsci 1971).  Gramsci gave ideology a more active role in politics and history than classical historical materialism.  He argued that the proletariat has the ability to influence the terms of its consciousness, so there is an extended struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat over the terms of the representation of the existing social reality.  The bourgeoisie generally exercises “hegemony” over the terms of ideology, through its control of the instruments of consciousness; but the proletariat can exert influence through its own cultural institutions.  This perspective introduces a major change into the classical theory of ideology, in that it denies that the subordinate class is simply the passive tool of the dominant ideology. 

      Fromm working firmly within the “ideology as false consciousness” perspective, observed that through “a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.” For him, learning to penetrate ideological obfuscation, and thereby overcoming the alienation this obfuscation induced, was the learning task of adulthood.

Frantz Fanon: Alienation and colonianism

Frantz Fanon, an early writer on postcolonialism, studied the conditions of objectification and violent oppression (lack of autonomy) believed to have led to mental disorders among the colonized in the Third World (in particular Africans) (Fanon, 1961).
Fanon sees the alienation of the colonized, as essentially socio-economic, but it is a socio-economic (socio-political) alienation that has profound psychological effects.  He speaks about the alienation of the Negro in terms of cultural imposition, and of the exploitation of the native by the colonists.

 He locates alienation equally firmly in the imperialist division of the world into poor countries and rich, exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled. Psychological violence then becomes a form of cultural imperialism in the context of the colonial situation…its victim is an alienated person, in the strong
institutions developed over centuries by the colonizers.

The alienation of the native may take the form of assimilation, the loss of cultural identity or its disruption, through which the social group imitate the oppressor. Within this context, Fanon writes: 

‘’The oppressor, through the inclusive and frightening character of his authority, manages to impose on the native new ways of seeing, and in particular, a pejorative judgment with respect to his original forms of existing’’. 

Fanon’s social theory extends Marx’s concept of alienation to the analysis of how race is constructed and reproduced within colonialism. His theory asserts that race, like class, is a denial of our species-being. Our humanity is a function of being recognized by others in a social relationship: Man is human only to the extent to which he is being recognized by another man. It is on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is that other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed (Fanon 1967).

Colonialism is not simply the economic exploitation and political domination of the periphery by the capitalist core. It is also the separation of colonized peoples from their individuality and culture (Fanon 1961).

Colonized peoples are denied the opportunity to know themselves. Instead, the colonizer claims to ‘know’ the colonized, but this knowledge “betrays a determination to objectify, to confine, to imprison” (Fanon 1968). The rich history and institutions of the indigenous population are physically and symbolically destroyed, and in their place the colonizer produces a people who deserve only to be ruled. The colonizer constructs colonized peoples as ‘lazy’ and ‘unproductive,’ thereby justifying low wages or coercive systems of labor. He also constructs them as ‘stupid,’ thereby justifying the imposition of the colonial power’s institutions and practices. Finally, he constructs them as ‘savage’ and ‘dangerous,’ thereby justifying military conquest and coercive forms of social control. The result is a people “in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the elimination of its local cultural originality” (Fanon 1967).

Racism and its objectification of the colonized, Fanon argues, can only be understood through its connection to capitalism. The colonial relationship between core and periphery in global capitalism is, like that between capitalist and proletariat, based on exploitation/

Epistemological approaches

Psychoanalytic  theory on the concept of alienation, focused on the divisions and conflicts between the conscious and unconscious mind, between different parts of a hypothetical psychic apparatus, and between the self and civilization. It included defense mechanism, of splitting, in both normal and disturbed functioning. The concept of repression has been described as having functionally equivalent effects as the idea of false consciousness associated with Marxist theory (Geyer, 2001).

For Lacan, alienation is an inescapable part of identity. Put differently, to be a subject is to be alienated. To this effect, in a tellingly entitled chapter ‘The Subject and Other: Alienation’, he (1981) proposes two types of alienation as precipitated by the presence of a Big Other, a figure who ostensibly represents psychological fullness. The first is contained in the very ‘decision’ to become a subject, through entering into a prevailing symbolic discourse. The possibility of psychic fullness, or of overcoming our innate sense of lack, through the symbolic command of a Big Other is inalterably alienating. Secondly this alienation persists even after one enters into the symbolic order. The ‘Real’ of who one is forever escapes the symbolic meanings culturally provided by a Big Other. Accordingly, one is by nature alienated, in that one defies symbolic signification.

Figures associated with critical theory, in particular with the Frankfurt School¹, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Jürgen Habermas, also developed theories of alienation, drawing on neo-Marxist ideas as well as other influences including neo-Freudian and sociological theories. They applied Marxist theories of commodification to the cultural, educational and party-political spheres. Links are drawn between socioeconomic structures, psychological states of alienation, and personal human relationships. This critical program could be contrasted with a tradition of linear studies that attempt to extract problems of alienation from the broader socioeconomic context, and which often attribute problems to individual abnormality or failures to adjust (Pangilinan, 2009).

Critical theory recognizes that culture is as much a determinant of the form of society as political economy. Any change in the form of society will ultimately have economic and political effect but it cannot be achieved without transformation of the culture of modernity. The form of society has a material dimension: the economic and practical arrangements for meeting needs, the laws governing social actions and the specific institutions that make practical arrangements. But the material form of society is given meaning, communicated and understood through the society’s culture: the ideas, understanding, reasons, images, writing and other modes of expression that accompany the material dimension. Frankfurt School critical theory mounts its critique of society as culture, rather than as political system or economy. Culture is treated not simply as the artistic and communicative stuff of society but as the way that ordinary lives are lived: at work, at leisure, through sexuality, as consumers, as minds that are curious and seek to be entertained, as social subjects that are knowing and have an interest in the way society is organized.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno published in 1947 can certainly be considered as one of the most influential works of Frankfurt School.

 The theme of alienation is a leitmotif of this book. Alienation is not only an aspect of the labour markets anymore, but is noticeable in a wide range of aspects of society like e.g. such as the substitution of character by function, the cycle of manipulation and need, of  leadership of mass culture, and mass media.

Horkheimer and Adorno noticed the development of individuals becoming totally subordinated by the economic powers. The question of the character of man is mainly the question of his or her function in society in general and in the economic system in particular. That is what we can call the substitution of character by function.

In the industrialised world, marked by the division of labour, every function within the system is predefined by the task that is to be fulfilled by the single individual. The defined function itself seems not to leave room for the special individual character but forces the character to adjust to the demands of the role it has to take. Thus, the single individual becomes substitutable (and consumable), since everyone will at least adjust. This has a two-folded consequence. First: The alienation of oneself. And second: The equalisation of individuals. Since the adjustment to the pre-existing system of work and economy seems desperately necessary to survive, the unfolding of the single character becomes marginal and many people tend to define themselves just by their success in the everyday competition of life. What’s left from the human character is the ability to develop skills which are useful for the system. That makes at least everybody equal. In the Human Resources Departments of the today’s big companies thousands of applications pile up that can mainly be distinguished by names but mostly look the same. Even the phrase Human Resource expresses the limitation of the single employee to a resource for the system and society. The ability to alienate from oneself is still and again becomes more and more necessary for being a successful and acknowledged part of society.

Another noticeable aspect, that Horkheimer and Adorno pick up in this context, is the use of rationality in today’s world. This seems to be affirmed, if one e.g. takes a look on the domination of the concept of homo economicus in social science, the domination of economics at all and the downfall of aspects like philosophical education and critical theoretical thinking.

Moreover the individual in modern capitalistic society is not just a substitutable resource but as well a substitutable consumer, who is caught in a “cycle of manipulation and need”.

At this point Horkeheimer and Adorno connect the sphere of economy with the sphere of modern mass culture. Through the influence of radio, TV and today the internet as well people get connected to a undifferentiated mass of consumers of industrial products as well as consumers of culture itself. Yet the consumer only consumes, if he feels a need to do so. The point is, that the capitalistic system can only keep up itself by steady growth. Therefore on the on hand it is necessary to produce and offer new products almost every day and on the other hand it is necessary to build up a need for these products. At least in industrialised countries all basic needs of humans are almost totally satisfied, like needs for food, for clothing, for living room, etc.. If we e.g. consider the pyramid of needs by US-Psychologist Abraham Maslow only the basic needs of a human can finally be satisfied by industrial products. Non-basic needs like social acknowledgement or self-development can hardly be satisfied by the economy. Therefore it seems logical, that, when basic needs are fulfilled, the only way to achieve sustainable economic growth is by creating constantly new, but after all artificial needs. These needs are often build up just by offering a new product.

Finally generating an artificial need for something is a kind of manipulation and so the people get trapped in this so called cycle of manipulation and need. Mass media and culture now is one way to fortify this cycle. The interesting and finally dialectic aspect of this cycle is, what Horkheimer and Adorno also state, that by offering people this kind of mass culture with a lots of choices, it is pretended that capitalist society offers a never seen before freedom for people. But finally it is a just illusory freedom without real alternatives. The freedom is limited to the choice of buying just different sorts of the ever-same. This illusion  “of competition and choice” is held up high by the mass media using advertisement and entertaining to keep people at it.

That leads to a direct influence on society. We again come to the point of the character of man. On the one hand it was stated, that it is build up by the role he or she adjusts to in society, on the other hand character is often build up and indicated to the outside world by what one does and what one has. By the clothing one wears he or she mostly automatically indicates belonging to a social group, may it be a group marked by financial status, wearing e.g. luxury brands, or a group marked by an ideological or not seldom musical background, e.g. wearing “hip-hop-style” clothing or Gothic clothing, etc.. But finally showing a belonging to a group by using products produced in the cycle of manipulation and need restrains the categories of character to choose from to a maybe high but still limited number. Individuality is pseudo-individuality. Thus, finally the capitalistic economic system offers us a kind of matrix of possibilities we can fit ourself in, but real freedom remains illusionary. The human will always be just a member of a group, limited in choices.  Within this group his character is only in limited ways individual, if it is at all.

The alienation the human being in modern mass society runs through is a dialectic of adjustment and equalisation on the one side and of isolation on the other side.

By becoming a just “functioning part” of society, blunted by the phenomenon of mass culture and the use of an almost mere technological rationality, people loose the ability for real sociality. In Education after Auschwitz Adorno criticises in a very similar way the loss of the ability to love. People become monads, struggling in the social coldness and atmosphere of competition and hostility of everyday life. Alienation becomes finally an all-embracing phenomenon.  People are alienated of each other and are trapped in a capitalistic cage, being a mass, which can be directed, e.g. using mass media. Individual critical thinking was substituted by the already described mere technological rationality. Thus, by mass culture and the capitalistic economical system the cornerstone for the fascistic and totalitarian system is laid. Since society was not more than an accumulation of monads, being indifferent against the individual, e.g. the use of technological rationality for realizing a system of industrialised mass murder became eventually possible. The rationality, born by the Enlightenment, reversed itself into the contrary. In Education after Auschwitz Adorno raises the question, how it otherwise could be possible, that e.g. a well-educated engineer uses his knowledge to construct a railway-system for the deportation of Jews to Concentration Camps. This finally was a consequence of alienation from oneself and others.

But today’s society is still marked by the same phenomenons which Horkheimer and Adorno described 1947, mass culture and capitalism, which seem not least to lead to a steady and ongoing depoliticization of people. Thus, maybe it is the prosperity of democracy or maybe just the consciousness about history that prevents us from totalitarianism.

 

Jürgen Habermas' ‘’Theory of Communicative Action’’ attempts a change of paradigm to the theory of communication makes it possible the critique of instrumental reason; and this renewed the task of a critical theory of society. Jürgen Habermas understands language as the foundational component of society. He attempts to update Marxism by "drawing on Systems theory (Luhmann), developmental psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg), and social theory (Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Mead, etc.)".  Alienation stems from the distortion of reasoned moral debate by the strategic dominance of market forces and state power. 

"Modern structures of consciousness emerged from the universal historical process of world-view rationalisation, that is, from the disenchantment of religious-metaphysical world views."  At the same time the means of production including that of culture increasingly passed into the control of a new class. (Who source of wealth is through ownership of the means of production).

The result is the promotion of a 'purposive rational action' in all spheres. An action orientated to profit and power rather than understanding, arising from entrepreneurial capitalism.

According to Weber, rationalisation creates three spheres of value: the differentiated zones of science, art and law. "The transition to modernity is characterised by a differentiation of spheres of value and structures of consciousness that make possible a critical transformation of traditional knowledge. For Habermas, this fundamental disunity of reason constitutes the danger of modernity. This danger arises not simply from the creation of separate institutional entities but through the specialisation of cognitive, normative, and aesthetic knowledge that in turn permeates and fragments everyday consciousness. This disunity of reason implies that culture moves from a traditional base in a consensual collective endeavour to forms which are rationalised by commodification and led by individuals with interests which are separated from the purposes of the population as a whole. This 'purposive rational action' is steered by the "media" of the state, which substitute for oral language as the medium of the coordination of social action.

"The socio-psychological costs of a rationalisation restricted to the cognitive instrumental dimension - costs that are externalised by society and shifted to individuals - appear in different guises, ranging from clinically treated mental illnesses through neuroses, phenomena of addiction, pyschosomatic distrubances, educational and motivational problems, to the protest actions of aesthetically inspired countercultures, religious youth sects and marginal criminal groups and religious cults."

Lukacs specific achievement consists in bringing Marx and Weber together in such a way that he can view the decoupling of the sphere of social labour from lifeworld² contexts simultaneously under two aspects: as reification and rationalisation... He conceives of the reification of lifeworld contexts, which set in when workers coordinate their interactions by way of the de-linguistified medium of exchange value rather than through norms and values, as the other side of a rationalisation of their action orientations."  

Habermas, in contrast to Adorno and Horkheimer, thinks that freedom and ideals of reconciliation are ingrained in the mechanisms of the linguistically mediated sociation of humanity.  His pragmatic optimism contrasts with other critical theorists. We can see from Weber through Lukacs to Adorno that thinkers have agreed that the rationalisation of society has produced a reification of consciousness.

Habermas then defines communicative action as a type of speech act in which the participants 'pursue illocutionary aims' 'first and foremost'. "He mean to distinguish cases of communications motivated by egocentric calculations of success from communications orientated to understanding.  Further only those illocutionary acts to which actors connect validity claims' are constitutive of communicative action.

Modern second-order cybernetics is a paradigm that offer a holistic picture of the constantly emerging novel complexities of ongoing human interaction, and does not postulate simplistic assumptions about the constancy of human behavior. The result of the adoption of the systemic paradigm, is that alienation studies, are becoming less denunciatory, less normative, and moralistic (Geyer, 1998).

Complexity is in the structure rather than in the elements making up the structure, in the way simple building blocks are organized as a result of simple laws. It is indeed the vastly more complex forms of human organization, and the increased interdependence of human organizations, rather than the increased complexity of human individuals themselves that has promoted the modern forms of alienation. Growing interdependence implies increasing communication.

The emergence of complexity is a bottom-up process, without any central controller leading it, rather than a top-down one; it is a matter of local units, acting according to local laws, producing new levels of complexity by interacting.

It is indeed difficult to maintain that the complexity of the modern world is somehow ordained from above; while interaction may sometimes result in hierarchization, these hierarchies are again local units when engaging in a wider process of globalization.

Life is not a property of matter, but of organization of matter. Living systems are constructed from the bottom up.

On the contrary, top-down systems are forever running into combinations of events they do not know how to handle.

   The world is becoming more complex and interdependent, that consequently causal chains stretch further geographically and timewise.  The process of complexification is irreversible.
 

The pathology of alienation

the five prominent features of alienation, Melvin Seeman

Melvin Seeman in his paper, "On the Meaning of Alienation" (1959), used the insights of Marx, Emile Durkheim and others to construct a model to recognize the five prominent features of alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement (Seeman, 1959). 

Powerlessnes

Alienation in the sense of a lack of power has been technically defined by Seeman as “the expectancy or probability held by the individual that his own behaviour cannot determine the occurrence of the outcomes, or reinforcements, he seeks." Put more succinctly, Kalekin-Fishman (1996) says, “A person suffers from alienation in the form of 'powerlessness' when she is conscious of the gap between what she would like to do and what she feels capable of doing”.

Meaninglessness

Seeman (1959) writes that meaninglessness “is characterized by a low expectancy that satisfactory predictions about the future outcomes of behaviour can be made." Where as powerlessness refers to the sensed ability to control outcomes, this refers to the sensed ability to predict outcomes. In this respect, meaninglessness is closely tied to powerlessness; Seeman argues, “the view that one lives in an intelligible world might be a prerequisite to expectancies for control; and the unintelligibility of complex affairs is presumably conducive to the development of high expectancies for external control (that is, high powerlessness)”.

Geyer (1996) believes meaninglessness should be reinterpreted for postmodern times: "With the accelerating throughput of information [...] meaningless is not a matter anymore of whether one can assign meaning to incoming information, but of whether one can develop adequate new scanning mechanisms to gather the goal-relevant information one needs, as well as more efficient selection procedures to prevent being overburdened by the information or the so-called "data tsunami" one does not need, but is bombarded with on a regular basis."

Normlessness

Normlessness (or what Durkheim referred to as anomie) “denotes the situation in which the social norms regulating individual conduct have broken down or are no longer effective as rules for behaviour”.[24] This aspect refers to the inability to identify with the dominant values of society. Seeman (1959) adds that this aspect can manifest in a particularly negative manner, “The anomic situation may be defined as one in which there is a high expectancy that socially unapproved behaviours are required to achieve given goals”. This negative manifestation is dealt with in detail by Catherine Ross and John Mirowski (2001) in a series of publications on mistrust, powerlessness, normlessness and crime.

Neal & Collas (2000) write, “Normlessness derives partly from conditions of complexity and conflict in which individuals become unclear about the composition and enforcement of social norms. Sudden and abrupt changes occur in life conditions, and the norms that usually operate may no longer seem adequate as guidelines for conduct”. This is a particular issue of the mass migrations, and the general sense of disillusionment that characterized the 1990s (Senekal, 2011). Traditional values that had already been questioned (especially during the 1960s) were met with further scepticism in the 1990s, resulting in a situation where individuals rely more often on their own judgement than on institutions of authority: "The individual has become more independent of the churches, and from other social institutions and can make more personal choices in far more life situations than before” (Halman, 1998). These choices are not necessarily "negative": Halman's study found that Europeans remain relatively conservative morally, even though the authority of the Church and other institutions has eroded.

One manifestation of the above dimensions of alienation can be a feeling of estrangement from, and a lack of engagement in, the political system. Such political alienation could result in abstention from the political process, and political apathy (Schwartz, 2007) .

Social isolation

Social isolation refers to “The feeling of being segregated from one’s community”. Neal and Collas (2000) emphasize the centrality of social isolation in the modern world: “While social isolation is typically experienced as a form of personal stress, its sources are deeply embedded in the social organization of the modern world. With increased isolation and atomization, much of our daily interactions are with those who are strangers to us and with whom we lack any ongoing social relationships.”

Self-estrangement

Self-estrangement is an elusive concept in sociology, as recognized by Seeman (1959), although he included it as an aspect in his model of alienation. Self-estrangement can be defined as “the psychological state of denying one’s own interests – of seeking out extrinsically satisfying, rather than intrinsically satisfying, activities...”.   It could be characterized as a feeling of having become a stranger to oneself, or to some parts of oneself, or alternatively as a problem of self-knowledge, or authenticity.
Seeman (1959) recognized the problems inherent in defining the "self", while post-modernism in particular has questioned the very possibility of pin-pointing what precisely "self" constitutes. Gergen (1996) argues that: “the traditional view of self versus society is deeply problematic and should be replaced by a conception of the self as always already immersed in relatedness. On this account, the individual’s lament of ‘not belonging’ is partially a by-product of traditional discourses themselves”. If the self is relationally constituted, does it make sense to speak of "self-estrangement" rather than "social isolation"?

Mental disturbance

Until early in the 20th century, psychological problems were referred to in psychiatry as states of mental alienation, implying that a person had become separated from themselves, their reason or the world. From the 1960s alienation was again considered in regard to clinical states of 'schizoid'' and splitting' disturbances. Varied concepts of alienation and self-estrangement were used to link internal schizoid states with observable symptoms and with external socioeconomic divisions. R.D. Laing was particularly influential in arguing that dysfunctional families and socioeconomic oppression caused states of alienation and ontological insecurity in people, which could be considered adaptations but which were diagnosed as disorders by mainstream psychiatry and society (Laing, 1967). For Laing, alienation is characterized by neglect and distance from an individual’s self-experience and self-identity, and by a lack of autonomy in interpersonal relations (heteronomy). He argues that people who are diagnosed with disorders such as attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia are often suffering from a more sociological condition - ontological insecurity.

Laing was one of the most articulate critics of the stance in which “the clinician assumes a priori that he is a neutral scientific observer/classifier of an (irrational) patient’s speech and behavior.”

Laing’s, ideas are relevant in the light of inability of modern psychiatry to think sociologically and critically about the concept of normality as well as the one-sided dominance of the medical model in mental health (Burston,2000). 

Laing’s early work was devoted to “elucidating the dilemmas of the schizoid and schizophrenic patient.” Drawing on Gregory’s Bateson’s famous concept of the “double-bind,” Laing suggested that, “a patient’s bizarre ideas and utterances are often intelligible responses to the complex and contradictory messages, demands, and prescriptions imposed on them by others.”  In his most well-known book The Politics of Experience (1967), Laing expanded this critique of normality in modern society to suggest, “families, schools, and churches provide us with little more than systematic training in self-estrangement and inauthenticity”.

Laing must be understood as part of a larger tradition that has raised important questions about the social construction of sanity  and about the need for a theory and therapeutic practice that puts un-measurable qualities such as human hope, fears, evil and even spiritual well-being at the center of any psychological approach in the human sciences and helping professions.

Within sociology, theorists such as Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, Thomas Scheff, Dorothy Smith and various scholars have been raising similar concerns about how definitions of mental illness can be socially, organizationally and politically constructed (Burston,2000).

The larger questions that Laing raises are as relevant as ever. There is a politics to therapy, and it cannot be understood simply as a technical and medical issue, despite the claims of some mental health professionals. Should psychotherapists take political stands in relation to the society in which they work? Is helping patients adapt to society a political stand itself?  Is the rise of drug-based therapies a move away from the humanism of Psychotherapeutic tradition, as well as a capitulation to the logic of insurance companies, a consequence of a modern culture concerned with quick fixes and a victory for pharmaceutical companies fixated on profits? Reasonable questions can be raised about the rights of individuals who do not fall within the definitions of normality laid out with such certitude in documents such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
 

For Ian Parker, psychology normalizes conditions of social alienation. While it could help groups of individuals emancipate themselves, it serves the role of reproducing existing conditions (Parker, 2007). This view can be seen as part of a broader tradition sometimes referred to as Critical psychology or Liberation psychology, which emphasizes that an individual is enmeshed within a social-political framework, and so therefore are psychological problems. Similarly, some psychoanalysts suggest that while psychoanalysis emphasizes environmental causes and reactions, it also attributes the problems of individuals to internal conflicts stemming from early psychosocial development, effectively divorcing them from the wider ongoing context.

 

Fromm suggests that “the insane person is the absolutely alienated person” who has lost a sense of self and cannot situate him/herself as the center of his/her own experiences. He suggests that as people become alienated, they lose their understanding of themselves and do not see their experiences as being based on their own decisions, judgments, and actions. Alienated people lead meaningless lives; they are estranged from themselves, others, and society. Fromm considers alienation almost complete in modern capitalist societies, and explains that it pervades individuals’ consumption habits as well as their relationships to their work, to their communities, to their fellow citizens, and to themselves. An alienated person lacks a sense of reality regarding “the meaning of life and death, for happiness and suffering, for feeling and serious thought.” In a technological age, machines routinely replace human intelligence and citizens tend to manipulate symbols and other people rather than actively and creatively producing commodities. They are not invested in their work, and find it routine, boring, and dull, which further contributes to a sense of apathy and dissatisfaction with their lives. As Fromm explains, in contemporary society work often can be defined “as the  performance of acts which cannot yet be performed by machines.” Within alienated societies consumption now dominates and defines the culture. Citizens consume food, drink, news, and entertainment without any active participation or unifying experiences resulting from the consumption. In addition, a continuous, ever expanding need for consumption is encouraged by “artificially stimulated fantasies” (Fromm, 1955) created by advertising and a variety of other psychological pressures that coax individuals into repeatedly buying as much as they can.

In a related vein, Slavoj Zizek (drawing on Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan) argues that in today's capitalist society, the individual is estranged from their self through the repressive injunction to "enjoy!" Such an injunction does not allow room for the recognition of alienation and, indeed, could itself be seen as an expression of alienation.(Zizek, 1994).

Zizek points out (2007) “The so-called permissive society allows all enjoyments, thus enjoyment is limited more than ever, as if there was a command that one can enjoy everything – on the  premise that the substance that makes them dangerous has been removed ( decaffeinated coffee, foods without fats, etc).   There is an abundance of all earthly pleasures ( from educational lectures to groups about the orthopedic of relations ) offered by the current culture to fill the leisure. All these provide material to the subject to forget the existence and death and also to disregard in a false communication the special meaning of life” (Zizek, 2007).

 



Contemporary alienation

Following the flowering of contestation movements at sixties and student revolutions in Europe and the USA, alienation studies proliferated, at least in the Western world.  The existence of alienation in the ‘decadent, bourgeois’ societies of the West was confirmed, as it was supposed to herald the impending demise of late capitalism.

   During the 1980s, as the postwar baby boomers⁴ grew older, and perhaps more disillusioned, and willynilly entered the rat race, interest in alienation subsided.

Nowadays stress is, on describing new forms of alienation increasingly pervasive ethnic alienation and conflict, and on alienation as caused by high joblessness rates, living under conditions of extreme economic deprivation an abject political system, exploitative working conditions, etc.

The changing nature in public employment policy, competition and the supposed end of ‘careers’ and lifetime job security, has driven employees in a continuous race to obtain achievements, titles, skills personal capacities that make them more likely to gain employment  and be able to move between jobs, thus remaining employable throughout their life.  This contemporary trend of the present working reality, has been called employability.

Employability; purportedly provides individuals the resources to not only obtain employment but also, more importantly, the opportunity to ‘control their employment fate’. Consequently, employability points to the emergence of an empowering contemporary identity juxtaposed against a changing economic reality that is marked by even greater job insecurity (Bloom, 2013).

Perhaps the option, to be one able to define one’s working destiny, that employability promises has been proclaimed as the solution of overcoming alienation-without changing the relations of production.

Yet, employability, deepens the employee’s commitment to capitalist ideologies and managerial demands (Cremin, 2010).. At the heart of this desire for employability, organizations’ wish to cultivate a culture in which the authority of management is re-established through the creation of a committed, yet autonomous, workforce (Costea et al., 2007). 

Cremin (2010) introduces the concept of ‘reflexive exploitation’ connected to employability, whereby ‘a person reflects on herself as an object of exchange in order to access a wage and social status, to choose a life that is compatible with the injunctions of liberal capitalism’ (Cremin, 2010).

Employability stands as a hegemonic discourse structuring identity around the paradox  of self-mastery, within an admittedly alienating capitalist reality Actually the result is the deeper colonization of subjectivity in line with capitalist values (Bloom,  2013).  Identity centers here on the capitalist desire to maximize one’s profit from exploitation.  These insights point, to the ways an empowering identity can be ironically constructed so as to actually reflect dominant demands and understandings. Acquiescing to hegemonic values is made more palatable when clothed in an appealing sheen of empowerment and resistance.

 A new determinant of alienation has emerged, which is the result of, unmanageable environmental complexity.  In much of the Western world, the average person is increasingly confronted, on a daily basis, with an often bewildering and overly complex environment, which promotes attitudes of political apathy, often politically dangerous oversimplification of complex political issues, and equally dysfunctional withdrawal from wider social involvements (Geyer, 2001).

   What is clear is that modern forms of alienation are emerging and will affect increasing numbers of people in the developed world, and soon also in the developing world. Several authors have hinted at this development. Lachs (1976) spoke of a mediated world, where the natural cycle of action/feedback  is broken, and where one is less and less in command of more and more of the things that impinge on one’s life. Etzioni (1968) likewise saw alienation as resulting from nonresponsive social systems that do not cater to basic human needs. Toffler (1970, 1990) vividly described how change is happening not only faster around us, but even through us.

Coping alienation

The above mentioned Bloom’s analysis of employability, seeks to provide the foundations for moving beyond this fantasy of employability. Recently, a number of critical scholars within the field have theorized the relation of fantasy to resistance. Hoedemaekers (2010), for example, calls on subjects to pay attention to such ‘interruptions’ to identification as potential sites for transversing, or break free from, a prevailing fantasy. Similarly, Contu (2008), inspired by Žižek, promotes a form of resistance by which individuals are willing to engage in acts that defy the symbolism and enjoyment associated with their current identities. Specific to discourses of employability, Cremin (2010) suggests to construct new fantasies and therefore selves which reject ideologies of managerialism and exploitation in favour of new values. Indeed, this appears to be happening the world over, as struggles in the wake of the financial crisis, such as the occupy movement or those catalyzed by the European debt crisis, in which new ‘commons’ are emerging reconfiguring identity work in relation to ideals of greater social and economic freedom and democracy.

Major changes in the world as globalization and the computer science and technology revolution have brought to the fore new productive forces and changes in relations of production and explosion of societal complexity and worldwide interdependence.

Modern technology greatly empowers individuals to perform tasks through control over the equivalent of large armies of slaves (Yaneer, 1997). These increased abilities could lead to independent and self-sufficient individuals, each providing for his or her own needs.  A new possibility appears to be happening—the formation of networks of interdependent individuals.

An empowerment of individuals, by the development of tools, results in an increasing complexity of activity.  The diverse individual activities are difficult to control because it is impossible for an individual to know how to control and coordinate many diverse activities.  At the same time, the coordination of activities through a network becomes possible through advances in communication.                                                                       

Complexity as all the phenomenon of life is ambiguous. From one side it is forming the modern aspects of alienation but at the other, attenuates the centralization of control and manipulation.

  Thus, we can extract from it that the quantity that can be tied most directly to a loss of effectiveness of central control is complexity. (Yaneer, 1997).

FOOTNOTES

1 In a more focused sense, critical theory designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School, which is particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. In order to fill in the perceived omissions of traditional Marxist thought, the Frankfurt School theorists sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of psychoanalysis, Weberian theory, aesthetic modernism and other disciplines. The school’s main figures attempted to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism. Hegel’s philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of reality. In a nutshell, the theorists of the Frankfurt School aimed a radical transformation of the social world of advanced capitalism that will bring freedom for all from features of modern society that restrict or constrain individuals from living in freedom. It does not aim to bring about social change through revolutionary means, through confronting the practical and economic arrangements with political opposition.

² Lifeworld: the social processes that reproduce cultural traditions, social integration, and personal identities.  In lifeworld, we construct, maintain and refresh meanings .

³Illocutionary pertaining to a linguistic act performed by a speaker in producing an utterance, as suggesting, warning, promising, or requesting. Illocutionary act is a term in linguistics introduced by the philosopher John L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. For example, in uttering the locution "Is there any salt?" at the dinner table, one may thereby perform the illocutionary act of requesting salt, as well as the distinct locutionary act of uttering the interrogatory sentence about the presence of salt, and the further perlocutionary act of causing somebody to hand one the salt.

According to Austin's original exposition in How to Do Things With Words, an illocutionary act is an act (1) for the performance of which I must make it clear to some other person that the act is performed (Austin speaks of the 'securing of uptake'), and (2) the performance of which involves the production of what Austin calls 'conventional consequences' as, e.g., rights, commitments, or obligations (Austin 1975, 116f., 121, 139). Thus, for example, in order to make a promise I must make clear to my audience that the act I am performing is the making of a promise, and in the performance of the act I will be undertaking an obligation to do the promised thing.

Searle (1975) set up the following classification of illocutionary speech acts:

directives = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice

commissives = speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths

expressives = speech acts that express on the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks

declarations = speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife

⁴ Baby boomers are people born during the demographicPost-World War II baby boom, between the years 1946 and 1964. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the term "baby boomer" is also used in a cultural context.

Baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values; however, many commentators have disputed the extent of that rejection, noting the widespread continuity of values with older and younger generations. In Europe and North America boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in post-war housing and education, and increasing affluence.

One feature of the boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon.

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