Page 39 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

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10 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

of social life that followed upon the develop- thwarted workers’ humanity in every domain
ment of capitalism. The on-going concentra- of their existence. In his analysis, alienation
tion of industry, the fragmentation of the followed the estrangement of the worker
labor process, and attendant intensive urban- from his/her tools on the one hand, and from
ization that atomized social relationships the products of his/her labor, on the other.
required new tools for investigating society. The capitalist mode of production resold the
In attempting to explain the adversities of a labor the worker expended in the production
rapidly expanding modernity, the fathers of of commodities, but that ‘surplus value’ went
sociology pinpointed different foci as the to the owners of capital, not the workers who
dynamic mechanisms of change. produced it. The sale of labor as a commod-
Emphasizing the centrality of rationality, ity that produced commodities, created a
the primary value of modernity, Weber system that stood outside the worker and
(1958/1946) saw that Enlightenment based refluxed back upon her. Workers were ren-
rationality of capitalism had expanded to dered powerless, their communities lost
almost every realm of social and personal coherence, and their selfhood was truncated.
life. Capitalism, as a rationally organized Work no longer provided workers with
economic system, depended on a rationalized sources of meaning and/or self expression.
administrative apparatus that entrapped Moreover, people who had to earn their
people into ‘iron cages.’ The bureaucratic livelihood according to arrangements
implementations of rules and regulations imposed by the capitalist system could not
which were efficient in the workplace were escape its pervasive effects. Notwithstanding
debilitating in social life, and caused an the radical transformations of the current
imprisonment of the body and the mind. world by a globalized capitalist political
Following upon the positivist legacy of economy, the Marxist critique remains a
Comte, Durkheim (1951/1897) attempted to viable framework for revealing the nature of
understand the shifting normative sands of late capitalism and unpacking its manifold
modernity as driven by a disruption of stan- consequences.
dards for behavior. As traditional precepts Current theorization of alienation builds
waned, new rules emerged that were not upon the shift in Marxian theory that recap-
however widely shared in a society with an tured the concerns with culture that began
advanced division of labor. In the varied with the neo-Marxian analyses of Korsch
experiences of daily life, people were faced (1923), Lukacs (1971/1920), and the Frankfurt
with ‘anomie,’ uncertainty about what norms School (see Jay, 1996; Kellner, 1989) in the
were applicable to novel situations, and first half of the twentieth century. Against the
about how norms were to govern action. economistic reductionism of the Second
In contrast with the attempts to situate the International, these theorists defended the
effects of capitalism as limitations on action role of culture and subjectivity first articulated
or on thinking about rules, Marx (1978/1844) by Marx in his Economic and Philosophical
argued that alienation was an inherent conse- Manuscripts (1978/1844), The German
quence of a capitalist society in which one Ideology (1978/1846), and The Eighteenth
class owned private property and another Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1978/1852). In
class, the workers, sold their labor power as a the twentieth century, the concept of alien-
commodity. Capitalism, as the latest expres- ation was central to the Frankfurt School’s
sion of an economic system based on classes understanding of the rise of fascism, and
with competing interests, most clearly somewhat later, to their analyses of the
revealed how the wealth of the ruling class, nature of consumerism. They synthesized
the bourgeoisie, was based on the exploita- Weber’s discussions of Protestantism and
tion of the workers, the proletariat. But wage rationality with Freud’s notions of individual
labor, necessarily fostered alienation that character and his understandings of group