Universities & Left Review 5 Autumn 1958

Alienation and Community

Charles Taylor
SOONER or later, any Socialism worth its salt must come to grips with the problems of alienation. Since the Industrial Revolution, thoughtful men of all political persuasions and religious beliefs have grappled with an indefinable sense of loss; a sense that life in modern society has become impoverished, that men are somehow ' deracinate and disinherited,' that society and human nature alike have been atomized, and hence mutilated, above all that men have been separated from whatever might give meaning to their work and their lives. This sense of decline has run alongside and, as it were, in counterpoint to the euphoric visions of Progress which had such a following in the nineteenth century and, somewhat defensively, still as inseparable from the process of industrialization itself, retain considerable influence in this. Both were seen as inseparable from the process of industrialization itself, at least in its form of development. At the extremes the two traditions have been sharply antagonistic. Aggressive utilitarians have professed to see no meaning in such analyses of discontents in industrial society ; and have implied that the motives behind these confused imaginings were disreputable either in terms of social orientation or in terms of psychological health. Reactionary thinkers in the grip of social nostalgia have indicted the modern world in its entirety and have dreamt of an impossible return to the dark ages, a holocaust which will cleanse us at once of the three cancers of Industrialism, Democracy and Reason. But many people, right and left, have preferred the longer and more arduous task of working through the tensions of our inevitably contradictory judgments of industrial society to some at least makeshift temporary solution. The centre of the socialist tradition has been at this nerve-point, where the immensely rich promise of industrialism and its callous destruction of men and their society have clashed most directly among the proletariat which it has created. Socialism might even be defined as a claim that men can find a solution, that they can build an industrial society without alienation, that they can recreate meaningful social bonds without tyranny and a reversion to the closed society. This is the point of departure which sharply distinguishes socialist thought from both the liberal and conservative traditions, both of which start from the premises that economic progress and the ' open society' are not compatible with human solidarity the one in order definitively to shelve the problems connected with the quality of life in our society (or to refer them to a team of ' Human Relations ' specialists, which comes close to the same thing) ; the other in order to justify an attack, overt or covert, global or piecemeal, on progress and democracy. The tendency of social democracy has been progressively to lose from sight the problems in this range, first from its programmes and then from its propaganda. This has been especially the case in this country because of the importance of utilitarian thought which has entered the labour movement with the Fabians. It has come to the point where it is not uncommon to hear on the left that the problem has been solved by the Welfare State and full employment This is true if we think of ' alienation ' purely in terms of child labour and the eighteen-hour day, but is this all that our socialist forbears were worried about ? More important, is this all that we have to worry about?

/. WHAT IS ALIENATION?
Why a man works and what his work means to him have been central questions in one tradition of socialist thought. It has been said that under capitalism man works out of fear of starvation alone, and cannot see his work as expressing any purpose which he could assume as his own. To this the reply has always been: when have men ever been allowed to work from any other motive and in any other way ? This rejoinder has some value as an antidote to the form of social nostalgia which tries to rehabilitate some murky slab of our past to serve as the golden age, but as an answer to socialist criticism it misses the point rather sadly. Of course, the vast majority of men have always had to work to avoid starvation, and it is very much to be doubted that the slaves who built the pyramids felt much identification with the purpose of the Pharaohs, but the point of the criticism is not to compare the present with an imaginary past, but to show it up in the light of a possible future. A critic may then ask why we speak of capitalist society specifically instead of simply all past society. The answer is that in industrial society the problem arises in an unique way. In pre-industrial society it was possible for a man's work, although hard and oppressive, to be an integral part of a life which, however difficult, had a meaning he could accept. This is certainly clear when we look at those societies where work is integrated by seasonal ceremonies, etc., into the ritual life of the community, which is also the centre of its cultural life. In a situation of this kind, one cannot reduce the motive for working to a simple fear of starvation: social solidarity, commitment to the common meanings of a culture can also enter in. One cannot equate this to the temporary position where men feel often indifference sometimes loathing for the way they earn their living, which they are therefore quite willing to separate rigidly off from the rest of their lives, as so many ' lost' hours. But this does not mean that the only way forward is to recreate the conditions of an earlier society. The growth of education and of self-conscious choice which have occurred since then are not only precious achievements, they are also irreversible developments. The way to recapture the good of the past is most emphatically not to copy the past. The same values cannot be given the same meaning at all times in history. It is therefore anachronistic to interpret ' meaning ' as purpose in the context of primitive society. When we talk about the ' meaning of life,' we naturally tend to think of purposes or goals towards which life can be directed ; but that is because we have been taught to think analytically of a thing and its purpose as separable. But this is a comparatively modern development. We can also think of ' meaning ' more on the model of artistic meaning: to say that a life has meaning is to say that its duties and rights, freedoms and

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servitudes, its basic orientations, form a pattern; a whole which is meaningful in this quasi-artistic sense to the one who lives it. Thus it is no answer to those who talk of alienation under capitalist society to point out that most men have not given their lives a consciously defined purpose : this has not always been essential to a meaningful life in the past. But, by the same token, we cannot expect it to be sufficient in the future ; we cannot recreate even the general pattern of the past. Liberal thought is often guilty of this kind of anachronism: it dismisses the problem of alienation on the grounds, first, that human nature has never changed and therefore our age has no special problems (therefore why worry); second, that human nature will never change and the perennial problems are ineradicable (therefore no use worrying). Thus one of the features of work in industrial society that one minority stream of socialist critique (e.g. Marx, Morris, Fridham) has clearly delineated, is the radical separation between work hours and the rest of life, which now becomes the rule. It is clear that work cannot be meaningful under these conditions, but it it usually assumed that the rest of a man's life doesn't necessarily suffer overmuch. Thus, although it is a commonplace that the proletariat of early industrialism were deprived of their cultural heritage and forced to lead aesthetically impoverished lives, it is widely believed not only among Liberals, but also in the Labour Party, that this was entirely due to the long exhausting hours, the overcrowding and the rapidity of the change of environment. Once these factors could be removed, the march of progress would recommence. But the " the-problems-of-work-are-over-the-problems-of-leisure begin" school on the Left seem to take for granted a very questionable Utilitarian theory of leisure and culture. The crude hedonism of Utilitarianism saw pleasure as an ' experience' in the classical empiricist sense,' i.e. as an effect of the senses or mind (we are never quite sure which), which they receive passively from the environment. In the quasi-economic book-keeping model of behaviour which the Utilitarians adopted, this was incorporated into the simple two-fold classification of human behaviour into Production and Consumption as the mechanism behind the latter. But this model entirely excludes Play, or the exercise of the faculties for other than bread-and-butter purposes or rather it splits it up into two separate processes: the action, which is work, and the experience, which is quite passive, i.e. into production and consumption. Now this model cannot account for the kind of activity which is crucial to all cultural life, the participation by people, who are not themselves creators of culture in the normal sense, in a heritage of meanings, which they take on, shape, whose offered continuations they accept or reject and which they ultimately hand on. This kind of activity, visible in anything from the square dance to the alive theatre audience, is not even thinkable in the original Utilitarian scheme, or unthinkable without fragmentation into two. For the ' passive experience' model of pleasure is meant to apply to art-tasting as well as to other forms of ' consumption.' The active participation of the amateur must then be considered as some form of ' work,' as in some sense ' productive,' as a means to the end of consumption. It is relegated to the other side of the dichotomy. That this fragmentation obscures from view the basic nature of the individual's participation in the cultural life of his community becomes obvious, for neither of the two kinds of activity into which it is ' analysed' resembles it in the slightest degree: it is neither ' experience' nor is it work ; the sum of these two cannot therefore come any closer to equalling it.

The recovery of participation in cultural life cannot therefore be a simple question of shortening hours so that enough time and energy is left after work ; or one simply of proliferating the means to such participation. It involves also re-acquiring the ability to participate. And there is no doubt that this has been lost to some considerable degree.

The Ideology of Alienation

But it is not enough simply to point out where the Utilitarian model goes wrong. The fact is that their picture is in another sense very close to the truth. For men in industrial society have tended more and more to approximate to the Utilitarian model. It has become in a sense true that all activity is production and, as such, is distinct from leisure or play, which in turn have tended to be more passive reception than participation. This is true not only in the sense that work is increasingly seen as unrelated to the rest of a man's life and particularly to those things which give his life meaning ; that it is seen, in other words, as a means to a life of which it is not in any sense a part, but also in the sense that leisure activity itself is seen as a form of work. It is seen therefore as a means to another end, which is ultimately envisaged as ' pleasure ' in something like the Utilitarian meaning of that term. The ' end' of the activity is the ' consumption ' of something ; this is what gives meaning to the process, the activity itself is strictly subordinate as a means. As Erich Fromm points out in this connection, taking exercise is often ' justified' as good for one's health, and many people naturally reflect on how they will spend their leisure hours in terms of what kind of activity will' pay off ' most. Naturally the objection will be made that men have always sought the most 'pleasurable' or 'useful' courses of action: there is nothing specific to our age in this. But this objection misses the point. What is new and disquieting is the obsessive importance put on getting the style of life which will ' pay off,' the sense that this is the meaning of life, that if one has failed in this realm, one's life has been wasted. The American essayist Riesman has spoken of this as the ' fun-morality,' which has replaced the earlier puritan-inspired ' work-morality ' of the nineteenth century. That this ' fun-morality' has played an important part in the United States for some years now is not in dispute, but little is known about its importance in British life. The evidence shows, however, that it is growing, especially among young people (Cf Michael Kullman's article in ULR 4, e.g. the way the word ' square' is used). Riesman sees this preoccupation with having the right ' experiences' as one of the ' costs of research' into the ' frontiers of consumption' (Individualism Reconsidered, p. 140). The unfortunate individuals concerned are paying for what will eventually be ' an addition to the stock of American leisure bounties and benefits' (loc. cit). But this urbane attitude surely presupposes that there is no important deformation of human leisure activity involved in the ' research,' and this seems to be a highly questionable assumption. Those on the Left who wish above all else not to be mistaken for puritans often forget, in their advocacy of a good time for all, that much of the current dissolution of puritan attitudes in the search for a ' good time ' is more apparent than real. The basis of the former ' puritan' view of man remains in a new guise, or rather with a changed emphasis ; life is still seen as a problem in economics: something must be produced in order to avoid psychological bankruptcy ; before, this was seen in terms of wealth or industrial-financial empires, now the raw

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nothing is changed if the search is successful, there are no intrinsic criteria of achievement; the search is potentially endless. (Cf E. Durkheim: Suicide, Bk. II, Cp. 5). Some socially established external criterion of success for different classes and groups is therefore a necessity. The goal of Pleasure and the avoidance of Pain becomes that of possession of the visible signs of ' full' life. The status hierarchy, laying down the standards of present required achievement, and of achievable future ambition becomes a psychological necessity. Status tensions, inevitable in a mobile society, begin to carry a lethal psychic charge. Anxiety over futility merges with anxiety over the gap between required and achieved status. This anxiety is, of course, fixed on and intensified by mass-media advertising. Advertising, as today practised in Britain and America, both exploits and helps to give shape to the status hierarchy. It trades on the anxiety over status by convincing people that the products it recommends are the pivotal criteria for having arrived. But this is not the only arrow in its quiver. It also gives recognition to the anxiety over futility. This is if anything intensified by the diversion of the search for Pleasures as a Consumer good into what even those firmly in its grip refer to as " the rat-race " for status. The increase in anxiety and effort required is liable to make the game seem even less worth the candle, even for those who are psychologically incapable of ' opting out.' Much advertising copy attempts to offer us surcease from our doubts by appealing to the original desire for Pleasure as a passive experience, by supplementing our faulty imaginations and conjuring up for us a dream world where Pleasure is consumed in such conditions of beauty for what manages by present canons to pass for it), grace and ease, not to speak of primal innocence, as quite to restore our flagging faith in the ideal. To the extent that we identify with the figures in these advertisements and every attempt is made to have us do so we are reconfirmed in our belief that it is worth while trying to find happiness and a meaning in life through every more satisfying, discriminating and expensive consumption, and we are discouraged from seeing our own creative potentialities as possible sources of happiness and meaningful living. These ads. are to the new religion what sermons on the Kingdom of Heaven are to Christianity. It is, of course, true that, in a capitalist society, particularly when the 'economics of abundance ' prevail, advertising will always be used to make as many people as possible good consumers, but it would be foolish to consider advertising, or the ' Dreamland' propaganda of the mass media in general, as solely responsible. This search for Pleasure as a consumer good is obviously deeply rooted in the way of life of industrial capitalist society.

class and elite culture intertwine, and are sharply set off against 'pop' culture, so that the inevitable struggle between the two is inextricably bound up with class tensions and resentments. But the trivialization of common meanings which immediately affects ' pop ' culture attains the 'highbrow ' indirectly in that it is classed as such, not only by those who do not participate in it but inevitably to some extent by those who do. It is thus always in danger of becoming the possession of a coterie, of becoming inbred, a set of private meanings by which the members of the elect recognise each other. But a 'highbrow' culture which doesn't seek to communicate, which doesn't try to break the existing barriers to communication inevitably stifles in a hotbed atmosphere of marginal titillation: it becomes as trivialized as the ' pop ' culture against which it has raised its walls. This is perhaps most evident of all in the theatre which, from its beginnings in ritual, has been the form which par excellence is ' of' a society, is meant to address a society and not a number of fragmented individuals, which requires the kind of audience participation which only a society with common meanings makes possible. The trivialization of content on both sides of the barrier means that neither side can remake a common culture simply by engulfing the other. But attempts are made at all levels to break through the limits, to reach new people, to rediscover the nerve-points of meaning. Because of the all-pervading power that trivialized culture has at its disposal in the mass media, the attempts that are made are often savage, and centre around a pre-occupation with violence, especially among young people. The violence often reflects the pent-up frustrated desire to break out to a new and more authentic image of inarticulate experience. And then, of course,the mass media try to cater for this need as well in sex-and-violence dramas, and once more to reduce it to a formula, shepherd it back to a safe anonymity. Small wonder that the most authentic voices! are often heard from genuine social rebels. But this very fact means that the participants in ' highbrow' culture, many of whom staff the mass media and the advertising agencies, cannot reach or very often even understand what is genuine in ' pop ' culture. If the cultural cleavage bothers them at all, they think of the answer in terms of a liquidation of popular culture, an extension of national culture from the top down, which is doomed to failure from the start.

The Decline of Community

A fragmented culture of this kind, however, can only take full hold if the traditional ' primary societies ' have broken up, if the society has really become a mass society. As long as the primary groups are vigorous, local or regional common meanings impede the formation of a real 'pop' culture. The mobility, both social and geographical, which seems to be the inevitable accompaniment of industrialization has a tendency to break up these groups,sothat it is often thought to he an inescapable consequence of economic progress. Whether this is a sufficient explanation is a question I would like to consider later on. For the moment, I should just like to point to the importance of the mass society not only in the creation of a ' pop ' culture, but also in the re-orientation of leisure pursuits towards the ideal of consumption as experience! Hoggart's Uses of Literacy and the findings of Young and' Wilmott show how strong the culture of primary groups has been among the working class of this country, and how slow has been their gradual emptying. Where such primary

"Pop" v. "Highbrow"
If it is true that what I have been calling Utilitarianism, which can perhaps more accurately be described as an abstraction of certain of the most popular doctrines of Bentham (certainly not of I. S. Mill), is the self-consciousness of alienated man in our society, then we would expect this to be reflected in the quality of its cultural life. We would expect its cultural life to be fragmented, no longer a bond between different groups ; and we would expect to see an enervating ' popular ' culture, which only needed to be 'consumed' to be enjoyed, vying with a more traditional culture, which, would either be the appanage of a class which had not been totally disrupted by industrial society, or would be an 'elite' culture, one entered by people individually on the basis of education. In Britain, 14

societies grew up in the new industrial towns, usually on the basis of a local tradition, the fact that work-hours became so many lost hours did not at once destroy the traditional conceptions of meaning in life ; rather something like a common culture grew up in the different working-class communities, based on the values of solidarity and mutual trust. The fact that the sense of solidarity was largely based on a mistrust and hostility to ' THEM ' has often been cited to show the narrowness and parochialism which infected the working-class community, but whatever the faults and virtues of this culture it provided a sense of meaning in life alternative to the standard utilitarian one of the alienated man in mass society. The gradual, weakening of these groups has made individuals uncertain of their status and has opened the door to the status tensions, which are exacerbated by the fact that they provide the only criterion of success. (This represents, in fact, the growth of " Consumer Capitalism," which Stuart Hall analyses at length in his article in this issue.)

to us via Marx, does more than just describe the phenomena, it represents also a beginning of an explanation, by offering us a model, that of human capacities and powers becoming foreign to man. An explanation is also, of course, the groundwork tor a programme of reform. It is therefore far more than a question of words whether ' alienation ' is the right term. A rival term is that of ' anomie,' introduced by Durkheim. This concept fits naturally into a quite different explanatory model, that of a breakdown of the rules which used to be accepted. Anomic men are men who accept no rules, no boundaries. Durkheim links this directly to a weakening of the social bond. It is for him therefore the fact that men become more independent, more self-reliant, that society becomes more varied, in short more ' open,' which is at the root of what, following Marx, I have called alienation. According to Durkheim (in Suicide), all forms of human activity which are not strictly necessary for survival are given meaning by society: " they are society itself jncarnated and individualized in each one of us " (Suicide, p. 212). Thus the weakening of social bonds through a development of individual self-consciousness cannot but raise a question which must remain unanswered: to what purpose? It cannot but introduce a sense of meaninglessness into " the superior forms of human activity." This thesis of Durkheim is important, for it introduces the idea of meaning unconnected with that of conscious purpose. For whatever rationale these ' superior forms ' of activity have had in the past religious, ideological or moral the reason why they have held men's allegiance is, according to Durkheim, the sense men have had of being p a r t of a larger whole. It is a sense based largely on an unreflecting adherence to a way of life, rather than on an acceptance of a purpose after reflection. These activities therefore had meaning and can only have meaning in the quasi-artistic sense mentioned above ; they are part of a set of common meanings which express adequately a people's deepest awareness of the turning-points of life. They are meaningful in the sense, for example, that primitive puberty rites are.

The Break-up of the Primary Group

But this fragmentation of the primary group is often seen as the condition of liberation of the individual from a parochial outlook of the free operation of ambition, and hence as an unqualified good. And this, as we might expect, is the Utilitarian view, reflected in the doctrine of * the ' invisible h a n d ' taken over from Adam Smith, that society is best served by an atomization into individuals each of whom seeks his own interest without regard to the others. The image of society is that of an economy considered as an abstraction, the economy as a machine, with input and output apertures connected to individuals. Marx pointed out that for Bentham, the model of individual behaviour was the shop-keeper keeping a record of profit and loss in terms of Pleasure and Pain for each action. This book-keeping model, incorporating the idea of "life as a business enterprise," as Erich Fromm puts it, together with the image of society as an economy with Pleasure and Pain as the currency form the crux of the self-image of alienated man. I have tried to give a sketch of the main features of alienation in contemporary society, using as a guiding thread certain basic assumptions of Utilitarianism. I have had to be schematic as the theory itself was: no individual apart from a pathological case really is made in the image of Benthamism. The index of alienation in any society is how many approximate to it and believe that they approximate to it even more than they do. Alienation is also a fact about consciousness: it makes the abnormal look right and inevitable. The important feature of Utilitarianism is that its assumptions make it impossible to state the case against it, even to call it into question if we use its own language. To the extent that men see their lives this way their alienation is complete. Even if one wishes to demand that work be more meaningful, the demand. must be expressed in terms of the 'disutility ' of unpleasant conditions. It must enter the ledger as a consumption good like the rest.

The Closed Society Again

But this kind of meaning can only survive in a ' closed' society, where men have little sense of their existence as individuals, where the adherence to the group is unreflecting. On Durkheim's view, therefore, the choice is between a growing sense of futility and a return to the closed society. This is, rather, the logic of his position, but the fact that he did not go to the final conclusion should not blind us to the implications of going even half-way. The idea is not so uncommon nowadays that one can recapture some of the advantages of the closed society within modern civilization. In particular, this is a not uncommon ambition among industrial psychologists in America. The preoccupation with ' human relations ' which springs largely from the work of Lloyd Warner and Elton Mayo reflects the desire to form a ' primary society' on the basis of the Corporation to cater for the need for meaning. But this can only be accomplished if the unfortunate beneficiaries of all this spiritual engineering are forced or induced to forgo the advance in consciousness and in self-reliance which our civilization has won for them. But it is even doubtful that people who had renounced these completely could go on living in a civilization such as ours. asystem of this kind would involve a far-reaching paternalism, a rigid separation between educators and educated, for the

//. ALIENATION AND ANOMIE

Enough has been said, I hope, to show what alienation is and what is more important, to show that it does not consist of the perennial evils in human nature and society, but has a form specific to our society. But it might still be asked if the term ' alienation ' is appropriate. This term, which was first used in this context by Hegel and comes

former would have to create and nurture the ' primary group' with a conscious purpose: to make people happy ; while the latter would have to be conditioned unreflectingly to feel themselves a part of the larger whole. These are already the terms of reference with which much work in ' human relations ' in American industry is done. But this work is bound to fail, and the problems it is meant to solve to recur as long as America remains a democracy. Even more futile is the attempt to become both manipulator and manipulated characteristic of the way of life of the Organization Man. In the part of his book entitled " The New Suburbia." Whyte describes the community life of the new, highly mobile middle class of America the ' pioneers ' of Riesman referred to above. The belief underlying their emphasis on participation, Whyte points out, is that the individual cannot live the ' good life ' without close bonds to his society. The important need to fill is that for a 'sense of belongingness.' But to the extent that this is seen as another good to be 'consumed,' to the extent. therefore that people try to administer it to themselves, to manipulate themselves and others, they must be much too sophisticated, much too highly conscious of their technique to develop a real ' sense of belongingness.' Since this requires an unreflecting sense of adherence to a group, they must always be in the position of people trying with great ingenuity to hoodwink themselves, which is never ultimately completely successful. If the aim were to found a sense of community on the basis of some agreed purpose, the task would be difficult, perhaps immensely so, but not self-defeating. But this is not the aim: the attempt is precisely to sink those differences of purpose religious, political, ideologicalin silence, and to build a community on ' togetherness ' alone. But mere ' togetherness' is impossible since it is just another means to the end of individual happiness, another good which the individual atom of society will consume-

criterion of this kind. By it one can measure one's successes and failures: one has a standard of achievement. ' Anomie ' can therefore be re-defined more broadly to include "not only those who are 'ruleless' but also those who are prisoners of a rule, a set of criteria for success and failure' which they cannot really accept. They are the 'maladjusted'

Riesman and Autonomy

In his most recent work the American sociologist David Riesman uses ' anomie ' in this wider sense (Cf. The Lonely Crowd, p. 278). This revised concept focusses attention on another side of the problem or, more precisely, it reverses the problem. For Durkheim the main question is how to reimpose a rule ; for Riesman it is how to give people some psychological room for manoeuvre inside a too constricting mode of conformity. He therefore transposes the goal from one of an impossible recreation of the closed society to that of the realization by individuals of the potentialities for freedom in the open one. ' Autonomous ' individuals are those who " are capable of conforming to the behavioural norms of their society . . . but are free to choose whether to conform or not." (Lonely Crowd, p. 287-8). Riesman is right in seeing the problem as one of freeing people from a rule they have no part in making, but he seems to under-estimate its magnitude in looking for a solution in terms of individual ' opting out.' He assumes that the current " behavioural norms " are unexceptionable in themselves, that they do not themselves reflect a deeper ' maladjustment.' Anomie is therefore an accident of time and place, a hazard of the transition from the old mode of conformity to the new: it is part of the cost of pioneering. But the behavioural norms of an age of ' outer-direction ' are those of the " New Suburbia " of the organization man with his anxious search for a ' sense of belonging,' of the anxious status-striving of newly mobile families, of the raw feeling of futility periodically slaked in the Dreamland of the mass media. It cannot just be considered one style of life among others. The anxiety which pervades it is not just an accidental feature of the transition: it is inherent in a way of life where an intrinsically meaningless goal is made the centre of aspiration. Riesman complains in his "Individualism Reconsidered " of the absence in America today of the " nerve of failure," the courage to risk a deviation and to survive the failure that may ensue. But he does not seek the explanation in the prevailing anxiety which infects even the " adjusted " in American society. It may be just because conforming costs the average man so much of his psychic stamina that so few can attain to the stature of the autonomous. Riesman, moreover, vastly underrates the power of the mass media in maintaining the pressures that maintain conformity. Autonomy will only be a realizable goal for an elite of birth or education, not only because of the pressures to which most people are subjected, but also because these will need a viable alternative ideal which can only express their moral rejection of the current behavioural norms. Only those who have not had to fight their way out of the system can afford the freedom "to choose whether to conform or not." the flexible approach of "values in context."

Durkheim's view of Anomie

In Durkheim's view, this sense of futility is closely associated with anomie or rulelessness, and both are thus the inescapable accompaniments of individualism. Man's appetites, thought Durkheim, were intrinsically limitless. He can find no criterion within himself for what constitutes fulfilment. The limits must therefore be set by an external authority if he is not to labour forever under the yoke of insatiable desires. Society alone can play this role. But physical restraint alone will not limit desire ; the individual must accept the moral authority of society: in other words, he must accept the meaning of life that his society offers him. Durkheim therefore posits what has been described above as the predicament of the alienated man that the goods he consumes will never really satisfy him-as the human condition in general. Man can only be saved from this anomie by being integrated into a closed society. But it is clear that this conception of anomie can only apply to a small minority of people at any one time a rebel fringe of society. In fact, most people find in the status hierarchy some criterion for success and failure, and hence some shape to their ambition. Durkheim himself points out that anomie only becomes an important social phenomenon in times of economic or political crisis when the hierarchy is severely shaken, as for instance during the inflation in Germany in- the 'twenties. The more common situation is that people accept externally imposed criteria which are not really meaningful to them but which they do not dare flout. Keeping up with the Joneses ' or, in Riesman's terms, with the ' peer-group' constitutes a

Marx and the Socialist Perspective

In spite of its usefulness the concept of ' anomie' is thus still too narrow to explain the phenomena of alienation in contemporary society narrow in two senses. First, it covers too narrow a range of people ; if what I have said above is right, we cannot consider the

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Positively, the road is not so clear. The premium put on individual mobility in a capitalist society, the style of life, i.e. consumption pattern, which represents its highest goal of achievement, have not only contributed to the break-up of the primary group but have tended to create actuation where those which survive are the most stagnant and resistant tochange. The struggle for survival has often resulted in a stifling parochialism. The attempt to build new primary societies cannot be based on the existing ones alone. But it cannot start without them. If we need the sense of a common lot, intertwined with that of a common purpose, we can only find it here, even if the purpose seems now largely lost and the lot for the most part negatively defined. The most urgent job is therefore to rescue the old communities, to prevent their sinking into the amorphous mass of the surrounding conurbations, to open them out by rescuing the local theatres, art galleries and museums from financial asphyxiation, to plan the rebuilding so that the old relationships are not torn down with the condemned housing, to give their development

some of the impetus that has been given to the New Towns, to associate the communities in their own development projects. This salvage work is as important, if not more so, than the development of the New Towns. We need pilot schemes in community development as the New Towns were pilot schemes in decongestion. But community development cannot be tried in New Towns since here the community can only be the product of the development and not the other way round. We must therefore start with the old communities. If democratization can be made real in this context, it can help to providethe model for the newer urban centres. Of course, this work cannot go on in a vacuum. It requires a context of socialist policy in education, and industry. Alienation is of a piece in work and leisure. But though it is true that socialism, to gather it up in a phrase, is about Industry and Society, this does not mean that the second is a simple projection of the first. Rather the aim of socialist policy is that they enrich each other.