It is claimed that Arnold S. Kaufman's article ?On Alienation? (Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1965, pp. 141?65) shows no understanding of the concept of alienation, and the authors undertake to contrast the concept as Hegel and Marx develop it and Fromm and Mills re?state it, with Kaufman's interpretations of Marx, Fromm and Mills. They contrast the Marxist self?realization framework with Kaufman's want?satisfaction framework, and argue that in Marx alienation is necessarily concerned solely with labor, is unavoidable because a necessary (...) stage of self?development, and has inseparable sociological and moral aspects. They claim that Kaufman's article shows no understanding of any of these points. (shrink)

Ebonics—Italian Style Usually, one has to read a book in order to evaluate it. Harney's book on “Italian” immigrants has the dubious distinction of capturing much of what is wrong with it on its cover. The very title prefigures its basic problem. Eh, Paesan! presumably refers to a particular greeting these immigrants employ in addressing each other. But there is no standard term “paesan.” The proper Italian word is “paesano,” which in its many dialectal renditions becomes “paisah,” “paisan” or variations (...) thereof. The same goes for the antecedent “Eh!” which in most Southern Italian dialects is actually “uí,” “ué,” “eeeeh,”…. (shrink)

The subtitle of Jacoby's book, “Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy,” aptly captures the way the present American political situation is usually perceived. Unlike conventional wisdom that celebrates this state of affairs as the achievement of genuine consensus, Jacoby bemoans it as an indication of general confusion: the result of the exhaustion of radical alternatives and a collapse of those utopian visions that generate political projects. The evidence seems compelling. Any cursory survey of the kind of issues being (...) articulated by the various presidential candidates positioning themselves for the November 2000 elections supports this diagnosis. In a country…. (shrink)

It has been almost half a century since Horkheimer and Adorno formulated their analysis of mass culture in the “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. This special issue on “Debates in Contemporary Culture” is an attempt to evaluate the relevance of this legacy in the mid-eighties. It has become part of the left conventional wisdom that the critical theory analysis of late capitalism, focusing on concepts such as the “totally administered world” (Adorno) or “one-dimensional society” (...) (Marcuse), was overly resigned and it remained unable to identify inchoate oppositional tendencies within the ‘iron cage’ of capitalist totalization. (shrink)