Abstract:

In 1961, Daniel Bell interviewed Paul F. Lazarsfeld about topics ranging from Lazarsfeld’s childhood friendship with Friedrich Adler to his fraught relationship with C. Wright Mills. Lazarsfeld, in the course of defending himself against Mills’ charge that he embodied the “abstract empiricism” characteristic of contemporary American sociology, made a striking claim about the orientation and aims of the postwar social sciences:

Bell: [Mills’ critique was] [t]hat you should be asking questions about the nature and the degree of alienation in American society, and evolving methods for measuring the degree of alienation.

Lazarsfeld: Well it so happens that I have developed methods, what is probably the fraction that I could… Look I don’t want to answer that. In addition[,] there are probably at least a dozen studies on alienation—my guess is, in every other issue of the [American Sociological] Review there is a new alienation scale.

Lazarsfeld’s estimate was quite accurate: between 1950 and 1960, a mere 66 articles on alienation appeared in the Review; between 1960 and 1970, the number rose above 275. Interest in alienation was not restricted to the sociologists. Journals were replete with studies conducted by researchers in fields ranging from political psychology to human relations. Through his refutation of Mills, this is to say, Lazarsfeld inadvertently gestured at a dynamic genre of interdisciplinary social-scientific research: empirical studies of alienation.

This genre—the existence of which Lazarsfeld took for granted—has been largely forgotten. According to the widespread and longstanding understanding, alienation was an eminently theoretical concept—an idea that originated in German philosophy, grew in Western Marxist social theory, and spread through existentialist literature. Although this characterization of alienation is most apparent in histories of European ideas, it originated in the disciplinary memory of the postwar social sciences. Disciplinary luminaries—including Lazarsfeld and Theodor W. Adorno—insisted on the existence of an insuperable gulf between empirical social science and critical social theory. But recovering empirical studies of alienation would challenge this conceptual distinction and complicate the histories it subtends.

This paper initiates this path of recovery and revision. Specifically, it focuses on Alienation and Freedom (1964)—Robert Blauner’s sociological study of industrial laborer and laborers in the United States in the wake of the Second World War. Alienation and Freedom originated as Blauner’s doctoral dissertation at the University of California-Berkeley; it eventually became the book that “made [his] career” as a researcher. Blauner drew on an array of conventional and unorthodox material—including the writings of the young Marx and his own experience as an industrial laborer—to complete the project. Qualitative evidence and quantitative analysis led him to the conclusion that the fragmentation of the labor-process inherent to industrial production engendered four forms of alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, and fragmentation. But, Blauner argued, the full implementation of automation could restore four corresponding modes of freedom: control, purposiveness, belonging, and selfhood. The paper concentrates on Blauner’s multifaceted concept of alienation, examining its origins, contents, and implications.