twelve propositions by kenneth burke on the relation between economics and psychology

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Twelve Propositions by Kenneth Burke on the Relation between Economics and Psychology Author(s): Kenneth Burke and Margaret Schlauch Source: Science & Society, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring, 1938), pp. 242-253Published by: Guilford PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40399217Accessed: 06-04-2015 00:48 UTC

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242 SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

lishing the article under discussion was to increase the number of such potential critics in English-speaking countries. I do not flatter myself that it will cause "an overpowering emotional urge to embrace the dialectic." The process took me some six years, so it was hardly love at first sight. And I hope that no student of biology will become a user of the dialectic unless he or she is persuaded that it is (as I believe and Dr. Lerner does not) an aid both to the understanding of known biological facts and to the discovery of new ones.

J. B. S. HALDANE

TWELVE PROPOSITIONS BY KENNETH BURKE ON THE RELATION BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND PSYCHOLOGY

The following propositions briefly state the approach exemplified in my recent work, Attitudes Toward History. They are offered as a reply to Margaret Schlauch's review of the work, in the last number of science & society. They are an attempt to codify my ideas on the relation between psychology and Marxism.

1. The basic concept for uniting economics and psychology ("Marx and Freud") is that of the "symbols of authority"

Symbols of authority are obviously related to economic categories, because of their connection with property rights (ownership of productive resources) , with educative, legislative and constabulary bodies, and with the guidance of a society's practices. Symbols of authority are related to psychological categories, because of their tie-up with morals, laws, social relationships, etc.; they overlap upon both political and intimate responses because they usually involve such figures as parents, doctor, nurse in the "pre-political" period of childhood, and such figures as boss or foreman or employer in commercial relationships.

2. The two basic dichotomous attitudes toxuard reigning symbols of authority are those of acceptance and rejection (with intermediate grada- tions, such as are to be found when any flat logical distinction is translated into the field of psychology) .

The attitude of acceptance is the most desirable way of "digesting" one's world. But the attitude of rejection is evoked insofar as the reigning symbols of authority represent ideals of ownership and modes of economic management inadequate for operating the means of production and distribution. By reason of such phenomena as "cultural lag," old values sur-


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vive from periods in which they were a relatively adequate structure of meanings into periods when they are relatively inadequate.

3. The need of rejecting the reigning symbols of authority is synonymous with "alienation"

"Alienation" is thus also a concept clearly having both economic and psychological relevance. An increasing number of people become alienated by material dispossession. And an increasing number who still share some material advantages from the ailing economic structure become spiritually alienated as they lose faith in the structure's "reasonableness." One may be materially or spiritually alienated, or both.

4. The purely psychological concept for treating relations to symbols of authority, possession and dispossession, material and spiritual alienation, faith or loss of faith in the "reasonableness" of a given structure's methods and purposes and values, is that of "identity"

The individual's identity is formed by reference to his membership in a group. In the feudal structure, for instance, one was identified mainly by his membership in the Catholic Church. The reigning structure of authority coordinated this "corporate identity" with his identity as member of some economic class and his identity in a family collectivity. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, such bases of identity were progressively broken, until now we are mainly offered identification by membership in a financial corporation, or identification by membership in a political corporation seeking either to cement or to destroy the business forms of identity. The business identity is retained in the "corporate state" and destroyed in the socialist state. The vagaries of transition were revealed particularly in the vague, footloose, "poetic" identities of nineteenth-century art, with its many variants of the "Esthetic Opposition."

5. In this complex world, one is never a member of merely one "corporation" The individual is composed of many "corporate identities" Some- times they are concentric, sometimes in conflict.

For instance, one may have a job in some large financial corporation, while at the same time being a member of a party opposed to its policies. Or if he is an individual, he may be identified with a general body of thought "oppositional" in quality, while at the same time making various attempts to identify himself with some specific political faction; and these two "identities" may conflict in varying degrees. An example of specious concentric identity is to be seen in the businessman who identifies himself with business and nation.



6. In highly transitional eras, requiring shifts in allegiance to the symbols of authority (the rejection of an authoritative structure still largely ac- cepted, even by its victims, who are educated in wrong meanings and values by the "priesthood'' of pulpit, schools, press, radio and popular art) the problems of identity become crucial.

Though it is men's natural tendency to make peace with their world, to "accept" it, they are forced into some measure of alienation by the inadequacy of its property structure. Men must then throw off old and deceptive modes of identification and take on new ones.

7. The processes of change of identity are most clearly revealed by analyz- ing formal works of art and applying the results of our analysis to the "informal art of living" in general.

Art works, owing to their high degree of articulateness, are like "meter readings." Here all the implicit social processes become explicit. By study- ing them, you will discern what forms "alienation" takes as a factor in human experience, and what forms likewise arise in the attempt to combat alienation (to "repossess" one's world) .

8. Identity itself is a "mystification." Hence, resenting its many labyrin- thine aspects, we tend to call even the study of it a "mystification."

The response would be analogous to the response of those who, suffering from an illness, get "relief" by quarrelling with their doctors. Unless Marx- ists are ready to deny Marx by attacking his term "alienation" itself, they must permit of research into the nature of alienation and into the nature of attempts, adequate and inadequate, to combat alienation.

9. The analysis of the "strategies" by which men respond to the factor of alienation and by which they attempt to repossess their world could not be conducted without tremendous wastage of time and energy, if a writer were required, at every point, to stop and demonstrate the specific bearing* of his analysis upon such matters as food, jobs, etc.

For one thing, the relationships, so analyzed, would often be totally unreal (particularly since many of those symbolizing alienation are not materially alienated to any extreme degree) . Further: the objective factors giving rise to a code of moral and esthetic values are, of course, economic. They are the "substructure" that supports the ideological "superstructure." But the objective materials utilized by an individual writer are largely the moral and esthetic values themselves. For instance, new methods of production gave rise to the change from feudal to bourgeois values. But Shakespeare's strategy as a dramatist was formed by relation to this conflict


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between feudal and bourgeois values. This "superstructural" material was the objective, social material he manipulated in eliciting his audience's response. Economic factors gave rise to the transition in values, but he dealt with the transition in values.

Or another example: Modern conditions of distribution by sale put a social value on the pushing, breezy, aggressive type of salesman. And since this "psychosis" is thus established as a social form, the dramatist may appeal (as is often the case in our popular motion pictures) by "idealizing" a character who is in general the "live wire" type.

In sum, economic conditions give form to the values; and these values, having arisen, form "objective material" with which the artist works in constructing symbols that appeal.

10. "Style" is an aspect of identification. Even a materially dispossessed individual may "own" privilege vicarious-

ly by adopting the "style" (or "insignia") of some privileged class. Thus did typical poets of the age of Pope vicariously own the privileges of the squirearchy, by embodying in style the ideals that the squirearchy approved of.

Consideration of such "symbolic boasting" offers an excellent instance in support of our contention that the analysis of esthetic phenomena can be extended or projected into the analysis of social and political phenomena in general. We see a petty clerk, for instance, who can "identify" himself either by "owning the style" of the workers or by "owning the style" of his boss. The boss's style often appeals the more strongly, because it symbolically promises him advancement; and in this mere symbolic promise he locates his notions of purpose, of his society's "reasonableness," etc. The boss is his "symbol of authority," related to his own notions of economic interest. Such a "style" may be totally deceptive. Such "identification" may get him no advancement whatever. But he may continue, through it, to get advancement vicariously, by merely "owning the insignia" of his boss. Such a man must change his identity if he would locate himself not by reference to his employers' "corporation," but by incorporation in a fellow- ship of employees. Our "proletarian" school of writers is, of course, at- tempting to coach a stylistic shift of this sort.

One may note another variant of "stylistic" identification when the immigrant, rich in gesture of speech, seeks to "possess" the insignia of middle-class status in the most paradoxical way imaginable: by learning deliberately to cramp the expressiveness of the body, suppressing marked gesticulation and range of voice. For the kind of citizens with whose privileges he would seek to identify himself (in keeping with the natural



human desire to "belong" by accomodating oneself to the reigning authoritative structure) are inexpressive in the language of gesture mainly because they have so little to express in any language, and have been sedentary too long. So the insignia here acquired "stylistically" are hardly more than the laborious attainment of zero. 11. Human relations should be analyzed with respect to the leads discovered by a study of drama.

Men enact rles. They change rles. They participate. They develop modes of social appeal. Even a "star" is but a function of the total cast. Politics above all is drama. Anyone who would turn from politics to some other emphasis, or vice versa, must undergo some change of identity, which is dramatic (involving "style" and "ritual") . People are neither animals nor machines (to be analyzed by the migration of metaphors from biology or mechanics) , but actors and acters. They establish identity by relation to groups (with the result that, when tested by individualistic concepts of identity, they are felt to be moved by "deceptions" or "illusions," the "irrational" - for one's identification as a member of a group is a rle, yet it is the only active mode of identification possible, as you will note by observing how all individualistic concepts of identity dissolve into the nothingness of mysticism and the absolute) . If you would avoid the anti- theses of supernaturalism and naturalism, you must develop the coordinates of socialism - which gets us to cooperation, participation, man in society, man in drama.

Both Freud and Marx were "impresarios." Marx's concept of the "class- less" stage following a maximum intensification of class conflict is precisely in line with the Aristotelian recipe for the process of dramatic "catharsis." The shock value of Freudian analysis exemplified the same process in tiny "closet dramas" of private life (the facing and burning-out of conflict) Forms like the lyric (to employ an excellent word used by Ben Belitt in a recent number of Poetry) are analyzable as "monodrama."

The value, the normative basis of reference, proper to this approach is "communication." It is "hortatory" in that it implicitly postulates communication as a good. It is "diagnostic" in that it invites us to note the psychological and material factors furthering communication (the coopera- tive act) and psychological and material factors obstructing communication (the competitive act) . The corresponding abstract ideal might be sloganized ethically (in terms of combined opposi tes) as: "Unity without Conformity." 12. The difference between the symbolic drama and the drama of living is a difference between imaginary obstacles and real obstacles. But: the


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imaginary obstacles of symbolic drama must, to have the relevance necessary for the producing of effects upon audiences, reflect the real obstacles of living drama.

Modes of cooperation (production and distribution) give form to modes of communication. The modes of communication thus refer back to the modes of cooperation. Much "symbolic action" in works of art deals with conflicts within the communicative or superstructural realm (conflicts among social values) - but these conflicts have their grounding in economic conflicts (as the clashes in Congress represent corresponding clashes among business interests) .

To an extent, also, they arise from the fact that men cannot be a com- plete fit for any historical texture (which necessarily encourages some possibilities and discourages others) . Hence, to some degree, solution of conflict must always be done purely in the symbolic realm (by "transcend- ence") if it is to be done at all. Persons of moral and imaginative depth acquire great enterprise and resourcefulness in such purely "symbolic" solu- tions of conflict (by the formation of appropriate "attitudes") . Hence, at times they try to solve symbolically kinds of conflict that can and should be solved by material means. A writer who has invested deeply in symbolic resourcefulness is threatened with a kind of "psychological unemployment" ("alienation") when his structure of meanings invites him to "solve" by symbolism alone a conflict requiring material solution.

It is of great importance to study the various strategies of "prayer" by which men seek to solve their conflicts, since such material should give us needed insight into the processes of prayer ("symbolic action," "linguistic action," "implicit commands to audience and self") in its many secular aspects, not generally considered "prayer" at all. Such insight should make precise the nature of the resistance encountered by those interested in engineering shifts in allegiance to the reigning symbols of authority.

And it should offer a ground in common between propagandizer and propagandized, whereby the maximum amount of readjustment could be accomplished through the "parliamentary" (discourse, discussion) . That is: it should avoid the coaching of unnecessary factional dispute by con- sidering modes of response applicable to all men and it could confine differences solely to those areas where differences are necessary. Such pro- cedure is especially to be desired in the propagandist, since humaneness is the soundest implement of persuasion. For it contributes towards the general humanization of policies, even should bad policies prevail.

To take up some of Miss Schlauches objections specifically: She contends that I use the concepts of "acceptance" and "rejection"



without reference to an object. In the "Twelve Propositions" I make the object clear. In addition I refer the reader to the book itself, where the passages in 1, p. 2, 3 and 27 show that the same explicit reference was there. I might make the point still clearer by asking whether the reader would expect any important difference of emphasis between a man advocating communism in a communist society and a man advocating communism in an anti-communist society. Psychologists speak of "negativism" in children, without feeling obliged at every point to say what they are negating. They are usually negating these "symbols of authority" that are their parents.

Miss Schlauch feels that I by implication deny the reality of the proletariat and its exploitation by suggesting that Marx make a "Paschal lamb" of himself and the proletariat. She writes: "The proletariat was, and was being exploited, whether or not Marx suffered from a sense of guilt and made a Paschal lamb of himself and the proletariat." I fully agree with her that "the proletariat was and was being exploited." I was simply dis- cussing how such a fact takes shape when filtered through a complex human consciousness. . . .

Miss Schlauch is more justified in her reservations about my remarks on the nature of "linguistic" action on the purely phonetic level. For I admit that my remarks on this subject were tentative and incompletely formed at the time. In fact, I considered omitting this section on "cues" entirely, because I recognized its weakness; but feeling that there was some element of truth here somewhere, though phrased in a slovenly fashion, I finally decided to include the paragraphs for purely "suggestive" purposes. I was careful to point out, however (11, p. 92) , that such an analysis of language would not apply to the main bulk of our vocabulary. Perhaps I might make my point most readily clear by posing this question: When a poet alliterates, is any alliterated sound of the same value as any other; i.e., would a poet be doing the same "symbolic act" if he stressed the alliteration of "m" as if he alliterated "r," "s," "v" or "p"? It is my notion that each letter would symbolize a different attitude. . . .

In her review Miss Schlauch also likens such "edifying speculations" to "the methods of Albertus Magnus in operating with Ave and Eva*' If a man of devout nature, using Latin spontaneously, finds some significance (to his "private organization") in the fact that a "key" word ("hail") is also a "key" word ("Eve") when reversed, I myself should try to find out just what is going on here. I shouldn't be enlightened too soon. Some minds of mystical caste (or of "Through the Looking Glass" sorts) do seem to see backwards as well as forwards. . . . Cummings, in Him, discovered that "God" is "dog spelled backwards." And since we at least know already


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that a mature mind is in some way bound up with a linguistic texture, I myself should tend to examine some of these extreme punnings in reverse, for something they might reveal about mental organization. Might we not guard against drawing conclusions before all the returns are in?

Finally, to instance my -"hostility" to change, Miss Schlauch cites, without giving page reference, my statement: "If we are ever to recover a world of nouns, going from a philosophy of processes to a philosophy of categories. ..." She comments: "Readers of science & society are not apt to feel this nostalgia for a medieval world of stable nouns. . . . They have pre- sumably made themselves at home in a world of verbs and change."

Looking up the passage (1, p. 88) , we find (the italics being now added to emphasize my present point) : "If we are ever to recover a world of nouns, going from a philosophy of processes to a philosophy of categories (perhaps to something like process-categories) . . . .

" The addition is of great importance. In fact, had not Miss Schlauch curtailed this brief cita- tion where she did, she could not have made her point at all. I question whether readers of science & society are willing to admit that the history of human speculation stops with the "process-thinking" of John Dewey's instrumentalism, fruitful as his philosophy unquestionably is. If an emphasis upon nouns (categories) was followed by an antithetical emphasis upon verbs (processes) , why should not "dialectic" reasoning lead us to look for a synthesis of the two, something like categories of processes?

I submit that, if such expectations are permissible, some such basic notion as "attitudes," filled out with some such verbal nouns as "acceptance" and "rejection," will be the kind of inquiry implicit in an attempt to consider "process-categories." Attitudes are "strategies." As such, they maintain something permanent through flux, while at the same time they must adapt themselves to the specific changes of material provided by flux.

I grant that my own attempt to categorize strategies (broadly differen- tiating between the euphemistic or heroicizing and the debunking sorts, and seeking by analysis of artistic symbols and human relations to locate the different proportions of the ingredients in the different "recipes" of attitude) - I grant that such speculations must be somewhat haphazard at this stage. But I do hold out for "the principle of the thing." For I do not see how writers can lay claim to a belief in Hegel-Marx coordinates while feeling gratified that they have "made themselves at home" in the pure process- thinking of pragmatism. The steps, to my notion, should be:

(1) Categories (thesis) (2) Processes (antithesis) (3) Categories of Processes (synthesis) .

KENNETH BURKE



A REPLY TO KENNETH BURKE In view of Mr. Burke's ambitious attempt to coordinate historical,

psychological, literary and linguistic phenomena in extremely general patterns of interpretation, it may have appeared that a review which treats of the linguistic aspects at the expense of others must give a less than fair impression of the author's intent. It is true that the first volume, which presents the substance of Mr. Burke's exposition, contains comparatively little pure linguistic speculation; and that the second, which concerns itself with linguistics, might be waived without affecting the propositions ad- vanced in the first. The method is not exclusively a "strategy" of language. Yet the linguistic can not be separated from the psychological. There is a wide field for conjecture of this sort in such suggestions as the one cor- relating Christ: Chrysler. The word-pair is quoted (1, p. 118 n.) as in- dicating why advertisement-writing for an auto firm should be elevated into the sphere of religious-mystical phraseology. The syllabic echo leads to recognition of a symbol. This is quite different, of course, from the genuine medieval doctrine of an essential connection between the nature of a thing and its appellation, which led to the ingenious and fantastic theories of an Isidore of Seville. Burke, it is evident, is pointing out rather a type of psychological association with creative ideational consequences springing from the sound-echo in the two words; not an inner "rightness" of nomina- tion. But it should be pointed out more sharply, perhaps, that many and strong reasons exist besides the partial rhyme or its symbolic implications, for making a salesman conceive his copy-writing for an automobile con- cern in terms of religion, "Unseen Value" and the like. When Lowes tried to trace the history in Coleridge's mind of the poetic figures em- ployed by him, he had before him as objective guide and evidence, the notebooks used by the poet at that very time; yet even so it would be rash to say that Lowes succeeded always in isolating the decisive moment impelling each specific metaphorical choice. The range of possibilities re- mains bafflingly great even with the notebooks before us. We grant that complicated psychological factors which determine the choice of existent words by a verbal craftsman will also shape the ideological structure to be erected from them - always in dialectic relation, no matter how mediate, to the economic environment - as in the case of our salesman writing Chrysler advertising copy. But it is not clear what light the reversal dog: God, discovered by Cummings, throws on the words, the things or Cum- mings; at least not without an exposition rivalling The Road to Xanadu in length.

When Mr. Burke makes a statement to the effect that "the 'essence' of 'm' is acceptance," he is on still less certain ground, as he himself admits.


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It must be remembered that the development of linguistic science was retarded for centuries by a fixation upon a similarity between words, quite irrelevant to their structure and semantic development. One who is familiar with the history of the science becomes suspicious, perhaps to an excessive degree, of similar verbal analogies in terms of modern psychology.1 Onomatopoetic and nursery words, the most promising subjects for such analysis, form a small part of the vocabularies of even the most primitive peoples, and certainly a very small part of our own; this Mr. Burke quite frankly admits.

In connection with Mr. Burke's protest against my criticism of his sup- posed lack of reference for such concepts as "acceptance" and "rejection" and others, I am quite willing to admit that it would be wearisome and unnecessary to repeat differentia constantly when once a general concept has clearly emerged. But the problem is to be aware of the occasions when limiting reference essentially changes the situation. I can imagine (though I am no psychologist) that a certain amount of talk of "negativism" in children could be clarified by insistent reference to the class environment in which the negation occurs. If we are talking of time, direction may be an irrelevant factor; but again, it may not, if the motion involves crossing the Pacific Ocean. Here the difference between going East and going West means a day's difference in time.

There is a certain difficulty inherent in the transfer of current verbal- isms into new semantic spheres. It is, to be sure, the privilege of scientists and philosophers to create a special vocabularly for a new system or new field of inquiry. Natural scientists have the advantage of a comparatively colorless, esoteric language made expressly out of the roots of dead languages. The absence of emotional periphery about the word "erg" insures it from the kind of ambiguity which at times hampers Mr. Burke's discussions, even for the most sympathetic reader. One may choose to speak of legislation as "secularized prayer," and then by a kind of shorthand as "prayer"; this yields an arresting figurative emphasis on the common appeti- tive elements in praying and law-making; but the important difference between the two for forward social movement must also be borne in mind when the transfer of current terminology is made. The figurative vocabulary may constitute a hindrance to rapid and accurate thought. So with a phrase like "Hebraic-Christian patterns of redemption and Marx's secularized equivalents" (1, p. 118). In such locutions the danger appears to me to lie in insufficient similitude: in the first dazzling flash, we seem to have

1For an interesting account of the static doctrine of linguistic analogies among the Greeks, see the introduction by I. Trotskii to O. M. Freidenberg's Antichnye Teorii Iazyka 1 Stilia (Moscow, 1936) .



moved nearer to a lasting illumination of relations; but too much omission has been necessary in order to make possible the superposition of the two concepts. An advantage arises from the expansion of certain language symbols, such as "prayer," so that they transcend the usual demarcations separating philosophy (let us say) from psychology or economics or literary criticism; but the semantic content may become too cumbersome for intel- lectual efficiency without sufficient compensatory advantages. An example of this, it seems to me, is to be found in the exposition of "neo-Malthusian principle" and "bureaucratization" (i, p. 178 f.) :

The rise of Protestantism, coupled with technnological advance and the bourgeois system of ownership, made an exceptional amount of individual enterprise both possible and necessary. The possibilities were necessarily utilized, until in time the whole social order became organized about the efficient utilization of these possibilities. This efficiency, as backed by the material order, equals "bureaucratization." And as such bureaucratization matured, the corresponding set of habits proliferated toward its "Malthusian limits." At this point, we find "class privilege" functioning as "cultural lag," since there is a group profiting by precisely the extreme bureaucratization that causes suffering to another group, and the profiting class utilizes its hold on the bureaucratic resources to maintain the disturbing set of habits to the breaking point.

The function of the neo-Malthusian principle, as backed by the "bureaucratization of the imaginative," may be illustrated by a simple ratio comparing the mediaeval church with modern art: church (bureaucratization) is to religion (imagination) as academy is to art.

In pursuing this brief exposition it becomes difficult to detect just how the abstract virtue, "efficiency," by support from a material order (here it is important to know what order!) suddenly equals "bureaucratization," which in turn causes very concrete suffering up to the "breaking point" of a system. Somewhere in the concatenation of brilliant Burkean analogies - words used figuratively in quotation marks - a sinister devil has crept in: the humdrum devil of economic exploitation, which Mr. Burke himself recognizes, though he seldom refers to him with the simple directness of a medieval clerk dealing with Christian devils. Perhaps it is the slurring of the diabolical force in his dialectic expositions which makes it appear at times that tendencies such as Burke's "bureaucratization" or "proliferation" of the splintering into sects are automotive. A "neo-Malthusian" excess of splintering into sects may indeed develop the power to go too far in going far enough; it may, as Mr. Burke says, try "to reverse the process of 'splintering' " and thus yield the united front; but we must remember as Marxians that it was people who made the united front, not merely an "it" or dis- embodied historical tendency; and they did so not merely as pawns of the force but as conscious subjects participating in a movement whose course they were able to control in part by understanding it. We need to


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be reminded of these corporeal interventions more often, it seems to me, while we are invited to trace the course of Mr. Burke's "curves" and "tendencies"; while at the same time we may freely admit the great value of his detection of such generally valid patterns as really transcend the barriers of formally divided disciplines.

MARGARET SCHLAUCH

COMMENTS ON BURKE'S PROPOSITIONS

Margaret Schlauches comments on Mr. Burke's book seem to me, on the whole, quite acceptable, but since she has not explicitly adverted to Mr. Burke's twelve propositions, I should like to make a few brief remarks, mostly methodological ones, in regard to these compact, very ingenious formulations. With respect to the first, it does not appear to follow from the fact that the concept, "symbols of authority," plays an important part in both economics and psychology, that it is the basic concept for uniting these sciences; because of course, there are other concepts, such as imitation, competitiveness, suggestion, wants, which also play a considerable rle, and especially in combination. Moreover, I do not see how it could be proved that this particular concept is the basic concept or that there is one basic concept at all or how, even if one could prove such a thing, it would aid these sciences in solving the specific problems which obstruct their unifica- tion. Mr. Burke evidently feels that the uncomfortable gap between the two diverse sciences can be closed by the recognition of an important concept which is homogeneous with both, i.e., symbols of authority; but to me this seems very doubtful. One could reduce psychology and economics to behavior, to attitudes, to space-time positions, to fields of force; but the scientific value of such reductions would depend, not on the circumstance that such things as behavior or attitudes are omnipresent in both sciences, but on the extended prediction, coherence and fertility facilitated in actual laboratory or research work.

Mr. Burke's second proposition is, of course, unobjectionable; but the third raises doubts of a terminological order, for the word "alienation" conveys, through its psychopathological associations, an unmistakable dis- paragement. Thus the alienation of workers from adequate food and housing is apt to be put on a level with pathological inadequacy or autistic withdrawal. At any rate, the tendency of the language of psychopathology to identify failure of adaptation to a given status in capitalist society with


Article Contentsp. 242p. 243p. 244p. 245p. 246p. 247p. 248p. 249p. 250p. 251p. 252p. 253

Issue Table of ContentsScience &Society, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring, 1938) pp. 147-286Front MatterThe Fascist Threat to Democracy [pp. 147-165]Babeuf and Babouvism, II [pp. 166-194]The End of Plant Expansion in American Manufacturing Industries [pp. 195-217]Correction: The Frustration of Technology [pp. 217-217]Unpublished Letters of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Americans [pp. 218-231]CommunicationsIs Professor Haldane's Account of Evolution Dialectical? [pp. 232-242]Twelve Propositions by Kenneth Burke on the Relation between Economics and Psychology [pp. 242-253]Comments on Burke's Propositions [pp. 253-256]In Defense of Emerson [pp. 257-259]A Note from Kurt Lewin [pp. 259-259]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 260-262]Review: untitled [pp. 262-265]Review: untitled [pp. 265-270]Review: untitled [pp. 270-272]Review: untitled [pp. 273-276]Review: untitled [pp. 276-278]Review: untitled [pp. 278-280]Review: untitled [pp. 280-282]Review: untitled [pp. 282-286]

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