PREFACE TO THE NEW and thus of any reality at all. History and Class Consciousness follows identical with it; here the two words were used synonymously. Hegel in that it too equates alienation with objectification This critique of the basic concepts cannot hope to be compre- [Vergegenstandlichul se the term employed by Marx hensive. But even in an account as brief as this mention must in the Economic-Philosophical crits). This fundamental and be made of my rejection of the view that knowledge is reflection. crude error has certainly contributed greatly to the success This had two sources. The first was my deep abhorrence of the enjoyed by History and Class Consciousness. The unmasking of mechanistic fatalism which was the normal concomitant alienation by philosophy was in the air, as we have remarked, reflection theory in mechanistic materialism. Against this my Ind it soon became a central problem in the type of cultural messianic uto ism, the predominance of praxis in my thought criticism that undertook to scrutinise the condition of man in rebelled in passionate protest-a protest that, once again, was contemporary capitalism. In the philosophical, cultural criticism not wholly misguided. In the second place I recognised the way of the bourgeoisie(and we need look no further than Heidegger) in which praxis had its origins and its roots in work. The most it was natural to sublimate a critique of society into a purely primitive kind of work, such as the quarrying of stones by primeval philosophical problem, i.e. to convert an essentially social aliena man, implies a correct reflection of the reality he is concerned tion into an etermal'condition humaine, to use a term not coined with, For no purposive activity can be carried out in the absence until somewhat later. It is evident that History and Class Conscious- of an image, however crude, of the practical reality involved. ness met such attitudes half-way, even though its intentions had Practice can only be a fulfilment and a criterion of theory when it been different and indeed opposed to them. For when I identified is based on what is held to be a correct reflection of reality. It alienation with objectification I meant this as a societal category would be unrewarding at this point to detail the arguments that -socialism would after all abolish alienation--but its irredu justify rejecting the analogy with photography which is so preva- cible presence in class society and above all its basis in philosophy lent: in the current debate on reflection theories brought it into the vicinity of the condition humaine It is, I believe, no contradiction that I should have spoken This follows from the frequently stressed false identification here so exclusively of the negative aspects of History and Class of opposed fundamental categories. For objectification is indeed Consciousness while asserting that nevertheless the book was not a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated from human life in without importance in its day. The very fact that all the errors society. If we bear in mind that every externalisation of an listed here have their source not so much in the idiosyncracies object in practice(and hence, too, in work) is an objectification, of the author as in the prevalent, if often mistaken, tendencies that every human expression including speech objectifies human of the age gives the book a certain claim to be regarded as repre- thoughts and feelings, then it is clear that we are dealing with a ntative. A momentous, world-historical change was stru to find a theoretical expression. Even if a theory was unable to do is the case, objectification is a neutral phenomenon; the true is as ustice to the objective nature of the great crisis, it might yet much an objectification as the false, liberation as much as en- formulate a typical view and thus achieve a certain historical slavement. Only when the objectified forms in society acquire validity. This was the case, as I believe today, with History and functions that bring the essence of man into conflict with his Class Consciousness xistence, only when man' s nature is subjugated, deformed and However, it is by no means my intention to pretend that all crippled can we speak of an objective societal condition of aliena- the ideas contained in the book are mistaken without exception. tion and, as an inexorable consequence, of all the subjective The introductory comments in the first essay, for example, give marks of an internal alienation. This duality was not acknow- a definition of orthodoxy in Marxism which I now think not only ledged in History and Class Consciousness. And this is why it is so objectively correct but also capable of exerting a considerable wide of the mark in its basic view of the history of philosophy. (We note in passing that the phenomenon of reification is closely sance. I refer to this passage: "Let us assume that recent research related to that of alienation but is neither socially nor conceptually had proved once and for all that every one of Marx's individual