“Alienation Arguments”

Kirun Sankaran

Abstract: “It's often argued that capitalism is alienating, because markets' reliance on extrinsic incentives, instrumental valuation, and commodity exchange make our social and political order confront us as something hostile or out of step with important, reflectively-endorsed ethical values. I argue that these arguments overgeneralize. The alienating features of markets allow them to overcome the information costs and free-rider problems that undermine large-scale cooperation. This is also true of bureaucracy, which is both historically and theoretically the most common alternative to market organization. In both cases, scalability explains alienation. Often, alienation theorists turn to democracy as a paradigmatically non-alienating governance mechanism. However, the features that make democracy non-alienating also leave it vulnerable to information costs and free-rider problems. Alienation theorists thus face a challenge. They must describe a non-alienated social relation that can overcome the problems that undermine large-scale cooperation. The prospects seem dim. Some amount of alienation may just be an inevitable drawback of our political arrangements.”

Keywords: Alienation, Capitalism, Markets, Bureaucracy, Democracy, Socialism