Glossary

Alienation, in Marx's sense, is the process by which capitalist society estranges human beings -- from the natural world, from each other, from the products and process of their own work, and ultimately from their own sense of self, as market relationships replace earlier collective and craft-based ways of life. The Enlightenment refers to the eighteenth-century European shift that rejected religious authority as the final word on truth, and put reason -- exercised by the human being as a rational, knowing subject -- in its place. A social fact, in Durkheim's sense, is any pattern of collective belief or behaviour that is not the creation of any one individual, that exists independently of particular persons, and that presses on and shapes how individuals actually behave -- law, education and religion are all examples. A mode of production is a lasting system of material production, defined jointly by its productive forces (such as technology and the organisation of labour) and its relations of production (such as slavery, serfdom or wage labour); primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism are all examples of distinct modes of production. Finally, in Weber's account of bureaucracy, an office is a public position of formal, impersonal au …