From Alienation to Self-Realization: Pathologies of Late Modernity, Work, and the Successful Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The “promise of modernity”—the capacity of individuals to lead successful lives comes under severe strain in late modernity. Adopting a formal “appropriative” model of alienated labour which is responsive to individuals’ own conceptions of the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs, I identify two principal obstacles to the self-realization of late-modern subjects: (i) social pathologies, which, I argue, contemporary political philosophy is unable to adequately diagnose and (ii) the tyranny of work, which remains peripheral to modern political theory. Both of these factors impede the ability of subjects to establish successful relationships to others, to themselves, and to the world and hence their capacity to lead successful lives. After exploring these in some detail, I put forward four proposals aimed at recapturing the broken promise of modernity beyond the realm of necessity. After laying out the theoretical foundations of the alienation critique (Chapter 1), the dissertation is divided into chapters that follow its novel application across the four tasks of ethical critique: (i) symptomatology and (ii) aetiology (Chapter 2), (iii) diagnosis (Chapter 3), and (iv) prognosis/therapy (Chapters 4 and 5). Chapter 1 makes the case for the appropriative model of alienated labour as the most promising candidate for the alienation critique and the one best suited to overcome the difficulties that plague traditional accounts of alienation. Part II is concerned with the critical-diagnostic dimension of the alienation critique. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the “malaises” of late modernity and discusses the aetiology of these symptoms. Chapter 3 diagnoses three social pathologies missed by current theories of justice: pathologies of individual freedom, pathologies of de-synchronization, and pathologies of organized self-realization. Part III is concerned with the prescriptive dimensions of the alienation critique. Chapter 4 argues that the appropriative model issues in a call for the “refusal of work” which attempts to chart a course beyond the work-based society and its productivist values. Chapter 5 makes the case for four proposals that aim to provide late-modern subjects with a measure of security and stability, decommodify labour, and pave the way to the realm of freedom beyond the tyranny of work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".