me. This general assessment of the work of Marx and Freud in respect of the human condition in the modern period can be substantiated with reference to key writings of theirs.
The personality that the modern world has created is of interest to both Marx and Freud. Marx is the acknowledged watershed theorist of modern society, and he locates its personality very much in economic terms. Although the implications of Marxism were great for political and economic (i.e., elite) history, the importance to Marx to social and cultural (not to say popular) history seems almost more relevant for the current period. For it was to the masses of society as well as to the bosses that are often the subject matter of history that Marx principally (and passionately) addressed his commentary. In that sense, the personality that the modern world has created from Marx's perspective is a highly structured one, which relies on and perpetuates social control. That structured personality is caused by the very existence of private property, and it is also the chief antagonist of the prevailing social system (capitalism) in his view. The analysis is in highly charged terms of economic theory: labor, capital, alienation, worker, bourgeois. The overriding point, however, is that social conflicts or alienation that are created when labor serves the interest of private property are the core of all social problems experienced by the individual human organism, or by the collective comprising individuals who are essentially without power in society. "Division of labour," he writes, "implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another." The contradiction is in the form of a dialectical confrontation of one feature of experience with its antithesis. The confrontation of an unbearable fact of basic human experience, one's own interest in fundamental competiti...