ABSTRACT
The writings of Louis Zurcher provide the opportunity for a critique of Western social psychology. He locates himself within the framework of contemporary work in the field and aligns his model with the writings of the more popular and engaging theorists in the field. He has committed himself to the notion of a mutable self as a solution to the problem of alienation, while radical social psychology, oriented to the writings of Karl Marx, offers a strategy of social revolution as the appropriate approach to the question of alienation. Depth psychology, behavioral modification, electronic monitoring, enlarged police forces, and cash incentives come to supplement the administrative order as the mediator of behavior in mass society. In capitalist society, as in other class-based, elitist societies, the means to produce self are limited by the means of material production as well as by the modes of distribution.
