The term
alienation has been used over the ages with varied and sometimes contradictory meanings. In ancient history it could mean a
metaphysical sense of achieving a higher state of
contemplation,
ecstasy or union—becoming alienated from a limited existence in the world, in a positive sense. Examples of this usage have been traced to
neoplatonic philosophers such as
Plotinus (in the Greek
alloiosis). There have also long been religious concepts of being separated or cut off from God and the faithful, alienated in a negative sense. The
New Testament mentions the term
apallotrioomai in Greek—"being alienated from". Ideas of estrangement from a
Golden Age, or due to a
fall of man, or approximate equivalents in differing
cultures or
religions, have also been described as concepts of alienation. A double positive and negative sense of alienation is broadly shown in the spiritual beliefs referred to as
Gnosticism. Alienation also had a particular
legal-
political meaning since as early as
Ancient Roman times, where to
alienate property (
alienato) is to transfer
ownership of it to someone else. The term alienation itself comes from the
Latin alienus which meant 'of another place or person', which in turn came from
alius, meaning "other" or "another". Another usage of the term in Ancient Greco-Roman times was by
physicians referring to disturbed, difficult or abnormal states of mind, generally attributed to imbalanced
physiology. In Latin
alienatio mentis (mental alienation), this usage has been dated to
Asclepiades. Once translations of such works had resurfaced in the West in the 17th century, physicians again began using the term, which is typically attributed to
Felix Platter. In
medieval times, a relationship between alienation and
social order has been described, mediated in part by
mysticism and
monasticism. The
Crusades and
witch-hunts have been described as forms of mass alienation.
17th century In the 17th century,
Hugo Grotius put forward the concept that everyone has '
sovereign authority' over themselves but that they could alienate that natural right to the common good, an early
social contract theory. In the 18th century,
Hutcheson introduced a distinction between
alienable and unalienable rights in the legal sense of the term.
Rousseau published influential works on the same theme, and is also seen as having popularized a more psychological-social concept relating to alienation from a
state of nature due to the expansion of
civil society or the
nation state. In the same century a law of
alienation of affection was introduced for men to seek compensation from other men accused of taking away 'their' woman. In the history of literature, the
German Romantics appear to be the first group of writers and poets in whose work the concept of alienation is regularly found. Around the start of the 19th century,
Hegel popularized a Christian (
Lutheran) and
Idealist philosophy of alienation. He used German terms in partially different senses, referring to a psychological state and an objective process, and in general posited that the
self was a historical and social creation, which becomes alienated from itself via a perceived
objective world, but can become de-alienated again when that world is seen as just another aspect of the self-consciousness, which may be achieved by self-sacrifice to the common good. Around the same time,
Pinel was popularizing a new understanding of mental alienation, particularly through his 'medical-philosophical treatise'. He argued that people could be disturbed (alienated) by emotional states and social conditions, without necessarily having lost (become alienated from) their reason, as had generally been assumed. Hegel praised Pinel for his '
moral treatment' approach, and developed related theories. Nevertheless, as Foucault would later write, "... in an obscure, shared origin, the 'alienation' of physicians and the 'alienation' of philosophers started to take shape—two configurations in which man in any case corrupts his truth, but between which, after Hegel, the nineteenth century stopped seeing any trace of resemblance."
Marx Marx was initially in the Young Hegelian camp and, like Feuerbach, rejected the spiritual basis, and adapted Hegel's
dialectic model to a theory of
(historical) materialism.
Marx's theory of alienation is articulated most clearly in the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and
The German Ideology (1846). The
'young' Marx wrote more often and directly of alienation than the 'mature' Marx, which some regard as an ideological break while others maintain that the concept remained central.
Structuralists generally hold that there was a transition from a philosophical-
anthropological (
Marxist humanism) concept (e.g. internal alienation from the self) to a
structural-historical interpretation (e.g. external alienation by appropriation of labor), accompanied by a change in terminology from alienation to
exploitation to
commodity fetishism and
reification. Marx's concepts of alienation have been classed into four types by
Kostas Axelos: economic and social alienation, political alienation, human alienation, and ideological alienation. In the concept's most prominent use, it refers to the
economic and social alienation aspect in which workers are disconnected from what they produce and why they produce. Marx believed that alienation is a systematic result of
capitalism. Essentially, there is an "exploitation of men by men" where the division of labor creates an economic hierarchy. His theory of alienation was based upon his observation that in emerging
industrial production under capitalism, workers inevitably lose control of their lives and selves by not having any control of their work. Workers never become autonomous, self-realized human beings in any significant sense, except in the way the bourgeoisie wants the worker to be realized. His theory relies on Feuerbach's
The Essence of Christianity (1841), which argues that the idea of God has alienated the characteristics of the
human being.
Stirner would take the analysis further in
The Ego and Its Own (1844), declaring that even 'humanity' is an alienating ideal for the individual, to which Marx and Engels responded in
The German Ideology (1845). Alienation in capitalist societies occurs because in
work each contributes to the common wealth but they can only express this fundamentally social aspect of individuality through a production system that is not publicly social but privately owned, for which each individual functions as an instrument, not as a social being. Kostas Axelos summarizes that for Marx, in capitalism "work renders man an alien to himself and to his own products." "The malaise of this alienation from the self means that the worker does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy....The worker only feels himself outside his work, and in his work he feels outside himself....Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is avoided like the plague.". Marx also wrote, in a curtailed manner, that capitalist owners also experience alienation, through benefiting from the economic machine by endlessly competing, exploiting others and maintaining mass alienation in society.
Political alienation refers specifically to the idea that "politics is the form that organizes the productive forces of the economy" in a way that is alienating because it "distorts the logic of economic development". Through
human alienation, individuals become estranged to themselves in the quest to stay alive, where "they lose their true existence in the struggle for subsistence". Marx focuses on two aspects of human nature which he calls "historical conditions." The first aspect refers to the necessity of food, clothes, shelter, and more. Secondly, Marx believes that after satisfying these basic needs people have the tendency to develop more "needs" or desires that they will work towards satisfying, hence, humans become stuck in a cycle of never ending wants which makes them strangers to each other. When referring to
ideological alienation, Axelos proposes that Marx believes that all religions divert people away from "their true happiness" and instead turn them towards "illusory happiness". There is a commonly noted problem of translation in grappling with ideas of alienation derived from German-language philosophical texts: the word
alienation, and similar words such as
estrangement, are often used interchangeably to translate two distinct German words,
Entfremdung and
Entäußerung. The former means specifically interpersonal estrangement, while the latter can have a broader and more active meaning that might refer also to externalization, relinquishment, or sale (alienation) of property. In general, and contrary to his predecessors, Marx may have used the terms interchangeably, though he also wrote "
Entfremdung... constitutes the real interest of this
Entäußerung."
Late 1800s to 1900s Many sociologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were concerned about alienating effects of modernization. German sociologists
Georg Simmel and
Ferdinand Tönnies wrote critical works on
individualization and
urbanization. Simmel's
The Philosophy of Money describes how relationships become more and more mediated by money. Tönnies'
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (
Community and Society) is about the loss of primary relationships such as
familial bonds in favour of
goal-oriented, secondary
relationships. This idea of alienation can be observed in some other contexts, although the term may not be as frequently used. In the context of an individual's relationships within society, alienation can mean the unresponsiveness of society as a whole to the individuality of each member of the society. When collective decisions are made, it is usually impossible for the unique needs of each person to be taken into account. The American sociologist
C. Wright Mills conducted a major study of alienation in modern society with
White Collar in 1951, describing how modern consumption-capitalism has shaped a society where you have to sell your personality in addition to your work. Melvin Seeman was part of a surge in alienation research during the mid-20th century when he published his paper, "On the Meaning of Alienation", in 1959. Seeman used the insights of Marx, Emile Durkheim and others to construct what is often considered a model to recognize the five prominent features of alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement. Seeman later added a sixth element (cultural estrangement), although this element does not feature prominently in later discussions of his work. In a broader
philosophical context, especially in
existentialism and
phenomenology, alienation describes the inadequacy of the human
being (or the
mind) in relation to the world. The human mind (as the
subject who perceives) sees the world as an object of perception, and is distanced from the world, rather than living within it. This line of thought is generally traced to the works of
Søren Kierkegaard in the 19th century, who, from a Christian viewpoint, saw alienation as separation from God, and also examined the
emotions and
feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. Many
20th-century philosophers (both theistic and atheistic) and theologians were influenced by
Kierkegaard's notions of angst, despair and the importance of the individual.
Martin Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (angst) and mortality drew from Kierkegaard; he is indebted to the way Kierkegaard lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence and the importance of passionately affirming one's being-in-the-world.
Jean-Paul Sartre described the "thing-in-itself" which is infinite and overflowing, and claimed that any attempt to describe or understand the thing-in-itself is "reflective consciousness". Since there is no way for the reflective consciousness to subsume the pre-reflective, Sartre argued that all reflection is fated to a form of anxiety (i.e. the
human condition). As well, Sartre argued that when a person tries to gain knowledge of the "Other" (meaning beings or objects that are not the self), their
self-consciousness has a "masochistic desire" to be limited. This is expressed metaphorically in the line from the play
No Exit, "Hell is other people". In the theory of
psychoanalysis developed around the start of the 20th century,
Sigmund Freud did not explicitly address the concept of alienation, but other analysts subsequently have. It is a theory of divisions and conflicts between the conscious and
unconscious mind, between different parts of a hypothetical
psychic apparatus, and between the self and
civilization. It postulates
defense mechanisms, including
splitting, in both normal and disturbed functioning. The concept of
repression has been described as having functionally equivalent effects as the idea of
false consciousness associated with Marxist theory. A form of
Western Marxism developed during the century, which included influential analyses of false consciousness by
György Lukács. Critics of
bureaucracy and the
Protestant ethic also drew on the works of
Max Weber. Figures associated with
critical theory, in particular with the
Frankfurt School, such as
Theodor Adorno and
Erich Fromm, also developed theories of alienation, drawing on
neo-Marxist ideas as well as other influences including
neo-Freudian and sociological theories. One approach applies Marxist theories of
commodification to the cultural, educational and
party-political spheres. Links are drawn between socioeconomic structures, psychological states of alienation, and personal human relationships. In the 1960s the revolutionary group
Situationist International came to some prominence, staging 'situations' intended to highlight an alternative way of life to
advanced capitalism, the latter conceptualized as a diffuse '
spectacle', a fake reality masking a degradation of human life.
The Theory of Communicative Action associated with
Jürgen Habermas emphasizes the essential role of
language in
public life, suggesting that alienation stems from the distortion of reasoned moral debate by the strategic dominance of
market forces and
state power. This critical program can be contrasted with traditions that attempt to extract problems of alienation from the broader socioeconomic context, or which at least accept the broader context on its own terms, and which often attribute problems to individual abnormality or failures to adjust. After the boom in alienation research that characterized the 1950s and 1960s, interest in alienation research subsided, although in sociology it was maintained by the Research Committee on Alienation of the
International Sociological Association (ISA). In the 1990s, there was again an upsurge of interest in alienation prompted by the fall of the
Soviet Union,
globalization, the information explosion, increasing awareness of ethnic conflicts, and
post-modernism.
Felix Geyer believes the growing complexity of the contemporary world and post-modernism prompted a reinterpretation of alienation that suits the contemporary living environment. In late 20th and early 21st century sociology, it has been particularly the works of Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman that address the issue of alienation in the contemporary western world. == Modalities ==