In
sociology and
critical social theory,
alienation refers to an individual's estrangement from traditional community and others in general. It is considered by many that the
atomism of
modern society means that individuals have shallower relations with other people than they would normally. This, it is argued, leads to difficulties in understanding and adapting to each other's uniqueness (see
normlessness). It is also sometimes referred to as
commodification, emphasizing the compatibility of
capitalism with alienation (a common theme of the early work of
Karl Marx; see
Marx's theory of alienation).
History
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation argues that things that naturally belong together are kept separate, or things that are properly in harmony are made to be antagonized. In the concept's most important use, it refers to the
alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" (
Gattungswesen, usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). Marx believed that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. 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).
Marx's Theory of Alienation is based upon his observation that in emerging industrial production under capitalism, workers inevitably lose control of their lives and selves, in not having any control of their work. Workers never become autonomous, self-realized human beings in any significant sense, except the way the bourgeois want the worker to be realized. Alienation in
capitalist societies occurs because in
work each contributes to the common wealth, but 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.
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 to translate two quite distinct German words,
Entfremdung and
Entäußerung, interchangeably.
Late 1800s-1900s
Many sociologists of the late 19th and early 20th century were concerned about alienating effects of modernization. German sociologists
Georg Simmel and
Ferdinand Tönnies wrote critical works on
individualization and
urbanization. Simmel's
"Philosophie des Geldes" ("Philosophy of Money") describes how relationships become more and more mediated through money. Tönnies'
"Gemeinschaft und 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 relations within society, alienation can mean the unresponsiveness of the 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. This form of alienation was criticized by many of the
Young Hegelians.
In a broader
philosophical context, especially in
existentialism and
phenomenology, alienation describes the inadequacy of human
being or
mind in relation to the world. The human mind, as the
subject of perception, relates to the world as an object of its perception, and so is distanced from the world rather than living within it. This line of thought can be found in
Søren Kierkegaard, who examined the
emotions and
feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. Many
20th-century philosophers, both theistic and atheistic, and theologians drew many concepts from Kierkegaard, including the notions of angst, despair, and the importance of the individual.
Martin Heidegger's concepts of anxiety (Angst) and mortality drew on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which the latter 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 passionate affirmation of one's individual 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, which is expressed metaphorically in the famous line of dialogue from the play
No Exit, "Hell is other people."
André Gorz,
Albert Camus and
Theodor Adorno, among others.
See also
