Alienation is a very widely, and loosely, used concept, which originates in its modern form with Marx, although he took the term from Hegel, and a similar usage can be found in Rousseau. In modern sociological analysis it has much in common with the Durkheimian concept of anomie. It is helpful to take an etymological approach in trying to define this important but sometimes obscure concept. In legal terms ‘alienation’ means giving up rights in property; analogously, political philosophers have used ‘inalienable rights’ to mean those rights which cannot be given up, and cannot ever legitimately be taken away. But the derivation, from alien, suggesting something other, foreign, distant, is also helpful.
For Marx, alienation is a condition occurring in pre-socialist societies, where the human nature of man is made other than, alien to, what man is really capable of being. This is also the sense in which Rousseau used it, though his view was that contemporary society had made man other, and more corrupt, than had once been so. Marx had a sophisticated theory of alienation, especially as it occurred in capitalism. People could be alienated firstly from their own selves (i.e.
from their true nature), secondly from other people (absence of natural fraternity), thirdly from their working life (because it was meaningless and involved ‘alienating’, in a legal sense, their labour for the benefit of others), and fourthly from the product of their labour (because most industrial workers do not have the satisfaction of designing and creating an entire product through the exercise of their skills). All of these are interconnected, and for Marx they all stem from the capitalist productive system, and especially from its practice of division of labour.
This stress on human nature, and on the way in which man is turned into a wage slave, without respect for self, fellows or daily work, is much weakened in the later and more economics-oriented work of Marx, but it has continued to be of vital interest and importance in social thought generally. It has often been applied far too loosely so that alienation frequently means no more than unhappiness; but some new applications are obviously legitimate extensions of Marx’s usage, as when feminists argue that capitalist society, as part of its generally dehumanizing effect, alienates men from women. However, there are serious objections to the concept of alienation. Firstly, though Marx’s writing is often highly persuasive in regard to the existence of the phenomenon, many critics hold that alienation is created by the division of labour endemic to any high-technology economy (perhaps even by the very nature of such economies) rather than by a particular system of property rights; and if this is so, alienation will remain a problem even under fully-developed communism. Secondly, the concept of alienation relies on the unprovable idea that a basic or true human nature exists. From a philosophical point of view the concept would be useful only if it could be shown (a) that man really would have certain characteristics under a different system, and (b) that these are in some sense ‘natural’. Yet Marxists, and most others who make use of the concept, are strongly opposed to the idea that any basic human nature exists independently of social reality. Despite such problems, the concept retains its vigour and is widely used in social analysis.
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