Alienation

This article provides an overview of the concept of alienation in social theory. It begins with a detailed discussion of the origins of alienation in the work of Karl Marx, including the relationship of alienation to wage labor and the industrial system. Next, it provides a summary of different theorists' opinions on whether or not alienation can be overcome, and if so, how. Finally, it presents views on alienation from a number of other classical and contemporary social theorists, including postmodern thinkers. Theorists discussed include Arendt, Berger, Baumann, Baudillard, Durkheim, Simmel, Adorno, Bourdieu, Harvey, and Sartre.

Keywords Alienation; Anomie; Capitalism; Class; Communism; Dehumanization; Enlightenment; Empirical; False Consciousness; Fragmentation; Ideology; Modernity; Norms; Objectivity; Postmodernity; Rationality; Rationalization; Reification; Religion; Self; Theory; Wage Labor; Work

Population, Urbanization & the Environment > Alienation

Overview

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, alienation means the "action of estranging." What the object of estrangement is, however, can vary. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries the term was used frequently in legal discussions to refer to the separation of affections between two people, the transfer of ownership or property, or the illegitimate use of some good. Though it is easy to see how the sociological use of the term might derive from this etymology, alienation has quite a different meaning to sociologists and social theorists.

The theorist mostly closely associated with the notion of alienation in the social sciences is Karl Marx. Today, Marx is best known as a theorist of capitalism, history, and economics; he used the term alienation to explain some of what he saw as the more problematic outcomes of the transition to a capitalist economy. He argued that alienation stemmed from the engagement in wage labor in the capitalist economy. Prior to the emergence of factory labor during the industrial revolution, people were intimately and directly connected to the products of their labor. For instance, a farmer knew the land he worked, and the farmer and his family consumed the produce that grew on that land. Similarly, a shoemaker knew the details of every pair of shoes he made, including who bought them and for how much money. In the factory system, this was no longer true. Individual workers were responsible for only one small step in the production process, leaving them distant from the ultimate product. Observing this shift, Marx argued that alienation occurs when workers, through participation in wage labor, become estranged from the products of their labor (in other words, the goods they are producing).

In fact, the notion of alienation is quite a bit more complicated than this simple tale would show it to be. The worker's estrangement from the product of his or her labor leads the him or her to see this product as an alien object. Whereas farmers or shoemakers would have seen the product of their labor as an essential part of their daily lives, factory workers or wage laborers see the product of their labor as just another object. Thus, life and labor become in some sense separate and distinct, even as labor becomes a larger and larger part of workers' lives. Marx noted that industrial workers spend two-thirds of the time that they are awake engaged in labor for someone else-labor that is nothing more than meaningless activity. While contemporary labor laws provide for a minimum wage and, in some countries, define the maximum hours a person can spend at work, the difference is only one of extent. Today, we still spend a considerable percentage of our lives at work, thinking about work, and commuting to work. A worker, for instance, who sleeps eight hours a night, works forty-five hours a week, and spends one hour per day commuting will spend roughly half of his or her waking life at work (and that is counting the weekends). Ultimately, Marx argued that the objectification of the product of work combined with the all-encompassing nature of wage labor leads workers to view their own labor power, too, as nothing more than an object.

Alienation is not just about the separation of people from the products of their labor. It is also about the separation of people from their own essential nature. Therefore, the essential distinction underlying Marx's notion of alienation is the distinction between labor that is undertaken by an individual for his or her own benefit, in order to express his or her own personality, relationships, and ideals, and labor that is one for the satisfaction of external motivations, most particularly to secure the means of subsistence, or the money and other material goods necessary to people for survival. Marx sees this latter form of labor as a form of self-sacrifice and the cause of the estrangement between people and their essential beings. To Marx, in other words, industrial laborers have not only sold their labor power to the capitalist, but have also lost their souls.

Marx identified four different types of alienation: the individual can be alienated from his or her self, from his or her fellow person, from his or her labor, or from the product of that labor.

In summary, Marx argues that alienation develops out of the emergence of capitalism. According to him, private ownership of industry leads to the development of factory wage labor systems in which individual workers sell their labor power to capitalists in return for a cash wage. The fragmented and depersonalized labor process then results in the estrangement of the worker from the product and from his or her essential self. In sum, wage labor leads directly to alienation.

Applications

Resisting and Reversing Alienation

Some authors argue that alienation is an irreversible process, or at least that reversing it would be extremely difficult and unlikely. For instance, Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that the estrangement between individuals that arises from alienation makes the coordination of resistance to oppression difficult and unlikely, thus perpetuating our alienation from one another. Similarly, David Harvey's argument that individuals have become fragmented and without the ability to pursue a better future suggests the lack of the spark that would lead to social change. Baudrillard similarly suggested that individuals can no longer perceive alternatives in societies in which alienation has become pervasive. Yet other theorists have presented arguments on how alienation could be limited or reversed.

In his writings on alienation, Karl Marx continued his well known advocacy for communism, arguing that the communist revolution would end alienation. This end would occur, he though, because, under communism, each worker would own a portion of the industry and would therefore be able to exert control over the process of production, thus enabling all workers to reconnect with the products of their labor. Hannah Arendt proposed a less political response to alienation. While she believed that alienation comes from the removal or withdrawal of the individual from public life, she believed that individuals could potentially continue to reveal their true selves in individual, face-to-face interactions. Alienation is not a central part of Arendt's thinking, but it is worth noting that if, as she believed, it is possible for an individual's true self to emerge under capitalism, collective resistance may yet arise.

Zygmunt Bauman saw still another way for humanity to resist alienation. To Bauman, it is the critical potential of creating new ways of thinking and being that provides the opening for possibility and thus the escape from alienation. Such transformations are possible because humans retain the capacity to build ethical relationships with one another. Alienation, he argues, is not natural, and we can always do something about it.

Viewpoints

Durkheim & Simmel

While Marx is the theorist with whom the notion of alienation is most closely identified, a variety of other social theorists have refined the concept of alienation or developed related concepts. For instance, though French sociologist Emile Durkheim did not draw on Marx's notion of alienation, he did employ the related concept of anomie. Durkheim's work was particularly concerned with the issue of social integration, and Durkheim realized that such integration might sometimes fail. Anomie is his description of what results from such a failure. It refers to a state in which norms are unclear or absent, generally due to the breakdown of the social order. Similarly, German sociologist Georg Simmel did not use the concept of alienation but nevertheless addressed related issues. In his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life," Simmel explained how human social life changes when we live in cities. Instead of being rooted in local social networks governed by familiarity, care, and enduring social ties, city residents experience lives in which they are surrounded by strangers. They develop what Simmel called "the blasé attitude," a form of disconnection from those around them; most of their interpersonal relationships are primarily concerned with economic exchange.

Adorno

Other theorists have refined their uses of alienation to explain different time periods, parts of life, or theoretical perspectives. Many of these theorists are particularly concerned with the social changes accompanying the transformation of society as it transitioned into modernity. For instance, Theodore Adorno argued that the emergence of empirical reason and rationality in the Enlightenment produced alienation. For Adorno, religion and spiritual activity used to provide a refuge from the potential of alienation but can no longer do so. The establishment of Enlightenment thought and reason brought with it the process of rationalization, which gives humanity a false belief in its control over nature and objectifies humanity. In this new rational world, we look to reason as our refuge instead of religion, and ultimately we become alienated even from our own thoughts.

Berger

Peter Berger also considered the role of religion in alienation, but came to quite a different conclusion. To Berger, religion is not a refuge in which we could once avoid alienation. Instead, he saw religion as an alienated and alienating part of human existence. According to him, religion provides explanations and shelter from the meaninglessness and purposelessness of life and ultimately becomes internalized into our own personal identities. Berger believed that religion thus presents a paradox: on the one hand, it is an attempt to create meaning, but on the other, it deprives the world of meaning and creates alienation. Alienation emerges from false consciousness, and religion has been a prime creator of false consciousness, Berger argued. Ultimately, however, religion is just one example of a broader social process leading to alienation. It is over-objectification, the translation of humanity into objectivity, and the limits on meaningful human activity that create alienation. In particular, this process occurs when institutions and society more generally become things in themselves apart from the people who created them—though Berger argued that this process is never complete. Though Berger's model does draw directly on Marx's notion of alienation, he uses another term to describe his conception: reification. By reification, Berger meant seeing the products of human action as if they were something other than the products of human action, as if they were "non-human or possibly superhuman" (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 88).

Sartre & Bourdieu

For other theorists, alienation is not a central part of their writing but they still develop unique conceptions drawing on this idea. Author Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about alienation from the perspective of social rather than economic or institutional relations, though he did argue that alienation was created by bureaucratic social organizations. To Sartre, alienation means becoming "an other" to yourself or those around you. To French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, alienation is the loss of the subject, or self, in the face of the material or cultural object. Bourdieu was particularly concerned with the relationships between class and culture, and thus he uses alienation to explain the commodification of cultural forms as well as the disconnection between classes and cultural forms. For instance, Bourdieu discusses alienation in terms of upper-class intellectuals who become disconnected from mass culture.

Alienation & Postmodern Thought

Theorists concerned with postmodernism have taken a different approach. For them, the task is not so much to extend or refine Marx's notion of alienation but rather to present a critique of its shortcomings. Such critiques include arguing that alienation springs from different processes than those Marx identified, that social thought itself may be responsible for alienation, and that the postmodern condition involves a move beyond alienation.

Where Marx argued that alienation is induced by the conditions of production, Baudrillard argued that it is induced by the conditions of consumption as well. He claimed that production became alienating and led us to turn to consumption for an escape, and yet consumption then became alienating as well. Baudrillard's critique of Marx begins with the observation that Marxism positions workers as productive bodies but does not provide space for the more radical social critique that production itself is an ideology. Baudrillard then argued that workers' views of themselves as productive bodies may be a form of alienation. Furthermore, Baudrillard argued that in a society where everything can be bought and sold, alienation becomes both total and inescapable. This pervasive alienation is rooted in the structure of market society due to its emphasis on consumption, but it is intensified by the postmodern media. Baudrillard saw the postmodern media as providing constant simulations that are devoid of meanings or messages, thus depriving us of all possibilities for avoiding alienation.

Another observation that is central to Marx's notion of alienation is the claim that communism would result in the erasure of alienation. Zygmunt Bauman disagreed with this argument. He believed that communism as well as capitalism can produce alienation—communism does so particularly through the suppression of creativity, individual thought, and initiative. But this is not the only way in which Bauman moves beyond Marxist notions of alienation. To Bauman, alienation can be produced by social thought and by other non-productive activities such as sexuality, as these activities can also lead to self-estrangement. Bauman saw any abstraction of humanity as a form of alienation, but he devoted particular attention to discussing the ways in which sociology itself may produce alienation. According to him, sociology is an agent of alienation when it views the world as an object that has power over humans without seeing humans as having power over the world. Bauman's critique is particularly directed at practices of objectivity and value-neutrality in the social sciences, which he sees as simply a way for alienation to be aware of itself. Instead, he argued for a critical sociology that asks where today's world comes from and considers the potential of tomorrow's world.

In contrast, David Harvey has argued that we are no longer alienated. Instead, he claimed, postmodernism presents a new and different problem: that of fragmentation. In order to become alienated, one needs to have a coherent identity and self from which to become estranged-a self that provides the basis for pursuing projects and thinking about ways to produce a better future. Postmodern individuals do not have such a self, Harvey said. Rather, their selves are fragmented by the endless development of more and more identities, possibilities, and practices that make it impossible to define themselves in coherent terms. Ultimately, such people cannot be alienated because they have nothing to be alienated from. They present a new and different dilemma that Marx, writing in the 1800s, could never have predicted.

Terms & Concepts

Alienation: The process whereby individuals lose control over and connection to their autonomous selves due to constraints imposed by outside forces such as work in an industrial production system.

Anomie: A state in which norms are unclear or absent, generally due to the breakdown of social organization.

Capitalism: An economic system in which individuals have control over private property and workers sell their labor power on the market in exchange for wages, which they use to obtain the things they need to survive.

Class: Categories of people who share common economic interests and are arranged in a system of economic inequality. Scholars describe class systems differently. For Marx, there are two primary economic classes: first, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class which owns the means of production such as land and factories; second, the proletariat or working class.

Communism: A political and economic system in which control over the means of production is held in common by the people, who also share common control over the government. In common usage, communism refers to the political and economic systems of totalitarian states such as China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union; communism as described originally by Karl Marx would have had a dictatorship only for a short transitional period while the revolution reshaped society.

Dehumanization: The degrading of people, often through one group reiterating the inferiority of subjugation of another group.

Enlightenment: An intellectual movement in eighteenth century Europe that stressed the importance of reason, science, and the study of human society. The Enlightenment provided Europe with the opportunity to reclaim some of the knowledge it lost in the dark ages and to begin to think critically about itself, but it also led to the abandonment of prior ways of knowing that were not rooted in rationality.

Empirical: Empirical statements are those which can theoretically be proven true or false. In other words, they are statements of fact, even if the facts they contain are not true.

False Consciousness: An idea emerging from Marxist theory which suggests that individuals have been mislead by ideology or other factors into believing things that are contrary to their own best interests.

Fragmentation: The term fragmentation has multiple meanings in sociology. Often it is used to describe the breakdown of social integration and social norms or to describe societies that lack social connections and networks. However, David Harvey uses the term to refer to the postmodern situation in which our selves are not fixed but rather are divided among multiple identities, worldviews, and cultural practices that are constantly in flux.

Ideology: A coherent worldview or system of thinking that obscures or rejects elements that do not fit within it in order to maintain and uphold a particular social order or point of view. To Marx, ideologies prevent the masses from engaging in the resistance and revolution necessary to bring an end to capitalism; later theorists have sometimes accused Marx himself of promoting communism as an ideology.

Modernity: Modernity refers to the period of human history ranging roughly from the end of the Middle Ages until the mid-to-late twentieth century. Modernity is marked by four primary characteristics: rapid and extensive social change; a new set of social institutions; a de-localization of social relations; and the development of new technologies that allow for increasing standardization and surveillance.

Norms: Expectations for proper behavior in social situations.

Objectivity: Assuming a position of political, moral, and ethical neutrality in viewing some social phenomena or conducting research; objectivity also implies an emphasis on reason and rational decision-making rather than on emotion or personal relationships.

Postmodernity: A term used to describe the characteristics of the historical and cultural period following modernity, particularly skepticism around notions of truth, objectivity, and progress as well as the taking for granted of rapid and constant social change.

Rationality: Systems of thinking that are based on logic, efficiency, calculability, predictability, and human control over the social and natural world.

Rationalization: The process by which society becomes defined by rationality rather than by emotion, tradition, or custom.

Reification: The act of treating something as real when it is actually an abstraction. Within sociology, Peter Berger used the term in a more specific way to refer to seeing the products of human action as if they were something other than the products of human action, as if they were "non-human or possibly superhuman" (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 88).

Bibliography

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Godbout, E., & Parent, C. (2012). The life paths and lived experiences of adults who have experienced parental alienation: A retrospective study. Journal Of Divorce & Remarriage, 53, 34-54. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=79470578

Hailwood, S. (2012). Alienations and natures. Environmental Politics, 21, 882-900. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=82719204

Harvey, D. 1990. The condition of postmodernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Suggested Reading

Acevedo, G. A. 2005. Turning anomie on its head: Fatalism as Durkheim's concealed and multidimensional alienation theory. Sociological Theory, 23, 75-85. Retrieved October 6, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=16073400&site=ehost-live

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Brender-Ilan, Y. (2012). How do income and its components and perception relate to alienation?. Journal Of Applied Social Psychology, 42, 440-470. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=71545924

Geyer, F. & Heinz, W. R. 1992. Alienation, society, and the individual. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Halnon, K. B. 2006. Heavy metal carnival and dis-alienation: The politics of grotesque realism. Symbolic Interaction, 29, 33-48. Retrieved October 6, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=20718387&site=ehost-live

Horton, J. 1964. The dehumanization of anomie and alienation: A problem in the ideology of sociology. British Journal of Sociology, 15, 283-301. Retrieved from October 6, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=10408869&site=ehost-live

Lindio-McGovern, L. 2004. Alienation and labor export in the context of globalization. Critical Asian Studies, 36, 217-38. Retrieved from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=13607373&site=ehost-live

Ollman, B. 1976. Alienation: Marx's conception of man in a capitalist society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Schmitt, R. 2003. Alienation and freedom. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press.

Yuill, C. (2011). Forgetting and remembering alienation theory. History Of The Human Sciences, 24, 103-119. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN= 60094828