Alienation: The critique that refuses to disappear

Alienation: A brief history

In Roman law, alienation referred to the voluntary transfer of property to another owner (Buckland, 2007 [1921]: 228ff.). Philosophers and theologians have used the term alienation to indicate separation from God, from correct doctrine (Ladner, 1983: 969), from self and mind, from property or affection, from truth, from political or social power (Evans, 1978; Faris, 1934; Russell, 1991; Sommer and Hall, 1958).

Contrasting interpretations of alienation can be seen in the writings of Rousseau (Cranston, 1991), for whom the ‘noble savage’, the exemplar of the unalienated individual, can unite with others to form a social whole. But this ended when one man put a fence around his land, found people naïve enough to believe, and were henceforth dominated and alienated. For Adam Smith (1986), the uncultivated person is alienated for he [sic] is unable to enjoy the pleasures of community and appreciate the fruits of urban culture (West, 2004 [1975]). Smith recognized, however, that alienation loomed for urban factory workers, who, in performing simple repetitious tasks, according to the division of labor, were isolated from their fellows, estranged from their humanity, and powerless to negotiate contracts (Lamb, 2004 [1973]). Although he also saw the negative implications of alienation, Hegel (2007) posited that alienation (Entaüsserung) had positive effects because through individuals’ externalized consciousness, the spirit built a shared culture in civil society (Ice, n.d.).

In the last two centuries, alienation became important in existentialist philosophy. For Kierkegaard, the average person, living a life of banal conformity, was alienated from his/her self-realization and transcendence. Heidegger echoed this view in his description of das Mann, who embraced an inauthentic life of conformity and conventionality, because he was alienated from his contingency (‘throwness’) and his finitude (being unto death). Tillich describes the ‘tragic universality’ of Entfremdung, a sense of unbelief (rather than faith), a desire for concupiscence (not love), and a drive for hubris and self-elevation rather than surrender to the omnipotent immortal (Williamson and Cullingford, 1997).

Like Hegel, Sartre (1956, 1960) also argued that alienation is universal, and inevitable, involving the recognition of an ‘alien Me’, namely the recognition that part of one’s existence is beyond subjective experience. But this objectification of self and others ultimately reveals a fundamental truth and thus alienation is not negative. In philosophical anthropology, alienation is described as a social condition that thwarts human possibilities for community and the self-realization that can enable a fulfilling life (Schacht, 1992; Wexler, 1996). Debates center on whether these limitations are due to capitalism, modernity or the human condition. Major critiques of alienation, its meanings, causes, and strategies for amelioration have had an enduring impact (see, for example, Israel, 1971; Mészáros, 1970; Ollman, 1976; Walliman, 1977). Lamentably, there has not been a major critique in recent years.

Alienation in sociological theory

Alienation research

After the close of the Second World War, when ‘the quest for community’ seemed hopeless (Nisbet, 1953), many researchers sought ways to understand living in an ‘alienated society’. Two distinct types of research in alienation were inspired by different educational and political goals. Research in the Marxist tradition views alienation as a general human condition shaped by material relations. Hence, given descriptions of the relations of production, the researcher can trace consequences for different levels of ‘human relations’ in the world of work, but also in politics, in the family and in the world of symbolic activity. Although such research must consider what people say and how people act, statements and actions are considered outcomes of comprehensive structures (Braverman, 1974). Without structural specifications, attempts to mend human relations can only lead to new types of symptoms of alienation, but not to its elimination. Some encouragement can be derived from detailed examinations of structures, for they can lead to the discovery of lacunae in prevailing understandings of horizons of possibility. Since those doomed by the social order to alienation are not aware of all the symptoms, findings from sociological analysis can enlighten them. Thus, practical outcomes of research based on these assumptions are indicators for collective action in the realm of politics or of economics.

The second type of research into alienation assumes that alienation is an issue in human relations where people can be alienated from organizations where they work, from family, friends, and from their ‘selves’. Such relationships are (re)constructed daily, so central questions for study are the degree of alienation that each individual or group feels, in what areas of life, and how the awareness is connected with actions they undertake in each domain. Framed this way, researchers can ask respondents about their alienation directly; findings provide new ways of perceiving alienation and point to appropriate strategies for helping individuals overcome it.

Research derived from the point of view that alienation is inherent in capitalist structures is conducted holistically, and is contextualized historically. Research which assumes that alienation can be discovered through its affective consequences is based on structured questionnaires designed to reflect how one or several of the dimensions of alienation – usually those delineated by Seeman (1959) – are experienced consciously.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, efforts were made to produce reliable and valid instruments to measure components of alienation and their correlations with constructs of liberalism, tolerance, acceptance of democracy, and life satisfaction among different groups. Factor analyses suggested significant intercorrelations of the various subscales potentially inferring that rather than being independent phenomena, the five dimensions all pertain to the construct of alienation. Some scales were based on completely different variables, among them Davids’ (1955) measure for egocentricity, distrust, pessimism, anxiety, and resentment. Another scale included vegetativeness, nihilism and adventurousness alongside Seeman’s powerlessness, and found significant correlations among all subscales (Maddi et al., 1979).

In exploring the relationships between school success and alienation as well as correlations between alienation and success in marriage, Dean (1961, 1968) refined statistical relationships and found that Seeman’s dimensions could be reduced to three: social isolation, powerlessness, and meaninglessness. He also compiled measures appropriate to additional conceptualizations of alienation such as: apathy, authoritarianism, conformity, cynicism, hoboism, political apathy, political hyperactivity, personalization in politics, prejudice, privatization, psychosis, regression, and suicide.

Srole (1956) elaborated a measure of ‘powerlessness’ and examined its correlation with a readiness to countenance messages about inter-ethnic tolerance. Nettler’s (1957) ‘measure of alienation’ tested the degree to which people felt alienated from their own society and its culture. In 1964, Blauner studied workers who held different kinds of jobs in four industries that varied by level of skill (assessed according to the type of plant [automobile and textile industries, a print shop, and a chemical plant] and the specific work done in each plant). Seeking correlations between skills and solidarity, as an indicator of ‘non-alienation’, Blauner found negative correlations between levels of skill and levels of alienation, confirmation of his hypotheses. Still, there are ambiguities. For the least skilled textile workers (those with the highest levels of alienation), small town communities provided sources of healing solidarity.

Scales based on the familiar dimensions of alienation were implemented to find levels of alienation among radical 1960s youth. Keniston (1971), a social psychologist, attributed rebellion to a calculable ‘alienation syndrome’ that could be explained by socialization in families with a leftist orientation and by an innate ‘protest-prone personality’. Such scales have been included in research on childhood (Bronfenbrenner, 1986), in organizational research (Anderson et al., 2008), in research on race (Walton and Cohen, 2007) and class (Pettigrew et al., 2008), and in educational research of different kinds (Case, 2008; Rovai and Wighting, 2005).

Nevertheless, scales measuring alienation are still being used to look at children’s emotional and cognitive adjustment to educational institutions (Atnafu, 2012; Elmi, 2012; Janangiri et al., 2013; Kalia and Sahu, 2013; Ozdemir and Rahimi, 2013). They are also prominent in studies of life in corporations (Abbas et al., 2013); in both private and government sectors (Belhassan and Shani, 2013; Hirschfield and Field, 2000; Tummers, 2012).

In psychological studies as well, alienation scales are used to measure maladjustment (O’Donnell et al., 2006), depression and mental illness (Miller et al., 2006) as well as what is increasingly diagnosed as ‘parental alienation syndrome’ (Bernet et al., 2010) and described as central aspects of personality (Nayak, 2013; Tellegen and Waller, 2008).

Indeed, many new research projects are oriented to refining the categories Seeman proposed. One example is the use of dimensions of alienation in the content analysis of extended interviews with teachers. Brooks et al. (2008) found that the dimensions were interrelated in the teachers’ conceptualizations and that, under changing circumstances introduced by school reforms, the salience of different dimensions of alienation shifted. In another experiment in content analysis based on Seeman’s dimensions, Mauldin (2008) drew conclusions about how alienation is configured variously in jokes. All together, on-going researches of alienation and social learning in hospitals, prisons, politics, and work continue to fulfill Seeman’s (1982) vision that empirical studies can and will be derived from his 1959 paper.

A modified structural approach to alienation has also been developed in research. Among these are studies of voter alienation as a challenge to governance and ultimately to the sustainability of democracy (Converse, 1972; Denters and Geurts, 1993; Finifter, 1970; Haddad, 2013; Hayes and Bean, 1993). There are also explorations of work and organizational behavior (e.g. Clark et al., 1994; Coser, 1991), education (e.g. Burns, 1994; Gibson, 2005; West and Palsson, 1988), everyday life (Kalekin-Fishman, 2005, 2010) as well as gender, community, and ethnic relations (Cullingford and Morrison, 1996; Travis, 1993). Sennett (1998) has argued that the demands of the contemporary capitalist culture demand flexibility, erosion of the capacity for loyalty and commitment and community ties. Although he does not specifically discuss alienation, he provides important insights into the nature of contemporary work that has led to what he calls the ‘corrosion of character’.

Both quantitative and qualitative analyses have been applied to the new digital technologies. Pietilä (1970: 248) concluded a quantitative study by pointing out that there is ‘no correlation between alienation and the type of material [that readers follow] in newspapers, radio or television’ but that alienated individuals seem ‘more inclined to use the media for vicarious reasons and non-alienated individuals for informational purposes’. Kellner (2005) has argued that understood dialectically, digital technologies, which arouse responses ranging from ‘technophobia’ to ‘technophilia’, foster new forms of alienation, but can also provide new realms of agency and meaning. Entering debates as to whether computers and cellphones (iPods, videogames) foster withdrawal from social life or more social connections, Hassan (2003) raises questions as to whether the growing use of internet-based news and information leads to a degradation of political literacy with people likely to agree with what they have read or heard most recently, losing the capacity for independent, critical thought (see, too: Coeckelbergh, 2012; Reveley, 2013; Zhu and Zhou, 2013). If one-dimensional thought (Marcuse, 1964) is developing, it undoubtedly leads to voter inertia with people sharing few common values and/or social ties based on religion, community or work, as Durkheim feared a century ago. A worthy project for students of alienation will be to work out the connections between biases such as othering, exclusion, segregation, isolation (vs. belonging, integration, assimilation) in order to extend the applicability of alienation theory to the concerns of our age.

The way forward

In the realm of theory, the first major work on alienation since the 1970s is Jaeggi’s (2014) recent book defending the importance of the concept. Offering an excellent overview of alienation as a concept, she also cites a number of important critiques and debates. Her work is part of a ‘tradition’ that began with Habermas, who, when he moved from a materialist theory of history and society to a discursive-communicative theory, began to distance himself from concerns with political economy in order to focus on problems of distorted communication and misunderstanding as the crucial emancipatory critique in the late 20th century. His move was continued by Alex Honneth, who deserted the Marxist critique of political economy and Freudian theories of psychodynamics, focusing largely on the problems of recognition or should we say its denial, instead. Moreover he incorporated a symbolic interactionist theory of subjectivity that is generally bereft of the capacity for critical thought and in turn resistance to oppressive social conditions. As his student, Rahel Jaeggi, in her attempt to revitalize the concern with alienation, continues the move from a sociological analysis of political economy to an ethical philosophical critique. But while she is quite critical of the political economic basis of alienation, e.g. wage labor and private property that were central for Marx, she is also critical of essentialist notions of selfhood and equally critical of the poststructural elimination of the subject as a basis for its possible alienation. For the most part, she focuses on alienation as a disturbed social relationship and on the experiences of such relationships. Resting her analysis on Heidegger’s phenomenology of ‘being in the world’, that world being modernity, conformity, and inauthenticity, she argues that ‘alienation is a deficient relation to world … a disturbed relation of appropriation’ (Jaeggi, 2014: 151). Of course, Heidegger did not specifically write about alienation, but embraced a Romantic expression of anti-modernity while living in a mountain hut much like a peasant. ¹

Jaeggi therefore chooses to ignore considerations of the socioeconomic causes of alienation that are more central for social sciences, which as we have noted include capitalism/wage labor, reification, the dehumanization of factory production, rationality, the demystification of the world, consumerism, and so on. Despite her claim of indebtedness to both Rousseau and Marx, her analysis tends toward a philosophical, ethical critique and theory of subjectivity. She makes a case for considering alienation as ‘the relation of relationlessness’, ‘living one’s life as an alien life’ and ‘alienation as disturbed appropriation’ which, as the realization of subjectivity, seeks the willful determination of life. Accordingly, one of the book’s primary concepts is appropriation, ‘a way of establishing relations to oneself and to the world, a way of dealing with oneself and the world and of having oneself and the world at one’s command’ (Jaeggi, 2014: 36). But the disruptions of appropriation lead to an alienated subjectivity since ‘being accessible rather than alien to oneself or being able to understand oneself as the author of one’s own action presupposes certain features of personhood’ (2014: 49). Thus while rejecting Marx as essentialist she nevertheless brings in her own essentialism. For Jaeggi (2014: 12), ‘in her labor, the alienated worker is not the master of what she does. Standing under foreign command and being powerless, the worker can neither comprehend nor control the process as a whole of which she is part but that remains un-transparent to her.’ Indeed, Jaeggi has very little to say about actual workers and much to say about the alienation and ennui of the privileged.

While Jaeggi (2014: 12) sees ‘alienation from something the self has made’, alienated labor for Marx produces a system of domination that stands outside the worker, a system that she did not make but nevertheless thwarts her freedom. When we become alien to ourselves, our lives are bereft of ‘willful determination’ – as is the condition of most people working in factories especially sweatshops or among the closely monitored lower echelon services, from making or serving fast food to customer service, for example. Moreover as we previously noted, increasingly workers today, even at higher levels including the professions, have become more and more subject to surveillance and regimentation, while careers increasingly consist of short-term commitments of limited duration largely in teams. Most such work is as alienating as was textile production for Marx or the manufacture of pins for Adam Smith. Given Jaeggi’s arguments, the book should be read by those interested in alienation; it may well be that her move away from Marx, from early critical theory and the wealth of empirical social research on the topic may, in a truly dialectical fashion, foster reconsiderations of these classical texts.

It cannot be denied that the research literature concerned with alienation as a sociostructural phenomenon and/or with its social psychological consequences has contributed to solutions of problems in various domains of social relations, and to inspiring strategies of social action.

Nevertheless, there are unsolved issues for future research. One such challenge was formulated in Kai Erikson’s 1985 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, where he spelled out the still knotty problem of how to combine structural understandings of alienation with objective measures of their impact(s) (Erikson, 1986). Accepting Marx’s description of the inevitability of alienation under still prevailing conditions of production, Erikson pointed out that many workers who are objectively powerless and lead fragmented lives are unaware of being alienated and even declare themselves satisfied with their lot at work. This is a sign of self-deception, not a sign that there is no alienation. Structural alienation undoubtedly leaves marks on the alienated and those marks can in principle be tracked and measured, but in practice this has not yet been achieved.

Still, there are several striking directions for elaborating alienation as a critique of domination. The work of Hochschild (1983), focusing on flight attendants, noted how service work led to a ‘commodification of feelings’ and alienation as bitter as that of 19th-century factory workers. A similar plight is found among other workers, from those in the fast food industries to strait-laced salespersons (cf. Leidner, 2003; Mills, 1951). Many people have been concerned with the alienation of and from the body. Prosono (2008: 635) demonstrates that ‘alienation of the body and the mind reworks the individual into a commodity and a function’. Thus, bodies, like other commodities, have become consumables (Galli, 2013: 56–59). The entire body culture, with its concern for the ‘expression’ of the stereophonics of desire, is a culture of irredeemable monstrosity and obscenity (Baudrillard, 1990: 33) which has yet to be explored in all its complexity. For example, the popularity of body adornment, tattoos, and piercing among many young people are both a statement of alienation and a conscious means of overcoming that alienation through commitment to transgressive norms (Langman, 2012).

With contemporary alienation due to large-scale migrations, economic stagnation, and an implosion of the global economy, many of the reactions and social mobilizations attract the attention of alienation researchers. These include various religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, terrorism, global justice movements, and a popular culture of carnivalesque transgressions ranging from heavy metal and rap music to ‘porn chic’ and bacchanalian vacations. Langman and Kalekin-Fishman (2013) have argued that alienation plays a considerable role in prompting a variety of social mobilizations – but the dominant paradigms of social movement theory, Resource Mobilization and/or New Social Movement theory, give little attention to political economy, or to emotions, and even less to the fact that for Marx, alienation engendered an imaginary of another kind of society. On the one hand, social change now fosters more democratic inclusive relations, more tolerance of social and moral diversity and liberal social values. Thus, identities alienated from ‘mainstream’ cultural values often embrace progressive agendas that valorize the heretofore marginalized, through activism for feminism, gay rights, as well as antiwar movements. But such social trends and movements often offend many of the more conservative people who then join and/or embrace more conservative, or even reactionary movements that would stop, if not reverse, social change and secure traditional political, religious or nationalistic values. This is seen in many of the Islamist movements, as well as in the National Front or the American Tea Party (Langman, 2012). Moreover, for many, the transgressive realms of popular culture provide commodified ways of overcoming alienation, entrapment, social fragmentation, and the inauthenticity of our age by providing people with momentary experiences of ‘the joys of sin’, with at least temporary gratifications of agency and community, free of alienation, entrapment, and inauthenticity (Langman, 2012).

At first glance these diverse reactions might seem to have very little in common. But closer examination reveals that when some alienated people seek agency, reactionary social or political movements, themselves alienated, can provide illusory moments of power and voice that would seem to stop if not reverse social change. Similarly, progressive movements seek actual social transformations that would alleviate alienation through transformations of culture and society that provide for greater democracy, equality, and indeed, the self-realization thwarted by alienation. If we begin with Marx’s critique of alienation, one could argue that overcoming alienated labor and overcoming the hegemonic ideologies sustained by the dominant political control of capitalists can perhaps be accomplished with the realization of dignity. It is possible to see in dignity the core of the ‘good life’ that is attained when people have recognition of their fundamental humanity, self-determination, incorporation into life-affirming communities, and the capacity to reclaim their ‘species being’. But dignity is not simply self-esteem, it is rather a web of circumstances which enable self-esteem, pride, and self-realization for everyone (Langman and Albanese, 2014).

Given the realities of globalization, new technologies, growing economic stagnation if not decline, and the enduring nature of alienation in both traditional and contemporary articulations, the 21st century is a time of tantalizing challenge for alienation researchers studying the myriad forms that alienation now takes, and the many ways people adopt to overcome that alienation