ALIENATION

in social sciences, the state of feeling estranged or separated from one's milieu, work, products of work, or self. Despite its popularity in the analysis of contemporary life, the idea of alienation remains an ambiguous concept with elusive meanings, the following variants being most common: (1) powerlessness, the feeling that one's destiny is not under one's own control but is determined by external agents, fate, luck, or institutional arrangements; (2) meaninglessness, referring either to the lack of comprehensibility or consistent meaning in any domain of action (such as world affairs or interpersonal relations) or to a generalized sense of purposelessness in life; (3) normlessness, the lack of commitment to shared social prescriptions for behaviour (hence widespread deviance, distrust, unrestrained individual competition, and the like); (4) cultural estrangement, the sense of removal from established values in society (as, for example, in the intellectual or student rebellions against conventional institutions); (5) social isolation, the sense of loneliness or exclusion in social relations (as, for example, among minority group members); and (6) self-estrangement, perhaps the most difficult to define and in a sense the master theme, the understanding that in one way or another the individual is out of touch with himself. Recognition of the concept of alienation in Western thought has been similarly elusive. Although entries on alienation did not appear in major reference books of the social sciences until as late as 1935, the concept had existed implicitly or explicitly in classical sociological works of the 19th and early 20th centuries written by Karl Marx, mile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tnnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. Perhaps the most famous use of the term was by Marx, who spoke of alienated labour under capitalism: work was compelled rather than spontaneous and creative; workers had little control over the work process; the product of labour was expropriated by others to be used against the worker; and the worker himself became a commodity in the labour market. Alienation consisted of the fact that man did not fulfill his species being in work; the essence of man remained unrealized. The Marxian tradition, however, represents only one stream of thought concerning alienation in modern society. A second stream, which is considerably less sanguine about the prospects for de-alienation, is embodied in what has come to be called the theory of mass society. Observing the dislocations brought about by industrialization in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Durkheim and Tnniesand eventually Weber and Simmel as welleach, in his own way, lamented the passing of traditional society and the consequent loss of the sense of community. Modern man was isolated as he had never been beforeanonymous and impersonal in an urbanizing mass, uprooted from old values, yet without faith in the new rational and bureaucratic order. Perhaps the clearest expression of this theme is contained in Durkheim's notion of anomie (from Greek anomia, lawlessness), a social condition characterized by rampant individualism and the disintegration of binding social norms. Both Weber and Simmel carried the Durkheimian theme further. Weber emphasized the fundamental drift toward rationalization and formalization in social organization; personal relations became fewer, and impersonal bureaucracy became larger. Simmel emphasized the tension in social life between the subjective and personal, on the one hand, and the increasingly objective and anonymous, on the other. The classification of more modern definitions of alienation given in the first paragraph of this articlepowerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, cultural estrangement, social isolation, and self-estrangementcan serve only as a rough guide because later writers often developed radically different conceptions within any one of the categories. Thus, with respect to self-estrangement, one can be out of touch with oneself in several quite different ways. Furthermore, later writers differed not only in their definitions but also in the assumptions that underlie these definitions. Two such contrasting assumptions are the normative and the subjective. First, those who held most closely to the tradition of Marx (Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm in the United States, for example, or Georges Friedmann and Henri Lefebvre in France) treated alienation as a normative concept, as an instrument for criticizing the established state of affairs in the light of some standard based on human nature, natural law, or moral principle. Marxian theorists, secondly, insisted upon alienation as an objective condition quite independent of individual consciousnesshence, to be a happy robot at work is to be alienated irrespective of one's acceptance of the work experience. Alternatively, some writersmost commonly the American empiricistsemphasized that alienation is a social-psychological factit is the experience of powerlessness, the sense of estrangement. Such an assumption is often found in analyses and descriptions of deviant behaviour (and in the work of such theoreticians as Robert K. Merton and Talcott Parsons).