alienation In Hegel's philosophy
man (sic) is seen to develop through alienation and its transcendence, realizing
a spiritual essence in labour. This formulation was critiqued in the early writings
of Karl Marx who saw labour itself as alienating and consequently developed
the concept in one of its key modern directions. In the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts (1844), Marx describes a condition of man's (sic) alienation
from nature, from others and from the products of his labour. The latter, in
particular, is induced by the exploitation of the worker under capitalism, enforcing
an identification of the worker with the commodity value
of the products of labour. Ultimately this is seen to produce a profound alienation
of man from himself.
Later observers than Marx saw alienation not so much as the effect of capitalism as the characteristic condition of urban living in the new modern metropolis. The impersonality of modern technologies, the speed of new transport and the increased size of city crowds were seen to create a disorientating double effect of proximity and isolation (Simmel 1969 ). Alienation in this urban context was the subject of much modernist literature (by Charles Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos).
The related experience of anonymous systems of modern bureaucracy
and political manipulation is close to the use of the concept in Max Weber and
its development in later sociology. This too has been explored in literature
and film from the writings of Franz Kafka to William Burroughs and in films
such as The Parallax View (1974) and JFK (1982).
In another quite common sense, deriving from Sartre and existentialism,
alienation is seen not as a specific historical mentality characteristic of
capitalism or of modernity but as a universal
See also alienation effect; reification. [from: Brooker, 1999]