In his The Division of Labor in Society (1893) and Suicide (1897), Émile Durkheim introduced the term “anomie” to indicate a set of phenomena whereby the norms guaranteeing social cohesion fall into crisis following a major extension of the division of labor. It was during this period, however, that several thinkers developed concepts that later came to be associated with alienation. Marx’s concept of alienated labor pushed beyond the existing philosophical, religious, and political notions of alienation to ground it in the economic sphere of material production Even Marx rarely used the term in the works published during his lifetime, and discussion of alienation was notably absent from the Marxism of the Second International (1889–1914).
But the concept of alienation subsequently disappeared from philosophical reflection, and none of the major thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century paid it any great attention. The concept of alienation continued to feature prominently in the writings of the Hegelian left, and Ludwig Feuerbach developed a theory of religious alienation in The Essence of Christianity (1841) where he described man’s projection of his own essence onto an imaginary deity. Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where the terms Entausserung (“self-externalization”), Entfremdung (“estrangement”), and Vergegenständlichung (literally: “to-make-into-an-object”) were used to describe Spirit’s becoming other than itself in the realm of objectivity. The first systematic account of alienation was provided by Georg W. If this important aspect of Marx’s theory has been underappreciated until now, it nonetheless remains the key to understanding what the mature Marx meant by alienation - and helps provide the conceptual tools that will be needed in transforming the hyperexploitative economic and social system that we live in today. In the notebooks of the Grundrisse (1857-58), as well as in other preparatory manuscripts for Capital (1867), Marx delivers a conception of alienation that is historically grounded in his analysis of social relations under capitalism.
This was a groundbreaking move, but alienation was a concept that Marx never put down, and he would go on to refine and develop his theory in the coming decades.Īlthough thinkers on the topic of alienation have, for the most part, continued to make use of Marx’s early writings, it is in fact in the later work that Marx provides a fuller, more developed account of alienation, as well as a theory of its overcoming. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx first developed his concept of alienated labor, pushing beyond the existing philosophical, religious, and political notions of alienation to ground it in the economic sphere of material production. Since they were first published in the 1930s, Karl Marx’s early writings on alienation have served as a radical touchstone in the fields of social and philosophical thought, generating followers, contestation, and debate.
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