Alienation Redux: Marxian Perspectives

Alienation was one of the most important and widely debated themes of the twentieth century and Marx’s reflections on this concept defined significant moments in its dissemination. Most of the authors who initially wrote on alienation considered it a universal aspect of human existence. Additionally, after World War II the popularity of the concept created a profound terminological ambiguity. The diffusion of Marx’s oeuvre paved the way for a conception of alienation geared to the overcoming of this phenomenon in practice—to the political action of social movements, parties and trade unions to change the working and living conditions of the working class. Marx’s writings on alienation provided not only a coherent theoretical basis for new studies of this concept, but above all an anti-capitalist ideological platform for the labour movement. Alienation left the books of philosophers took to the streets and became a critique of bourgeois society.