Alienation and Political Behavior

Alienation is both one of the most popular and vague concepts used by contemporary social scientists. Scholars often cite Robert Nisbet's statement that alienation is basically a perspective. The current age is said to be one of alienation, or writers declare alienation to be the fundamental interpretive concept for explaining deviant behavior. One author has even gone so far as to say that definition is unnecessary because we can all feel what “it” is in our very bones. Indeed, if we don't understand it intuitively we are alienated by definition. Recently, there have been a series of attempts to clarify the meaning of the term. Daniel Bell, commenting on the uses of the concept alienation in the works of Marx, distinguishes estrangement (“a socio-psychological condition”) from reification (“a philosophical category with psychological overtones”). For research purposes, the fundamental difference between these meanings lies in the criteria which are applied in determining whether an individual is alienated. The existence of estrangement is determined by investigating the attitudes of individuals; reification is measured against “objective” standards about the quality of human life established by the investigator. The reification (objective) tradition has many strong exponents. It offers a potentially powerful concept to an analyst wishing to evaluate the human condition in terms of explicitly stated criteria of what man ought to be in his social and personal relationships. Most of the contemporary scholarly work, however, is concerned with estrangement, and my own interest also lies in the individual's perception of the situation he faces.