Alienation: From Classical to Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Alienation is not a frequently invited guest into the study of the emotions. Perhaps the main reason for this is that alienation is mostly not regarded as an emotion – but rather as a political or philosophical notion. Alienation is a concept often associated with Marxist social science – a notion covering the experiences of the working-class in capitalist and industrial society. Moreover, in a more broad sense alienation is also associated with the coming of modern society as such – with its particular social, cultural, economic, religious, urban, architectural and a ranger of other characteristic features. However, as a more generalized feeling – not necessarily related to one’s class status and socio-economic position or to the rise of modernity – alienation may also point to a certain emotional experience. This chapter seeks to frame alienation within a sociological and social theoretical context. It does so by providing some insights into alienation as an emotional experience (although we do specifically not state that alienation is an emotion, but it an experience with certain emotional connotations). First, we will trace the roots of the idea of alienation in the work of the Romantic movement, G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Following this, we will dig into a number of studies that have pointed to alienation as an emotional experience in modern and late-modern society. Here we will look at the work of C. Wright Mills on white collar work life in modern large-scale organizations and Arlie R. Hochschild’s work on the commercialization of human feelings and emotion work. This leads us to the more recent work by Hartmut Rosa on acceleration and alienation before concluding the chapter with some microsociological insights by Erving Goffman on alienation from interaction. In this way, the chapter aspires to provide a broad overview of reflections on alienation.