Prelude to Alienation

Alienation is now itself an ideology. It is also a category into which many different kinds of experience are directed and in effect lost. Yet the basic emphasis, on an absence or loss of connection or community, remains central to all our thinking. The inquiry that still matters is into the formation of this structure of feeling: an inquiry that can alternatively be imaginative or historical.

One decisive period, for this kind of inquiry, is late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe, when the idea, as we now use it, was shaped. The story of the development through Hegel to Marx is well known. An essentially religious conception of man’s alienation from God by the Fall, and of his redemption through Christ, was generalized and transformed into a continuing historical process. The recovery of spiritual connection was then in turn transformed by a translation into human and social processes: the hitherto autonomous realm of spirit, in which both alienation and...