Alienation

Political alienation was introduced in political and social thought in the 19th century. From the beginning, the concept was broadly, ambiguously, and inconsistently used by scholars, mainly because of its ideological connotations and purposes. In Hegel's and Marx's analyses of civic and capitalist society, alienation meant a state or a process of human disconnectedness. According to Claude S. Fischer, “alienation is the state in which the actor fails to perceive a positive interdependence between himself and social relationships or other objectifications” (1974, p. 18). According to Melvin Seeman, the most important elements of this conceptualization are the following:

• 1.
  Alienation refers to a kind of “discrepancy”—something that is only implicitly entailed in the definition before.
• 2.
  The individual himself or herself or his or her social environment functions as a target or a source of alienation.
• 3.
  Alienation can be regarded as a state or as a process.
• 4.
  It can be considered as a social situation/relationship, an individual mental state, a social circumstance, or a sentiment.

These aspects are discussed below.

In contemporary social science, alienation was restated as an essential part of the critique of advanced capitalism by authors like Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Alain Touraine. Alienation, understood as an objective state or process, refers to a lack of socioeconomic resources, an underprivileged social status, an inferior position in a power relation, a lack of autonomy in labor relationships, or the degradation of objective life conditions. As a subjective feeling, it has several different meanings, such as a perceived loss of something considered valuable, a sense of inferiority, feelings of frustration, isolation, anomie, lack of control of one's own life conditions, or a perception of being manipulated by powerful others or by social structures. Drafted like this, the concept found its way in various scientific disciplines such as philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and political science. Manifold social and psychic/attitudinal states and processes were subsumed under the heading of alienation, ranging from physical or mental illness to specific attitudes toward politics, such as political distrust or feelings of belonging to a discriminated social group (class, ethnicity, etc.). In modern political science, alienation was used more narrowly and referred to negative or critical political attitudes often leading to deviant political behavior. The topics that have been most prominent in empirical political research on alienation are analyses of various dimensions of the concept and its measurement and analyses of the impact of feelings of alienation on individuals' political behavior, particularly political apathy and participation in protest activities.

Other than the view of alienation as a general, diffuse disposition, the term was used as a multidimensional concept in empirical research. In this regard, Seeman was the leading scholar proposing a distinction of the subsequent six different dimensions of alienation, which were primarily understood as mental states:

• 1.
  Powerlessness refers to an individual's perception of low self-esteem or inferiority in political life or to a sense of low control of one's own life conditions and the political circumstances one lives in. People feeling politically powerless think that they do not have any opportunity to make their voices heard in political life and to influence the conduct of public affairs. Some scholars distinguish between personal and political powerlessness, with the first set of attitudes describing the (lack of) ability to master one's own life and the second set referring to the perceived (lack of) capacity to exert some degree of influence on politics. The feeling of powerlessness comes quite close to the sense of political (in)efficacy or subjective (in)competence, which are much more familiar concepts in political science. It was often measured by using the ANES (American National Election Studies) standard items on political efficacy. The I-E (Internal-External Locus of Control) Scale developed by Rotter is the most common alternative measure.
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• 2.
  Meaninglessness has to do with the individuals' sense of being able to comprehend political events, situations, and decisions and with the individuals' assessment of the impact of politics on their own lives. In short, people suffering from meaninglessness are cognitively disconnected from social and political life. This attitude resembles to a certain degree the cognitive component of powerlessness and thus is often interpreted as a facet of political (in)efficacy.
• 3.
  Normlessness as the third subdimension of alienation is largely synonymous to anomie and signifies the expectation that only the use of socially unapproved means will lead to the achievement of given goals. This expectation is due to the perception that social norms regulating individual and collective behavior do not perform their function any longer. Hence, political leaders do not react in a calculable and responsive way to citizens' demands. Those citizens who are well aware of this situation will rely on illegal or illegitimate forms of political behavior. In the practice of empirical research, normlessness is often equated to distrust and measured by the ANES standard items on trust in government. Alternative scales such as Dean's scale of normlessness and McClosky and Schaar's scale of anomie were also used in empirical research.
• 4.
  Self-estrangement seen as a failure of self-realization is the classical master theme of philosophical work on alienation and originated in the Marxian analysis of working conditions and relations. Accordingly, a lack of intrinsic fulfillment in work or an incapability of controlling one's working conditions is regarded as the core element of self-estrangement. In widening this narrow conceptualization, some scholars proposed regarding self-estrangement as an individual's engagement in activities that are not appreciated as intrinsically rewarding or are considered in authentic. In empirical political science research, this dimension is not particularly important.
• 5.
  Cultural estrangement overlaps to a certain degree with normlessness and self-estrangement. It means the individual's rejection of commonly held values in society, while normlessness is seen as a rejection of more specific social norms. Again, the concept does not play a major role in empirical research, despite the important role attributed to value consensus as a source of social and political integration.
• 6.
  Social isolation, as the sixth subdimension of alienation, was originally seen as a lack of social relationships rather than as a mental state. In practice, however, both aspects cannot really be separated from each other. Lack or loss of social ties does not become a serious problem for individuals unless it will be perceived and assessed. Thus, social isolation signifies not only a whole set of behaviors and attitudes, a sense of being excluded or lonely, a lack of identity, a feeling of being rejected or discriminated as a member of a particular social group but also deviating behavior and lack of integration into social networks. Social isolation is used as an explanatory concept in some community studies, but it is clearly less influential in empirical research than powerlessness and normlessness.

Empirical social science research on alienation reached a point of culmination in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was mainly embedded in two specific research contexts. The first one was the theory of mass society, which was a fashionable idea to many social scientists in that period. The second impetus came from empirical research on political protest activities and movements, which used the notions of alienation, cynicism, [Page 59]and subjective deprivation as the main explanatory concepts. The approach to alienation in analyses of mass society was far broader than in empirical research on political protest. As outlined by Seeman, the general research question of the former referred to the relationship of social change to political alienation, while the latter focused on various forms of behavior induced by feelings of alienation. An integration of these three sets of variables (structure, attitude, behavior) was largely missing in empirical research on alienation. An overview of the assumed links between the respective variables is outlined in Table 1.

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