Trinity Of Estrangement

The Trinity of Estrangement:
Alienation, Anomie, and Disenchantment as Psychological Reactions to Social Change

While thrust into a period of industrialization, Marx observed the spoils of modernizing society as workers (the proletariat) were forced to complete repetitive and monotonous work tasks. In response to his observations, he developed his theory of alienation. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes four distinct types of alienation: alienation from self, alienation from worker, alienation from the production process, and alienation of species-being. According to Marx, we are intrinsically defined as human by our ability to creatively produce our culture (Calhoun). So, in the tedium of repetitive,

The worker feels disconnected from his fellow workers because there is: competition between workers, no honest relationships and standard changes (“pushing up the pace”) due to the better work of others. Lastly, alienation from the production process occurs as workers must commit to an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive, motions that provide little psychological satisfaction. Workers become a small cog in a larger machine and their labor power is commodified and reduced to being marked by wages or another exchange value. Workers begin to feel estranged from the process of working itself which results in alienation from the production process. Although the worker is a self-realized, autonomous being, Marx recognized that the worker, as an economic entity, is bound to the will of the industrialist and that his goals and actions are thereby dictated are by the bourgeoisie. For Marx, the most pressing problem in modernity is the rise of the bourgeois class, who owns the means of production. Alienation is the psychological phenomenon that results from one not owning the means of production. And the only way to resolve this problem for Marx is by creating a classless society or a communist

Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental…” (Weber, 154)

Although Weber lauds rationalization because ideas begin to “gain systematic coherence and naturalistic consistency,” he also negatively views rationalization as it drives humans away from more romantic sentiments that transcend rationality (Weber, 45). Rationalization is seen as a product of modernity that is dualistically a benefit and a loss. All the theorists convey some sort of dismayed feeling in the face of social change. Marx’s feeling of alienation is founded on the advent of industrialization; Durkheim’s anomie is founded on shifts in social norms, and Weber’s disenchantment is founded on the rationalization of modern society. Although each term is nuanced for each particular situation — be it industrialization or norm change or rationalization — they all offer a disillusioned psychological reaction to a change in societal