Alienation in a Four Factor World*

Daniel Silver
The University of Toronto

[Forthcoming in The Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior]

*Daniel Silver, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Ave, Toronto, ON
M5S 2J4, dsilver@utsc.utoronto.ca

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Alienation in a Four Factor World

Abstract

This paper aims to reconstruct the concept of alienation as a live topic for active social
theorizing. Joining Marxian and Simmelian ideas, it provides a multi-dimensional, formal, and
synthetic theory of alienation. The paper develops a set of theoretical tools for articulating formal
elements of action that make alienation possible, without giving conceptual priority to alienation
in the sphere of production, or within that sphere to the alienation of labor. These tools make it
possible to derive classical notions of alienation as specific, contingent combinations of multiple
elements, theorizing them as concrete socio-historical configurations of a broader universe of
possibilities. They also organize systematic reflection on various forms and relations of
alienation; not only those between for instance labor and capital, but also among all four factors
of production: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. The paper accordingly develops an
original, multi-dimensional theorization of alienation for a complex, pluralistic world.

Keywords: alienation, Simmel, Marx, theory, action theory,

This paper aims to reconstruct the concept of alienation as a live topic for active social

theorizing.1 It seeks to recombine and expand elements of classical alienation theory to produce a

more multi-dimensional, formal, and comprehensive theory of alienation, geared toward the

pluralistic contemporary social world. While classical Marxian alienation theory provides

important resources for this endeavor, it is also limited in crucial respects. Most notably its

essentialism and reliance on the logic of dichotomies restrict its adaptability to the present. To

develop a new conceptualization, this paper brings certain Simmelian sensibilities to bear on the

Marxian formulation, such as pluralism and perspectivism, while drawing from Jaeggi’s (2014)

path-breaking philosophical work.

Alienation is a crucial term in the social theoretical lexicon that has done important work

and can continue to do so, if it can be refashioned into a multi-dimensional tool for

understanding and analyzing our pluralistic contemporary scene. Though in recent decades

alienation theory has been relatively marginalized among social theorists, worries about

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alienation of some form or another persist, under various guises. We hear concerns about how

contemporary flexible ‘knowledge work’ promotes ‘the corrosion of character’ (Sennett, 2011)

and a split between ‘thinking and doing’ (Crawford, 2009); how homogeneous urban

environments produce experiences of ‘placelessness’ (Relph, 2008); how fragmenting

communities heighten political disaffection (Alexander, 2006); how ‘uncertainty’ and a ‘more

knowledgeable public’ yield a ‘malaise of modernity’ generating widespread ‘disenchantment’

with institutions (Guppy and Davies, 1999); and much more. There now exists for example a

robust and fast-growing interdisciplinary discourse on boredom (Gardiner and Haladyn, 2016).

Even as such expressions and observations of malaise persist, alienation theory has

receded from the center of sociological theorizing. This is in part because sociological theorists

have not developed a suitably flexible conception of alienation, one capable of dealing with these

myriad, contingent alienations. This paper aims to develop such a conception of alienation,

grounded in an acknowledgment of contingency and pluralism: there is no single ultimate source

of alienation, and alienation may emerge through multiple combinations of diverse factors.

To develop this model, the paper proceeds in four main sections. The first briefly

summarizes the vicissitudes of alienation theory, suggesting that in addition to considering

contextual factors feeding into its waxing and waning, it is worth reengaging the inner

assumptions and concepts of traditional alienation theory itself that have restricted its currency.

The second section outlines three general principles for moving forward, theoretically: formalize

substantive concepts to shift from ‘what’ questions about the ultimate nature of human being and

motivation to ‘how’ questions about ways of acting that may be more or less alienated regardless

of their specific substantive content; expand the scope of alienation theory to make it more multi-

dimensional – in the sphere of production to incorporate more factors of production (beyond

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labor and capital), and in general action theory to incorporate more dimensions of action (beyond

personal effort and utilitarian calculations); bring key elements of the Marxian and Simmelian

approaches to alienation into productive dialog, in particular joining Marxian emphasis on

integration and separation, relations between individuals and groups, and production, with

Simmelian emphasis on growth and ossification, relations between subjects and objects, and a

non-reductive pluralism.

The third section puts these principles to theoretical work, building from the classical

Marxian formulation. The aim here is not so much to produce a new and finally correct exegesis

of Marx’s ideas but to take well-known Marxian concepts as vehicles for illustrating the

theoretical fertility of the approach developed in the previous sections. Accordingly, this section

reformulates some core Marxian concepts central to the tradition of alienation theory as forms of

self-world relationships; expands the purview of alienation theory from two to four factors of

production; and synthesizes the concepts of integration and growth to generate four analytical

dimensions of action that may become alienated. With these conceptual tools, various forms of

alienation may be derived, such as powerlessness, indifference, disorientation, and reification.

The fourth section introduces a diagrammatic device – ‘the wheel of alienation’ – for

systematically and experimentally theorizing about alienation from multiple perspectives and at

various levels of generality so as to map out the contours of its possibility space. The conclusion

reflects on the implications of this approach for building an agenda for advancing alienation

theory and research.

The vicissitudes of alienation theory, a brief sketch

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 Alienation in various guises seems to always be with us. But alienation theory waxes and

wanes. Alienation was a central theme for many of the giants of modern social thought.

Rousseau charted its contours, even if he did not use the term. Hegel used the concept explicitly,

and Feuerbach integrated it into his religious anthropology. Marx produced the foundational

statement for modern social theory in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,

followed by Simmel in The Philosophy of Money. Durkheim and Weber discussed similar

phenomena under the headings of disenchantment and anomie. Post-Marxian critical theorists

such as Lukacs, Adorno, and Horkheimer famously carried forward the tradition of alienation

theory, as did Parsons and Merton. Alienation was also a major theme in existentialism, often

with Kierkegaard as classical inspiration, and among conservative and communitarian social

critics (cf. Oldenquist, 1992).

The theme of alienation was also vigorously pursued in mainstream empirical sociology

in the 1960s and 1970s, led by Melvin Seeman (Seeman, 1957, 1967, 1975, 1983). During this

period, theoretical and methodological discussions of alienation within the discipline of

sociology became highly elaborated (e.g. Geyer and Schweitzer, 1981; Israel, 1971; Ollman,

1976; Schacht, 1971; see also Debord, 1994; Lefebvre, 1968). These discussions sometimes

became flashpoints for broader debates, for instance about positivism vs. critical social theory

(e.g. Harvey et al., 1983).

Yet by and large, since the early 1980s alienation has become a less central theme among

sociologists and social theorists. 2 In 1983, Seeman wrote ‘the analytic attraction of the concept of

alienation seems similarly to have been exhausted… In fact, one senses a certain antiquated air

surrounding its current use’ (Seeman, 1983, p. 171). This declining centrality was not restricted

to the more positivist and social-psychological stream of research that Seeman had pioneered.

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Jaeggi noted a similar shift in the continental critical theory tradition, ‘Not only has alienation

nearly disappeared from today’s philosophical literature, it also has hardly any place any longer

in the vocabulary of contemporary cultural critique’ (Jaeggi, 2014, p. ix). To be sure, some have

kept the flame alive at the margins of the discipline (e.g. Geyer and Heinz, 1992; Langman and

Kalekin-Fishman, 2009, 2006), but in general it seems clear that alienation has been sidelined as

a topic for creative theorizing and empirical research. Indeed, Yuill (2011) found that just three

articles on alienation had been published between 1978 and 2011 in three leading US journals

(Yuill, 2011, p. 109), whereas in previous years alienation had been a major topic in such

venues. Similarly, the British Journal of Sociology has not published an article with ‘alienation’

in its title since 1979.

Why did alienation theory wane? There is no single clear answer. Yuill (2011) and Jaeggi

(2014) suggest several plausible factors. Given the generally Marxian project with which

alienation theory has been traditionally associated, the various political setbacks Marxism

suffered since the 1980s likely played a role. Within Marxism, Althusserian anti-humanism and

analytical Marxists sidelined existentialist themes. Postmodernists (e.g. Baudrillard, 1994)

attacked the idea of an underlying human essence that could be alienated by certain working

conditions (cf. Callinicos, 2006). Heavy industry declined, post-industrialism and consumerism

grew. Alienation theory seemed geared to the former, while the latter issued in notions such as

flows (Urry, 2000) and networks (Castells, 1996). At the same time, the study of work

increasingly migrated from sociology departments to business schools, where research examined

topics such as how to manage stress and balance work and life, rather than pushing to deeper

forces that generate stressful or imbalanced lives in the first place (Strangleman, 2005).

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 These and possibly other factors may have coalesced to push alienation theory into the

background. But this does not mean alienation itself disappeared. Rising inequality, routinized

workplaces, empty consumerism, social isolation, the ‘corrosion of character’ (Sennett, 2011),

homogenous places, political polarization, institutional cynicism, hyper-cognitive knowledge

work, and similar phenomena have been highlighted by authors seeking to demonstrate a ‘hidden

continuity’ with alienation of yore (Jaeggi 2014; Langman and Kalekin-Fishman, 2009; Schacht,

1994, p. 2) and spark renewed intellectual interest in the topic.

Contextual factors may well play a role in the waning and waxing and waning of

alienation theory. For sociological theory, however, it is worth considering the matter from a

point of view internal to alienation theory itself. Indeed, alienation theory became rather

moribund after its mid-century zenith. Seeman’s positivist stream was mostly atheoretical from

the start, concerned with assembling and distilling common uses of the term to build analytical

dimensions (powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, etc.) and empirical indexes, the specific

formulations of which had dubious connection to their theoretical source material (Harvey et al.,

1983). The theoretical aspect of this stream was largely devoted to seeking abstract covering

definitions to guide empirical research (e.g. Fischer, 1976), rather than to deriving analytical

concepts from a coherent model of action. For its part, as work in heavy industry became less

widespread, the critical theory stream primarily sought to extend classical Marxian alienation

critiques of modern society to new arenas, focusing on technology, consumerism, and identity

politics (Erickson, 1986; Langman and Kalekin-Fishman, 2009). Marx was taken for granted, as

were the basic anthropological and action-theoretical assumptions on which the classical

Marxian theory of alienation was based.

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 For these sorts of reasons, the most thoroughgoing recent philosophical treatment of

alienation aims ‘neither to update the problem of alienation by looking at its contemporary

manifestations nor to discuss alienation in a way that remains within the confines of an already

defined theoretical framework’ (Jaeggi, 2014; p. xx). To reconstruct a moribund concept it is not

enough to simply dust it off and put it back to work: a new application requires a new

articulation. Yet neither should we abandon classical insights, which have profoundly plumbed

the depths and dynamics of the topic. This paper pursues a pragmatic middle course, aimed at

transforming yet preserving classical meanings by engaging them as living occasions for creative

theorizing and model building rather than as fixed orthodoxy or established conventions, to be

merely updated or mined.

Toward a conceptual reconstruction: formal, multi-dimensional, dialogical

As a first step toward this re-articulation, consider three general orienting principles:

formality, multi-dimensionality, and dialogical cross-fertilization.

Formality. Jaeggi (2014) argues that one of the major stumbling blocks of traditional

alienation theory was its reliance on a substantive conception of human nature. In the Marxian

stream, this conception was associated with an anthropology of labor, which continued in

prominent mainstream sociological research. For example, in his 1985 Presidential Address to

the American Sociological Association on ‘Work and Alienation,’ Kai Erickson urged

sociologists to reengage with Marxian alienation theory.

‘the producer, then, and the thing he produces, are of the same flesh. Or at least that is the
way nature intended it to be. In the age of industrialization and capitalism,
however…developments have conspired to disturb that natural arrangement’ (Erickson,
1986, p. 1).

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This is a striking example of how conceptual pressure built into traditional alienation theory

pushes one in a teleological direction: to criticize some state as alienating can seem to require

envisioning such a state as a departure from some natural arrangement, and to conceive nature as

an entity capable of intentions. While the external and contextual factors cited above likely

played some role in the decline of alienation theory, reliance on an outmoded teleological and

essentialist anthropology poses a distinctively theoretical obstacle to the on-going relevance of

the concept.

A theoretical problem requires a theoretical solution. Jaeggi identifies a number of

theoretical problems that this sort of essentialism produces, and points toward some solutions

(see especially Jaeggi 2014, pp. 2, 15, 27; for critiques of essentialism in general, see Emirbayer,

1987; Fuchs, 2009). For instance, it assumes we know a priori what humans’ genuine or ultimate

needs are, such that certain social relationships may distort or thwart them. It also assumes a self

with a transparent, unified, and self-sufficient inner life, which is then blocked from being

realized by an external agency. Learning and growth through experiences and interchanges with

the world and others become incomprehensible as anything other than inherently alienating, as

do the complex multi-dimensional selves that characterize complex social orders.

Drawing from Ernst Tugendhat and writing in a broadly Kantian vein, Jaeggi argues that

alienation theory can overcome its essentialist impulses by building from a formal theory of

action (see also Rae, 2010). ‘How, not what’ becomes the centerpiece. That is, instead of asking

what people truly want or need, we ask about the formal conditions under which action is

possible. For instance, to be able to act, an agent must have some sort of command or disposal

over her will. Arrangements (such as compulsion) that distort this capacity and its attendant

conditions – such as the capacity to creatively incorporate aspects of the environment or learn

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from past experiences – may be deemed alienating without any substantive implications about

what, specifically, people should be striving for, or what ‘nature’ intends them to be striving for.

Such an account is formal and immanent. It is formal because it concerns the ‘how’ not

the ‘what’ of action, and involves identifying not natural or essential goals or aims but rather

certain ways of relating in one’s actions to oneself and the world. It is immanent because it

locates the conditions of successful action in action itself. Failed or debilitated action is action

that somehow ceases to be action, in for instance loss of meaningful orientation and

commitment, the ability to adapt to on-going situations, or take on the role of others.3 ‘Instances

of alienation can be understood as obstructions of volition and thereby – formulated more

generally – as obstructions in the relations individuals have to themselves and the world’ (Jaeggi,

2014, p. 34). Accordingly, building on Jaeggi’s insights implies that a first guiding principle for

reconstructing a sociological theory of alienation is to formalize its central concepts and ground

them in conditions immanent to action theory.

Multi-dimensionality. The precise scope of Marx’s theory of alienation has always been

difficult to determine. On one hand, Marx clearly has the industrial workplace in mind, and

within it, the alienation of labor at the hands of capitalists. On the other, owing to his Hegelian

and Feuerbachian heritage, Marx takes a much more expansive view, associating alienation with

the general dynamic whereby human creations take on a life of their own, and control the fates of

their creators. This latter point of view carries the process of alienation out of the workplace and

into theology and culture. It resonates more with Simmel’s overall orientation (Arditi, 1996;

Canto-Mila, 2015), and has been an inspiration for post-Marxian writers seeking to extend the

notion of alienation into areas such as culture and consumption (Langman 2004).

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 Yet this expansive impulse can be difficult to carry out because it can clash with another

Marxian tendency: dichotomization (Baldamus, 1976; Parsons, 1967). This tendency is most

evident in Marx’s reduction of the field of production to a two-way conflict between labor and

capital (discussed in more detail below), explicitly pushing into the background other factors of

production – most notably land – that his predecessors such as Smith and Ricardo had

foregrounded. The logic of dichotomies make it difficult to countenance processes and

relationships that fall outside them.

For alienation theory, overcoming the logic of dichotomies for a more multi-dimensional

approach has a twofold implication. First it means not restricting analysis of alienation within the

sphere of production to the confrontation between capital and labor. Second, it is necessary to

carry this same spirit of multi-dimensionality into the more general and formal theory of action

on which alienation theory relies. Here the general point is less about the specific dimensions and

more about the theoretical value of multi-dimensionality. By abandoning the logic of

dichotomies we gain a theoretical foothold for expanding the scope of the alienation concept

beyond the narrow confines of labor and capital.

Dialogical cross-fertilization. Marx’s great humanistic statement about the alienation of

labor has provided the platform for the vast bulk of alienation theory, and any fresh theory of

alienation must start here. Yet here, as in other cases (Levine, 1995), new theoretical vistas may

be opened through placing classical theories into productive dialogue with one another. Georg

Simmel’s reflections on alienation, primarily in his Philosophy of Money but also in his later

work (e.g. ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture,’ ‘The Conflict in Culture,’ and The View of

Life), provide a valuable fund of ideas that may enrich the Marxian tradition.

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 Poggi (1993, ch. 7) provides perhaps the most incisive analysis of the overlaps and

divergences between Marx and Simmel’s conceptions of alienation. Both share the major topoi

in alienation discussions: the autonomization of human products (taking on a life of their own,

frustrating the wills of their creators) and the metaphor of inversion: inversion of means and

ends, subjects and objects, causes and effects.

Yet Marx and Simmel differ in key areas of their alienation theories. Marx seems to tie

alienation as such to the socio-historical moment of capitalism, and views a post-capitalist world

as a world without alienation; for Simmel alienation is inherent to the human condition, even if it

is intensified in a money economy. For Marx alienation tends to be clear-cut, as producers either

expropriate workers or they do not; for Simmel alienation is more ambiguous; it is always

possible, but never necessary – a visit to the theatre may be alienating, but it need not. Marx

highlighted alienation in relations between persons and groups (primarily workers and

capitalists), Simmel looked to subjects losing touch with objects (primarily of cultivation). Marx

tended to derive other forms of alienation from economic alienation, Simmel refused to give

economic affairs conceptual priority. Where they did highlight alienation in the economic

domain, Marx highlighted production, whereas Simmel featured exchange. Marx’s theory of

alienation was part of a prophetic visionary revolutionary program geared toward a society free

of alienation; Simmel prized more individualistic values of scholarly attainment, intellectual

integrity, and aesthetic sensitivity, and saw alienation as a challenge to persons’ abilities to

comprehend and appreciate their existences. Marx tended to diagnose alienation as a symptom of

some kind of disintegration or separation (Schacht, 1994, p. 38); Simmel featured obstacles to

creativity, vitality, and growth (Levine, 2004).

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 Rather than treat these differences as a contest for singular theoretical supremacy, we can

take them as pointing toward opportunities for fruitful theoretical cross-fertilization (Camic and

Joas, 2004). Particularly promising are aspects of the Simmelian conception that aid in

reimagining the Marxian framework in more formal and multi-dimensional terms. 4 Here

Simmel’s non-reductive pluralism and perspectivism are crucial (Levine, 1995, p. 304). These

orienting principles enable us to avoid essentialism by approaching alienation from multiple

points of view without prioritizing any one over the others – for instance, from a pluralistic point

of view, as we will see, alienation occurs not only in tensions between capital and labor, but also

in tensions between multiple factors of production: capital-land, labor-entrepreneurship, labor-

land, and so on. Equally promising is the prospect of joining the Marxian focus on inter-group

processes and the Simmelian concern with objects becoming closed off from subjects, and

integrating alienation as separation and disintegration with alienation as the loss of vitality and

creativity.

Building a conceptual took-kit for alienation theory

With these orienting principles in mind, let us return to Marx’s classical statement as a

starting point for applying them. Consider first Marx’s famous discussion of alienation as a four-

fold process: under capitalist conditions, workers are alienated from their products, from the

labor process, from their fellows, and from their species being. The general thrust of Marx’s

account is well known and need not concern us here. The value of the Marxian categories in the

present context comes in providing widely shared terms for putting to theoretical work the

orientating principles elaborated above.

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 Marx’s four-fold alienation: from what to how. Marx’s portrait of the alienated worker is

closely tied to industrial conditions and to his anthropology of labor, as discussed above. But it is

not difficult to see in his four-fold picture of the alienation of labor the seeds of a more formal

account of self-world relationships not tied to any specific content. That is, in the spirit of Jaeggi,

Tugendhat, and Rae, we can convert Marx’s four-fold alienation from a theory of what alienation

consists in substantively (its essential content) to a theory of how alienation disturbs ways of

relating self and world (its form).

Table 1 summarizes a recasting of Marx’s four-fold alienation in formal terms.

Table 1. Marx’s four-fold alienation recast as forms of self-world relations

Agentic objects Self-self process

Self-other fellows

Non-agentic objects Self-artifact product

Self-environment species-being

The far-right column lists Marx’s basic categories of alienation: alienation from process, fellows,

product, and species-being. The left column organizes these into two major groups, according to

whether they are oriented toward agentic objects. Marx’s categories seem to be implicitly

structured along these lines: workers become alienated from agentic objects, namely their own

activity and that of other workers, but they also become alienated from non-agentic objects,

namely their products and species-being.

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 The middle column summarizes this pattern in formal terms. ‘Self’ is the common thread

to all forms of alienation, whatever the object. Alienation always involves some failure or

disturbance of a self’s capacity to lead its own life (Jaeggi, 2014, p. 22). Some component in an

action process becomes inaccessible and alien, an impediment rather than stimulus, and the loss

of power to act is intertwined with an evacuation of meaning.

But ‘leading a life’ involves the self in a number of relations. First and foremost, with

itself, but also with other selves, with artifacts that extend its capacities to act in the world, and

with a facilitative environment. For instance, a self that is alienated from itself has become rigid,

me but not me, an alien force that seems to push me to do and be things that are not ‘really’ me –

whatever that happens to be. A self that has become alienated from others has lost the desire for

their desire and recognition, they become tools to be used or manipulated or mere obstacles

rather than sources of mutual affirmation and esteem and respect. A self that has become

alienated from its artifacts has lost touch with them as extensions and enhancements of its

capacities to act beyond itself in the world, they become instead impediments and frustrations. A

self that has become alienated from its environment does not experience it as a world that

demands and sustains growth in perceptiveness, intelligence, sympathy, and creativity – a loving

world (cf. Lear, 1990) – but rather as a disorienting field of enmity, envy, destructiveness, and,

perhaps worst of all, dulling indifference. Thus Marx’s conceptualization has the seeds of a more

formal theory of alienation grounded in diverse ways in which action relates self to world. 5

A four-factor world. To be sure, shifting from Marx’s vivid concepts to more formal

terms can seem to take some of the blood out of a conceptual scheme rooted in a concrete image

of the industrial worker confronting the rapacious boss. But this loss is compensated by the

theoretical gains it generates, in opening up alienation theory to a wider range of potential

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objects and grounding this transfer in the common forms of action and relation they may exhibit,

rather than in sharing a set of substantive grievances necessarily similar in content to those Marx

found.

Nevertheless, surely part of the power of Marx’s original formulation is that he situated

his humanistic portrayal of the self-denied-itself in the context of concrete groups and agents

interacting. Yet in this portrayal Marx largely restricted his vision to the confrontation between

capital and labor. A contemporary theory of alienation must widen the lens while retaining the

capacity to apply to concrete and recognizable agents. To do this, let us stay with Marx in the

sphere of production and turn to the question of what generic forms of activity production

involves, and how those forms may become alienating.

Marx’s great predecessors, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, typically spoke of three not

two factors of production: land, labor, and capital. They associated each with distinct types of

proceeds – land with rent, labor with wages, capital with profit. They also associated each factor

with distinct social types: land with aristocrats and peasants, labor with wage workers, capital

with industrialists.

Smith and Ricardo’s accounts of the distinct contribution of each factor to productive

work are full of puzzles and complexities (cf. Gee, 1981; Lackman, 1976), but the underlying

intuitions are clear enough. Work performed by more skilled, industrious, and energetic workers

will be better than work performed by lower quality workers; this is the contribution of labor.

Work performed with bigger and better tools will be more productive than work without such

tools; this is the contribution of capital. Work performed in a fertile environment will be more

productive than work performed in a barren one; this is the contribution of land. Early

formulations tended to treat land in narrow agricultural terms, but later theorists, especially

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Alfred Marshall and then following him Talcott Parsons and Neil Smelser (2005), treated the

‘fertility’ of land in much broader cultural terms, as environmental situations that enhance the

productivity and abilities of those who enter into them (see also Mei, 2017). Later theorists –

most notably Marshall and Joseph Schumpeter – added a fourth factor, entrepreneurship, which

operates according to a similar logic. Work performed with the aid of entrepreneurial intelligence

and creativity will be more innovative and adaptive than work undertaken with a less creative

spirit.

Marx studied Smith and Ricardo in great depth, and was well aware of their theories of

land and rent. He worked in his later years to integrate a theory of land and rent into Capital, but

never seems to have been able to do so in a satisfactory way. Geographers, most notably David

Harvey in Limits to Capital, have endeavored to reconstruct and extend Marx’s thoughts on the

topic, but even Harvey calls Marx’s ideas ‘tentative thoughts set down in the process of

discovery’ (Harvey, 1982, p. 330).6 Marx’s early statement on alienation directly follows a

summary of theories of rent, the outcome of which was to assimilate land into capital. ‘The final

consequence is thus the abolition of the distinction between capitalist and landowner, so that

there remain altogether only two classes of the population — the working class and the class of

capitalists’ (Marx, 1959, p. 25).

Marx had any number of reasons for making this reduction of a complex field to two

principal antagonists. Politically, he wanted to ‘sharpen the contradictions’ of modernity to a

fever pitch, where a final confrontation of the latent struggle defining all hitherto history could

come to the fore. Philosophically, the dialectical-Hegelian structure of his argument requires two

opposing polarities that clash before they are reconciled at a higher level (Kolakowski, 1978, pp.

130, 152). And from an economic-technological point of view, Marx arguably believed that

17
capital was well on its way to absorbing other factors of production such as land, so that if land

(and its characteristic social types, aristocrats and peasants) appeared to be a separate dimension

in economic life, that was only because capital had been less extensively applied to agriculture

(Marx, 1967, pp. 760, 765; see also Howard and King, 1985, pp. 147-148).

A singular focus on the stark conflict between capital and labor may have been

appropriate in Marx’s time, but not today. We live in a multiple factor world that accordingly

may generate multiple forms of alienation. The economic importance of place has only grown.

Where people work is a crucial factor in their productivity and success (Currid, 2007; Glaeser,

2011; Harvey, 2009; Moretti, 2012). Critical geographers are giving renewed attention to the fact

that ‘land is not the same as capital but has unique attributes as a factor of production which

require a separate theorization’ (Ward and Aalbers, 2016; see also Mei, 2017), just as urban

political economists had previously recognized that capitalists, land owners and developers, and

workers often represent distinct interests (Logan and Molotch, 1987). The greatest driver of

inequality in recent decades is not the wealth of industrial capitalists but urban land prices

(Rognlie, 2014). Entrepreneurship has become just as central. The creative class is ascendant in

post-industrial societies (Florida, 2004; Bell, 1976), and does not necessarily align politically

with traditional economic elites (Markusen, 2006). Creativity has been institutionalized and

internalized as a vital personal, social and economic quality, such that the contemporary means

of production are also lodged in the creative intelligence, analytical acumen, and aesthetic

sophistication that generate new and interesting products (Lloyd, 2010; Reich, 2002).

The importance of all four factors to contemporary work is evident. Less noted, though,

is the clear implication of this importance for alienation theory. Since work involves multiple

factors of production, they all may be alienated by and from one another. A multi-dimensional

18
theory of alienation is therefore required. For instance, just as places can enhance one’s abilities,

there can be place alienation: living in a sterile environment that dulls one’s productivity or

creativity or even more profoundly does not permit one to become the kind of person one has the

potential to be. Lefebvre pioneered theories of place alienation, but as Yuill (2011, p. 107) notes

‘the late translation of his work into English has, however, limited his influence outside France

until fairly recently.’ For their part, phenomenological geographers have documented place

alienation as the opposite of the ‘sense of place’ (Relph, 2008). Likewise, just as there can be

place alienation, observers of the contemporary workplace have remarked upon what we might

call entrepreneurial alienation, for example when the free-flow of ideas comes to be experienced

as a debilitating split between thinking and doing, head and hand (Crawford, 2009). In these and

other ways alienation is not only the province of labour’s struggle with capital but a possibility

for all participants in the productive process.

From types to dimensions. Building conceptual infrastructure for systematically

organizing reflection on multiple possible forms of alienation among all four factors is the major

goal of this paper. To do so, however, it is necessary to move from treating them as types to

treating them as analytical dimensions. The theoretical advantage of analytical dimensions over

type concepts is additional scope, precision, and flexibility that permits the discernment of unity

amidst diversity, continuity amidst change, configurations out of combinations. This was one of

Parsons’ major critiques of Max Weber in The Structure of Social Action (1949): ‘The Protestant

Ethic’ identifies a narrowly circumscribed historical social type. But analytical dimensions, such

as ‘commitment to work,’ can travel, and be found in various degrees in many persons, groups,

and situations. Marshall made a similar point about rent. One of his key conceptual innovations

was to treat rent as an analytical element present in all objects of value, rather than as strictly

19
identical with the physical earth: ‘even the rent of land is seen, not as a thing by itself, but as the

leading species of a large genus’ (Marshall, 1892).

A similar move helps expand the scope of alienation theory beyond the sphere of

production to lay the ground for a more general model of alienation. The four factors are

specifications of formal analytical elements present in all activity, and to varying degrees in

individuals and groups. That dimension of action that arises from its environmental situatedness

is in the sphere of production its ‘land’ component, and where this component predominates, we

may observe in greater degrees a ‘landed’ temperament, traditionally associated with aristocrats

and peasants but perhaps accentuated in different groups today. In the domain of production,

entrepreneurship identifies the capacity for creative problem solving, and individuals or groups

where this aspect predominates are more entrepreneurial. Likewise, the ‘capitalist’ moment in

production involves a generic form of action: accumulating instruments or means of action and

deploying them to enhance the capacity to achieve one’s ends. Finally, the ‘laborious’ aspect of

work is a specific form of a general dimension of action: the motivational effort one pours into

an activity (Baldamus, 2013). All four may be present in the same individual, even if the

distribution across individuals and groups varies.

Shifting from types to dimensions places alienation theory at a higher level of generality

that embodies the injunction, outlined above, to move from ‘what’ to ‘how.’ Capital, labor, land,

and entrepreneurship become specific incarnations within the sphere of production of more

formal ways of acting not necessarily geared toward a specific substantive set of goals or ideal

states. These capacities may operate in or beyond the workplace, and by articulating their

potential combinations and clashes we can both abandon traditional essentialist assumptions of

alienation theory and produce a more general theory capable of elaborating the dynamics of

20
alienation in production as specifications of a more general problematic that may apply to other

domains.

The fusion of integration and growth. The discussion so far has developed concepts for

articulating a) ways of relating to oneself and to one’s world that may be realized or disturbed

and b) formal aspects or components of an action process that may become alienated by and

from one another, namely, labor (effort), capital (means), land (environment), entrepreneurship

(creativity). To be able to combine these into a single synthetic model, another step is necessary.

We need to examine what it means to be alienated.

The traditional Marxian framework tends to highlight alienation as disintegration or

separation (Fischer, 1976; Schacht, 1994, p. 38). In order to realize itself, the self needs to

identify with its products, its activity, its fellows, and its environment. When the self is separated

and disintegrated from these, they come to stand before it not as aspects of itself or essential aids

to realizing its capacities. Instead they become foreign entities. Thus disintegration makes the

self a stranger to itself.

But integration and disintegration are not enough on their own to comprehend alienation.

One can be separated from something without being alienated from it. Likewise, integration can

itself be a source of alienation: one loses oneself in the accepted conventions of ‘what one does’,

a particular form of alienation highlighted by Martin Heidegger in his analysis of ‘das Man’ in

Being and Time. Hence Rae (2010) points to the distinction between antagonistic and integrative

authenticity, where the former involves taking a critical stand on taken-for-granted customs and

thought-patterns. At the same time, hyper-criticism can leave one unmoored and adrift, without

the anchors needed to realize oneself in effective worldly actions, a form of alienation critique –

rootlessness – that tends to be associated with conservative critiques of modern society.

21
 To supplement the ‘integrationist’ conception of alienation we can turn to Simmel.

Though Simmel like Marx did emphasize separation and disconnection as crucial to alienation,

Simmel more prominently featured growth and creativity, especially in his later vitalistic

writings.7 Expansive and creative life over and against rigid form became the major ‘conflict in

culture’ (Simmel, 1968). In this conception, life is both ‘more life’ and ‘more than life’ (Simmel,

2010). Life as ‘more life’ means that life is growth and expansion; life as ‘more than life’ means

that life is creative self-transcendence, reaching out to generate new forms of living, but never

being completely satisfied by them. 8 Where life contracts, shrinks, and ceases to expand or

overcome its current forms, it is dead or dying. Accordingly, the self that becomes stuck,

incapable of growth and creative self-transformation, has lost touch with itself as part of a vital

living process. Thus if integration and growth are crucial aspects of what it means for a self to

actively realize itself in the world, disintegration and stultification are the seeds of alienation.

Because integration and growth are both simultaneously at stake in self-realization and

alienation, it is necessary to treat them as interacting rather than atomistically independent

processes. The realization of self and its alienating disturbance occurs at the intersection of

growth and integration. We can conceptualize this synthesis with the help of a four-fold table, as

in Table 2.

22
 Table 2. Synthesizing integration and growth

Integration
Active Receptive
Growth

More Means/Capital,
Effort/Labor, indifference
(expanding) disempowerment
More-than Environment/Land,
Creativity/Entrepreneurship, reification
(self-transcending) disorientation

Table 2 crosses growth and integration to produce four ways they can intersect, both at

the level of general action theory and in the domain of production. Following Simmel, it divides

‘growth’ into two: ‘more’ and ‘more-than,’ or the expansive and self-transcending aspects of

vital growth. Following Simmel again (Simmel, 1997), it divides ‘integration’ into two, active

and receptive. The active side of integration refers to what Simmel called ‘subjective culture’:

reaching out toward an object and striving to identify with it. The receptive side refers to what

Simmel called ‘objective culture’: the experience of objects as open to or closed off from such

striving – for instance a fitting tool that is ready to be put to work, asks to be handled, in contrast

to one that seems unsuited to the task at hand, or a collaborator who is open and responsive to

one’s thoughts and desire.

The four inner cells show the intersections of these aspects of growth and integration.

They are populated with the same four factors discussed above, with the first term referring to

formal dimensions of action and the second to the sphere of production: effort/labor,

means/capital, creativity/entrepreneurship, and environment/land. Effort lies at the intersection of

active integration and expansive growth, striving to pour energy outward. This is the ‘laborious’

dimension of production, as we actively strive to maintain motivation and expand the energy

23
with which we work. Means of action by contrast are the receptive side of expansive life, the

tools capable of receiving our energies and heightening their power. This is the ‘capitalistic’

dimension of production, the accumulation of tools and infrastructure – the means of production

– that empower human productivity to continually grow, engendering more work with less effort.

Creativity marks the active side of self-transcendence, striving to overcome current forms of

thought and action; in the sphere of production, this is the ‘entrepreneurial’ dimension. Finally,

the environment is the receptive aspect of self-transcendence, the world beyond the self that

draws one out of oneself, demands that one develop abilities that one would not be able to

develop on one’s own. In the sphere of production, this is ‘land,’ the external environment that

enables one to do and be things that one could not do and be elsewhere (Mei, 2017).

Synthesizing integration and growth in this way reveals something that might not have

been otherwise apparent: the four factors comprise four ways of fusing growth and integration,

and therefore indicate four sources of alienation. These are shown in italics in Table 2. The

collapse of effort is the self’s loss of the capacity to maintain active energy for its projects,

indifference. The breakdown of creativity is the incapacity to continually transform and

reconstruct, reification. To be cut off from means of action diminishes the self’s ability to

exercise control over its environment, disempowerment. An evacuated environment that fails to

offer meaningful direction generates disorientation. While indifference and reification emerge

primarily in a self’s relation to itself, disempowerment and disorientation emerge in relation to

the world.

Fusing integration and growth not only joins major ideas of Marx and Simmel central to

the tradition of alienation theory, it provides a framework from which we can derive – rather

than merely list – core concepts that have often been used to specify the qualitative experience of

24
alienation. This is a quite remarkable and surprising result, not at all obvious at the outset. It

reveals simple structural principles – growth and integration – at work in the rich, complex, and

wide-ranging verbal formulations that mark phenomenological discourse about alienation,

retaining their specifics while illuminating how they emerge at the intersection of common basic

processes. Even Jaeggi’s penetrating analysis tends to move through various alienation themes

one after the other. Yet as a synthesis of growth and integration, disparate descriptions of topics

such as reification or disempowerment become intelligible as specific manifestations in a general

model. Fusing insights from Marx and Simmel illuminates these processes in ways that neither

could alone.

The Wheel of Alienation

The aim of the preceding sections was to build up a conceptual toolkit for alienation

theory. We now have a number of tools in hand: formal relations of self and world; four factors;

integration, growth, and their intersection. Throughout we have stressed connections between

these general tools and their Marxian specifications. The goal is not to replace or re-interpret

Marx’s texts, but to build a theoretical infrastructure in which core alienation concepts may be

derived as particular combinations among others. In this way we preserve the classical Marxian

application as a special case of a more general multi-dimensional model for describing many

other modes of alienation that continue to confront us, but for which we lack – and sorely need –

a common vocabulary that reveals their interconnections, similarities, and differences. This in

turn paves the way for empirical questions about where and why one combination rather than

another occurs, and how they have changed.

25
 ‘The wheel of alienation’ is a diagrammatic device for systematically organizing

reflection and theoretical experimentation about how all of these aspects of alienation may

interact. It provides a simple model that embodies the major principles outlined above: a

complex array of forms of alienation may be derived and articulated, without giving conceptual

priority to any specific form. This section introduces the ‘wheel’ and illustrates how to use it,

26
without aiming to work through all of its implications exhaustively. That is, the goal here is to

outline a generative theoretical model rather than to highlight any particular propositions we

might draw from it.

Figure 1 shows the Wheel of Alienation in its most general form, and Figure 2 shows it

specified to the sphere of production. The inner ring is the subject of alienation. The middle ring

is the object of alienation. The outer ring is the relation of alienation. The dark lines focus

attention on a specific configuration. For instance, Figure 1 highlights the alienation of effort

from the means of action in the relation of the self to itself. Figure 2 highlights the same

configuration, specified to the realm of production: the alienation of labor by capital in its

productive activity.

27
 To work with this sort of diagram, one spins the various circles around, and observes the

different configurations that result. Doing so helps to systematically elaborate and consider a

range of possible alienations, without prioritizing any specific one. There is room here to

examine the sorts of alienation that concerned Marx: Figure 1 and Figure 2 are positioned to

28
highlight the alienation of labor specifically and effort more generally, for example. Spinning the

outer ring cycles through the various aspects of alienation Marx imagined.

Yet the diagram also enables one to observe other configurations. In this way the wheel

of alienation embodies the Simmelian impulse of pluralistic non-reductionism: alienation is

always possible but never necessary, and once we abandon the essentialism of traditional

alienation theory, there is no reason to assume a priori that labor is the only factor capable of

being alienated. The point is not to deny that labor has been profoundly subject to alienation, but

rather to indicate that this particular situation should not be baked into our theoretical framework

from the start. A more open, formal, and multi-dimensional framework in fact allows us to pose

more precise questions about when and why this configuration may have come to the fore, why it

does or does not persist, and what other forms may emerge in different contexts. It permits

alienation theory to retain its core principles while opening up to the problematics of the present.

Working through some examples helps illustrate the theoretical utility of the wheel of

alienation. Let us start with the alienation of effort. As we saw above, the alienation of effort

involves indifference to cultivating and expanding capacities for action. Now consider

indifference when the object of alienation (the middle ring) is ‘means’ and the relation of

alienation is the self to itself (the outer ring). Here the self becomes indifferent to the personal

significance of the tools it uses: a hammer or computer or iPhone become mere objects rather

than opportunities for cultivating oneself according to one’s own self-conception. In the sphere

of production, this is the Marxian alienation of labor from its productive activity at the hands of

the capitalist, where the process of work is not the worker’s own. Spinning the outer ring invites

consideration of a variety of indifferences: to others (indifference to how one’s means deepen

one’s inter-personal interactions); to one’s tools (indifference to the cultivation and refinement of

29
tools that effectively channel one’s energies outward), and to the world itself (indifference to

how one’s means contribute to the cultivation of a loving, facilitative environment).

Yet there are many other forms of indifference that may emerge, in the various ways that

labor/effort may be alienated from means/capital but also from environment/land and

creativity/entrepreneurship. The alienation of labor from land occurs when the energy one pours

into one’s work is severed from the environment in which one lives. One becomes indifferent to

one’s own situation, and its bearing on one’s relation to oneself, others, one’s artifacts, and the

environment itself. An extreme example is commuting long hours to maintain the gardens of a

gated community, but there are less extreme versions. In such situations, one’s effort enhances

somebody else’s neighborhood and pulls one away from one’s neighbors, severing productive

activity from enhancing the community in which one lives. At the same time, and analogous to

Marx’s analysis of the dialectics of home and work when labor is alienated (Marx, 1978, p. 74),

one’s residential neighborhood becomes a zone of escape and retreat, rather than an environment

for testing and growing one’s productive abilities and benefiting from how they improve one’s

surrounds.

Labor and effort can also be alienated from the creative process, for example when the

connection between the generation of ideas and their implementation is severed. Labor becomes

a mere quantum of energy necessary to carry out ideas created somewhere else, and so becomes

indifferent to the process of reconfiguring products and the social organization of work. The

‘creatives’ are over here, the laborers are over there, and the latter do not experience their

activity as connected to the former. The hand is severed from the heart.

Labor is not the only factor of production capable of being alienated, however. Spinning

the inner ring enables one to consider other possibilities: the alienation of

30
creativity/entrepreneurship, environment/land, and even means/capital. Consider each briefly.

The alienation of entrepreneurial creativity occurs when self and world become fixed in place

and cease to be open fields of possibilities to be continually reconfigured and surpassed:

reification. When creativity is dominated by capital (the middle ring), the creative process is not

open to all possibilities. It is instead reified by the desire of owners to perpetually expand their

operations, as when a designer’s ability to play with ideas is constrained by the boss’s judgments

of their profitability. When creativity is dominated by land and the local environment, reification

comes from not being permitted to imagine possibilities that might offend local customs and

sensibilities or disturb the local character. When reification comes from domination of creativity

by labor, new ideas are met by workers who are unwilling and unmotivated to devote energy to

learning how to use or implement them. The proverbial peasant shovel is the result, a blunt tool

frozen in time and not susceptible to adaptation or experimentation.

The alienation of our situatedness in place occurs when self and world become unmoored

in and undefined by their place: disorientation. When places are dominated by capital, they

become merely standing reserves of material resources and investment vehicles that provide no

practical direction for cultivating oneself and others – a river is a power generator and nothing

more, with no special status based on its place in a community’s local practices or ways of life.

Similarly, when the environment is dominated by entrepreneurship, it becomes fodder for

interesting and novel experiments rather than sites of deep and abiding local traditions and

customs that provide guidance for how to properly live a life – a street is there to be redesigned

indiscriminately, without respect for its effect on personal or social growth. When labor

predominates over place, the environment becomes simply a neutral place to work; work could

be anywhere, and the fact that it is here but not there has no bearing on its value and significance:

31
the stereotypical homogenous office park is the result. The needs and demands of the local area

fail to provide concrete direction for guiding work toward cultivating relations to self and others

that emerge out of their distinct local history and connections.

The alienation of the means of action occurs when they are blocked from expanding our

abilities to control and direct ourselves and our environments: disempowerment. In the sphere of

production, this is the alienation of capital, a phenomenon not contemplated by Marx but which

the wheel of alienation encourages us to imagine. When capital is dominated by

entrepreneurship, innovation devolves into tinkering and mere creative play, without resulting in

the accumulation of tools that actually enhance the power to work more productively – the

artistry of ideas outweighs their effectiveness and action loses its foothold in efficacy. When

capital is dominated by labor, the process of accumulation is restricted by the labor pool, which

in this scenario is unwilling to expand and redirect its efforts to work with larger accretions of

capital. A specific form of disempowerment results: massive crystallization of potential

productivity embodied in the factory or office stands ready to receive effort, but workers are

unwilling to provide their energy to run them: they put their bodies upon the gears of the

machine. When capital is dominated by land, the local environment restricts the process of

accumulation and growth. Only certain areas are open to development, and the full set of powers

that our environments could unleash are not unlocked. For action to be continually open to

expanding its powers there must be some openness to the expansive potential of it means. But

when disempowered in these ways, it becomes alienated from its own conditions of

effectiveness.

These examples highlight primarily the implications of spinning the inner and middle

rings, and how they produce multiple forms of indifference, reification, disorientation, and

32
disempowerment. By spinning the outer wheel, we could refine these observations through

systematically considering how indifference, reification, disorientation, and disempowerment

occur across modes of self-world relationships. For instance, in the case of reification, this

would involve reflecting on how it varies when the self takes itself as fixed and final; when it

takes its relations to others to be unchangeable; when it takes its environment to be impervious to

transformative action; and when it takes it tools to be eternal rather than provisional. In the

present context, however, the primary point is more general: These illustrations of theoretical

experiments performed upon the wheel of alienation indicate how the more familiar Marxian

combinations are one specific configuration and that others even in the sphere of production may

be contemplated.

Yet we may also use the wheel to ponder other possibilities. By aligning the inner and

middle rings with themselves, we can consider forms of reflexive, self-destructive alienation

more characteristic of the psychoanalytic tradition than the Marxian. Here we can examine

entrepreneurial creativity that undermines itself, a hyper-creativity that produces so much change

that it is impossible to distinguish new from old. Likewise we can consider the possibility of

laborious effort spent attacking the ability to sustain effort: working hard to avoid hard work.

Pursuing this latent theoretical potential in the wheel across permutations around the outer ring

may facilitate further surprises and reflection upon the social processes in which action

undermines itself.

Nor must we remain wedded to Marxian concepts of alienation embedded in Figure 2.

The formal terms in Figure 1 are a bridge to other domains beyond production. For example,

Simmel’s Philosophy of Money treats money as the means of exchange par excellence, an

‘absolute tool’ capable of realizing the greatest range of desires. Money for Simmel thus

33
becomes the ultimate medium for self-cultivation: ‘Money grants to the self the most complete

freedom to express itself in an object’ (Simmel, 2005, p. 325). Yet as money expands the

powers of the self to act and express itself in the world, it may also become the ultimate vehicle

for disempowerment. ‘This is precisely the miserly type – gaining satisfaction from having fully

acquired potentialities without ever conceiving of their actualization’ (Simmel, 2005, p. 325).

Since money embodies a pure possibility to act, to spend it is to reduce one’s power. Miserliness

is the result.

In the terms of Figure 1, Simmelian miserliness is an example of the means of action

undercutting the means to act so that the self becomes alienated from itself: the peak of

reflexivity along this dimension, where ‘means’ is both subject and object of alienation in a ‘self-

self’ relation. In a similar way, spinning the outer wheel so that ‘self-other’ aligns with ‘means’

in both the inner rings reveals another characteristically Simmelian form of alienation, at least if

we are considering the realm of money exchange. In this configuration, money becomes not a

medium of connection and interaction but a ‘prostitute’ that ‘signifies the nadir of human dignity

(Simmel, 2005, p. 379): a means for manipulating relationships with others. Myriad other

conceptual experiments are possible. The wheel of alienation provides a tangible medium for

pursuing them.

Conclusion: a research agenda for alienation theory

These examples provide only the barest sketches of the various forms of alienation. They

are meant only to illustrate how to work with the wheel of alienation, not to in any way exhaust

its potential. This diagram, like all theory diagrams, operates at the level of potentiality, not

actuality (Stjernfelt, 2007): it envisions a set of relations that permit us to map the contours of a

34
space of possibilities. In this case, it is a diagram with which various interlocking configurations

of the subjects, objects, and relations of alienation may be imagined, without granting a priori

normative or conceptual priority to any particular constellation.

The value of this sort of diagram is in producing generative theoretical models to

organize a research agenda. The wheel of alienation can provide alienation theory with a clear

direction forward. As a first step, a much more thorough and systematic articulation of all

potential forms of alienation is necessary. We need conceptual investigations of the various ways

one can spin the wheels. These investigations would be pure social theory, not restrained by

empirical likelihood. Drawing on art, literature, history, journalism, and one’s own imagination,

one builds rich portraits of what every possible configuration of alienation would be like, should

it occur – even if it never has and perhaps never will. The second step is to elaborate propositions

about when, where, and why particular configurations ought to in fact occur. For instance, we

might hypothesize that in moments and areas of rapid industrial growth where capital is

ascendant, the alienation of labor, land, and entrepreneurship at the hands of capital should be

particularly acute. By the same token, when place and locale become crucial focal points of

work, the alienation of other factors from and by land may be strong. These are some of the

simplest propositions one might develop, but many other more complex formulations are

possible. A third step is to expand the theoretical scope from the sphere of production to other

domains, such as politics and culture. The present essay started with Marx and built outward,

and so took production as its point of departure, while making some gestures toward exchange.

But similar processes may occur in political and cultural alienation. It is an open theoretical

question whether this four-factor model can illuminate alienation in these and other arenas.

Articulating possibilities, expanding the scope, and formulating propositions constitute

35
the core theoretical part of the agenda opened up by this paper. There are also major

methodological challenges, most notably in the accurate measurement of alienation. How to deal

with these challenges is a difficult and open question, and there is much to be learned from the

controversies and solutions developed in the last wave of alienation research. But to even raise

such methodological questions again, the social theoretical imagination needs to be reawakened

to the problem of alienation and given a coherent, generative analytical model to work with.

1 The author wishes to thank Mark Alznauer, Milos Brocic, and Erik Schneiderhan for their
helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as participants in the 2016 conference of
the ISA Research Committee on Sociological Theory.
2 Writing in 1959, Daniel Bell noted that the wave of enthusiasm building for alienation studies

at the time was itself a rediscovery of a concept that a previous generation had ignored.
3 Jaeggi (2014) also notes clear parallels with pragmatism, which are worth pursuing further,

some of which are explored in Schwalbe (1992).

bracketing Simmel’s specific application of his concepts to money (for this, see Silver and
O’Neill 2014).
5 Marx’s notion of species being is clearly the most enigmatic and controversial. My (pragmatist

inspired) reformulation as a facilitative environment is broadly in line with the suggestions of

pursuing the difficult distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘differential’ rent). See also Harvey
(2009).
7 And for his part Marx certainly does strike pragmatist notes of creativity and growth, as many

commentators have observed.

vitalism.

36
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