“Alienation is being made other — Latin alienatio meant the transfer of property from one person to another, from alienus (belonging to another), and Marx transformed this legal term into the central diagnosis of industrial capitalism.”
Latin alienus meant belonging to another person, foreign, other. Alienare was to transfer ownership — to make something belong to another. Alienatio was the legal term for the transfer of property: the legal separation of a person from what had been theirs. Roman law used alienatio for property transactions, inheritance transfers, and the manumission of slaves — the legal making-other.
In 18th-century English and French, alienation appeared in discussions of sanity — the alienated mind was the mind estranged from itself, from reason, from social connection. An aliéné was a madman; the asylum was the hospital for the alienated. The legal transfer and the mental estrangement shared the root of being made-other.
Karl Marx, reading Hegel and the early economists, used alienation as the central diagnosis of capitalist labor in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (not published until 1932). The industrial worker was alienated from their product (which belonged to the employer), from the process of production (which was not creative but repetitive and compelled), from their fellow workers (who were competitors), and from their own human nature (which was social and creative but was being denied).
The existentialist tradition — particularly Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir — used alienation for the broader estrangement of modern individuals from meaning, community, and authentic existence. The alienated person was estranged from themselves, from others, from the world. The sociological tradition measured alienation empirically — surveys of workers' meaninglessness, powerlessness, and normlessness.
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Alienation is perhaps Marx's most enduring contribution to social vocabulary, precisely because it describes an experience that transcends his specific economic analysis. The worker who does not recognize themselves in their product, the citizen who cannot see their interests in their government, the person who feels like a stranger in their own life: alienation names the estrangement that modern complexity produces regardless of the economic system.
The Latin legal transaction — the transfer of property from one person to another — was transformed into a description of the condition of modernity. We are alienated when the structures of our lives are experienced as external, as belonging to someone else, as foreign to who we are. The made-other of Roman law became the felt-other of modern existence.
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