In a recent web essay, the eminent historian (and my Berkeley colleague) Martin Jay raised this question: Why has the term “alienation,” which was the all-purpose diagnosis of social and personal ills a generation or so ago, seemed to wane in public discourse? “Why aren’t we ‘alienated’ anymore?,” Jay asks. So does historian David Steigerwald in a 2011 piece cited by Jay.
The question immediately resonated. Circa 1975, inspired in part by my teacher, Melvin Seeman, I had written articles with “alienation” in the titles, taught a seminar on the topic, passed around an alienation reading list, and generally joined that conversation. Now, forty years later, hardly at all. Yes, what did happen to “alienation”?
Hopper, The Automat, 1927
Before trying to answer that question, however, we need to make sure that diagnosing “alienation” has in fact ended. If it has, we then need to figure out whether the conditions labeled “alienation” have diminished or just uses of the particular word have.
It turns out that academics have largely dropped “alienation” as a topic, but high-brow writers are still deploying it, although much less often. That these fluctuations say something about changing life in America is less likely than that they are saying something about changing fashions among the intelligentsia.
What is “Alienation”?
“Alienation” is one of those blanket–no, big, blue, roof tarp–words that can be stretched to cover a vast array of conditions, none of them, except perhaps artistic inspiration, good. People who are angry, withdrawn, fatalistic, rebellious, criminal, radical, and so on are often described as “alienated.” Lengthy books have been written to define the notion more theoretically and precisely, but I’ll be briefer.
“Alienation” is, in many of its versions, both an objective state of being and a subjective response to that condition, the condition of being separated from something essential, something such as the quality of being human, God, Nature, a person’s “true” character, the culture, or the community. In some renderings, everyone in a certain place or time (except, often, the author) is alienated. We today, for example, may be alienated by modern technology, capitalism, or the science’s “disenchantment” of the world.
The young Karl Marx developed the most important version of this argument. The essence of being human, our “species-being,” he argued, is free, creative, labor. Capitalism forces people to work for survival under others’ control, doing regimented and repetitive work, and thus alienates workers from their humanity. Only after the revolution will people be made whole again.
In some versions of the concept, being objectively alienated leads people to feel separated and to express that feeling in ways such as depression, unease, distrust, hostility, or self-doubt. In other versions, however, feelings of alienation are suppressed by internal forces like self-delusion or by external ones like “bread and circuses.” Then, alienation is revealed only in individuals’ subtle, perhaps unconscious, behavior (for example, spending extravagantly or seeking escapist entertainment).
A sprawling idea, indeed, alienation.
Has “Alienation” Gone?
Both Jay and Steigerwald evidence their case that “alienation” has gone into eclipse largely by comparing the intellectual debates and pop cultures of the 1950s and 1960s, when “alienation” was a “talismanic term” (Jay) and “the paradigmatic explanation for social behavior” (Steigerwald), to those of today, when it seems absent. Jay, in addition, uses Google’s Ngram program of word-counts from centuries of books to find that mentions of “‘alienation’ [were] rising spectacularly [in English-language books] from 1958 to its height in 1974. But since then it … dropped like a stone.”
Detecting themes and trends in cultural products like fiction and film is difficult and controversial. The word counts are, however, semi-hard data, shedding light at least on the use of language. So, I revisited Google’s Ngram and I also looked at “alienation” in other sources, as described in footnote[1].
The take-aways are: (a) Social scientists and historians of America almost never addressed “alienation” before 1960. They then flocked to the topic, with their attention peaking in the 1970s. After that, they steadily and almost completely walked away from it. (b) In high-brow publications and books, authors’ mentions of “alienation” zoomed up from out of nowhere in the 1960s and ‘70s and then declined–but declined not as much as academics’ use did. Their invocation of alienation” persisted into 2010 at about half the rate of the 1970s. “Alienation” is, albeit diminished, still with us.
We can push the word-count analysis yet further: From what are people described as alienated in different decades?
One can count phrases, not just words, in Google Ngrams. The phrases “alienated/tion from labor/work,” the classic Marxist version, rose and fell rapidly, mentions growing ten-fold from the 1950s to the ’70s and then shrinking ten-fold to 2008 (the end of the Google series).[2] “Alienated/tion from others/people” also rose about 10-fold from about 1950 to the ‘70s, but these phrases remained frequent through through the mid-’90s, and then sank by only about a fourth to 2008. Mentions of “alienated from his/her/their body(ies)” rose rapidly to peak in the 1980s and ‘90s and declined halfway back by 2008. As a final example, references to “alienated/tion from God” slowly but steadily increased since 1940 and continued to increase in the 2000s.
One implication of this exercise is that “alienation’s” popularity seems to depend on the specific topics to which the term is applied rather than reflecting one holistic concept. Another implication is an endorsement of both Jay’s and Steigerwald’s sense that authors’ concerns about labor, work, and class have waned while their concerns about more cultural issues–like community, the body, and faith–have persisted.
Stepping back again to the big picture, let us ask, as Jay and Steigerwald did, why discussion of “alienation” as a whole dropped by about half after the 1970s–especially when it would seem that experiencing a state of alienation did not decline and may have increased as average Americans’ economic fortunes stagnated, as they increasingly expressed distrust of other people,[3] and as their politics grew increasingly bitter.
But we should first try to explain the even more dramatic rise in the mentions of “alienation” after the 1950s.
Explaining Rise and Fall
Before the 1960s, writing about “alienation” was rare among social scientists and authors generally. (Both Jay and Steigerwald seem to misremember the 1950s as an alienation-full decade; it was not.[4]) By the mid-1970s, “alienation” references had grown by an order of magnitude. Why?
Did the underlying rates of experienced alienation, however it is defined, soar after the 1950s? Probably not. However, young folks’ cultural and political protests against mainstream American society did grow. Perhaps the growing alienation literature reflected all those complaints. (Steigerwald cites Mario Savio’s 1964 speech about stopping “the machine.”) A simpler and, to me, more plausible explanation is that an intellectual fashion arrived from Europe during the 1940s and ‘50s, planted itself here, and blossomed in the ’60s and ‘70s. Jay describes the landing of European refugee scholars such as Erich Fromm and how their ideas and their words flourished in American soil. Thus, literary terms emerge and rise and shape the discourse–as in the word “discourse” itself.[5]
Next, why did “alienation” talk drop out in academia and drop substantially in the high-brow media after the 1970s and ’80s? Jay raises several possibilities: “Was it fatigue with a concept whose explanatory power and emotional charge had been spent? Was it the realization that other, unrelated sources of oppression were yet to be vanquished? Or had alienation become a self-indulgent luxury, now that living standards were not necessarily rising from one generation to the next?” In the end, Jay focuses mainly on intellectual trends, discussing figures like Foucault and Brecht.[6] Steigerwald argues that “… as both a paradigmatic way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and as a tangible social-psychological difficulty, alienation has mostly evaporated.” The reason it has mostly evaporated, he goes on, is the rise of a consumerist culture that induces distraction, passivity, and false bliss (an argument, by the way, that has been made for at least a century[7]).
Simplifying the issue: Is the explanation for the fall of interest, one, that the condition of being “alienated” has become less common in post ‘70s America? Or is it, two, that authors’ use of “alienation” theories to understand people has become less common? Or is it, three, that the use of the specific word “alienation” has gone out of fashion and it has been replaced by other words pointing to the same conditions?
Google Ngram data suggest that the third explanation, word substitution, is unlikely. Synonyms for “alienation” show roughly the same rise and fall as the word itself.[8] The first explanation, that Americans have become actually less alienated in its various meanings, also seems improbable. Subjectively, answers to survey questions that would seem to measure feelings of alienation don’t show notable improvement since the 1970s and ’80s.[9] Objectively, conditions that might be described as alienating or as revealing alienation–say, chronic joblessness, social isolation, addiction–have either not changed much or changed in different ways.
The second explanation seems the best bet: That the academic and more broadly intellectual fashion of applying alienation ideas to a wide variety of problematic conditions, objective and subjective, has faded since its 1970s heyday. Perhaps authors have focused instead on more specific concerns–say, community solidarity or emotional depression–than on a broad malaise. Or perhaps, they have been attracted to other topical issues, like sexual identity and diversity. (Those perhapses will have to be answered another day.)
In any case, the history of “alienation” testifies to the way ideas cycle in public discourse for reasons that have more to do with the world of commentary than with the lived world.
———————-Notes————————–
[1] Because the volume of publications and of vocabulary rose over the years, I turned counts into ratios as available in the indices. In academic writing, there appears to have been a rapid rise and rapid fall of attention to “alienation.”
(1) The proportion of sociological articles–broadly defined–using the term in either title or abstract was essentially nil in 1950s, rose to 15 per one thousand articles in the 1970s, and then dropped to 2 per thousand in the 2010s. (This is based on Sociological Abstracts and is measured as the ratio of articles with titles or abstracts including “alienation” to articles with titles or abstracts including “the.”)
(2) The proportion of American history articles–also broadly defined–using the word “alienation” anywhere in the text went from 3 per thousand articles in the 1950s to 12 in the 1960s, 7 in the 1970s, and down to under 3 since 2000. (This is based on the America: History and Life database and is the ratio of article texts using “alienation” to those using “American.”)
In general intellectual writing, “alienation” rose rapidly, but it did not plummet back to its original low level. I looked at three specific databases.
(1) The New York Times: In the 1950s, 0.6 articles per thousand articles used the term; in the 1960s, 4.2 did; in the 1970s, 6.6 did; in the 2000s, 5.6; and in the 2010s, 6.3. (This is a ratio of articles with “alienation” to those with the word “the.”)
(2) In The Nation during the 1950s 10 per thousand articles had “alienation” in them, rising to 46 in the 1970s, falling to about 33 in the 1980s and ‘90s; and about 25 since 2000. (The denominator is articles with “American” in them.)
(3) The New Yorker’s online archive to which I had access does not seems complete, but includes a rapidly growing absolute number of articles with “alienation.”
Google’s Ngram viewer tells us about books. First, a clarification: Ngram does not present word counts; its result is the percentage of all words (or n-word phrases) in a year’s worth of books that are the word (or n-word phrase) in question. Second, it is a rich but tricky tool. My procedure: (a) I looked at the American English corpus, 1940-2008 (Google’s end year). (b) I combined the terms “alienation” and “alienated.” The result is the figure below. (By the way, if one looks at British rather than American books, the upswing is similar, but the decline has been notably less. Also, if one removes English Fiction results from total English results, the general pattern remains.)
[2] The phrases (“alienated from labor” + “alienation from work” + “alienated from labor” + “alienated from work”) were effectively absent in American books before 1945, went up ten-fold between 1955 and 1975, and dropped ten-fold by 2008 (a five-year moving average).
[3] The General Social Survey has long asked Americans “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” The percentage picking the second option has steadily increased from 53% in the 1970s to 64% in the 2010s.
[4] To many cultural analysts the 1950s was the alienated decade of The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Catcher in the Rye (1951). But “alienation” hardly appears in The Lonely Crowd’s first edition–not in the book’s index and not really in its text; Riesman used the word in its current sense perhaps once. In Riesman’s introduction to the 1969 edition, however, he used it several times and in its current meaning. It is no surprise that the word does not appear in The Catcher in the Rye (nor does alienated or even alien).
[5] Google ngrams shows that “discourse’s” representation in books slowly dropped by over 90% between 1805 and 1920. It rapidly re-emerged in the 1980s, roughly tripling in 20 years.
[6] Jay also points to a rise in anxiety about actual “aliens.”
[7] See chapter on “Goods” in my book, Made in America.
[8] Isolation, estrangement (multiplied ten-fold for visibility), indifference, disaffection (times 10), loneliness, anomie (times 10), with alienation for comparison:
[9] In the General Social Survey, self-descriptions as “unhappy,” or dissatisfied with family life or friendships, or views of most people as not trustworthy have changed little from the 1970s to the 2010s (to the 1990s for family and friends). Trends in expressions of loneliness in other data have been flat (see Fischer, Still Connected, and this recent post by David Weakliem). Meanwhile, hostility around politics has clearly increased.
