Latent in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality is a dialectic of socialization and alienation. In order to determine the origins and development of inequality in civil society, Rousseau attempts to analyze the development of civilization itself. This analysis reveals to us a process of alienation at the heart of social development, or socialization. In the coming together of people and subsequent productive activity that creates and develops civil society, as well as in the individual’s acceptance of and absorption into the present set of social relations, humans are alienated themselves, from ‘their nature’, from nature itself, and from each other. Rousseau’s analysis also indirectly connects the phenomenon of alienation to the phenomenon of exploitation.
The implicit recognition of the alienation at the heart of civilization and its development connects Rousseau’s thinking in Discourse on Inequality to that of Karl Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In this essay, I will explore the relationship between social development and alienation in these works of Rousseau and Marx. Then, I will examine aspects or instances of contemporary life and culture which demonstrate how this relationship manifests in actuality, namely Ridley Scott’s film Alien and the present-day realities of social media, before considering the possibilities (including the potential troubles) of addressing this tension inherent to our social being.
Social or societal development, as the development of certain social relations themselves and of the whole of social relations (civilization or society), a continuous process with no set end, and as a process grounded in social interaction between people, will for the purposes of this essay be subsumed into the broader, dynamic notion of socialization. Socialization may be most generally defined as the development of social being. Within the general process of socialization, there is the development of social being in the form of social organization or relations between people (social development of the collective), and in the individual’s cultivation of social being, or the individual’s dialectical process of self-creation with the civil society around them. These two forms, though distinct, are nevertheless vitally interconnected, inseparable even.
In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau’s central objective is to determine the origin of inequality and prove that the inequality we see amongst people in civilization—which he deems “moral or political” inequality—is not “warranted by natural law” but merely the result of conventions. They are simply features of the extrinsic relations which organize human existence and are produced and continually reproduced by the institutions which preside over society (Rousseau 1994, 24). To demonstrate this, he undertakes a pseudo-anthropological thought-experiment, beginning with humans in our “natural state,” or the embryonic stages of human civilization, and following the development of civilization until he arrives at his modern day (Rousseau 26). Important to note is that even in their pre-socialized, so-called “savage” state, humans are defined by free action, by the ability to step back and consider their instincts and decide against them.
Rousseau’s progression through the theoretical development of human (or, perhaps more accurately, Western) civilization, from the earliest advancements in social interaction to the modern world, points first and foremost to a kind of self-alienation. In the natural state, as Rousseau describes it, humans were “always carrying one’s whole self with one” (Rousseau 28). Every aspect of their existence and its preservation was achieved with nothing but their own body, through simple, direct engagement with their surroundings. They were, according to Rousseau, at one with themselves, with nature, and with their nature. Rousseau’s framing of the pre-civilized state as natural Rousseau implies that our departure from that state was an alienation from our very nature.
As we progress past the natural state and begin forming organized social existences, and then the foundations of civil society, we cease to carry out the entirety of our life activity with just our own body. The results of the process of socialization, such as advanced tools and techniques, division of labor, and the ever-increasing complexity of resource acquisition through money-systems, effectively removed humans from their individual, whole, natural state of life in which we “live within [ourselves],” leaving us to live “outside [ourselves]” (Rousseau 84). The development of civilization or “the origin of society…put new shackles on the weak,” and “destroyed natural freedom irretrievably,” subjecting most of humanity to “labor, servitude, and misery” (Rousseau 69). In civil society as we know it, humans are alienated from what makes them human, as they are estranged from free action and situated in a set of social relations which forces them to work for others—or be exploited by others—to exist. “But from the moment one man needed help from another, and as soon as they found it useful for one man to have provisions enough for two, equality evaporated, property was introduced, and work became mandatory” (Rousseau 63). Within the process of socialization, humans are separated from their nature, or what supposedly defines their being—free action—as well as from their capacities to sustain themselves independently.
Alongside self-alienation we observe interpersonal alienation. Not only does the development of inequality, or unequal social relations—which, again, Rousseau identifies as a feature embedded in the general process of socialization—alienate humans from ourselves, but it alienates us from other people as well. From the establishment of property emerged inequality in wealth and its corresponding power. Over time, those with the most wealth and power set up social organizations or “institutions…favorable to [them]” (Rousseau 68). The very state of social-material inequality is a state of alienation: a separation of humanity, the ‘othering’ of one person or group of people by another. We see this in the very embryo of civilization, property: “The true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’” (Rousseau 55). The establishment of property sees one person alienate themselves from all the rest by separating their land from all others; it also, one may argue, entails the separation of the self from the self, as the action of positing ownership of something one cannot physically hold or did not produce seems to imply some other ‘self’ which can, in some sense or way apart from that of practical, sensuous activity, possess the land. Thus, at its most elementary state, just as throughout its ceaseless development, we find inherent in the process of socialization a current of alienation; we find that, in the unfolding of human social life, a contradictory process remains ever at work.
For Rousseau, the material and political alienation at work in the formation and development of civil society creates “civil” alienation (Rousseau 79). The inequality between people and their rulers—between the rich and powerful and the poor and weak—is reproduced in the interactions and relations between those ruled. Rather than trying to overcome the systemic, structural inequality, they try to remedy their oppression by establishing “domination” over their neighbors, over other oppressed civilians (Rousseau 79). In effect, not only does our material standing alienate us from each other as political subjects, but that alienation is endlessly reproduced through the creation of countless intra-class “distinctions,” separations, or alienations. The more civil society develops, the more we are socialized, the more we find ways to relate to each other and thus distinguish ourselves from others, a phenomenon Rousseau calls the “greed for distinction” (Rousseau 80). Such a phenomenon appears almost as a sort of advanced alienation. For one, these kinds of distinctions rely on the perceptions of others, and thereby rely on appearances: “Everything is reduced to appearances” (Rousseau, 80). The focus on appearances is a kind of alienation in itself; even if we now heed Kant and recognize all experience as a matter of appearances, we are still left with an irreducible distancing, the movement from real appearance to virtual appearance, or between levels of mediacy of appearance. Again, the “social man” lives “outside himself” (Rousseau 84). Furthermore, in distinguishing ourselves from others, we are separating, estranging, or alienating ourselves from them. And yet, it is all an attempt to become more socialized, to develop our social beings—alienation is used to develop social being, that is, for the purpose of socialization.
By framing alienation as inherent in our process of social development or socialization, alienation is connected to the development of inequality. As stated, inequality between people is effectively the alienation of person from person. However, we must recognize the truth of inequality, that it is bound to exploitation: for Rousseau, “[moral or political] inequality consists of the various privileges that some persons enjoy at the expense of others” [my italics] (Rousseau 23). Inequality in civil society appears almost as the state that defines, results from, or simply corresponds to the process of exploitation. If, in Rousseau’s thinking, alienation is connected to or conditions inequality, then it is also connected to or conditions exploitation. Alienation both lays the grounds for and fuels exploitation; the estrangement of person from person sets the stage for the immiseration of one for another’s benefit and allows for the continual development of that dynamic. Exploitation may be the primary or predominant actualization of alienation in social life.
In the essay “Alienated Labor” from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Karl Marx likewise grasps—albeit in a far more explicit and direct way—this fundamental alienation at the heart of civil society and its equally fundamental connection to exploitation. In the text, he undertakes a critique of political economy, which he claims does not provide explanations for its presupposition of private property, but only accounts for the “abstract and general formulae which it…takes as laws,” failing to “grasp the interconnections within the movement [of private property]” (Marx 1994, 58). He thus seeks to explain these connections. It is important to note how starkly Marx’s method and overall project in “Alienated Labor” diverges from that of Rousseau in Discourse on Inequality. For one, Marx is working strictly in economic terms, in terms of the organization of the production processes that serve as the foundation of civil society, while Rousseau thinks in terms of sociology, anthropology, etc. Marx does not attempt to reconstruct the entire history of economic, societal, or social development, and repudiates the practice of placing ourselves “in a fictitious primordial state” in order to “clarify things,” which is precisely what Rousseau does in Discourse on Inequality (Marx 59). Rather, Marx purports to “proceed from a present fact of political economy.” Nevertheless, both have civil society, or the set of social relations among humans, as the object of their study. Moreover, as we will see, Marx situates the economic relations between people at the heart or foundation of social relations. As Mike Healy puts it in the chapter entitled “Theories of Alienation: Seeman and Marx” from his book Alienation, Technology, and Capitalism, “for Marx, labor expresses the essential humanity of people” (Healy 21) Connecting this to Marx’s claim in his Theses on Feuerbach that “the essence of man…is the ensemble of social relationships,” we see that for Marx, the relationships of labor constitute the defining social relation (Marx 100).
Marx understands the relation of labor or the worker to the product of their labor as a relationship of alienation. “The worker puts his life into the object; then it no longer belongs to him but to the object” (Marx 60). Within capitalist societies, laborers put their energy, their “life,” into the objects they produce, only for those objects to not belong to them. The object, as the “embodiment” or “externalization” of the worker’s labor, stands separately from the worker as an “alien, autonomous power opposed to him” (Marx 59). Such externalization or “realization” of labor is achieved through the material provided to us by nature. The worker’s labor is embodied in its product, which is necessarily a material furnished to us by the natural world. Labor relies on nature to live, for the latter provides both the means of physical subsistence for the laborer as well as the laborer themself. By taking nature, putting their labor or themselves into it, and producing a product which will not belong to them, laborers alienate themselves from nature: “the more the worker appropriates the external world and sensuous nature through labor, the more he deprives himself of the means of life” (Marx 60). In the alienation of labor from its product we find the alienation of the laborer, or of humans, from nature.
If laborers are alienated from the products of their labor, Marx contends, then so too must they be alienated from the process or act of production itself: “If the product of work is externalization, production itself must be active externalization, externalization of activity, activity of externalization” (Marx 61). We see that labor is external to the laborer, or “not part of his nature,” in how a laborer “feels ease only outside work, and during work…is outside himself” (Marx 62). As soon as there is no external pressure to work, the laborer ceases to do so. As such, labor in capitalist societies is forced labor. It is “not the satisfaction of a need but the means to satisfy other needs” (Marx 62). The very act of laboring or producing sees the laboring person alienated from that act. This is apparent in how, during productive activity or labor, the workers’ labor belongs not to themselves but to others, whomever they are working for. Their activity is not their own, which Marx identifies as the “loss of [one’s] own self,” or self-alienation (Marx 62).
From these two forms of alienation found in the processes of production in capitalist societies—the alienation of the worker from their product (and thus nature) and from their productive activity (and thus themselves)—Marx derives a third. To formulate it, he refers to his notion of species-being, which he uses to mean the essential nature of a species. Humanity’s species-being, according to Marx, lies in that we are “universal or free beings,” or that we exhibit conscious free activity (Marx 62). We are universal insofar as we make nature in its entirety our “inorganic body,” both as “a means of life” and “as the matter, object, and instrument of…life activity” (Marx 63). We live through nature; thereby nature is our greater “body with which [we must] remain in perpetual process in order not to die” (Marx 63). Our species-life or being is our productive activity, our ongoing process of interaction with nature: “the animal is its life activity” (Marx 63). In alienating humans from nature and from our own life activity, capitalist social organization also alienates us from our species-being, or, more broadly, from our species. The productive or life activity of humans is rendered a mere means to survive, to exist. Within capitalism, humanity’s essence is only a means to existence; “life itself appears only as a means of life” (Marx 63). The human essence is alienated from the human body.
The alienation of humans from themselves, Marx follows, is realized in the alienation of humans from other humans. If one’s labor does not belong to oneself, it must belong to some other person. The laborer’s self-alienation becomes “objective and actual…only through his relationship to other men” (Marx 65). The alienation of the worker from their product or activity becomes manifest in the relationship between their product or activity and another person, i.e., whomever owns it. The very notion of property, Marx concludes, emerges from or is a consequence of the phenomenon of alienated labor, or the relationships of alienation present in labor. Understanding property, as Rousseau does, as the first step in the development of civilization, we see that at the heart of civilization and socialization is a process of alienation. And since the relation of worker to owner is one of “domination,” in which the latter owns and uses the labor of the former for their own gain, this is a relationship of exploitation (Marx 60). Alienation is the basis of exploitation and the process which drives the processes of exploitation. This alienation inherent in socialization conditions the exploitation which is preponderant in civil society.
Contemporary life and art provides us with countless demonstrations of this relationship between alienation and socialization. One artistic demonstration of the alienation within socialization is Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. The premise, at its most elementary level, is the confrontation of humans with an alien being. However, our consideration of the work as a demonstration of alienation in civilization is based on much more than just this. For one, the cast of characters who face the alien are crew members on a commercial ship: they are workers, laborers. The film opens with the super-computer system that runs the ship, Mother, rousing the crew from their “stasis,” in which they are kept alive yet unconscious in specialized pods, their life functions preserved solely by the operations of Mother. The decision to name the supercomputer “Mother” draws obvious parallels to “Mother nature,” or just nature. In this way, the film begins with humanity in its natural state (as Rousseau would say), or in simple unity with nature. When the crew members leave the pods, we may see them as departing from the state of nature, committing the “fatal accident” which Rousseau rues (Rousseau 62). Or, alternatively, they simply begin to work. Either way, they come together and enter into social relations with another: they enact the process of socialization.
After waking the crew, Mother informs them that per company policy they must investigate a distress signal that came from a nearby moon. The crew complains, weary and wanting to just keep a straight course toward home. Nonetheless, they are forced to entertain the detour, illustrating the alienation of the worker or human from their own free life activity. When they arrive on the moon from whence the signal came, a portion of the crew heads out from the spacecraft to track down the origin of the signal. Their pursuit leads them to a crashed and abandoned alien spaceship. As they explore it, the crew’s executive officer comes upon a room storing a vast collection of the species’ eggs. He touches one and it opens, shooting out a small creature which breaks through his helmet and clings to his face. He is rushed back to the ship, where the next-in-command after the executive officer refuses to let him and the others carrying his incapacitated body in, citing protocol. Eventually, the Science Officer lets them in. Sometime later, the crew finds that the creature has let go of the executive officer’s face and died, leaving him alive and intact. However, that night, as they are eating, another alien entity gorily emerges from his chest, killing him. In the alien’s emergence, we see the separation of the human being from itself, a grotesque demonstration of the critical idea that the alienation and connected exploitation we see across society came from us, i.e., from the development of our being, namely our social being. Moreover, this visualizes the domination of the producer (or the worker, the human) by that which they produce, the “alien thing.”
Various crew members are successively killed by the alien, which grows larger and stronger with each kill, depicting the relationship between the worker and the alien thing that confronts them. The more of their life they put into their work of fighting the creature, the less their life belongs to them and the more it belongs to the alien.
Amidst the film’s climactic moments, we learn that the corporation the crew works for knew that they would encounter the alien and sent them there in order to conduct research on the creature, ultimately for their own gain. The crew, we are told, are regarded by the company as “expendable” and the sole focus is on them procuring or producing the alien for the company. The alien exists in relation to the crew as alien not only in the simple sense, but because it is their product. In the end, when the alien is destroyed, the sole survivor goes back into stasis, into the natural state. Here we find a kind of longing for a return to the “natural state”, similar to that which Discourse on Inequality is drenched in—a romantic yearning for primitivization which has always been unproductive and unfeasible.
We also see the dialectic of socialization and alienation in the contemporary reality of social media. Developments in technology are social developments; the creation, constant development and proliferation of social media technologies is ultimately a specific current or facet of socialization. In social media, we come upon one of the most glaring and profound moments of alienation. It has become quite commonplace to note that “social” media, despite its purported intent, clear capacity, and demonstrated ability to bring us closer together than ever before, simultaneously estranges us from the rest of the world like few developments have. We are alienated most obviously from nature, our “inorganic body,” as our amount of time spent in or on social media, or digital environment, often exists in inverse proportion to the time spent engaging with our natural environment. Additionally, we are alienated from ourselves, for there is a clear separation of self which is involved in online presence. In many cases, the representations of ourselves which we create in our profile becomes entirely separate from us. We say and do things online we would never say nor do in ‘real life.’ Moreover, this alien thing, the representation of ourselves, often comes to dominate us: our actual existence is subjugated to our online existence. We act and exist in accordance with our digital being, reversing the initial relationship wherein our digital being existed in accordance with our actual being. Our profile does not look up to us to know how to be; we look up to our profile. What we do and what we are in our actual lives is often used as a means to enhance or enrich our online life, presence, or appearance. In this way, the alienation seen in social media exemplifies Rousseau’s notion that in our society, “everything is reduced to appearances” (Rousseau 84). ] Another notion of his—the “greed for distinction”—is apparent in the interpersonal alienation present in social media. Social media is widely used by people to cultivate an identity distinct from others. Simply put, we seek to stand out. It is this very standing-out or distinguishing that marks a ‘successful’ social media user, in multiple senses: in terms of financial success, as well as in terms of social valuations (which are of course dearly interconnected). To develop one’s being on social media, which is but a kind of social being, individuals seek to separate or alienate themselves from others. Most simply, however, social media alienates us from others by making us spend more time by ourselves engaging with representations of other people and less time actually engaging with other people. And of course, these advanced kinds of alienation necessarily create likewise advanced, novel opportunities for exploitation.
That a process of alienation lies at the heart of our civilization and operates in a dialectical relationship with socialization is clear to see. What is to be done about the contradiction which is responsible for the exploitation in our world today? Can it be overcome? If so, how? Rousseau fails to provide much in the name of solutions to this issue. Marx, of course, argues for the dialectical confrontation and sublation of labor and capital. To try and defeat the alien, Sigourney Weaver’s character, the lone survivor of Alien, elects to annihilate the entire ship; and yet, even that doesn’t finish the job. Clearly, an issue so fundamental to civil society will require drastic, radical efforts to overcome. Yet, as we seek a path forward, we must be especially careful not to confuse the overcoming of alienation with the annihilation of difference or diversity. A united civilization is not necessarily one which strives for absolute self-identity or homogeneity, an entirely self-same monolith of identical social beings. Attempting unity through the establishment of a totalizing identity is not just unfeasible but in fact only concentrates and thus worsens the very problems of alienation and exploitation that we must go beyond—take, for example, the realities of the ethnostate. In this way, the effort to resolve the fundamental issue of alienation relies heavily on a kind of unity which preserves diversity rather than reducing it or liquidating it altogether, on the development of a concept of diverse unity. Indeed, there is profound danger in the fact that the more civil society develops, the more we find ourselves alienated from ourselves, from nature, and from each other. Yet we must nonetheless be weary of the potential dangers that lie in our attempts at overcoming or remedying such alienation.
Works Cited
Healy, Mike. “Theories of Alienation: Seeman and Marx.” Alienation, Technology,
and Capitalism. University of Westminster Press, 2020.
Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” and “Theses on Feurbach.” Selected Writings. Hackett Publishing, 1994.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Franklin Phillip.
Oxford University Press, 1994.
Scott, Ridley. Alien, 20th Century-Fox, 1979.
