ABSTRACT
The term alienation has been so extensively used and misused in twentieth-century literature, both popularand academic, that it has accumulated an almost unmanageable array of meanings. For Hegel, alienation is a category of spirit and refers to a condition in which the self confronts an unappropriated other. Hegel was, of course, concerned about alienation on a grand scale. He employed it as an ontological category to account for the disequilibrium which motivates the dialectical movement of spirit. The alienation involved in a system of monetary value is not due to the instrumentality itself but the mistaken assumption that everything has its price. Orthodox Marxists have stressed the objective order as the crucial factor in constituting man’s alienation from himself and others; existentialists and, more recently, specialists in group dynamics have emphasized the subjective dimension.
