ABSTRACT
The notion of legitimation crisis does much of the work, rhetorical and ideological, that was performed in the past by the much-abused concept of "alienation." The diagnosis of a mood of distemper, of cynicism and distrust, with respect to contemporary political institutions amounts to a displacement of the alienation that the older Marx grounded in the oppressive conditions of wage labor under capitalism. The Young Marx was revived at the expense of the old Marx among left intellectuals in the 1950's; in the 1960's "alienation" became a popular catchword among social scientists, political intellectuals and radical youth. The young Marx extended the idea of alienation to the state and the economy, ultimately concluding that economic alienation was the foundation of both religious and political alienation. Alienation as a form of consciousness was dissolved into the social reality of subjection to capitalism and the class domination it imposed.
