ABSTRACT
Despite the incredible degree of confusion that exists about the term alienation—a confusion that has caused many influentials in sociology and psychology to try to do without it there is a danger in a premature scrapping of the term. There are few enough words in the vocabulary of social science having wide generic implications. There is in the dialectical approach a common belief that alienation, while ontologically and logically no better and no worse than integration, in the actual affairs of men alienation provides a basic fuel for social change and political liberation. Alienation as anomie tends to describe the social system in terms of an assumed rationality: that which has the power, norms, and meanings, in contrast to the personality system or that which is not a condition of rationality. Alienation is intensified when individual freedom comes to be first idealized and then frustrated.
