ABSTRACT
Despite the incredible degree of confusion which 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. Alienation is often used as a psychological surrogate in the literature. Instead of being employed as a phenomenon of separation, it is used as a phenomenon of negation, or even of "lessness"—a suffix prefaced by "power-lessness," "norm-lessness," or "meaning-lessness." At its most elevated form, the psychological definition of alienation is linked to the notion of ideology. This in turn is fused with the notion of how intellectuals view their roles in a social world. The sociological tradition is perhaps a consequence of this distinction between psychic disorganization and social disorganization. The standard sociological perspective is to see alienation as a phenomenon of a unitary type, with differences being attributed to the stratification system.
