Alienation

Recent social criticism tends to focus on issues of equality -- of wealth, income, opportunity and status. The problem of how we live with others and with ourselves has been neglected. An important aspect of this problem used to go under the heading of alienation. Through a compelling combination of acute analysis and rich phenomenological description Rahel Jaeggi's book brings that concept back into the center of political philosophy. Jaeggi does so by arguing that to talk of alienation need not entail commitment to a conception of a human essence. She argues that alienation concerns a how rather than a what. It is a failure to appropriate oneself in the right way, a problem with how one comes to be what one is, rather than an inability to realize some pre-given identity. Jaeggi is not only thoroughly learned in both the continental and analytic traditions. She does what is quite rare: she brings these traditions into a highly productive synthesis. Alienation is a very impressive achievement. -- Daniel Brudney, University of Chicago With this masterful reconstruction of the concept of alienation, Rahel Jaeggi opens fruitful new avenues for Critical Theory. She also claims her place as a powerful exponent of social philosophy and a thinker of the first rank. Her book is a tour de force of cogent argumentation and rich phenomenological description. -- Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School Alienation, the concept Hegel and Marx made so central to European political and social thought, has receded in importance in more recent political philosophy. Like self-deception and weakness of will, it is extremely resistant to analysis even though it continues to be a major theme of modern life and accounts of the features of contemporary life. Jaeggi's great accomplishment in her book is to provide the outlines of a new theory of an old term and thereby to give the concept a new life by showing its linkage to major ethical and political concerns. She develops a sophisticated and clear account of it with her novel idea of relationless relations as failures of self-appropriation as having to do with how institutions and practices actually function in modern life. She illustrates this thesis with a variety of concrete examples carried out with a kind of phenomenological finesse one rarely finds nowadays. She forcefully brings out its affinities with the idea of drift, and of being present in an action, and of how the experience of alienation problematizes the very concept of what can count as one's own action. With this book, an entire tradition of political and social philosophy has received a new lease on life. -- Terry Pinkard, Georgetown University Rahel Jaeggi's scholarship and writing in this book is excellent, and the resuscitation of the concept of alienation in critical social theory is a welcome event in the literature. -- Matthias Fritsch, Concordia University Rahel Jaeggi's Alienation is one of the most exciting books to have appeared on the German philosophical scene in the last decade. It not only rejuvenates a lagging discourse on the topic of alienation; it also shows how an account of subjectivity elaborated two centuries ago can be employed in the service of new philosophical insights. -- Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College