Critica structuralistă a conceptului marxist de alienare

Any debate on alienation almost inevitably involves reference to Karl Marx’s theories. Inherited from Hegel and Feuerbach, the concept of alienation reached a true philosophical elevation in Marx’s writings, being constantly reworked from his early philosophical and political writings to his mature works. One of the weaknesses—if not the greatest weakness—of the concept of alienation is undoubtedly its almost necessary reliance on the (at least implicit) determination of a human essence from which individuals are presumed to have become estranged. The essentialism underlying the concept of alienation, challenged by the structuralist movement in France, led to its progressive abandonment within the conceptual framework of political and social philosophy starting in the 1960s and 1970s. The aim of this article is to highlight what a non-essentialist concept of alienation might look like. Our research is based on the model of (epistemological) rupture between an ideological perspective (that of the actors) and a scientific perspective (that of the social critic), a position particularly strong in France, where it was notably supported by Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu.