The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (5 page)

 
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Prior to the seventeenth century, ‘alienation’ denoted a relationship to property. One could, for example, alienate one's property by transferring it to another person, or to an institution. During the seventeenth century, the focus of the term shifted from material to immaterial possessions such as rights, and sovereignty over oneself. It came to be accepted by thinkers such as
Grotius
and
Locke
that alienating certain rights or powers was a necessary prerequisite for legitimate political society. Alienation in this sense became the basis of social contract theory.
A more recent sense connoted a loss of reason or personality, so that one was alienated or estranged from one's true or rational self through mental disorder (‘alienist’ is an obsolete word for a psychiatrist). In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as
Paine
argued, for example, that certain rights were not just accidental to human character, but essential. Hence such rights were ‘inalienable’, and to lose such rights either by giving them away or by having them removed against one's will, was to lose an essential part of one's humanity.
Although
Rousseau
did not specifically use the term, the first systematic account of alienation by a political theorist is to be found in his
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
(1755). Here, alienation is uncompromisingly a condition of developed society, where systems of law—moral/religious, political and economic—rob one of the responsibility of setting the parameters of one's own liberty. Under such conditions one will remain alienated from one's potential, moral self, unless and until one can reconstruct society to enable one to participate in the setting of such boundaries.
The Social Contract
(1762) proposes one form which such a society might take.
The most important accounts of alienation from the point of view of political theory are those of
Hegel
and
Marx
. Hegel believed the purpose of history to be the progressive overcoming of the gap between the particular consciousness and the universal consciousness until a final unity of the two is achieved (absolute self-consciousness). This gap between the particular and the universal constitutes, for Hegel, a central and necessary element of alienation. History is therefore the story of humanity's progress towards freedom from alienation. For Hegel, alienation is through and through a historical concept.
Marx accepts this latter point, but (under the influence of
Feuerbach
) rejects Hegel's emphasis on consciousness for two main reasons. First, it implies that alienation originates within the individual, whereas for Marx alienation originates in the material conditions of existence—the ‘ensemble of social relations’—within which the individual is enmeshed. Second, Hegel's view makes the individual responsible for his or her own release from alienation, since all that is required is an effort of will. For Marx, overcoming alienation requires a change in the material conditions of productive social existence, and such a change cannot be wrought by individuals. Alienation, for Marx, must therefore be overcome by the activity of a historically specific class.
Marx believes humanity to be capable of producing freely and creatively, overcoming the tyranny of immediate, basic needs that characterizes the rest of the animal kingdom. Under conditions which enable free, creative production, one's personality can be expressed in the objects one produces. This investing of oneself in one's products is a form of alienation, but it is a positive form. It must exist wherever and whenever human beings freely create things, including communist society. But where the conditions for free, creative production do not exist alienation will become distorted into negative forms.
Under capitalism, for instance, factory work (through the division of labour) turns labour from a social activity into an individuated process, alienating workers from each other. Factory work dehumanizes workers by giving them repetitive tasks which require no free, creative input. Thus workers are alienated from their human potential. The products one produces fail any longer to express one's personality. For Marx, then, the superseding of capitalism is a necessary prerequisite for ridding alienation of its distorted elements.
Since Marx, writers across a number of disciplines have developed accounts of alienation, notably existentialist philosophy (
Sartre
), social psychology (Erich Fromm), and various hybrids of Marxism (
Marcuse's
psychoanalytic version, for example). As a result of its dissemination across a range of disciplines, the term has been loosely applied. However, many writers, from Rousseau to the present, broadly agree that the concept describes the sometimes debilitating effects of life in modern, large-scale societies.
AA 

 
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(1908–73)
Chilean politician. Born on 26 July 1908, Allende became a student leader at Valparaíso University where he studied medicine. In 1931 he was imprisoned because of his role in student opposition to the dictatorship of Carlos Ib´ñez , yet received his degree the following year.
While working for the public health service in 1933, Allende helped create the Socialist Party of Chile. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1937 and served as health minister in the Popular Front government elected in 1938. He was general secretary of his party from 1943 to 1970.
Allende's political career was mainly in the Senate, which he presided over in the 1960s. He also became the left's presidential candidate, eventually triumphing at the head of the Popular Unity alliance in 1970. The new coalition was handicapped by internal divisions, its lack of a majority in Congress, and strong US opposition. Electoral support for Popular Unity reached 44 per cent in 1973 but its economic policies were inflationary and provoked active middle-class opposition. Eventually Allende took his own life on 11 September 1973, during a US-backed coup led by General Pinochet .
Internationally, Allende is associated with the conviction that socialism can be introduced by parliamentary means. Left-wing opinion was deeply divided over the significance of Allende's defeat. Some simply made US imperialism a scapegoat; others decided that Allende's policies had been too ambitious; others concluded that socialism could not be introduced by reformist methods—the state would subvert the socialist government by means of military intervention.
RG 

 
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alternative vote
(AV)

A procedure for selecting a candidate who can command a majority. Voters rank the candidates. First preferences are counted, and any candidate with more than half of them is declared elected. If no candidate is elected, the candidate with fewest first preferences is eliminated and their votes redistributed; this is repeated as often as required until a candidate wins more than half of the valid votes cast.
AV is used in the Australian parliament. Its near relations, doubleballot and exhaustive ballot, are used respectively in French national elections and in British trade-union and Labour Party internal elections. As they are majoritarian, not proportional systems, they do not achieve proportionality in multimember assemblies. They also may fail to select the
Condorcet winner
, and are thus far from ideal majoritarian schemes.

 
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