Society and alienation from Rousseau to Marx : the historical-political roots of a pathology

This essay aims to scrutinize the concept of alienation from both a history of ideas and a philosophical-political perspective. On the one hand, I will focus on some pivotal modern thinkers who have addressed this topic. On the other hand, I will evaluate the progressive shift of the concept of alienation: from its original juridical dimension in Rousseau, to one of the dialectical driving forces of subjectivity throughout history in Hegel, to the collateral effect of the alienating relationship with religion and God in Feuerbach, and finally, in Marx, to its development as the symbolic-political mark of a society subservient to the monopolistic will of the bourgeois class, which he aimed to politically re-found to restore individual creative freedom.