Hegelian Alienation and the Struggle for Recognition

19th Century Lessons for 21st Century Social Fragmentation

Fragmentation and atomisation are defining characteristics of our disorientating times. We have lived through an unprecedented era of social and institutional breakdown: the decline of the nuclear family; the secularisation of society; the diminishing of community; the dismantling of organised labour and destruction of the working class; deindustrialisation and the shift from a material to an immaterial, financialised economy; the shattering of social mobility; mass unregulated immigration; the disappearance of basic competence in governments. We offshored and outsourced everything from manufacturing to governing to thinking. Where once there was a local industry and a working wage, there are now boarded-up high streets and socio-economic dead ends. Where once there was competent governance, there is now a litany of NGOs and “think-tanks”. Where once there was a social contract underpinning a national sense of self and cohesion, there is now festering resentment at an increasingly punitive and extractive State offering disintegrated public services.

The result is a profound sense of alienation. Alienation and its attendant social issues, however, are not new concepts. The 19th Century German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, first articulated his theory of alienation in his 1807 work, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, and developed his concept through his lectures in Berlin in the 1820s. Hegel’s theory of alienation profoundly influenced 19th Century German philosophy and subsequent thinkers, including Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer. Hegel articulated this concept using the German word, Entfremdung, translated as alienation or estrangement, emphasising alienation from oneself. Europe in the mid-19th Century was a continent of convulsions as new political, social, economic, and scientific ideas emerged to challenge the hegemony of monarchy, Church, and the heredity of elite social standing. To Hegel, the crisis of modernity (at his time) was a crisis characterised by alienation, which he expressed in terms of how we regard each other as human beings and as members of a society. ¹

In The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel highlighted the theory of alienation by reference to the Lord and Bondsman dialectic. The Lord and the Bondsman are alienated from each other by their respective standing and the resulting self-image generated by their social relations. As the Lord exerts dominance over the Bondsman, so the Bondsman views the Lord with hostility and negativity. Yet the Lord’s self-image is positive; the Lord perceives himself as a good person, yet knows that the Bondsman projects a negative image onto him; the Lord thus becomes alienated both from himself, from his self-image, and from the Bondsman, who does not recognise the Lord in a positive light. Similarly, the Bondsman understands that the Lord holds a demeaning view of him, a conception at odds with the Bondsman’s self-image as someone of value. Thus, the Bondsman experiences alienation from himself, from his positive self-image against the negative conception of his Lord, and is alienated from the Lord he knows views him as inferior. Alienation thus arises as Lord and Bondsman view each other as different, separate and threatening. They are alienated because each sees a negative conception of themselves in the other.

Through his labour, however, the Bondsman creates products of value, which he recognises as valuable, and thus gains a positive sense of self. Yet the Lord’s alienation persists because the Lord’s recognition of the products’ value is not meaningful so long as the labour is indentured. Only if the Lord grants the Bondsman his freedom will the Lord’s alienation be reconciled; otherwise, the Lord remains dependent on the Bondsman for his labour and products. Conversely, the Bondsman’s recognition of the products’ value and the dignity in the labour that produced it validates his agency, and he transcends his position of bondage in relation to the Lord. Thus, for Hegel, alienation did not exist in a vacuum, but was juxtaposed against the mutual concept of Anerkennung, or mutual recognition. Hegel developed the concept of recognition from his philosophical predecessor, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who viewed recognition as foundational to the reciprocity of positive freedoms in society; for others to have the right to act freely in the pursuit of their interests, one limits oneself in certain behaviours so as not to interfere with their pursuits, and this is reciprocated by others also limiting themselves so as not to interfere with ones own freedoms and pursuits.

In the Lord and Bondsman dialectic, their alienation constitutes a form of discordance flowing from their lack of recognition of the other; the Lord does not recognise the Bondsman as an equal person of value, and the Bondsman does not recognise the Lord as his true superior or as a person of virtue. Yet beyond Hegel’s seminal dialectic, the concepts of alienation and recognition would have a profound influence on the subsequent development of 19th and 20th Century philosophy, given their broad conceptual applicability to different contexts. Alienation and recognition relate intimately to how we interact as individuals within a society, as members of a community or subscribers to a particular political ideology. The capacity to recognise, or refuse to recognise, the humanity in others determines our behaviour towards them; Hegel thus positioned Anerkennung, mutual recognition, as a “moral attitude”.² Our harmony with our society and community is predicated upon the recognition we receive from others in our society, which shapes our self-image. If recognition is not mutual or we are cast in a negative light, the consequence is our alienation from the social sphere.

Hegelian alienation and recognition thus hold relevance for the breakdown of our social fabric in the 21st Century; the concepts underpin our crisis of culture and loss of confidence in our political and social institutions. Alienation writ large across society erodes the social fabric, reducing the social domain to a constant struggle of one asserting their claims over another. Open societies can only function on the basis of a shared moral attitude towards others, which recognises the rights of others and operates on a reciprocal basis of positive freedoms. To Hegel, our individuality is only conceivable by reference to other people who may differ from us; thus, our individuality is dependent on others, not an independent construct of ourselves. Reciprocal recognition is therefore necessary for our self-conception as individuals and for the development of the society to which we belong. Mutual recognition of our individuality underscores positive obligations and engagements in society. Conversely, if one feels denigrated, patronised, or castigated, mutual recognition is supplanted by mutual hostility; reaffirming one’s positive self-conception then mandates reasserting oneself over the other by eradicating their self-image. The result is a zero-sum contest for social and cultural dominance. In contemporary discourse, we call this the “culture wars”.

The social sphere is now social media, a cultivated mis/dis/information ecosystem in which recognition of the humanity in others, of anyone with a different point of view, political persuasion, or cultural values, is stripped away and replaced with denigration, disparagement, and condemnation. As individuality is dependent on recognition from others, so the lack of recognition renders individuals into tribal groupings defined by mutual animosity. A culture that is at home, glued to the phone, and alone, is a culture of alienation from society and, increasingly, from reality. As individuals are alienated from society and reality, so they are alienated from themselves. The result is a near-pathological obsession with superficial characteristics of identity and demands for recognition based on perceived social hierarchy, not reciprocal recognition of shared humanity. When demands for recognition seek to engineer a social hierarchy, only by compulsion is the position of the group seeking dominance in the hierarchy recognised by others. The net result is “identity politics”.

The quest of the Progressive Left to police language and control thought in institutions, in corporations, and the social sphere, alienates others who feel powerless to the imposition of their ideological dictates. The institutional ideological monoculture can only be maintained through coercion; those who disagree are forced to either remain silent and quietly go on or be compelled to leave. Coercion invalidates any recognition of the monoculture, and the resulting alienation breeds hostility against institutions. Hostility finds expression on the Right, harnessing alienation for their desired ideological crusade to destroy institutions, deprive individuals of basic rights, and further suppress freedom of expression. The cycle of ideological struggle, censorship and authoritarianism, alienates individuals from the institutions which once formed the bedrock of our democracies - universities, the press, and political parties - who come to perceive these institutions as hostile and oppressive. Recognition of the legitimacy of institutions is lost, supplanted by opposing forces for whom institutions merely become a means to the end of the control of one group over the other. We call this “political polarisation”.

As a political concept, polarisation echoes Bruno Bauer’s critique of religion and religious power, which Bauer developed from Hegel’s theory of alienation.³ For Bauer, a notable characteristic of religion was its subsuming of human reason and freedoms by the assumption that their God provided a fixed point against which truth claims could be pronounced with certainty. As all religions create their own fixed truths, these are irreconcilable save through conflict and persecution of the other competing religion, as their “truths” entail the negation of one’s own truths. Religious belief thus creates a constant state of alienation from the Other against which the True Believers seek to overcome through vanquishing that Other. For Bauer, hatred and violence were not accidental byproducts, but a necessary condition of religious belief. A further necessary condition was suppression of critical and independent thinking; to be a True Believer and maintain one’s status within the group requires total compliance with the beliefs and ideological dictates of one’s faith. To think critically about those dictates - to independently examine the beliefs of one’s own side - thus represents a betrayal, warranting excommunication. Bauer’s critique of religion provides perhaps the closest analogy to the polarisation of American politics, where allegiance to either party has become an belief-system bordering on religiosity, where critically thinking about one’s party dogma is perceived as a sin worthy of condemnation, and where politics is reduced to a desperate, hateful struggle to vanquish The Other Side.

A major driver of our alienation relates to the disintegration of our shared sense-making apparatus, from the press to the sciences. Recognition plays its dialectic role here, too. Recognition of the press and the sciences as trustworthy depends not on argument from authority, but on trust engendered by their methods: for the press, a commitment to fact-based reporting; for the sciences, a commitment to the realist and positivist ontology and epistemology that constitute the scientific method. Yet the press have abandoned their commitment in favour of narrative warfare, bolstering narratives that only accord with the political wing with which they align. This undermines the freedom of thought of the individual, stripping them of the ability to critically examine an issue on its merits and arrive at their own views accordingly. The press is no longer recognised as truly “free”, and the alienation of individuals from the formerly free press drives them into the rabbit hole of alternative media, alienating them further from reality. And the sciences, particularly those relating to social issues such as race, gender and sexuality, have abandoned the scientific method in favour of postmodern relativism. The result, TheScience™, thus devolves science into a tool for political Left/liberals to leverage authority over others on a range of contested issues. By claiming the authority of TheScience™ as exclusively in their domain, Left/liberals assume that their views are thus infallible. Science as a whole thus loses the recognition of its legitimacy, resulting in an alienating relativism where Your Truth and My Truth become irreconcilable through any shared epistemic framework.

Hegel viewed his world, defined by the convulsions and ripple effects of the French Revolution, as a crisis of modernity. And so we stumble through our crisis of modernity, alienated and atomised, peering at the world through the screen in our hand, unable to recognise anything we see.

1. Stewart, J. Hegel’s Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution. Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, UK: 2021.

2. Clarke, JA. Fichte and Hegel on Recognition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 2009;17(2):365-385.

3. Ref. 1 Ibid.