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Melvin Seeman Alienation Analysis

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Melvin Seeman’s five prominent features of alienation Melvin Seeman, the American sociologist, considers alienation as the summation of the individual's emotions, divides it into five different modalities: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, and finally self-estrangement. 1. Powerlessness According to Seeman, powerlessness theoretically means when the individual believes his activity will fail to yield the results he seeks. He also opines that the notion of alienation is rooted in the Marxian view of the worker’s condition in capitalist society, where the worker is alienated to the extent that the prerogative and means of decision are expropriated by the ruling entrepreneurs. (Seeman, 1959). Keeping this in mind, Seeman has incorporated …show more content…

Neal and Collas also emphasize the criticality of social isolation in the modern world, and to them social isolation is typically experienced as a form of personal stress; and its sources are deeply embedded in the social organization of the modern world. Moreover, according to Neal and Collas, with increased isolation and atomization, much of one’s daily interactions are with those who are strangers to them and with whom they lack any ongoing social relationships. (Neal & Collas, …show more content…

K.J.Gergen argues that: “the traditional view of self-versus- society is deeply enigmatic and should be replaced by a conception of the self as it is immersed in relatedness. On this account, the individual’s lament of ‘not belonging’ is partially a by-product of traditional discourses themselves”. Furthermore, if the self is relationally constituted, does it make sense to speak of "self-estrangement" rather than "social isolation" (McGarty & Haslam, 2012). Costas and Fleming propose that even though the concept of self-estrangement has not weathered postmodern criticisms of essentialism and economic determinism in an effective way and the concept still has significance when Lacanian approach of the self is deployed. This can be drawn out as part of a larger deliberation on the concept of self between humanism and anti-humanism, structuralism and post-structuralism, or nature and nurture (Costas & Fleming,

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