The debate around alienation within American and European context. New perspectives and applications between sociology and philosophy in the digital era

Abstract

This paper revisits the sociological concept of alienation, tracing its divergent development across American and European intellectual traditions and proposing a renewed theoretical synthesis for the digital era. While postwar American sociology sought to render alienation empirically tractable through operational definitions and psychometric models, European critical theorists maintained its conceptual depth, linking it to systemic critique and social transformation. Through a detailed engagement with key authors, this study illustrates how alienation evolved from a political-economic critique of capitalist labour into a fragmented psychological construct and, more recently, into a relational and normative paradigm for interpreting work and society. The paper argues that digitalization reopens the question of alienation and destabilise traditional understandings of autonomy, recognition, and job quality. In doing so, it proposes a reintegrated framework that combines empirical measurability with structural critique, reclaiming alienation as a central tool for diagnosing the social pathologies of digital capitalism.