After enjoying good fortune in the Sixties and having been forgotten for a long time, today the concept of alienation is being revived by scholars as Hartmut Rosa and Rahel Jaeggi, who come from the tradition of the Frankfurt critical theory. This essay briefly reconstructs the way these two authors rethink the concept of alienation in order to make it still usable today. It shows how Rosa and Jaeggi overcome the shortcomings of Rousseau’s and Marx’s ideas of alienation, and how they make use of this concept in order to criticize contemporary society. Their reactualized ideas of alienation, however, mostly focus on pointing out forms of generalized, individual psychological suffering in today’s society, while leaving aside the need to reshape the Marxian concept of capitalistic alienation.
