hi
...ature. That is one way to read the point of the Rousseau piece: that society, or civilization, or enlightenment, or reason, has altered nature man to the point where he can no longer recognize who he is, and such that he now acts out of accordance with his nature. The other forms of alienation are, I think elaborations on this theme. The second quite clearly is: it is is what I’ll call alienation as socially inculcated need. The idea is that society effects an imperceptible transformation of desire into socially inculcated need; of how things which we did not need, but might be nice to have, transformed themselves into things that that we need, and really were not that nice to have. This is a kind of alienation, because the needs are not there in natural man, but a result of the civilization, and thus represents a way in which we fail to understand our own nature...