Political powerlessness as reality

Marvin E. Olsen

pp. 245-261

in: Felix Geyer, David Schweitzer (eds), Theories of alienation, Berlin, Springer, 1976

Abstract

A sense of political alienation is certainly not unique to our era, as seen in the writings of the fifteenth-century French poet Deschamps. Many commentators on modern social life nevertheless view estrangement from power and politics as a fundamental and pervasive characteristic of all urban-industrial-bureaucratic societies: "Rarely before have men experienced such mass resignation before the forces of society, such a sense of distance from the sources of power, such defeatism in the face of an explosive world situation' (Keniston, 1960).