Alienation and Self-Respect: An Evaluation Through Pluralistic Critiques

In contemporary political philosophy, the marxist concept of alienation takes few places. the reasonbehind this is the belief that the concept of alienation includes a unique good life perception which contradicts with the value pluralism that is considered as an indispensable principle of democratic culture. in opposite to that widespread idea, from the point of concept of alienation it couldn’t be concluded that a unique goof lifestyle could exist in the absence of alienation. despite the fact that today’s capitalist societies’ liberal pluralistic values have constantly been preaching, the alternativeness arising from the imposition of one dimensional consumption based life that shows us the necessity to rethink the concept of alienation and also many rejections made against it. in this regard, it is meaningful that john rawls allocates a place to the concept of “self-respect”, which has many similarities with the idea of “self-realization” that the marxist concept of alienation includes, as an important social resource in a theory of justice. nevertheless, by taking into account the critical and transformative structure of marxist alienation theory, the insufficiencies of the concept of self-respect must also be revealed.