Karl Marx’s critique of the state as an alienation of society in his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State

Politics out of place

“…Here, I suggest that this sentiment can be best understood as a form of peripheral alienation. With that, I draw on the classic conception of alienation as feeling powerless or without of control to shape one's own life and destiny, famously used by Marx (see Thompson, 1979;Flohr, 2023), and later interpreted in a spatial context by Lefebvre (1991). Taking this idea of a lack of control into the spatial constellation of centre-periphery tensions, I argue that the process whereby inhabitants of the periphery feel detached, distanced from the central state and feel deprived of co-shaping thecherishedsurrounding in which their everyday life takes place, can be viewed as a sense of alienation in the periphery.…”