Socio-biologists, again not to be scorned out of hand, see all human discourse as struggle for domination, territory, sexual access and genetic survival. For Hegel and his followers, alienation was defined and measured by the gap between objective knowledge and subjective understanding. If we only understood the larger laws of history and society, we would organized ourselves to fit within them and thus end the thousand forms of pain and problem. There is a theory of the state and of a fascist state at that in Hegel since the state was the repository of what small rationality was possible among fallible human creatures. Without canonizing Marx nor by forgetting the many positive elements changes in social psychology brought into being by the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, let's take a look at some basic ideas in a distinctly marxian theory of alienation.
Human beings create themselves as 'species being' by appro- priating nature.
The means by which nature is appropriated is critical to a solution of alienation. These are the forms of economic life. For most of human history, the sources of alienation resided limitations of production. The means of distribution. A fatal flaw in capitalism is the private appropriation of the wealth produced by social labor.