 This claim goes beyond the familiar suggestion that alienation forms a necessary step in certain Hegelian and Marxist developmental narratives. The suggestion here is that internal to the second stage, the stage of alienation, there is both a problematic separation from community and a positive liberation from engulfment. Those who see only the negative thread in alienation, and fail to see ‘what is being achieved within in and distorted by it’, will miss an important, albeit subtle, thread in Marx’s account of the progressive character of capitalism (Cohen 1974: 253).