 That latter assumption raises the wider issue of the relation between alienation and, what might be called ‘revolutionary motivation’. Let us assume that radical social change requires, amongst other conditions, an agent—typically a collective agent—with both the strength and the desire to bring that change about. The role of alienation in helping to form that latter psychological prerequisite—the desire to bring about change on the part of the putative revolutionary agent—looks complicated. First, it would seem that the mere fact of objective alienation cannot play the motivating role, since it does not involve or require any feeling, or thinking about, or otherwise experiencing, the problematic separation here. It remains possible, of course, that a subject’s knowledge of that alienation might—depending, not least, on one’s views on the connections between reasons and motivations—provide an appropriately psychological incentive to revolt. Second, the relation between subjective alienation and motivation looks more complex than it might initially seem. Note, in particular, that some of the experiential dimensions of subjective alienation look less likely than others to generate the psychological prerequisites of action here. Feelings of powerlessness and isolation, for instance, might well generate social withdrawal and individual atomism, rather than radical social engagement and cooperative endeavour, on the part of the relevant agents. In short, whether subjective alienation is a friend or an enemy of revolutionary motivation would seem to depend on the precise form that it takes.