 The term ‘alienation’ is usually thought to have comparatively modern European origins. In English, the term had emerged by the early fifteenth century, already possessing an interesting cluster of associations. ‘Alienation’, and its cognates, could variously refer: to an individual’s estrangement from God (it appears thus in the Wycliffe Bible); to legal transfers of ownership rights (initially, especially in land); and to mental derangement (a historical connection that survived into the nineteenth-century usage of the term ‘alienist’ for a psychiatric doctor). It is sometimes said that ‘alienation’ entered the German language via English legal usage, although G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), for one, typically uses ‘Entäusserung’, and not ‘Entfremdung’ to refer to property transfer (Hegel 1991a: §65). (It is only the latter term which has an etymological link to ‘fremd’ or ‘alien’.) Moreover, perhaps the first philosophical discussion of alienation, at least of any sophistication, was in French. In the Second Discourse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) diagnoses ‘inflamed’ forms of amour propre—a love of self (which is sometimes rendered as ‘pride’ or ‘vanity’ in older English translations)—whose toxicity is amplified by certain social and historical developments, as manifesting themselves in alienated forms of self; that is, in the actions and lives of individuals who have somehow become divided from their own nature (see Rousseau 1997, and Forst 2017, 526–30).