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The alienation theories of M. Seeman, M. Scott, and G. Nettler are reviewed and criticized. The basic criticisms are: (1) the authors arbitrarily combine various concepts and meanings of alienation; (2) by reason of eclecticism, the concept of alienation is incorrectly extracted from its original theoretical framework; and (3) the rationalization for this approach is the intent to operationalize the concept; however, that objective is pursued in a positivistic fashion, first by rejecting general theory, then by throwing out undesirable elements of particular theories (mostly K. Marx's). The basic confusion of the authors is between two fundamentally divergent perspectives on alienation, Marx's and E. Durkheim's. The crux of the disagreement is that Marx starts from the human being and his condition of degradation; functionalists, on the other hand, start from a given social system and define alienation in terms of individual maladjustment or nonconformity to given social norms. As noted by E. FROMM, the problem concerns not the adjustment of individuals to society, but the adjustment of society to the fundamental needs of man.