One of Dylan's albums in the 1990s was called World Gone Wrong. The title has a wider resonance. It expresses the particular conception of politics and the political which informs so much of his work. Many of his songs depict a world which is fundamentally disordered, and from which as a consequence people are alienated and disaffected. Alienation is one of Dylan's major themes, but his account of how human beings become alienated and his recommendations as to how we should respond to it are many-sided and complex. There is no single perspective or attitude which he consistently presents. The changes through which his work has passed, and the constant reinventions of himself have contributed to this, but the ambivalence also goes deeper, and is reflected in songs at every stage of his career.

Alienation has a long history in western thought, both in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the secular social theories which grew out of it. Its oldest meaning is estrangement, the experience of the world as alien. Individuals become divorced from their essential natures and from authentic existence, and begin to live in inauthentic ways. The source of this alienation is alienation from God, and from the ways of God, brought about by original sin and the fall of man. Disobedience to God's commands led to the expulsion of human beings from the Garden of Eden and the loss of innocence. The attempt to understand and to overcome this estrangement between God and man lies at the centre of Judeo-Christian teaching and its parables about human existence, and has always been a deep influence on Dylan's songs, not just in the Christian albums.

The Judeo-Christian tradition also shaped the secular ideologies and social theories of the modern period, including liberalism and socialism, which proclaimed the possibility of a redemption for the human race through the reordering of society. Rather than being alienated from the ways of God, human beings in the modern world were seen as alienated from nature, both from the physical world and their own human nature. They experienced feelings of estrangement, powerlessness, insecurity, and anxiety arising from political and social structures which denied equality and liberty to their citizens.