What is reification in Georg Lukács’s early Marxist work?

I What is the problem with the concept of ‘reification’?

In his early work of the 1930s, Max Horkheimer followed a philosophical path which begun with a critique of positivism and metaphysics and led to a critical, dialectical theory of society. However, he was reluctant to make extensive use of the concept of reification (Abromeit, 2011: 391–2). In his few relevant references to it, he prefers to use the adjective ‘reified’ to characterize the ahistorical concepts and views of ‘traditional theory’ (Horkheimer, 2002: 194) and, in some cases, to attribute closeness and rigidity to bourgeois authority (Horkheimer, 2002: 83, 103, 104, 106). Closer in general to Lukács’s spirit, Herbert Marcuse used the concept of reification to describe the phenomenon of the ossification of modern social power structures due to the dominance of a one-dimensional, technological reason (Marcuse, 1964: 172, 210, 260). However, he did not eschew formulations that allow the identification of technical-rational objectification with reification, e.g. the ‘reification of human labour power’ or of the worker himself (Marcuse, 1964: 36, 40).

A similar tendency to regard reification as a specific type of rational objectification that dominates in modern times can be detected in the standard work of the Frankfurt School’s first generation, Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). These two theorists refer to the ‘reification of human beings in factory’, the reification of the subject’s ‘intimate reactions’ or of ‘the whole of nature’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 23, 136, 194). Simultaneously, in a more Lukácsian manner, they tackle the issues of reified power structures (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 29, 170) or reified thought (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 33, 149). Thus, although they extended Lukács’s analysis of the effects of social rationalization into the fields of modern technological domination over nature and the emergence of mass culture, they deployed a rather opaque notion of reification. In his late work, Theodor Adorno attempted to clarify the issue by interpreting reification as the distorted reflection of social conditions in subjective consciousness (false consciousness) and by criticizing Lukács’s theory and any other that heavily draws on this concept as idealistic (Adorno, 1973: 189–92).

Similarly, in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas explicates reification as the ‘category mistake’ we commit when we regard an interaction as a natural thing. According to this reading of Lukács’s theory, in modernity the universalization of such an objectifying attitude towards the world of human social relations leads to a distorting instrumentalization of man’s communicative interactions. Thus, Lukács’s one-sided understanding of ‘rationalization as reification’ (Habermas, 1991: 355–6) failed to acknowledge the rational potential of communication. Habermas criticizes the theoretical deficits of the critique of reification, which he regards as resulting from the outdated paradigm of the philosophy of subjectivity with all its fundamental conceptual shortcomings. Therefore, he suggests abandoning the classic concept of reification and radically reformulating the ‘problematic of reification’ through a turn towards the paradigm of intersubjectivity and communication. In its Habermasian version, critical theory focuses on the phenomenon of the ‘colonization’ of the communicative structures of the ‘lifeworld’ by the functionalist logic of the ‘system’ (market, bureaucratic administration) and demands the harmonization of these two modes of coordinating social actions (see Habermas, 1992) through establishing social democracy.

Finally, in his recent book Reification (2008), Axel Honneth proposed a new way of interpreting Lukács’s initial idea. However, while Habermas and the representatives of old critical theory preserved Lukács’s original connection between the phenomenon of reification and the process of social rationalization, Honneth dissociates them and relates reification to a specific individual attitude towards the ontogenetically necessary relations of recognition between subjects. His analyses aspire to anthropologically ground an ethical demand for mutual recognition – ‘ethical’ in the sense of the evaluative-ethical criteria needed to found a critique of ‘social pathologies’ (Honneth, 2007: 1–48), distinct to the strictly normative ethics and theories of justice of the Kantian tradition.

In Honneth’s view, the constitution of the human subject is based on an ‘antecedent’, primordial recognition of the other – a recognition that comes to the fore every time we relate to her, or even to ourselves or our environment, in an empathetic, i.e. ‘emotionally engaged’, way. However, when the attitude of original recognition is totally replaced by a secondary objectifying stance, the phenomenon of reification as ‘forgetfulness of recognition’ emerges. Then the original recognition is replaced by the ‘detached’, ‘emotionless’, ‘psychologically distanced’ attitude of the neutral observer who apprehends her ‘natural surroundings, social environment, and personal characteristics […] in a detached and emotionless manner – in short, as things’ (Honneth, 2008: 25). In opposition to the preservation of an awareness of antecedent recognition, reification represents the case in which ‘in the course of our acts of cognition, we lose our attentiveness to the fact that this cognition owes its existence to an antecedent act of recognition’ (Honneth, 2008: 59). As I have shown elsewhere, despite Honneth’s assertion of the opposite, his interpretation cannot be considered as a reading of Lukács’s theory of reification. At best, it represents a problematic conceptualization of a pathology of recognition (cf. Kavoulakos, 2018).

The ambiguities in the fluctuating but nonetheless persistent use of the term ‘reification’ in critical theory de facto create the need for its clarification. The metaphor of turning something into a thing can easily lead to confusion as to exactly what is being ‘reified’. All too often, the metaphoric character of the term is forgotten and it is taken almost literally. Consequently, one-sided interpretations become possible, at times implying that ‘reification’ is an epistemic category, and at others, a moral one. In other words, the impression is often created that the problem with ‘reification’ is, e.g., the ethically unpalatable treatment of persons or human qualities or the cognitively unacceptable consideration of certain natural objects as things. Such interpretations open up the way to all too easy and superficial ethical or epistemological critiques of the concept which, however, do not even touch its essence.

II Early forms of the theory of reification

To understand what Lukács might have wanted to denote by this concept one has to search for its origins in his early work and then to reconsider its classic conceptualization in the reification essay from History and Class Consciousness (1923). In his pre-Marxist work, Lukács sought to investigate the rationalization process in the Western world and its effects on subjective attitudes and cultural structures. Independently of whether he based his approaches on Lebensphilosophie or neo-Kantianism, Lukács always applied different versions of a basic explanatory scheme: he located the central form of mediation between subject and object and connected it with certain effects on the level of human consciousness and behavior. This very scheme is repeated and refined in History and Class Consciousness.

During his early period, Lukács was particularly interested in a sociological diagnosis of the situation in modern society and its culture, as becomes apparent in his first book, The Evolutionary History of the Modern Drama (1911). In fact, in this book Lukács offers a brief description of the fragmented and objectified social structures of the modern world in order to explicate its dominant historicist worldview and consequently, to examine whether it allows drama to flourish. ³ His remarks on modern social structures rely on Simmel’s views. Despite its brevity, Lukács’s description of the fundamental traits of modern society is particularly interesting as it contains, in a seminal form, some of the central elements of his subsequent theory of reification.

As Simmel before him, Lukács connects the distinctiveness of bourgeois culture with the wider process of the rationalization of economic life, social relations and the dominant intellectual forms. For Simmel, the generalized use of money has a decisive impact on social life, which is increasingly dominated by the objective attitude of the calculative intellect and by the de-personalization of human relations (cf. Simmel, 2011: 465–83). This change is particularly visible in economic life, in the development of the division of labor and the specialization of workers. For Simmel this development renders it impossible to acknowledge the individual self in the results of practice, which ‘appears only as a wholly specialized part of our being that is indifferent to the total unity of man’ (Simmel, 2011: 493).

Leaning upon Werner Sombart’s analyses, Lukács concretizes Simmel’s description of the consequences of the generalized use of money on the structure of production by turning his attention from the role of money in general to the role of capital. ⁴ For Lukács the dominance of capital in production leads to the separation of the abstract, objective process of production from the personality, the psychic life and the distinctive, individual qualities of the people who serve it – regardless of whether they are its owners or workers (cf. Lukács, 1981: 95). Lukács’s analysis points out the emerging opposition between, on the one hand, the impersonal capitalist division of labor and its objective ‘criteria of purposefulness’ and, on the other hand, the ‘always irrational and thus only qualitatively determinable abilities of the worker’ (Lukács, 1981: 94–5) that are violently subjected to the demands of a system external to them.

Rationalization, as the reduction of the irrational individual uniqueness, the unrepeatable qualitative element to homogeneous ‘quantitative categories’, generates a strong tendency towards the homogenization of the work process as well as all other fields of modern life (cf. Lukács, 1981: 94–5), including modern science (cf. Lukács, 1981: 92–3). Both for Simmel and Lukács, objectification, homogenization and de-personalization are structural features not only of the ‘material’ social processes, but also of the intellectual and cognitive dimensions of modern life. This assumption is central in The Philosophy of Money (1900) and in The Evolutionary History of the Modern Drama, but also in the description of the objective dimension of the rationalization process offered in History and Class Consciousness. This objective side of rationalization is supplemented by a ‘subjective’ aspect that pertains to the formation of a corresponding form of consciousness. The examination of this form of consciousness or worldviews in Evolutionary History prefigures the subsequent analysis of reified consciousness in History and Class Consciousness.

The opposition between modern life and individuality diagnosed by Lukács determines a form of consciousness that he describes in Dilthey’s terms: the fundamental common experience of the members of bourgeois society is the ‘historical experience’ (das historische Erlebnis). ⁵ It corresponds to the awareness of the so-called ‘historical problem’, i.e. the ‘problem of the existent, which – even if its inadequacy were known – is, purely through its existence, capable of effective, even victorious resistance’ (Lukács, 1981: 55). The historical problem is nothing but the omnipotence of the given, of the historically established. Hence, the ‘historical experience’ is the ‘hopelessness of the consciousness’ (Lukács, 1981: 55), the awareness of the deep chasm and disharmony between subject and object that leads to the subject’s passive attitude towards the brute reality.

During his apprenticeship in philosophy in Heidelberg between 1912 and 1918, Lukács distanced himself from Lebensphilosophie and turned to the philosophically stricter neo-Kantianism. However, he did not abandon his fundamental scheme for explaining man’s everyday behavior. In his Heidelberg Aesthetic he develops a theory of everyday life as a theory of ‘experienced reality’. Leaning upon the neo-Kantian analysis of the spheres of validity, he conceptualizes experienced reality as a secondary, derivative sphere or, in the new terminology he now uses, a derivative ‘positing’ (Setzung). In other words, according to Lukács’s new approach, the experienced reality represents a specific kind of subjectively constituted objectivity. ⁶ Compared to other spheres, experienced reality has the character of a secondary, derivative and ‘artificial’ (gekünstelt; Lukács, 1975: 28) realm of appearances, ⁷ constituted by the form of ‘experienceness’, through which objects appear in the experience of the ‘historical human being’ or the ‘whole man’ (cf. Lukács, 1975: 26).

Hence, experienced reality is constituted through a type of experiencing that consists in a kind of normatively neutralized attitude of mere experiential acceptance of the objectivity given ready-made to the ‘whole man’ (cf. Lukács, 1975: 26–7). Lukács distinguishes two subjective behaviors that correspond to the opposition between the normative and the empirical subject: the separation of the active constitution of objects and their merely passive experiencing. In experienced reality, the objects are characterized by a kind of ossification, a fact suggested by the metaphors Lukács uses to connect passive experiencing with being. In fact, leaning upon the classic neo-Kantian opposition of being and validity, Lukács characterizes the function of passive experiencing as the ‘transformation of validity into being’, as the sinking of the whole man in the ‘experience as being’ or in the ‘being of experience’. ⁸ Therefore, experienced reality is finally a sphere of ‘brute facts’ (factum brutum; Lukács, 1975: 30), a ‘level of the completely transcendent objectivity’ (Lukács, 1975: 29). Here Lukács draws upon the notion of transcendence of transcendental philosophy, i.e. the ‘independence from the subject’. ⁹ It is the impenetrable transcendence of the merely given, towards which the ‘whole man’ can only adopt an instrumental attitude, but never develop a constitutive behavior (cf. Lukács, 1975: 30–3).

In the next section I will explicate the concept of reification. The cautious reader will not find it difficult to draw parallels with Lukács’s neo-Kantian theory of experienced reality. Their structural homologies are obvious: In both theories the constitution of reality is performed through a form of objectivity that entails the passive attitude of merely ‘experiencing’ the objects. The subject of this immediate experience is confronted with an ossified, ‘transcendent’ reality to which it cannot give meaning. It can only take it into account in its calculations and practical pursuits. This subject sinks into the forgetfulness of the fact that the ‘ready-made’ objects given to it are in reality products of its spontaneity. Lukács’s ascertainment that ‘a distant, completely transcendent world of objects corresponds to the immediacy of the common experiencing’ (Lukács, 1975: 34) could be a phrase from his essay on reification.

Finally, in his Theory of the Novel (1916) Lukács attempted to historicize his neo-Kantian theory of experienced reality. In this book the transition from the ‘closed’, ‘integrated culture’ to the ‘problematic’ modern culture is described as a consequence of the loss of the ‘transcendental topography of the spirit’ (Lukács, 1978: 31), due to the modern discovery of the ‘productivity of the spirit’ (cf. Lukács, 1978: 33–4). In these conditions the subject is lost in the merely given, indifferent and meaningless social formations, which constitute the modern ‘world of convention’ that Lukács also characterizes as a ‘second nature’ (Lukács, 1978: 62). The ‘second nature’ refers precisely to the ‘formations’ which, albeit a product of men, resemble the objects of the (‘first’) nature, inasmuch as they obey laws that can be cognized as facts but not understood as meaningful (cf. Lukács, 1978: 62–3).

With his Theory of the Novel Lukács re-establishes a social-historical reference of the abstract critique of culture he formulated in his Aesthetic. Nevertheless, he does not yet form a dialectical theory of society and history. While retaining the idea of the distortive effect of a specific form of mediation of the subject and the object, he disconnects it from the timeless form of ‘experienceness’ and links it to the emergence and domination of modern subjectivism. Even if he is not yet able to synthesize his early views on social rationalization with the problem of the modern form of objectivity, as he would do a short time later in History and Class Consciousness, he detects a distortion in the alienation of man from the self-created social formations and in his passive attitude towards them. From our retrospective point of view, for Lukács’s ‘sudden’ turn in 1918 there was only one more step to be made: to find in Marx the language that would allow him a synthesis and a non-idealist understanding of all these elements.

III Rational objectification in bourgeois society

In the previous section, I pointed to the origins of Lukács’s idea to locate the fundament of the constitution of social reality in a particular forming of the world in his early, pre-Marxist work. In History and Class Consciousness Lukács names the fundamental category of this forming, using the neo-Kantian term ‘form of objectivity’, which he historicizes and imbues with a socio-ontological and epistemological meaning. In the reification essay from History and Class Consciousness Lukács defines the central form of objectivity of bourgeois society: it is the ‘commodity form’, which he constitutes by referring to the first chapter of Marx’s Capital.

To talk about the ‘commodity form’, Lukács firstly examines the position of the commodity in pre-capitalist societies. This retrospective view allows us to acquire a better knowledge of the social-historical present through comprehending its historical distinctiveness, comparing and assessing the decisive significance of the commodity form as a ‘constitutive form’ (Lukács, 1971: 85; 1923: 96) of modern society. ¹⁰ Leaning upon relevant remarks by Marx, Lukács stresses the fact that whereas exchange and barter had already appeared in primitive forms of social organization, the exchange value did not take a form independent of the use-value of the commodities in them. The difference between such historical periods and the capitalist epoch arises from the fact that in them the commodity form is not yet the ‘universal form of shaping society’ (Lukács, 1971: 85; 1923: 96, my emphasis). The historical uniqueness of capitalist society, its qualitative difference from pre-capitalist societies, is precisely connected with the trend of the universalization of the commodity form and, subsequently, with the decisive, ‘constitutive’ role of the ‘problem of the commodity…as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all manifestations of its life’ (Lukács, 1971: 83; 1923: 94).

What is, however, the particular structure represented by the commodity as the original form of objectivity in bourgeois society? As an object to be exchanged, the commodity represents the principle of formal equality of qualitatively different things. The ‘commodity relation’ (Lukács, 1971: 96, 97, 98; 1923: 69, 71, 74) is founded on the reduction of different things to their only common element, i.e. the objectively countable, abstract labor needed for their production. With the universalization of the commodity form in economic life, every contingency of the quantitative relation at the basis of commodity exchange ceases, since it is integrated in a system of market relations, in which the abstraction necessary for exchange is performed according to ‘objective laws’, independent of the agents’ will.

It would be a mistake to think that with this analysis Lukács attempted an economic explanation of the ‘laws’ of bourgeois society. ¹¹ Instead of searching for the economic cause of social phenomena, Lukács expresses his opinion that, in opposition to what is the case in pre-capitalist societies, in capitalism the ‘commodity form’ or ‘commodity structure’ is ‘the prototype (Urbild) of all forms of objectivity and all forms of subjectivity that correspond to them’ (Lukács, 1971: 83; 1923: 94, emphasis added). If the commodity is the ‘prototypical form’, then in bourgeois society there must be other structural forms in other social fields apart from the economic sphere, which constitute variations of it. The relation between them will not be that of a cause to its effect, but should rather be described as a relation of structural homology. Thus, instead of a mechanistic explanation of the genesis and functioning of capitalism, in Lukács we have a holistic presentation of the fundamental form of objectivity that permeates the relation of bourgeois society to nature, the relations between men, as well as the relation of man with himself (see Lukács, 1971: 88; 1923: 99). This presentation may start from the field of economy, but it extends to the rest of the fields of social life, detecting the structural homologies between their forming principles without attempting to reduce them to an ‘economic basis’ (cf. Feenberg, 2014: 73–7).

The emergence of the new division of labor is accompanied by the social establishment of a new form of objectivity, which it simultaneously presupposes, on the objective as well as the subjective level. This is the form of ‘calculability’ (Lukács, 1971: 88; 1923: 99), of calculative rationality. As has been noted, the implementation of this calculative form of objectivity corresponds to that which Marx described as a ‘social process of abstraction’, as an imposition of abstract categories which thus become ‘real abstractions’ (Realabstraktionen) that govern real economic life. ¹² Lukács describes this process as ‘rational objectification’ that consequently conceals ‘above all the – qualitative and material – immediate character of things as things’ (Lukács, 1971: 92; 1923: 104). This fundamental structure permeates the whole of life in bourgeois society, from the bureaucratic organization of the state to intellectual structures and intimate family relations. Hence, it defines its historical particularity as a rationalized social totality.

IV The phenomenon of the reification of social relations

The analysis of the various aspects of rational objectification must be cautiously distinguished from the description of the ‘phenomenon of reification’ – to which the title of the first section of the relevant essay from History and Class Consciousness refers. This phenomenon ‘results from the commodity relation’ and assumes a ‘decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the behaviour of men towards it’ (Lukács, 1971: 86; 1923: 97, emphasis added). It is the phenomenon of beclouding the social-historical character of the relation between subject and object that is organized and delimited by the dominant form of objectivity. In this way a social ‘second nature’ is constituted, which is governed by definite, empirically-analytically describable ‘laws’, and which appears to be impenetrable by human intellect and action. Lukács describes precisely this dual, subjective-mental and objective-socio-ontological phenomenon as ‘reification’.

The discussion about what Lukács’s concept of reification means would have easily come to a clear and simultaneously definite conclusion if the meaning of the term in Marx had been taken into account. The truth is that Marx himself uses the term ‘reification’ in the forty-eighth chapter of the third volume of Capital. At this point he describes the ‘mystification of the capitalist mode of production’, the ‘reification of social relations’, the ‘immediate coalescence of the material relations with their historical and social specificity’. ¹³ It is certain that this reference inspired the constitution of Lukács’s concept of reification, for Lukács elsewhere cites the continuation of the above quote. ¹⁴

György Márkus explains that the ‘material relations of production’, to which Marx refers, pertain to the ‘technical’ dimensions of social practice, i.e. the abstract functions that are necessary for the social reproduction of every society. Marx ascertains that these functions are merged, they are inseparably interwoven with their historically concrete realization so that the latter’s historicity is concealed (cf. Márkus, 1982: 149–51). As we will see in detail below, for Lukács as for Marx, reification always refers to precisely this ‘vanishing’ of the historical character of social relations through their appearance as ‘material relations of production’, as ‘technical imperatives’ that have the unchangeable traits of a ‘thing’. In this sense, reification means to ‘treat social relations as things’ (Feenberg, 2014: 66).

This does not, of course, mean that these relations are not mediated by ‘things’ or that they do not have a ‘material character’. As in every ‘mystification’, the problem here is that the materially mediated relations do not appear as they are, i.e. socially-historically determined, but rather, they appear as ‘things’ whose nature is given and unchangeable. Lukács uses Marx’s expression ‘phantom objectivity’ (gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit; Marx, 1976: 128; 1962: 52; Lukács, 1971: 83, 100; 1923: 94, 112) to denote the capitalist mystification of the social-historical reality, the constitution of the phantom-like objectivity of the commodity relation as a ‘thing’. However, how can this ‘mystification’ or – as one could also say – this ‘naturalization’ of social relations be explained?

To answer this question Lukács synthesizes his concept of the ‘prototypical’ form of objectivity of the modern time, inspired by neo-Kantianism, with Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism. In the section on commodity fetishism in Capital (Marx, 1976: 163–77; 1962: 85–8) Marx showed that, since the form of value commodity exchange relies upon takes on the form of the equivalence of qualitatively unequal things, their value appears to be an ‘objective property’ that these things possess. Thus, the value-form immediately produces an appearance that conceals the social relations lying at the basis of the material reproduction of society, since ‘[i]t is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here…the fantastic form of a relation between things’. ¹⁵ While socially determined, the form of value is thus transformed into a quasi natural fact, a ‘natural form’ (Naturform; Marx, 1976: 168; 1962: 90) that produces a series of further capitalist mystifications, due to which labor, capital and land are separated from the context of the social relations they represent and appear as ‘natural’ sources of value (Marx, 1981: 968–70; 1964: 838–9).

V Second nature and contemplation

Does this mean that reification is only a phenomenon that relates to the false consciousness of men in capitalist society? An examination of the quotes in which Lukács refers to reification initially seems to support such a reading, since in their majority they pertain to the ‘reified consciousness’, the ‘reified thought’ or ‘theory,’ etc., while, when the term reification refers to the ‘world’ or the ‘relations’, one might easily think that it describes the way in which these are perceived by the subject as something fixed and unchangeable. ¹⁶ This interpretation does not consider the fact that for Marx and Lukács thought and being, consciousness and reality, are dialectically interrelated. ¹⁷

In Marx it is clear that the mystification of the relations of production, i.e. capitalist fetishism, does not only consist in a false form of consciousness but also pertains to the reality of alienated capitalist economy. Capital (as accumulated unpaid labor) becomes autonomous and imposes the logic of capitalization as superior to the satisfaction of social needs. As Marx writes about actors in capitalism: ‘Their social movement within society has, for them, the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them’ (Marx, 1976: 167–8; 1962: 89). Yet, their subordination to the ‘movement of the things’ is not a mere illusion. Therefore ‘[f]reedom in this sphere can consist only in this, that…the associated producers govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control, instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’ (Marx, 1981: 959; 1964: 828). For both Marx and Lukács, the distorted consciousness (verkehrtes Bewusstsein) is the other side of a ‘real distortion’ (Realverkehrung) on the level of the relations of production. ¹⁸

Lukács emphatically notes that, as ‘forms of appearance’, the ‘reified laws…are by no means merely modes of thought, they are forms of objectivity of the present bourgeois society’ (Lukács, 1971: 177; 1923: 194). Therefore, one must assume that the abstract social forms of objectivity correspond to the ‘necessary existential and intellectual form of bourgeois society, the reification of being and thought’ (Lukács, 1971: 177; 1923: 194). Because the problem of reification pertains to both being and thought, its resolution cannot be confined to a transformation of consciousness, but must include the practical alteration of reality itself. The abolition of the reified forms ‘cannot simply be a movement of thought alone; it must also amount to their practical sublation as the actual forms of social life’ (Lukács, 1971: 177; 1923: 194, emphasis in the original), i.e. to the practical disruption of the ‘reified structure of existence’ (Lukács, 1971: 197, similarly: 205; 1923: 216, similarly: 224).

Thus, as a ‘phenomenon’ reification is ‘existent’, it belongs – to speak in a Hegelian manner – to the level of ‘illusion’ (Schein), i.e. the level of the immediately given form of appearance (Erscheinungsform) of bourgeois society: ‘Reification is…the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society’. ¹⁹ This immediate facticity, permeated by ‘reified laws’, corresponds to what Lukács calls ‘second nature’ (Lukács, 1971: 86, 128; 1923: 97, 142). In contemporary terms one can identify second nature with the social system; after all, it consists in an ‘ineluctable sequence of known, knowable, rational systems of laws’ (Lukács, 1971: 129; 1923: 142) that are externally imposed upon men, in a fashion analogous to the laws of (first) nature, i.e. independently of our will. ²⁰

Lukács’s intention from the beginning was to theoretically conceptualize the dialectical relation between social being and consciousness, object and subject, in modern society. Besides, this is why, when he turned his attention to the commodity form as the ‘prototype of all forms of objectivity’, he simultaneously saw it as the prototype of ‘all forms of subjectivity that correspond to them in bourgeois society’ (Lukács, 1971: 83; 1923: 94). The concept of subjectivity does not only contain its passive formation by the objective conditions or, in other words, its constitution on the basis of the dominant form of objectivity. An essential part of it is also the stance assumed by the subject and its behavior or way of relating (Verhalten) to the world. The examination of this subjective stance is of particular importance for Lukács, who searched for the conditions of possibility for an active intervention by the subject, in order to change the social-historical objectivity. As he notes in a quote already cited above, the phenomenon of reification ‘that results from the commodity relation’ is of

decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the behaviour of men towards it; for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression; for the attempts to comprehend this process or to rebel against its disastrous effects, to liberate themselves from servitude to a ‘second nature’ so created. (Lukács, 1971: 86; 1923: 97)

Reified consciousness determines a particular behavior of the subject in all its everyday practices in capitalist society, which Lukács calls ‘contemplative’. When he uses the term ‘contemplation’ Lukács does not allude only to an epistemic stance, but to a wider cognitive and practical behavior. Indeed, as has been aptly remarked, this stance must not be misunderstood as ‘a psychological property of individuals’, but must be considered as a ‘categorial appearance form of (individual) social existence in capitalist social formations’, as a ‘historically produced and derived mode of relatedness to the world’. ²¹ As the rationalization and mechanization of the labor process progresses, ‘the worker’s activity increasingly loses its practical character and is transformed into a contemplative stance’ (Lukács, 1971: 89; 1923: 100–101). In fact, a ‘passive submission’ (Lukács, 1971: 89; 1923: 100) characterizes all the activities of the individual that behaves as an unengaged spectator.

VI Conclusion: Objectification and reification

The distinction between rational objectification and reification I suggested above is particularly important for the interpretation of Lukács’s theory of reification. This is firstly because it confutes the misplaced critique that in History and Class Consciousness Lukács identifies reification with objectification. This critique determined a great part of the reception of this work even by prominent authors, ²² while Lukács himself adopted the same misinterpretation of his own position in the preface to History and Class Consciousness of 1967. ²³ Secondly, by restoring the relevant distinction, we make it possible to avoid the wrong impression created by formulations such as the ones we saw above (in Section I), which suggest that reification is itself a specific kind of distorted objectification, e.g. of handling man, his/her abilities or his/her surroundings as ‘things’. Reification is not merely an epistemic or/and an ethical concept – it is primarily a socio-ontological and simultaneously a cultural category. ²⁴

The suggested absence of this distinction in Lukács could be corroborated only if for Lukács every rational objectification inevitably led to reification. But Lukács does not contend any such thing – quite the opposite: only a historically specific form of rational objectification brings about the phenomenon of reification. More concretely, in Section III we saw that the prototype of the modern form of objectivity, namely the commodity form, had already appeared in pre-capitalist societies, without, however, having the same effects on the social structures in them that it has in capitalism. Only (the postulate of) its universalization leads to that quantitative social change which is connected with the phenomenon of reification. ²⁵

The universalization of rational-calculative forms entails the claim and, consequently, the tendency that they form a complete system which exhaustively organizes the world and human life in it. The claim to systematization we meet in rationalist philosophy and science reflects precisely this tendency on the level of intellect and knowledge. The universality and systematization of the rational-calculative formations is not a self-evident characteristic of every historically realized rational objectification, but only of the rational objectification in the framework of modern rationalism, which in modern times is considered the only valid model of knowledge (cf. Lukács, 1971: 139; 1923: 154).

However, ascribing to Lukács the identification of objectification and reification seems to be confirmed by his description of the rational-calculative objectification of the self, which pertains to the subjective dimension of reification. At this point, commentators are strongly tempted to identify the objectification of the subjective abilities or performances with their ‘reification’. ²⁶ After all, is it not Lukács himself who tells us that the abilities of the subject are transformed into a ‘thing’ (cf. Lukács, 1971: 87, 90, 91, 99, 100; 1923: 98, 101, 102, 110, 112)? Indeed, a further variant of this interpretation imputes to Lukács an identification ‘of the reification of relations and the reification of labor itself’. ²⁷

Actually Lukács was attentive enough to use in almost all cases only the terms ‘rational mechanization’, ‘calculability’, ‘rational’ or ‘mechanical objectification’, etc., to describe the process of separating a specific ability from the whole personality, abstracting its qualities and rationalizing it through measuring and quantitatively expressing it (cf. Lukács, 1971: 88, 89, 92, 100; 1923: 99, 100, 104, 110-111). Even if in a few places he refers to the ‘reified, mechanically objectified “performance” of the worker’ (Lukács, 1971: 90; 1923: 101) or to the reification that penetrates ‘deep’ in the ‘“soul” of the man who sells his performance as a commodity’ (Lukács, 1971: 172; 1923: 188), despite all ambiguity, it is more plausible to interpret these points in the light of the overall spirit of the text. As we have understood it so far, this suggests that reification consists in the concealment of the social basis of the rational objectification of the subject’s physical and psychic abilities, i.e. as the obfuscation of the internal connection of their measurable objectivity with the capitalist division of labor. In the case of rational ‘self-objectification’ too (Lukács, 1971: 92; 1923: 104), what becomes reified is not the self but the social foundation of its rational objectification, that is, a specific system of social relations. The usual interpretation of Lukács’s concept of reification appears to be a projection of an error his critics were the first to make.

My retrospective analysis of Lukács’s pre-Marxist work showed that it already contained the idea of connecting a particular formation of objectivity with specific consequences for the subject’s attitude towards it. In History and Class Consciousness Lukács only needed to synthesize this idea with Marx’s analysis of commodity and Weber’s description of social rationalization to constitute an explanation of the phenomenon of de-historicization, neutralization and ossification of capitalist social power relations. Of course, so far I have one-sidedly emphasized the explication of reification as a phenomenon provoked by the universal domination of the commodity form. However, according to Lukács, this phenomenon can be found in all fields of modern social life that are penetrated by rational-calculative forms, including the state, the administration, the legal system, journalism, etc.

The term ‘reification’ is used in these cases in analogy to the field of economy to describe an effect of the implementation of the modern form of objectivity. But, in a strict sense, the rigidification and de-historicization of the rational-calculative structures of such fields of modern life does not depend upon their ‘transformation into things’ ²⁸ but upon their appearance as incarnations of the only valid form of rationality, which one might describe as their ‘rational consecration’. This is something we must always keep in mind if we wish to avoid misunderstandings. In any case, in Lukács’s turn to the reifying consequences of the formalist rationality of commodity exchange and to the social generalization of the calculative form of rationality one can discern the origins of a critique of capitalism that took the form of a ‘critique of instrumental reason’ or a ‘critique of technical rationality’. This is the model that would become the centerpiece of the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. ²⁹ Thus, the clarification of Lukács’s theory of reification also allows a more lucid understanding of his successors.