I have regular access to the online OED (I'm an emeritus Prof at Wayne State and a linguist). Here's what the current OED says:
The making of something abstract into something more concrete or real; the action of regarding or treating an idea, concept, etc., as if having material existence. Also: an instance of this.
1846 G. Grote Hist. Greece I. xvi. 466 (note) Boiocalus would have had some trouble to make his tribe comprehend the re-ification of the god Hêlios.
1854 Fraser's Mag. 49 74 A process of what may be called reification, or the conscious conversion of what had hitherto been regarded as living beings into impersonal substances.
1882 J. B. Stallo Concepts Mod. Physics 269 The existence, or possibility, of transcendental space is another flagrant instance of the reification of concepts.
In sense 2 after German Verdinglichung (1904 or earlier in specific Marxist use; 1824 in apparently isolated early use in sense 1).
In Marxist thought: a process whereby the alienated worker falsely endows commodities and the production relations, institutions, and ideologies of capitalist society with autonomous existence independent of himself or herself, or his or her labour, and hence comes to view them as natural or necessary aspects of life;
The word is not used in early English translations of Marx.
1941 H. Marcuse Reason & Revol. ii. i. 279 Marx's early writings are the first explicit statement of the process of reification (Verdinglichung) through which capitalist society makes all personal relations between men take the form of objective relations between things.
1970 J. J. Shapiro tr. J. Habermas Toward Rational Society iii. 39 The active assault upon culture is based on the same reification as the fetishism of those students who believe that by occupying university classrooms they are taking possession of science as a productive force.
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I have regular access to the online OED (I'm an emeritus Prof at Wayne State and a linguist). Here's what the current OED says:
1846 G. Grote Hist. Greece I. xvi. 466 (note) Boiocalus would have had some trouble to make his tribe comprehend the re-ification of the god Hêlios.
1854 Fraser's Mag. 49 74 A process of what may be called reification, or the conscious conversion of what had hitherto been regarded as living beings into impersonal substances.
1882 J. B. Stallo Concepts Mod. Physics 269 The existence, or possibility, of transcendental space is another flagrant instance of the reification of concepts.
In sense 2 after German Verdinglichung (1904 or earlier in specific Marxist use; 1824 in apparently isolated early use in sense 1).
The word is not used in early English translations of Marx.
1941 H. Marcuse Reason & Revol. ii. i. 279 Marx's early writings are the first explicit statement of the process of reification (Verdinglichung) through which capitalist society makes all personal relations between men take the form of objective relations between things.
1970 J. J. Shapiro tr. J. Habermas Toward Rational Society iii. 39 The active assault upon culture is based on the same reification as the fetishism of those students who believe that by occupying university classrooms they are taking possession of science as a productive force.
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