For various reasons, I follow Brian Leiter's blog--if you're not familiar, Leiter is perhaps most famous as the originator of a law school ranking website (not updated in some time), and a philosophy graduate school ranking website (since handed off to others). He is an outspoken, sometimes abrasive Marxist, but also decidedly anti-woke. He occasionally cites mostly-approvingly to Freddie deBoer, but is much older and better educated, so it is helpful to read Leiter if you want a sense of what very old school, very leftist academic thinking looks like today.
Anyway a recent entry on Leiter's blog piqued my interest, because I am a word nerd, but not an academic linguist. In it, Leiter appears to be airing his annoyance at the way the word "reification" gets used in its literal sense (making the abstract concrete)--he's praising NYT for using the word "correctly," in its Marxist sense, while also offering further correction:
"Some social scientists have a term--'reification.'" Actually, the terms [sic] comes from Lukacs, one of the few useful concepts from his History and Class Consciousness...
Now, it is true that contemporary Marxists using the term as a term of art are indeed channeling Lukacs. However, the term itself most assuredly does not originate with Lukacs. Etymonline traces it to 1846 (the relevant Lukacs' text arrived in 1923). Wiktionary provides some further context, suggesting that the word is "a macaronic calque of German Verdinglichung." The only other source I've found suggests that the term "emerged in the English language in the 1860s" but no supporting evidence is provided for the claim, and the rest of that blog sticks to Marxist exposition.
That is where my Google-fu caps out. I know that the term today gets used in programming contexts (e.g. LISP) so certainly the word has been genericized whether Leiter likes it or not. And of course Marx himself was writing in 1846, so I can't dismiss the possibility that Marxists did coin the term (either in German, or by being the ones to calque it from German), in which case it might even be a mistake to credit Lukacs for the concept. But neither can I dismiss the possibility that the term itself had no Marxist implications for several decades before Lukacs came along, in which case the term has been co-opted by Marxists to the extent that they (like Leiter) assert the "correct" use as a Marxist one.
Either way I suspect Leiter's annoyance re: "incorrect" use is not justified by linguistic history, except to the extent he is complaining about people talking about reification in Marxist contexts without using the term in Lukacs' sense (which doesn't appear to be the case, from this blog entry, but I am doing a lot of reading between the lines). Some of you speak German and some of you read Marx and some of you have access to fancy corpus databases... any chance one of you knows, or can find, the first English or German print instance of "reification?"
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Ah! So, this definitely addresses what I'm wondering about. If the ultimate source is Hegel, then Leiter could perhaps make the case that the Marxist interpretation is just the most faithful use of the term--though given his broad dismissal of Hegel, maybe he wouldn't want to do that.
Warning: I have never read Hegel, do not know the Kapital nor any other writing of the mature Marx, and am generally not conversant with 18th to 19th century German philosophy. But I know that Marxism is one branch of a larger movement that was Left-Hegelianism.
What I gather from the second link is that Verdinglichung is involved in the dialectic process, and that Marx as a materialist had another way of conceiving the dialectic process than Hegel.
Generally, I find it little surprising that words with a transparent ethymological meaning - and an obviously useful one - should be used in different fields as more or less different technical terms. It may be annoying to the practitioners of one of these fields that the term is used differently elsewhere - but that's life. As long as there are no consciously disorienting word games played with it, I would not object to it, and I find the cries of "X doesn't use Y as I do" completely unjustified.
Memes want to be free, and shedding parts of their meaning is what makes them able to invade new discoursive ecosystems.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link