Reification names the process by which social relations come to appear as fixed, thing-like properties of the world. Georg Lukacs developed the concept in History and Class Consciousness (1923), extending Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism into a general theory of consciousness under capitalism. Where Marx showed that commodities conceal social relations, Lukacs argued that this concealment pervades all thought: law, bureaucracy, science, and philosophy each treat dynamic relational processes as static objects with measurable properties.
The concept captures something precise: a relation (between worker and employer, between community and land, between knower and known) gets frozen into a thing (a wage rate, a property title, a data point). Once frozen, the relation appears natural and given rather than produced and contestable. Reification is not mere abstraction — all thought abstracts. It is a specific kind of abstraction that erases the relational and historical character of what it describes.
From the standpoint of relationality, reification is the inverse of the framework’s central claim. Where relationality holds that relations are ontologically prior to entities, reification produces the appearance that entities are prior to relations. Recognizing reification as a produced effect — not an error but a social achievement — helps clarify what a relational ontology works against.
Related terms
- commodity-fetishism — the economic foundation of reification
- ideology — the systems of belief that reification supports
- spectacle — reification extended into image and performance
- alienation — the lived experience reification produces
- Relational ontology — the framework reification inverts
- historical-materialism — the method that reveals reification as historically produced