Reification

Research

Treating an abstract concept as though it were a concrete, independently existing thing — e.g., describing "the economy" or "society" as an actor with intentions; in Marxist theory (Lukács), social relations come to appear as fixed properties of things.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Georg [György] Lukács”, Titus Stahl (first published 4 November 2013; substantive revision 8 June 2023) plato.stanford.edu accessed 22 September 2026

The term’s place in social theory comes from György Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923). Titus Stahl’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry explains: “Lukács calls this development ‘reification.’ It is a process that primarily affects the objective way in which human beings relate to the totality of social relationships that is constitutive of the meaning of their actions, separating this totality (and thus the meaning of their actions) from their self-understanding and establishing it as a form of objective reality.” That is cited as the term’s origin, not as this entry’s definition: the entry describes the general reasoning error of treating an abstraction as an agent, which is broader and does not carry Lukács’s critique of capitalism.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is cited because it carries a named author and a dated revision for each entry, so the claim is attributable to a person on a date — which is the test this lexicon applies to reference sources, and the reason an open-edit encyclopedia is not used. The application to research practice above is this lexicon’s reading.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.