The Labyrinth of Reification

Georg Lukács was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, his early Marxist work History and Class Consciousness (HCC) of 1923 being considered a hallmark of Critical Theory. But does it still offer, one century after its first publication, productive tools to analyze capitalist societies? To answer this question, we must first untangle the conceptual labyrinth in which the book’s main categories have been enmeshed. To contribute to this end, this paper examines the cogency of Lukács’s later self-criticism (implicit in The Young Hegel and explicit in his 1967 critical preface to HCC) that his early concept of reification conflates the phenomena of alienation and objectification and thereby leads to an acritical and idealist view of capitalism. Our conclusion is that the self-criticism does not hold insofar as the theoretical framework developed in HCC involves an approach to the relation between subject and object that is much more sophisticated than understanding reification merely as the former turning into the latter.