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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   1991 thread views

Can You Help Me With the Etymology of Reification (Verdinglichung)?

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?"

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Using Google Books, I found two English-language usages of the term from the 1850s; all of the earlier usages appear to be OCR errors. However, there appear to be earlier usages of "Reification" in German and "réification" in French, so I plan to keep looking for those.

"The Principle of the Grecian Mythology: Or, How the Greeks Made Their Gods." Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, vol. 49, no. 289, Jan. 1854, pp. 69-79. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/sim_frasers-magazine_1854-01_49_289/page/69.

In short, although the process by which the Greeks selected the objects of their Pantheon may very well, in the sense in which we are now viewing the subject, be regarded as a process of deification, the actual march of the Greek mind in its intercourse with nature was not a process of deification, or the conscious conversion of impersonal substances into gods, but the very reverse—a process of what may be called reification, or the conscious conversion of what had hitherto been regarded as living beings into impersonal substances. ("The Principle" 74-75)

This is the earliest English-language usage I could find.

Review of A History of Rome, from the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Empire, by Henry G. Liddell. The Athenæum, no. 1467, 8 Dec. 1855, pp. 1425-1427. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/sim_athenaeum-uk_1855-12-08_1467/page/1425.

Primeval men began with a world all vitality, and instead of having any room or occasion to employ themselves in what we call deification or the conversion of things into personages, their whole intellectual procedure necessarily consisted in exactly the opposite—in a gradual and difficult effort of reification, or the conversion of personages into things. (Review of A History 1425)

The reviewer here appears to be repeating the argument from Fraser's Magazine, contra Liddell.

Interesting! Given the year on the Fraser source, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that is what Etymonline and Wiktionary are referencing. This strengthens my suspicion that Leiter was mistaken to attribute the term to Lukacs, who apparently only applied it to Marxism. The concept Leiter has in mind indeed appears to be only one kind of reification, so his suppressed complaint re: people using the term incorrectly seems unjustified.

Thanks for the insight!

I think I found the 1846 usage! A German translation of a later edition of this book contained "Re-ification" on Google Books.

Grote, George. History of Greece. Vol. 1, John Murray, 1846. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/dli.granth.36583.

Tacitus, in reporting the speech, accompanies it with the glossary "quasi coram," to mark that the speaker here passes into a different order of ideas from that to which himself or his readers were accustomed. If Boiocalus could have heard, and reported to his tribe, an astronomical lecture, he would have introduced some explanation, in order to facilitate to his tribe the comprehension of Hêlios under a point of view so new to them. While Tacitus finds it necessary to illustrate by a comment the personification of the sun, Boiocalus would have had some trouble to make his tribe comprehend the re-ification of the god Hêlios. (Grote 466)

The derivation appears rather simple here: "re-ification" is constructed by analogy with "personification", going from Latin persōna to rēs. Meanwhile, the other foreign-language hits turned out to be OCR errors, except for an 1855 French usage.

Jullien, B. Thèses de grammaire. Librairie de L. Hachette et cie, 1855. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/thsesdegrammaire00jull.

Nous réi-fions, si l'on peut ainsi parler, les êtres animés, c'est-à-dire que nous les prnons comme des choses quand, par notre sentiment actuel, nous considérons en eux plutôt l'être matériel que l'être intelligent. C'est ainsi qu'on dit tous les jours, en parlant d'un enfant, d'un domestique:

C'est propre, c'est rangé;

C'est tranquille, c'est studieux, etc.;

Cela ne fera jamais que ce que je voudrai. (Jullien 149)

In the index, this passage is cited as "réification opposée à la personnification" (501). Looking at the inflected form réi-fions, it would probably be a good idea to check for variations on the verb "reify". (Edit: No luck on that front.)

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