DENNIS WRONG
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intellectual baggage the term has inevitably accumulated over the
years , accentuates elements that were central to the German phil–
osophical tradition out of which the concept came. As Peter Berger
defines it in
The Sacred Canopy :
"Alienation is the process whereby the
dialectical relationship between the individual and his world is lost to
consciousness. The individual 'forgets' that this world was and con–
tinues to be co-produced by him.... The essential difference be–
tween the socio-cultural world and the world of nature is obscured–
namely, the difference that men have made the first but not the sec–
ond."
In another book, coauthored with Thomas Luckmann
(The So–
cial Construction of Reality),
Berger offered a definition of "reification"
that is almost identical word-for-word with the definition of aliena–
tion I have quoted. Lukacs is the source of the conception of reifica–
tion as a form of social consciousness, although he did not, as is
sometimes ignorantly alleged, invent the term. It had long signified–
and is still so defined in English-language dictionaries-the mental
habit of treating abstract concepts as possessing a substantial or
"thing-like" existence in the external world. Alfred North Whitehead
labeled this practice "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," and his
vivid phrase was invoked by Talcott Parsons against the utilitarians
in
The Structure of Social Action.
Lukacs's achievement was to give reification a much wider col–
lective meaning, connoting the perception by most people most of
the time, particularly social classes , of the social and political world
as fixed, unalterable and external to their lived experience. Lukacs ,
in effect, rediscovered a central aspect of the Hegelian idea of aliena–
tion and recognized that it was implicit in some of Marx's later
writings, despite Lukacs's own inevitable ignorance of the as yet un–
published Paris Manuscripts.
Whether one calls it alienation or reification, this conception
differs from the conventional usages of American sociologists in
which, as Richard Schacht remarks in
Alienation ,
his thorough
survey of the proliferating meanings of the concept, ". . . alienation
is conceived mostly in terms of the presence of certain attitudes and
feelings .... Thus there is no question of alienated individuals who
are not aware of their alienation." Berger strenuously objects to what
he calls the "psychologization" of the concept, but his own version
which, following Lukacs, he explicitly links to the notion of "false
consciousness ," is psychological in referring to cognition even if it ex-
