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9 S. Cal. Interdisc. L. J. 401 (1999-2000)
Reification in Law and Legal Theory

handle is hein.journals/scid9 and id is 407 raw text is: REIFICATION IN LAW AND LEGAL THEORY DOUGLAS LITOWITZ* The term reification derives from the Latin words for thing, res, and to transform, facere.' This term is something of an artificially created counterpart to the German word Verdinglichung (to turn into a thing), which came into currency following the publication of Georg Lukdcs' seminal Marxist essay, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.2 According to Lukdcs, reification involves a confusion between the natural world and the social world, where the very people who create and sustain a social construction treat their own product as something fixed and unchanging. In the act of reification, people mistakenly treat a non- thing, such as an institution, social role, or relationship, as a thing, an immutable part of the natural world Lukdcs explains: Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a 'phantom objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all- embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.4 As applied to law, reification represents a kind of infection within legal doctrine and legal theory because it is essentially an error, a delusion, and a mystification that blinds people to alternative legal arrangements by naturalizing the existing legal system as inevitable. By way of example, consider three rather obvious instances of reification: (1) the notion that private ownership of property is natural and inevitable; (2) the notion that labor power is a commodity to be bought and sold; and (3) the notion that gender roles are mandated by nature or God. Legal doctrine is shaped by these limiting assumptions: thus, the law of real property begins from a reified concept of property as something to be held by individuals and passed by inheritance, just as employment law begins from the assumption of employment-at-will, and family law begins with *Professor of Law, Florida Coastal School of Law, B.A. Oberlin College 1985, J.D. Northwestern University 1988, Ph.D. Loyola University Chicago 1996. ' See 13 THE OxFoRD ENGLISH DICIONARY 532 (2d ed. 1989). Reification is defined as the mental conversion of a person or abstract concept into a thing. Id. 2 GEORG LuKACS, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, in HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNSS 83 (Rodney Livingstone trans., MIT Press 1971) (1968). Hanna Pitkin identifies no fewer than twenty different meanings of the term reification, even while insisting that the concept lacks explanatory power for critical social theory. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Rethinking Reification, 16 THEORY & Soc'y 263, 293 n.89 (1987). 4 LUKAcs, supra note 2, at 83.