Reification as dependence on extrinsic information

Synthese 109 (3):361 - 399 (1996)
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Abstract

Marx criticized political economy for propounding an inverted, mystical view of economic reality. But he went beyond asserting the falsity and apologetic character of the doctrine to characterize it as reflecting a social practice of inversion or mystification — an inverted social world — in which individuals incorporate their own actions into a process whose dynamic lies beyond their control. Caught up in this process, individuals confront aspects of their own agency in the alien or reified form of a given, determining reality. Marx leaves unclear exactly how the process exerts and maintains its hold on agents, the nature of the reasons they might have for wanting to free themselves of it, and under what conditions they could do so. However, it is possible to abstract somewhat from Marx's specific concerns and to model a self-reproducing practice of reification that works through the informational environment of decision. Though of wider interest, this more general conception can shed light on the nature and critique of Marx's inverted world. It draws on conceptual resources from decision theory, game theory and general equilibrium theory.

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Julius Sensat
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Citations of this work

Classical German philosophy and Cohen's critique of Rawls.Julius Sensat - 2003 - European Journal of Philosophy 11 (3):314–353.
Marx's inverted world.Julius Sensat - 1996 - Topoi 15 (2):177-188.
Amoral Adorno: Negative Dialectics Outside Ethics.Giuseppe Tassone - 2005 - European Journal of Social Theory 8 (3):251-267.

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