Reification, Materialism, and Praxis:

Adorno’s Critique of Lukács

Timothy Hall

I.
The work of Georg Lukács has languished in critical neglect since a
period of intense interest in his work in the 1960s and early 1970s. Lately,
however, there are signs of a revival of interest. The reasons for this are
multiple. On the one hand, art theorists and literary critics are turning to
Lukács’s concept of realism in order to help understand the political and
realist turn of contemporary art and literary works. In a separate develop-
ment, social and political theorists are turning again to Lukács’s concept
of reification as a way of understanding the peculiar social pathologies
of the present. Two recent studies, in particular, stand out in this regard:
Timothy Bewes’s Reification: Or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism and,
more recently, Axel Honneth’s Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea,
with critical responses from Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan
Lear. While the approach of each study diverges, markedly, both advance
the thesis that the category of reification is essential for understanding the
present, albeit, for Honneth, in a heavily reconstructed form.
It is against the backdrop of this renewed interest in Lukács that I
propose to look again at Adorno’s critique of Lukács, particularly as this

.  See Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, eds., Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dis-
sonance of Existence (London: Continuum Press, 2011).
.  Timothy Bewes, Reification or the Anxiety of late Capitalism (London: Verso,
2002).
.  Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2008).

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Telos 155 (Summer 2011): 61–82.
doi:10.3817/0611155061
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62   Timothy Hall

is developed in Adorno’s principal theoretical work, Negative Dialectics.

As is well known, Adorno was a trenchant critic of Lukács, especially his
later work. What is less frequently recognized is Adorno’s debt to Lukács,
in particular the life-long engagement with a number of Lukács’s early
works, including “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” from Soul and
Form (1911), Theory of the Novel (1916), and History and Class Con-
sciousness (1923). What I propose to do here is review Adorno’s critique
of Lukács’s Hegelian Marxism, particularly as this is developed in Nega-
tive Dialectics, and consider what if any responses are possible to this
from a Lukácsian perspective. I will focus specifically on the two-pronged
and seemingly contradictory character of this critique, which, on the one
hand, criticizes Lukács for not getting beyond idealism and, on the other,
takes him to task for regressing behind it.
The charge of idealism derives from Adorno’s belief that Lukács’s phi-
losophy of praxis confounds the realization of autonomy with overcoming
the dependency on the object, a position most emphatically articulated in
Fichte’s subjective idealism. What, in Adorno’s eyes, the philosophy of
praxis shares with subjective idealism is the view that the demonstration
of the actuality of the autonomous subject—the absolute ego in Fichte
and the identical subject-object in Lukács—turns on showing how the
object is ultimately derived from the subject. This in turn leads to a purely
“productivist” account of the subject that in some sense produces its own
reality. To this conception of the praxical subject—as producer of its own
history—Adorno opposes the priority of the object and the heteronomy of
the materialist subject.
At the same time, however, there is an alternate strand of criticism
in which Lukács is accused of regressing behind idealism to a form of
romantic anti-capitalism. This is particularly evident in Adorno’s critique
of Lukács’s analysis of the principle of exchange. In this analysis Adorno
appears to criticize Lukács for romanticizing pre-modern societies, in

.  Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge,

1973). On Adorno’s critique of Lukács, see Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An
Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: Macmillan, 1978); Martin Jay,
Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1984); Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical
Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971) and Late Marxism: Adorno or
the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990). See also Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A
Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   63

particular the view that pre-modern economies were geared toward the
production of incommensurable use-values and that people related to
one another immediately and without the mediation of reified objects
(i.e., social institutions). For Adorno, the problem with this was twofold:
first, it was simply untrue, since pre-modern societies were not free of the
principle of exchange or reification, as Lukács contends; and second, in
inveighing against comparability as such, Lukács’s critique loses sight of
the principal purpose of the critique of exchange, that is, the critique of
unfair exchange and the establishment of fair exchange.
These criticisms appear to pull in different directions. Whereas the
productivist account of the subject calls for a reinterpretation of material-
ism on the basis of the priority of the object, the criticism of the romantic
strains in Lukács’s critique of identity/exchange calls for more idealism—
specifically, the notion that the universality of the idealist subject has
emancipatory potential and is not simply complicit with more totalizing
forms of social domination. The former appears to call for a clear demar-
cation of idealist and materialist conceptions of the subject, whereas the
latter seems to call for the acknowledgment of the emancipatory potential
of the modern autonomous (i.e., idealist) subject: the acknowledgment of
the possibility of a fair exchange implicit in the principle of exchange.
Such a tension, however, disappears—or at least is significantly
reduced—if we bear in mind that there were strong romantic elements
in the immediate post-Kantian tradition, not least in the work of Schiller,
Schelling, and the German Romantics. Indeed it should be remembered,
when considering Adorno’s critique of Lukács, that Romanticism as
a form of critique is internal to Enlightenment modernity, of which the
idealist conception of the subject is a significant part. That is to say, it is
primarily concerned to address the dichotomies and fragmentation arising
from the specifically modern and idealist project of attempting to under-
stand the subject as autonomous. There is nothing, therefore, inconsistent
in maintaining that Lukács’s own attempt to overcome the antinomies
and contradictions of modernity is both idealist and romantic as, I will
argue, Adorno does. Indeed, I will suggest that the importance of Adorno’s
critique—especially in the context of contemporary attempts to retrieve

.  For a contrary view, see Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in Against
the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1979); John Gray,
Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern age (London:
Routledge, 1997).
64   Timothy Hall

Lukács’s concept of reification—lies in the way that it demonstrates how

the praxical subject remains very much within the horizon of the attempts
to overcome the diremption and fragmentation of modernity in the imme-
diate post-Kantian tradition, despite Lukács’s claims to the contrary. Any
attempt to retrieve Lukács’s critical concept of reification and the praxical
conception of the subject to which it gives rise must, I will argue, be alive
to its romantic and subjective idealist impulses.
Adorno’s engagement and critique of Lukács occurs throughout
Negative Dialectics. There are three passages in particular where this
engagement is specific: the sections entitled “On the Dialectics of Iden-
tity” and “Objectivity and Reification,” both from part two; and the
section “Happiness and Idle Waiting,” from part three. “On the Dialectics
of Identity” anticipates the transcendence of the principle of identity in its
social form—that is, the domination of value-in-exchange over use value
in capitalist society. “Objectivity and Reification” criticizes the attempt
to resolve reified objectivities into processes as a hostility toward things
as such. And lastly, “Happiness and Idle Waiting” criticizes the “false
choice” between “fetishism” and “immediacy,” and proposes a concept
of materialism that is neither the acceptance of reified objectivities nor
the recovery of an integrated world in which people relate to one another
directly. Taken together, I will argue, they constitute a cogent and compel-
ling critique of Lukács’s theory of praxis and Hegelian Marxism generally,
and present the case for a different object-centered conception of praxis. I
begin with the critique of the principle of exchange and by contextualizing
Lukács’s distinctive approach to the problem.

II.
A fundamental characteristic of capitalist society is the production of goods
for exchange rather than use. Whereas in pre-capitalist societies only the
surplus was exchanged, capitalist societies are characterized by the uni-
versality of the principle of exchange. This is not to say, of course, that
goods in capitalist societies no longer render a use. It is just that their use
value comes to be a function of their value-in-exchange. This domination
of exchange value over use value, revealed in the analysis of the commod-
ity form, is the starting point of Marx’s analysis, in Capital, of capitalist

.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 146–48.

.  Ibid., pp. 189–92.
.  Ibid., pp. 373–75.
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   65

relations of production and the social domination inherent in them. What

Marx is particularly interested in is the illusory character of the commodity
form: the process whereby relations between people (the relation between
private individuals producing independently of one  another) come to
appear as the objective characteristics of a thing (its value-in-exchange or
price). It appears, therefore, that commodities have a life of their own as
evidenced by the fluctuations of their exchange value on the market.
Classical political economy and, later, economic science “buy into”
this illusion by treating the economy as an objective realm of law whose
laws and regularities can be systematically investigated without being fun-
damentally transformed. This leads to a fatalistic relation to the economy
not unlike the fatalistic relation to nature found in natural religions. Marx
himself refers to the fetish character of the commodity. With the help of
political economy and economics, we can anticipate the likely outcome
of economic events (although not completely) and position ourselves in
respect of these. However, we remain powerless to fundamentally alter
these events and mitigate the force of the laws that determine human
action.
As science was implicated in capitalism and the form of illusion spe-
cific to it, Marx called his critique of capitalist relations of production a
critique of classical political economy. The critique of capitalism was indis-
sociable from the way these relations appeared to people living in capitalist
societies and to the way these societies have come to be theorized. The
vulgar Marxist concept of ideology is a fundamentally inadequate way of
expressing this relationship between the relations of production, prevalent
views about the social world, and social science because it implied that the
way the social world appears is the consequence of beliefs and worldviews
that have been, in some sense, impressed upon it. This overlooks the origi-
nation of social illusion in the economic process itself. For Marx, capitalist
society contains its own non-optional appearance-form, that is to say, the
way economic relations necessarily appear to its members.
Marx’s analysis of the commodity form was central for both Lukács’s
Hegelian Marxism and for the Frankfurt School. Lukács saw the commod-
ity form not simply as the central problem of economics but as a model
for analyzing bourgeois society in its entirety, that is, in all its objective

.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans Ben Fowkes (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1976),
pp. 164–65.
66   Timothy Hall

and subjective forms.10 It is a moot point the extent to which Marx thought
that the fetish character of the commodity provided a basis for thinking
social illusion generally—what Lukács calls societal reification. What is
clear, however, is that Marx nowhere elaborates these forms in the detail
that Lukács does in History and Class Consciousness. The split between
the objective realm of law and the subjective impotent standpoint charac-
teristic of our economic life is also to be found in the administrative and
legal spheres. Indeed, Lukács argues, the passive, subjective position of
the worker vis-à-vis the production process, the individual vis-à-vis the
legal and administrative process, can be traced back to the basic categories
of the subject’s immediate relation to world.11 It is therefore not simply the
economic subject but the bourgeois subject in general that is confronted
with a reified social reality that it can only contemplate and not fundamen-
tally alter.12
It is this analysis of bourgeois society—societal reification/subjective
contemplation—that leads Lukács to search for a practical principle capa-
ble of altering social reality.13 It is a search that takes him back to Kantian
and post-Kantian idealism—to a “metacritique” of idealist concepts of
reason. For Lukács, the importance of idealism lay in the fact that it took
up and attempted to go beyond the fundamental antinomies of bourgeois
society—principally the dichotomy of subject and object.14 This made it an
invaluable resource for a non-dogmatic materialism that sought to uncover
the practical standpoint from which social reality could be altered. The
fundamental limitation of idealism for Lukács was that it sought to “intro-
duce” a concept of the subject into history. Whereas materialism viewed

10.  Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 83.
11.  Ibid., p. 89.
12.  The implications of Lukács’s account of social illusion for the classical base-
superstructure model is also unclear. In my view—which I don’t have time to elaborate
properly here—Lukács’s account of the “economic structure of modern societies” in no way
commits him to the view that the primary determination in modern societies is economic.
While Lukács views the becoming autonomous of economic life as the principle driver
in social fragmentation, there is little evidence to suggest that he thinks that reification in
the legal and administrative sphere or the cultural sphere is determined by reification in
the economic. It is at least problematic to maintain, as Honneth does, that Lukács’s theory
of reification is restricted by his prior commitment to the base-superstructure model. See
Honneth, Reification, p. 77.
13.  Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 126.
14.  Ibid., p. 121.
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   67

the overcoming of the dichotomy of subject and object as the consequence

of the collective self-interpretation of a historical subject (the proletariat),
idealism saw it as the consequence of the successful self-grounding of
a philosophical subject.15 What made the proletariat the bearer of social
transformation, in Lukács’s view, was its position in the social process as
pure object/commodity. As self-conscious commodity it was the negation
of the bourgeois conception of subjectivity, incapable of making sense
of its life in accordance with bourgeois categories of thought and action,
and therefore compelled—in a boot-strapping exercise—to forge its own
concepts in line with its own experience.16

III.
Adorno draws a great deal on Lukács’s elaboration and development of
Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, particularly the idea of a general
concept of social illusion and the critique of immediacy that this entails.
Indeed in many respects Dialectic of Enlightenment could be read as
an anthropological extension of the concept of fetishism and a deepen-
ing of the philosophical analysis of the relationship between identity and
exchange.17 Adorno also shares Lukács’s view that modern science and
philosophy are not free of this illusion insofar as they are contemplatively
positioned toward social reality. As with Lukács, the elaboration of a mate-
rialist theory depends heavily on a metacritique of idealism—above all
Kant’s practical philosophy and Hegel’s philosophy of history. However,
in Lukács’s critique of the principle of exchange he detects regressive ten-
dencies toward pre-modern social forms. He refers indirectly to Lukács’s
critique of the commodity form as an abstract negation.18 Adorno writes:

15.  Ibid., pp. 145–49.

16.  Ibid., pp. 167–68.
17.  To suggest that Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) could be read as a continuation
of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism as well as Lukács’s concept of reification is not,
of course, to suggest that the former could be accommodated to the latter projects. In at
least one important sense it cannot. This is Adorno and Horkheimer’s view that substitution
and exchange can be traced back to Greek mythology. If this is the case, then commodity
fetishism and reification cannot be distinguishing characteristics of capitalist societies, as
both Marx and Lukács claim.
18.  Even though Lukács is not named in this passage, there is little doubt that Adorno
has him in mind. See similar criticisms of Lukács’s tendency to romanticize pre-capitalist
societies in Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp.191, 396.
68   Timothy Hall

If we denied the principle abstractly—if we proclaimed, to the greater

glory of the irreducibly qualitative, that parity should no longer be the
ideal rule—we would be creating excuses for recidivism into ancient
injustice. From olden times, the main characteristic of the exchange
of equivalents has been that unequal things would be exchanged in its
name, that the surplus value of labor would be appropriated. If compa-
rability as a category of measure were simply annulled, the rationality
which is inherent in the exchange principle—as ideology, of course, but
also as promise—would give way to direct appropriation, to force, and
nowadays to the naked privileges of monopolies and cliques.19

Adorno’s argument is that if we critique identity by siding with the

non-identical—use value as the irreducibly qualitative or the radically
incommensurable—we end up throwing out the baby with the bath water.
That is to say, we delete the promise of fair exchange implicit in the prin-
ciple of exchange. Thus, while the principle functions as an ideological
pretext for concealing the expropriation of surplus labor, it also points
beyond itself to fair exchange—to a rational identity in which “no man had
part of his labor withheld from him anymore.”20 The problem, therefore, is
not with exchange relations as such but with the specifically exploitative
form they assume in capitalist societies.21
Following on from this, Adorno sees two problems for criticisms of
the principle of exchange that assume this form, the first theoretical and
the second political. By deleting the promise of fair exchange implicit
in the principle of exchange, the critique of identity (and by extension,
the principle of exchange) loses its immanent basis. Identitarian thinking
cannot be criticized from a standpoint “outside” identity.22 For example,
the conceptual grasp of reality in identity thinking cannot be criticized
from a standpoint that claims an “intuitive” grasp of reality unmediated
by concepts. Nor could a critique of production for exchange in capitalist
societies be mounted from the (imagined) standpoint of a society that met
its needs through the production of use values. For Adorno such a critique

19.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp.146–47 (translation modified).

20.  Ibid., p. 147.
21.  For this reason I disagree with Hammer’s claim that use-value/the non-identical
“becomes a cipher for everything that can possibly contain a utopian promise.” See Espen
Hammer, Adorno and the Political (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 30–31. The utopian
promise is actually lodged in the rational claim to identity for Adorno, in this case the
possibility of fair exchange implicit in the principle of exchange.
22.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 5.
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   69

could only take the form of a self-critique—that is, a self-critique of the

concept and a self-critique of the exchange principle. Second, by taking
comparability or equivalence as such to be the problem, Adorno argues,
it creates a pretext for a regression to pre-modern (i.e., direct) forms of
expropriation and their latter-day equivalents in the Soviet Union.23
Adorno’s suggestion here is that romantic elements in Lukács’s critique
of reification make it all too appropriable by authoritarian currents in the
communist movement—above all, Stalinism.

IV.
A second line of criticism is outlined later in the second part of Negative
Dialectics, in the section entitled “Objectivity and Reification.” Unlike the
first critique, this is carried out explicitly and Lukács’s History and Class
Consciousness is mentioned by name. Here he criticizes Lukács for con-
flating reification (Verdinglichung) and objectification (Objektivität)—that
is to say, of failing to distinguish between the illusory objectivity that is
really alienated subjectivity and a genuine objectivity beyond the subject.
“In the realm of things,” he writes, “there is an intermingling of both the
object’s non-identical side and the submission of men to prevailing condi-
tions of production.”24 The task for a critical materialism is, therefore, to
carefully delineate these two sides of the thing/object: between the false
objectivity of congealed social activity, on the one hand, and of the alien or
unfamiliar thing that exceeds the subject and mediates subjective action,
on the other. The consequence of conflating these two sides of the object,
Adorno argues, is a backslide into idealism. Idealism is understood, in this
context, as a search for a first; the search, that is, for an originary principle
that would arrest the dialectical process, once and for all, in a final recon-
ciliation of subject and object. Versions of this can be found in Fichte’s
concept of the self-positing subject and in Hegel’s concept of absolute
knowing. It is also understood as the tendency to see in objectivity only
an inessential limitation of subjective freedom. For idealism, autonomy
is characteristically achieved at the expense of the object, through over-
coming one’s dependence on it—not, as Adorno will argue, through the
acknowledgement of its fundamental independence from thought.25

23.  Ibid., p. 147.

24.  Ibid., p. 192.
25.  Ibid., p. 191.
70   Timothy Hall

It is precisely these aspects of the idealist project, Adorno argues,

that are preserved in Lukács’s social theory. In holding that reification is
the problem of modernity, he overlooks the fact that reification is merely
“the reflexive form of false objectivity.”26 Lurking beneath this diagnosis,
however, is an absolute subject (the proletariat as the identical subject-
object of history), whose self-realization or freedom is seen to lie in the
wholesale setting-into-process of reified objectivities. What is idealistic
about History and Class Consciousness is not—as the later, self-critical
Lukács, author of the 1968 preface, would write—that it located the first
in the subject and not the object (nature),27 but rather in its identification of
a first at all. On the basis of this identification, it comes to define freedom,
like its idealist forebears, as the absence of any objective or natural deter-
mination. This means that social institutions figure in his account of social
praxis only as shorthand designations for social processes and not, in what
Adorno will take to be the eminently materialist sense, as the ineluctable
objective mediation of subjective actions.
It is Lukács’s exclusive focus on the subject and the subjective media-
tion of the object that leads Adorno to state:

The trouble is with the conditions that condemn mankind to impotence

and apathy and would yet be changeable by human action; it is not pri-
marily with people and with the way conditions appear to people.28

Exclusive focus on the subject leads to an overestimation of the capac-

ity of the subject both to see through and to alter these conditions. More
importantly, it leads to the uncoupling of subjective action from objective
context of action and its concrete possibilities. Greater emphasis on the
object—specifically, the aspect of the object that is not reducible to the
subject—leads, in Adorno’s view, to a more precise sense of the concrete
possibilities of action. In this sense, Lukács’s concept of the proletariat
retains Promethean characteristics found in bourgeois conceptions of the

26.  Ibid., p. 190.

27.  Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. xvii–xxiv. Specifically: “[o]bject­
ification is indeed a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated from human life in society.
If we bear in mind that every externalization of an object in practice (and hence, too,
in work) is an objectification, that every human expression including speech objectifies
human thoughts and feelings, then it is clear that we are dealing with a universal mode of
commerce between men” (ibid., p. xxiv).
28.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 190.
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   71

subject, which are given their philosophical articulation in idealism—most

notably in Fichte’s conception of the absolute subject.29 However, it is not
simply the actuality of human action that is sacrificed in attributing priority
to the subject, but also the very conception of freedom. Adorno writes:

We cannot eliminate from the dialectics of the extant what is experienced

in consciousness as an alien thing: negatively, coercion and heteronomy,
but also the marred figure of what we should love, and what the spell, the
endogamy of consciousness, does not permit us to love. The reconciled
condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the
alien (das Fremde). Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the
alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different,
beyond the heteronomous and beyond that which is one’s own.30

The idealist understanding of autonomy as freedom from dependence on

the object is replaced by an acknowledgement of this dependence—what
Adorno refers to as the priority of the object.31 Moreover, reconciliation,
fulfilment, happiness, rather than being precluded by this acknowledge-
ment, is actually held open and maintained in the possibility of a different,
non-appropriative relation to objects/nature. The fact that objects are not
ultimately reducible to our concepts is what, for Adorno, keeps alive the
possibility of a changed world and a changed relation to world.
If Adorno’s critique of Lukács’s attempt to transcend the exchange
relation suggests a regression behind idealism to a form of romantic anti-
capitalism, the critique of reification as hostility toward things as such
implies, in a much more direct sense, a failure to escape idealism and
the impasses that characterize it. The autonomy and independence of the
subject that is the desideratum of idealism, which survives in Lukács’s
thought, is bought at the heavy cost of the subsumption, without remainder,
of the object. For Adorno this indicates two things: first, that the idealist
subject (which includes the praxical subject) fails to bring about the kind
of reconciliation between subject and object that it purports to or—what
amounts to the same thing—fails to imbue the social world with meaning.

29.  Indeed Adorno’s claim that “absolute dynamics would be the absolute action (Tat-
handlung) whose violent satisfaction lies in itself,” with the non-identical being reduced
to “a mere occasion” for this action, renders the Fichtean character of Lukács’s concept of
praxis explicit. Ibid., p. 191.
30.  Ibid.
31.  Ibid., p. 183.
72   Timothy Hall

Second, in wholly reducing the object to the subject, it loses the objective
mediation of action. For Lukács, revolutionary action remains a more or
less permanent possibility inhering in the reified world. Provided it can
recover its own alienated subjectivity lying dormant in things, revolution
remains imminent. The capacity to dissolve things into processes resides
firmly in the subject.32 But this renders the revolutionary subject mythical.
For Adorno, subjective action always requires objective mediation, and
this in turn requires the prior delineation of the subjective and objective
parts of the object—of the object as alien subjectivity, on the one hand, and
the object as that which transcends the subject, on the other. But are these
criticisms consistent with one another? Can Lukács’s theory of reification
be both romantic and idealist, as Adorno seems to suggest? Before turning
to this, I will briefly consider a further elaboration of the idealism charge,
which occurs in the final section of Negative Dialectics.

V.
This criticism of Lukács’s subjectivism is restated in the final section,
“Meditations on Metaphysics.” In the context of a discussion on the pos-
sibility of a metaphysical experience, Adorno again denies that objectivity
is reducible to “congealed society” alone and insists on the priority of the
object as a distinguishing feature of materialism. The total reduction of
things to social processes involves a regression to the subjectivism of the
pure act. He goes on to elaborate the sense in which he understands reifica-
tion to be an epiphenomenon: the reflexive form of false objectivity. “Pure
immediacy and fetishism,” he writes “are equally untrue”:

In our insistence on immediacy against reification we are relinquishing

the element of otherness in dialectics. . . . Yet the surplus over the subject,
which a metaphysical experience will not be talked out of, and the ele-
ment of truth in reity—these two extremes touch in the idea of truth.
For there could no more be truth without a subject freeing itself from

32.  Étienne Balibar has developed a similar criticism of the early Marx’s concept
of praxis. Balibar links Marx’s failure to depart from the idealist concept of the subject
in the mid-1840s with the loss of objective mediation in the revolutionary activity of the
proletariat. As a consequence, the situation of the proletariat is one of “permanent insurrec-
tion.” See Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso,
1995), pp. 25–27.
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   73

delusions than there could be truth without that which is not the subject,
that in which truth has its archetype.33

According to Adorno, the problem with Lukács’s materialism is that it

offers a false choice between pure immediacy, on the one hand, and fetish-
ism, on the other: between an integrated meaningful society in which
individuals relate to one another immediately, and a fragmented, anomic
society in which relations between individuals are mediated by impersonal
institutions. However, for Adorno, each is equally untrue: the latter is the
abstract negation of the former and, as such, is anticipated by it. Just as
the objective instrumental standpoint of the positive sciences anticipates
its subjective moralizing critique, so the notion of a society dominated
by the fetish form anticipates the standpoint—the integrated, meaningful
society—from which it will be abstractly negated.
The idea of a society in which people would relate to one another
directly without the mediation of institutions is simply the negative
image of reified society in which individuals are seamlessly integrated
into mechanically functioning social systems. In Adorno’s view, Lukács’s
approach ends up reproducing existing social reality, along with its consti-
tutive oppositions, rather than interrupting it.
To summarize: Adorno thinks that Lukács’s materialism ends up
backsliding into idealism, despite its criticism of the idealist philosophy of
history because, ultimately, it tolerates nothing alien to the subject. That
is to say, in its concern to negate the “given” in its immediacy, it inadver-
tently deletes that part of the object that transcends the subject. In this way,
Adorno argues, he repeats the idealist fallacy of identifying autonomy with
overcoming dependence on the object. For Adorno, it is immaterial whether
this identification is carried out in thought or spirit and is imposed on the
world, as in Fichte and Hegel, or discovered in reality itself as Lukács
argues in respect of the proletariat. With regard to the object, there is no
difference between the so-called “intellectual synthesis” and the “mate-
rial synthesis.” What is characteristic of both approaches is a refusal to
accept a notion of otherness or the alien that is not reducible, finally, to the
subject. In contrast to Lukács, Adorno maintains that acknowledgement
of our inescapable dependence on the object is the condition of knowing
anything above and beyond what we contribute to the object and—more

33.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 374–75.

74   Timothy Hall

significantly for the concept of praxis—is the necessary objective media-

tion of any action.34 The practical significance of the charge of idealism
for the theory of praxis is that it loses the very objective mediation that
it claimed distinguished it from bourgeois practice in the first place. As
a theory of political subjectivity, it is flawed because the capacity to see
through the illusory appearance-form of the social world and re-institute it
lies in subjectivity itself and is not tied to objective possibilities existing in
the world. And here objective possibility cannot simply be understood in
the one-sided Hegelian Marxist sense, as the release of alienated subjec-
tivity in the reified social object but also in the emergence of the object in
its unfamiliarity as the objective mediation of praxis. Materialism begins
for Adorno, by contrast, with the acceptance of the irreducible otherness
in things, with the acknowledgement of an irreducible distance between
subject and object. On this acknowledgment of the object’s aura hangs the
very possibility of a changed relation to world.

VI.
What responses to this critique are possible from a Lukácsian perspective?
To begin with, there is no small irony in the fact that Adorno criticizes
Lukács for lapsing into the kind of romantic anti-capitalism with which
he is all too familiar.35 In the critique of the dominance of the princi-
ple of exchange considered above, Adorno effectively criticizes Lukács
for siding with the non-identical against the identical (the qualitatively
unique and radically incommensurable use derived from a good against
its value-in-exchange) and attempting, on this basis, an “abstract nega-
tion” of capitalist society. The problem with such approaches for Adorno
is that they romanticize the past and attempt a critique of the present in the
absence of an immanent standpoint. Ironically this criticism is similar in
form to that leveled by Lukács against Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Pres-
ent.36 Lukács thinks, like Engels, that Carlyle’s work is suggestive of the
dehumanizing character of bourgeois society in all sorts of ways. The short-
comings of the work, however, lie in its lack of immanence: “man as he
34.  Adorno’s appeals to Hegel’s “institutionalism” and to the “mature Marx” are
significant for his critique latent “Fichteanism” of Lukács’s theory of praxis. See ibid.,
p. 192.
35.  I am grateful to Andrew Feenberg for drawing my attention to this irony—and for
his criticisms generally—in a version of the paper presented at the Marxism and Philoso-
phy Society Annual Conference in London, May 2008.
36.  Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 190.
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   75

is” is abstractly confronted with “man as he was/should be.”37 As we have

seen, for Lukács, the only possible critique of capitalism is an immanent
critique. For this reason he describes materialism as the self-knowledge of
capitalist society: through the conscious activity of the proletariat, capital-
ist society is brought to an awareness of itself.38
Lukács would, doubtless, further object to Adorno’s characterization
of his critique of capitalism as a “lament over reification.”39 While it is
clear that Lukács draws on pre-capitalist societies for examples of non-rei-
fied social relations, it is not at all clear that he sees a post-capitalist society
as a return to pre-modern social forms.40 In fact, for Lukács, it is not at all
clear what pre-modern societies were like, as made clear by his 1919 lec-
ture “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism,” which marked
the inauguration of the Institute for Research into Historical Materialism
in post-revolutionary Hungary. If materialism is the self-knowledge of
the present, then, as Lukács contends, it has little or nothing to say about
pre-capitalist societies. For the newly appointed People’s Commissar of
Culture of the Hungarian Republic, coming to an adequate understanding
of pre-modern societies was all very much work to be undertaken. The
idea that the critique of the present itself rests upon an extended “narrative
of decline” would surely have been vigorously rejected by him. On the
contrary for Lukács, as for Adorno, it is the unfulfilled promise of moder-
nity that provides the immanent basis for criticism. With the advent of
capitalism and the universalism inherent in it, it becomes possible, for the
first time, to understand all human relations in purely social, rather than
natural, terms. It is the manner in which this “socialization of the world”
miscarries in the emergence of a “second nature”—every bit as inexorable
as “first nature”—that provides the platform for critique.41 In other words,
Lukács recognized that capitalism was both humanizing and dehuman-
izing, bringing with it new forms of freedom as well as new forms of
unfreedom. The idea that Lukács romanticized pre-modern societies has to

37.  Ibid.
38.  Ibid., pp. 149, 229.
39.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 190.
40.  See, for example, in his analysis of the rationalization of the labor process and,
following on from this, the legal and administrative process. Lukács, History and Class
Consciousness, pp. 92–103.
41.  Ibid., p. 176. For an exemplary reading of this passage, and of Lukács generally,
see J. M. Bernstein, “Lukács Wake: Praxis Presence and Metaphysics,” in Tom Rockmore,
ed., Lukács Today: Essays in Marxist Philosophy (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1988).
76   Timothy Hall

be set against his avowed modernism, evidenced throughout History and

Class Consciousness.
It might further be objected, as indicated, that Adorno’s critique of
Lukács pulls in contrary directions: on the one hand, he appears to be criti-
cizing Lukács for regressing behind idealism and providing ideological
cover for pre-modern forms of subjectivity, corresponding to pre-mod-
ern (i.e., direct) forms of expropriation; on the other hand, he appears to
suggest that the praxical subject is no different from the idealist subject
in its desire to overcome the object as such. Lukács could quite reason-
ably object that Adorno’s criticisms cancel each other out. For while the
perceived romantic strains in his thought require the critique of abstract
negations, which is the stock-in-trade of idealism since Hegel, the critique
of the praxical subject’s appropriative relation to objects appears to call for
the recognition of some limitation on the negating power of the subject.
Adorno appears to want it both ways, calling for more or less idealism as
the circumstance dictates.42
A further example of Adorno’s apparent ambivalence toward idealism
can be seen in his rejection of the false choice between immediacy and
fetishism in which Hegelian Marxism results. While the content of this
argument would have been surprising to Lukács, the form of the argument
would surely have been very familiar. Essentially Adorno is arguing that
the reified social world incorporates its own critique: the social world of
reified objectivities becomes process much in the same way that Lukács
argued that the objective social world incorporated its subjective moral-
izing critique. Indeed, revolutionary praxis, to the extent that it lacks an
objective mediation, shares some of the characteristics of moral criti-
cism: for example, it represents a permanent possibility inherent in the
revolutionary subject, and, ultimately, it is down to the subject, whether
it realizes it or not. Adorno’s argument is not therefore particularly novel.
What is novel is its application to the philosophy of praxis.

VII.
While these rejoinders are suggestive, none in my view is decisive in
rebutting the charges that Adorno levels at Lukács’s social theory. Ador-
no’s seeming ambivalence toward idealism—criticizing the reversion to
it while employing quintessentially idealist arguments—is really nothing
42.  I am grateful to Meade McCloughan for formulating this criticism precisely for
me in a presentation of an earlier version of this paper.
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   77

other than the ambivalence and instability at the heart of idealism itself. It
should be remembered that Romanticism, as well as the romantic critique of
capital, is internal to the Enlightenment. That is to say, it is not a wholesale
rejection of Enlightenment concepts of progress but an internal critique of
some of its unanticipated outcomes, such as the fragmentation of the sub-
ject, the loss of community, and the instrumentalization of nature. There
is, therefore, no intrinsic contradiction in Adorno’s charge that Lukács’s
social theory is idealist with romantic anti-capitalist strains. It is quite pos-
sible to be both. Indeed, it is the attentiveness to the inherent instability
and volatility of the modernism at the heart of idealism—constantly at risk
of regressing to pre-modernist forms43—that characterizes the metacritical
approach that Adorno inherits from Lukács. Here the final criticism con-
sidered above—that Lukács’s social theory offers a false choice between
fetishism and immediacy—takes on a particular importance inasmuch as
it combines the subjectivism and romanticism charge. If reity is nothing
other than “alienated society,” then the resulting subject cannot but emerge
as an abstract negation of society structured by exchange relations.
Furthermore, the fact that the arguments used against Lukács would
have been familiar to him (that the critique of society as reified implies
a longing for pre-modern social forms; that the fetish form of society
incorporates its own critique) does not, in my view, vitiate them. On the
contrary, the very familiarity of these arguments would suggest the proper
grounding of Adorno’s critique in the concepts and categories of Lukács’s
social thought. Indeed, it is worth emphasizing the extent to which the
standards by which it is judged and found wanting are themselves drawn
from Lukács’s own thought. Lukács’s insistence that theory reverts to
mythology at the point where the dialectic is arrested, could just as well
have served as the motto of Adorno’s critique.44 Lukács’s philosophy of
praxis is one of the most rigorously historical theories in its insistence
that the adequacy of a theory be judged by its ability to apprehend the
meaning of the present. If correct theory is nothing other than the present
raised to self-consciousness, then the traditional divide between reason
and history would appear to be overcome. For Lukács, the problem with
the most advanced forms of rationalism—even Hegel’s idealism—is that
they cannot countenance the possibility of the novel or the radically new.

43.  Schelling is the case in point here, particularly in his call for a modern
mythology.
44.  Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 194.
78   Timothy Hall

This is not to identify history as the site of contingency and thereby assign
definite limits to rationalism; rather, it is to insist that the contingency
of the historical penetrate the rational forms themselves.45 This is exactly
what Lukács intends by grounding theory in the self-interpretation of the
proletariat.46 It is through this act of self-interpretation that the categories
through which the present is comprehended are forged. In no sense are
they introduced from “without” in an endeavor to make sense of history.
However, if we hold fast to Lukács’s insistence on the essential open-
ness of theory (i.e., that it is able to countenance the radically new), how
does his own concept of theory as praxis stand toward this? His insistence
on the identity of subject and object would seem to imply that the contin-
gency of history is absorbed, wholly, in the coming to self-consciousness
of the proletariat. The question is: how is the image of history as “the
history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the
life of man” sustained in the face of the emergence of a subject whose
self-understanding coincides with understanding society as a whole?47
Put simply, does not Lukács’s concept of the subject—which acts through
history rather than having history acting through it—signal the limits of
the rigorous historicality of his theory? Is this not precisely the point at
which his own dialectic is arrested and his theory turns into conceptual
mythology?
Unsurprisingly for a work as great as History and Class Consciousness,
this was not a question that Lukács ducked in any way. Indeed, he poses it
explicitly in the “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism”:

The substantive truths of historical materialism are of the same type as

were the truths of classical economics in Marx’s view. They are truths
within a particular social order and system of production. As such, but
only as such, their claim to validity is absolute. But this does not pre-
clude the emergence of new societies in which by virtue of their different
social structures other categories and systems of truth prevail.48

Contrary to the conclusion arrived at above, Lukács appears in this passage

to insist that the emergence of the proletariat as the identical subject-object

45.  Ibid., p. 118.

46.  Ibid., p. 229.
47.  Ibid., p. 186.
48.  Ibid., p. 228.
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   79

of history does not preclude the emergence of new social forms. This is a
striking claim, and one in which Lukács appears to take his thought to its
absolute limits. However, to my mind at least, Adorno’s criticism prob-
lematizes this conclusion in at least two important respects. First, the form
of Lukács’s thought (its reliance on the identity principle) seems to negate
its expressed content. If the proletariat, as identical subject-object, under-
stands itself and its social world exhaustively, how can this not preclude
the emergence of new social forms? If truth is defined in idealist terms as
the adequation of concept and object how can different social structures
with different categories and systems of truth emerge? Two possibilities
would appear to present themselves here: either the self-understanding of
the proletariat and its understanding of the social world is acknowledged
to be not exhaustive, thereby leaving room for the emergence of novel
social forms and forms of truth; or the position is rejected as unsustain-
able. But neither option is promising. In the former case, the reconciliation
of subject and world is downgraded and the concept of totality is reduced
to the status of “regulative idea.” In the latter case, the principle of identity
prevails, negating Lukács’s insistence on the radical historicality of his
theory. It is at this juncture, I would suggest, that we run up against the
limits of Lukács’s theory. Instead of suspending idealist antinomies, as it
claimed, it reveals itself to be thoroughly enmeshed in them.
Moreover, and again drawing on Lukács’s own insights into bourgeois
society, it is not clear that Lukács’s theory of praxis did comprehend the
present. The present of 1923, as Lukács was all too aware, involved the
increasing penetration of reification into the interior of the modern subject
and into the spheres of culture. But this led to tendencies that were not
anticipated by Lukács: for example, the disintegration of socializing func-
tions intrinsic to bourgeois civil society and the bourgeois family left the
individual of “late-capitalist” society more vulnerable to regressive (i.e.,
pre-individuated) forms of collective action, as evidenced by the fate of
the proletarian revolutions and rise of fascism in Europe. The reification
of the cultural sphere, specifically the spheres of art and philosophy, sig-
naled a qualitative change in society: the emergence of the increasingly
totalized and integral society. In the face of such a change, the task is not
to distinguish between an old, regressive culture in its terminal stages and
a progressive new one—a task that is ever present in Lukács’s aesthetics
from this time onward—but to raise the question of the very possibility of
art and philosophy as forms of critique, under these new conditions. What
80   Timothy Hall

is apparent from looking at Lukács’s prescriptions for bourgeois society

is that he clearly did not comprehend his own present. He saw in the dis-
integration of bourgeois society only the portents of the emergence of a
new progressive society and culture. While his critique of societal reifica-
tion registered the extent to which the individual was being integrated into
mechanically functioning social systems, he was incapable of seeing in
this anything other than the nullity at the heart of the old bourgeois culture
teetering on the edge of collapse. He was, in short, unable to understand
the subtle ways in which the institutions of bourgeois society mediated
the Marxian concepts of class consciousness and class politics to which
he turned. For Adorno, by contrast, the qualitative change undergone by
society—the transition from bourgeois society to late capitalism—were,
necessarily, the occasion of a rethinking of the basic categories of critical
thought.

VIII.
Lukács’s theory of praxis remains, for Adorno, very much within the
horizon of idealist aporias of the subject, notwithstanding Lukács’s claim
to have transcended these. The principal reason for this is the priority it
accords to the subject and the related claim that knowledge of the social
world and radical transformative action requires an identity of subject and
object. However, one needs to be clear about what Adorno’s charge of
idealism against Lukács amounts to. I’ve suggested that it is not to identify
his theory of praxis with any specific forms of idealism (e.g., subjective
idealism, objective idealism, or absolute idealism), for, as we have seen,
strains of each form can be found in it. Rather, it is to suggest that the
theory repeats idealist aporias instead of making a definitive break from
them, as it claims to do. The theory, therefore, falls short when judged
according to its own criteria.
At the same time it falls short as an account of the meaning of the
present. For Adorno what defines the present of “late capitalism” is the
existence of strong tendencies toward totality and integration. Lukács’s
idealist theory of praxis falls down on account of the fact that it does not
examine its affinity with the present of late capitalism. The problem, then,
is not that Lukács’s account of transformative social action was founded
on a fallacious idealist logic that is in some sense internally inconsistent.
As Lukács was well aware, the whole point of materialism was to deny any
independent foundational existence to logic. The problem for Adorno was
 Reification, Materialism, and Praxis   81

that Lukács—while aware of the totalizing tendencies in the present—did

not see this as necessitating a thoroughgoing critique of identitarian (i.e.,
idealist) categories. Rather he was content to appropriate these, unaltered,
from idealist philosophy. But given their lack of independence, why should
these categories be exempted from a critical accounting on the basis of the
present? This, in my view, is the central question that Adorno’s critique of
Lukács poses.
All this might be conceded and yet Adorno’s conclusions still rejected.
For the critique appears to leave behind a conception of critical theory
as permanent metacritique, stripped of its transformative social power.
In my view, however, this assessment is summary and premature. As is
apparent from Adorno’s criticisms of Lukács, his principal concern is that
if we neglect to distinguish between the subjective and objective sides
of the social object, the objective constraint on social praxis is lost. As
a consequence of this, the modern subject’s capacity to overcome social
domination runs the risk of being consistently overestimated by social
theorists. Counterposed to Lukács’s idealism, Adorno’s account of social
praxis emphasizes the institutional constraints of subjective action. Adorno
rejects the notion of pure productivity at the base of the modern subject
as intrinsically idealist and opts instead for a more realistically inflected
account of social action: an account that involves both the experience of
the social thing becoming process and the experience of institutional con-
straint in terms of what is concretely possible. This much, at least, is clear
from his claim that the rational identity in the principle of exchange had to
be realized and not simply abstractly negated. Novel, transformative social
action cannot divest itself of the experience of institutional constraint. Just
as actions take on new meanings at points of radical change, so also do
hitherto misrecognized social institutions open up new and unanticipated
possibilities of action.
In my view insufficient attention is given to the distinctive character of
the position Adorno stakes out here. Adorno’s emphasis on the necessary
institutional constraints of subjective action is generally viewed either as
a blanket hostility toward all forms of collective action, which are seen
as a priori compromised, or it is annexed to subsequent theories of social
action, such as Habermas’s, that start from quite different theoretical prem-
ises. While it is certainly the case that fractures in the ethical substance of
modern society appear to render all forms of collective action potentially
regressive for Adorno—for the simply reason that late-capitalist society
82   Timothy Hall

and culture corrodes the self-enlightenment processes that animates

such collective forms of action—nowhere does he appear to insist on the
individual as the necessary locus of any account of human action. The
Weberian pessimism often attributed to Adorno is, in my view, for this
reason misplaced. Concomitantly there is little evidence to suggest that
Adorno would have subscribed to Habermas’s view that ineliminable rei-
fication in modern society necessitates the use of “steering” mechanisms
for complex social systems. Recognizing the institutional constraints of
subjective action, for Adorno, is more about discovering in the de-reified
social object new and novel forms of institutional possibility than it is
about establishing a restricted domain for instrumental rationality, as it is
for Habermas.