In the essay "Reification and and the Consciousness of the proletariat" Lukacs recognized that the dominance of commodity exchange in social relations produces effects which result in the reduction of social life to "... the principle of rationalization based on what can be calculated." For Lukacs, following Weber, rationalization consists: "... of being able to predict with ever greater precision all the results to be achieved...by the exact break down of every complex into to its elements and by the study of the special laws governing production." This breaking down a complex phenomena into elements which can be quantified, studied and manipulated in the interests of ever increasing control and prediction is the central mechanism of the capitalist imperative, it is an essential feature of reification (or thingification) to come to see humans, machinery, raw materials and everything else as merely factors of production and loci of competitive advantage.
>From 1912 to 1918 Lukacs was an active participant in the lively
intellectual circles of Heidelberg and to a lesser extent, Berlin.
During this time Lukacs had contacts with Max and Marianna Weber,
Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, Ernst Bloch, Karl Polanyi, Martin Buber
and Karl Jaspers and I think Thomas Mann as well. Lukacs
incorporated key elements of Weber's thematic on rationalization in
his own theoretical work. For Weber, rationalization is the
structural consequence of social actions premised upon instrumental
rationality (zweckrational) and stands in constrast to value-rational
(wertrational), affectual and traditional forms of social action.
Instrumental rationality is social action: "...determined by
expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of
other human beings; these expectations are used as conditions or
means for the attainment of the actor's own rationally pursued and
calculated ends." Weber traced instrumental rationality between
historic periods and across a variety of social contexts. His study
of bureaucracy, economic organization and even his sociology of
religion address the circumstances that either influenced or
inhibited instrumental rationalization. From these disparate cases
Weber constructed a loose model of rationalization that includes: the
disenchantment and intellectualization of the world; the
objectification of things and actions via formal analysis and
mathematical abstraction and technical mastery via specialized
practices and discourse. In the essay Science as a Vocation Weber
argued that instrumental rationality began several millenia ago in
specifically occidential culture and has gained momentum until today
it instills the believe that: "...one can in principle master all
things by calculation." In the closing pages of Science as a
Vocation Weber says:
"The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world... To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently and simply...nothing is gained by yearning and tarrying alone, and we shall act differently. We shall set to work and meet the demands of the day in human relations as well as in our vocation."
Weber - so frequently used to bash Marx for the crimes of stagism and for the the crimes excessive reduction - regarded human behavoir fixed, predetermined and fated has always struck me as pretty funny. In contrast to this Lukacs saw the dominance of instrumental rationality over substantive rationality as the organizational effect of commodity production. Lukacs was a better historian than Weber. Blaut, Furuhashi and others have demonstrated the Weber's work is at least implicitly racist. Weber's theory of rationalization is also far more teleological than anything Marx himself wrote. And Weber never really provides an adequate explanation for what caused rationalization to emerge in the first place. Lukacs provides the useful insight within rationalization with an adequate causal explanation by grafting it onto the historical specificity and context of Marxism.
In providing the necessary historical context and showing which way the causal arrow really points (from class relations and mode of production to culture) Lukacs rescues all that is useful in Weber and abandon's the rest. Weber is mostly just footnotes and quibbles with Marx and the majority of it is shit. Nevertheless, Weber serves bourgeois sociology quite nicely. He is always invoked as the more subtle "multi-causal" not "economically deterministic" not "stagist" sociological thinker. George Ritzer's McDonaldization theory is Weber redux with a catchy brand-name attached making it easier for undergrads to swallow. Someone really needs to write an undergrad friendly book on Lukacs and reification, showing that rationalization, bureaucracy, instrumental reason etc. are (1) historically specific (2) propelled by capitalism (3) far from historically inevitable and (4) that resistance to such processes can and must be more than Ritzer's advice that we eat Ben and Jerry's ice cream, that we pick up after ourselves in McDonalds and grab bag of other guilty conscience, liberal life hating, hair-shirt, nonsense. If you have to do sociology (and teach it), it might as well be scientific and therefore Marxist.
Sean Noonan snnoonan at email.msn.com +++++
+++++ Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2000 12:33:29 -0500 To: marxism at lists.panix.com From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Subject: Re: rationalisation and reification
>En relación a Re: rationalisation and reification,
>el 9 Dec 00, a las 8:26, Louis Proyect dijo:
>
>> Phil:
>> >PS: BTW, does anyone know any good books on the subject of the
>> >origins/evolution of sociology?
>
>Positively yes. Lucien Goldmann's _Les sciences humaines et la philosophie_ is
>directly engaged with this.
>
>Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
>gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar
Lucien Goldmann is wonderful. I'm reading Eric R. Wolf's _Europe and the People Without History_ now. In the introduction, Wolf briefly discusses the rise of the social sciences and the development of sociological theory (how both became divorced from political economy, which in turn got compartmentalized into economics & political science):
***** The rising tide of discontent pitting "society" against the political and ideological order erupted in disorder, rebellion, and revolution. The specter of disorder and revolution raised the question of how social order could be restored and maintained, indeed, how social order was possible at all. Sociology hoped to answer the "social question." It had, as Rudolph Heberle noted, "an eminently political origin....Saint Simon, Auguste Comte, and Lorenz Stein conceived the new science of society as an antidote against the poison of social disintegration" (quoted in Bramson 1961: 12, n. 2).
These early sociologists did this by severing the field of social relations from political economy....
Bramson, Leon 1961. The Political Context of Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
(Eric Wolf, _Europe and the People Without History_, Berkeley: U of California P, 1982, _p. 8) *****
Yoshie
P.S. Thanks to Sean Noonan for his very fine post. +++++
Yoshie