reifying

Reifying is the process of treating social relations, ideas, or abstract concepts as if they were concrete, independent objects with stable essences. It involves projecting inherent properties onto phenomena that are actually products of human practices and power relations, making dynamic processes seem natural or inevitable.

The term comes from Latin res, "thing," and the German Verdinglichung. It is widely used in philosophy, sociology, and critical theory to describe how social phenomena—such as value, labor, money, or institutions—are experienced as things with a life of their own rather than as outcomes of human actions.

In Marxist theory, reification is central to the idea of commodity fetishism: social relations of production appear as relations between things, and values seem intrinsic to objects. This obscures the social and historical character of economic life and can sustain exploitation and alienation.

Reification also appears in everyday discourse: money is treated as having autonomous power; social categories such as race or gender are taken as natural essences; and organizations are described as unchanging, external forces rather than outcomes of collective practices. When reified, people may feel estranged from the products of their work and from other actors in society.

Critical theory and post-structural approaches encourage recognizing and historicizing social constructs, arguing against reification by revealing underlying power relations, contingencies, and the human grounding of social life. Reification is distinguished from hypostatization, which involves treating abstract terms as concrete entities; reification concerns the mischaracterization of social processes as things.