The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (230 page)

 
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The process of misunderstanding an abstraction as a concrete entity. Although the concept was used by many Marxist writers it is with
Luk´cs
, Benjamin , and
Adorno
that it is carefully examined. Luk´cs saw the origins of the concept in both Hegel and Marx , although the German word for ‘reification’,
verdinglichung
, cannot be found in any of their writings. Despite this Luk´cs relates the concept to
commodity-fetishism
as explicated by Marx in the first chapter of
Capital
. For Marx, fetishism exists when social relations between men take the form of relations between things. Luk´cs discusses reification in this light by focusing on how men's productive activity takes an alien form in the capitalist mode of production. For Benjamin, the emphasis was on understanding the reification of culture which emerged from commodity production. He saw society as producing a ‘phantasmagoria’ which manifests into that society's culture. In contrast, Adorno stressed the importance of understanding reification as a social category which indicates the way in which consciousness is determined. The emphasis on reification becomes not simply a relation between men that appears as a relation between things, but rather a relation between men that appears in the form of a property of a thing. Adorno relates this to Marx's distinction between use value and exchange value. Only exchange value is reified because it is the form in which the value of a commodity is expressed.
IF 

 
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In general, this term—in German
Produktionverhältnisse
—refers to those relationships which arise out of the actual production process and also, of course, to ownership relations of which the most important is property. Like
forces of production
, it is a technical term from the theory of
historical materialism
. According to
Marx
, the most fundamental ownership relation, under capitalism at least, is bourgeois ownership of the means of production, an ownership which also manifests itself in a monopoly of political power. The precise relationship between forces and relations of production is ambiguous, and the sense or senses in which a contradiction between forces and relations constitutes the dynamic of history is obscure.
JH 

 
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The theory that any social totality has four separate and distinct sets of practices—economic, political, ideological, and theoretical—which act in combination, but each of which has its own complete autonomy according to the limits set by its place in the totality. It is a term which has assumed particular significance in discussions of the
state
. In Marxist theory the notion of relative autonomy was developed in response to the perceived bankruptcy of Soviet Marxism-Leninism which saw the state as an epiphenomenon whose actions could be reduced to the operation of an ‘economic base’ ( see
base/superstructure
). Whilst it could be argued that Marx and Engels first introduced the notion in discussing the Bonapartist regime in France after Louis-Napoleon's
coup d’état
of 1852, the notion of relative autonomy was popularized by
Poulantzas
in
Political Power and Social Classes
(1968). Poulantzas argued that the modern capitalist state best serves the interests of the capitalist class only when the members of this class do not participate directly in the state apparatus, that is, when the ruling class is not the politically governing class. This degree of relative autonomy from the capitalist class and from the interests of particular fractions of capital (finance, industrial sectors, etc.) enables the state to function as a ‘collective capitalist’ and maintain its legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate. The concept of relative autonomy has been heavily criticized for its functionalist overtones and its tendency to tautology. Orthodox political theorists (in particular statists or state-centred analysts) have also been preoccupied with the issue of state autonomy, usually defined as the ability of states to pursue goals in spite of the demands or interests of other social groups or classes. Rather than opt for notions of relative autonomy, statists have developed a continuum ranging from ‘strong’ to ‘weak’ states, which has been particularly influential in discussions of the developmental state.
PBm 

 
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There can be no precise and agreed definition of religion. The origin of the word is of little help, for it descends from the Latin
religiare
, to bind, which suggests the broadest possible boundaries for the territory of religious belief and encourages the acceptance of the argument, frequently put in the twentieth century, that many kinds of belief which fall outside the bounds of the recognized religions, including forms of Marxism and nationalism, have the essential characteristics of religion. It is thus genuinely difficult to define religion for the purpose, say, of teaching children about comparative religion or of formulating laws against offending people's religious beliefs. Are witchcraft and paganism a religion or set of religions? Is theosophy?
However, if the boundaries of religious belief are difficult to draw, the core territory is relatively easy to characterize. Religion is concerned with the worship of transcendent or supernatural beings whose existence is outside or above the realm of the normal, which is mortal and temporal. In its most historically important and ethically demanding form, monotheism, as exemplified in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions, the religious concern is concentrated onto a single God who is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, the creator of the universe.
Religion is therefore normally of huge ethical significance. What people ought to do is derivable from the existence, nature, and will of God. It would be difficult to be seriously religious in any sense without that religion determining some of one's political beliefs. Indeed, the most natural relation between religion and politics is one in which the most important political questions have religious answers: the legitimacy or otherwise of regimes, the limits of a particular authority, and the rightness or wrongness of legislation can all be derived from religious revelation ( see e.g. medieval political thought). The range of religiously justified regimes can be divided into theocracies, where divine revelation and the priests who interpret it rule directly and those nontheocracies where the divine will has, nevertheless, sanctioned the particular form of secular rule (the doctrine of the Divine Right of beings to rule being a typical form of religious, though non-theocratic, legitimation).
However, since the seventeenth century Western Europe and the Americas have been dominated by secular views which sought successfully to separate religion from politics, so that the state's existence is not justified by theology. Secularization arose out of the tension between science and religion and the schisms between forms of Christianity. It was essential to put religion beyond the sphere of truth and refutation and to justify the authority of the state without recourse to (disputed) theological premisses. Thus in ‘Christendom’, though not in the territory of Islam, there developed an acceptance that political disputes must be resolved on secular grounds. Paradoxically, this process evolved most rapidly in England which retained (and continues to retain) an established Church.
In a ‘secular’ society the principle that religion and politics are independent realms is accepted, but religion continues to influence politics in a number of ways. Although religious doctrines may be taken to be arbitrary or indeterminate on many political questions, there remain issues on which a Church must speak clearly and forcefully. Roman Catholic doctrine on abortion is one of the clearest cases. A particular form of religious belief can be strongly linked to national identity, as Catholicism has been for the Poles and the Irish, and Orthodox Christianity for the Armenians and Georgians. Where parties are freely formed, there are likely to be parties based generally on Christian social morality, like the many
Christian Democratic
parties of contemporary Europe, or specifically on one Christian Church. For example, the Catholic People's Party in the Netherlands and the
Mouvement Républicain Populaire
in France have been specifically Roman Catholic parties, though both of these parties have now merged with others and there has been, in the late twentieth century, a tendency for parties based on one Christian Church to decline. But where there is no formal link between a religious organization and a political party, there may be overlaps of membership and mutual influence: in England the Anglican Church has been described as ‘the Tory Party at prayer’, even though it has always contained many non-Tories. In the 1990s it would be better characterized as the Liberal Democrats at prayer.
LA