purpose and the order of social relations – because it treats the result as the
cause. This reification creates the appearance of both structural determinism
and the need for an infinite regress of interpretation: a picture of things that
is the reverse of the actual concrete relationships in which they stand.
Marx argued that in focusing on thingsas ideas, as finished products – one
ends up with the idea that history developed backwards. In the preface to
The Holy Family,Marx ([1845]1956:15, emphasis in original) outlined his objec-
tions to allowing “self-consciousness” to substitute for the “real individual man.”
The argument is complicated by the fact that Marx is criticizing Hegel, tak-
ing on a particular form of German Idealism, and criticizing what he calls
“Critical Criticism,” a form of Christian Germanic argument. But, his fun-
damental point is one that Durkheim, C. Wright Mills and Garfinkel will later
take up: that focusing on the end product of social relations creates the appear-
ance that the end product (beliefs or developments like industrialism) was
the purpose and effective stimulant of social action – when in actuality it
came after and was caused by something else. The something else consists
of social relations that are in Marx’s terms both “real” and “material.”
According to Marx ([1845]1956:21, emphasis in original) “In material his-
tory there were no industrial townsbefore there were factories; but in Critical
history, in which the son begets his father, as already in Hegel, Manchester,
Bolton, and Prestonwere flourishing industrial towns before factories were
even thought of.” Marx is taking exception to both a particular way of treat-
ing religion and a particular way of looking at history. His point in both cases
is that the result is treated as the cause, and that this contradiction is the con-
sequence of looking at things in terms of resulting ideas (reification) – rather
than looking at the “materialness” of social relations in their details. In try-
ing to rise above the particular – the critical focus on ideas loses sight of the
real altogether – and as if there were no real social relations the result is
allowed to substitute for its cause.
In current terminology it is generally said that social relations – material
relations – are in their concreteness messy and contingent. As social scien-
tists we are supposed to be preoccupied with how to get a pattern out of
these details that is generalizeable across cases by performing some sort of
conceptual reduction. In spite of a long and important debate over the efficacy
of rules, institutions and motives – and their relationship to social order –
there has been a general failure to take seriously the argument that social
practices would not work in the first place unless there were a recognizable
282 • Bonnie Wright and Anne Warfield Rawls