The False Memories of a Reified World

The myth of a “social contract” is not unlike the Adam Smithian Barter Savage myth that Polanyi critiques in his criticism of Neoliberal ideology. The common thematic thread the two economic myths share is they are designed to provide ideological justification and therefore acceptance of wealth inequality and commodification of money in a self-regulating economy. An important aspect of ideological justification of this particular kind of Smithian market capitalism is to present the state as rational and scientific:

"The argument is part of modern day economics, which was supposed to be a scientific endeavor to explain the underlying scientific principles behind this concept, and Adam Smith is credited with being the perpetrator of this so-called science. Because it's considered a science, it fits with the classical liberal trend towards rationalism, which is given credence as being the basis for an advanced society, towards which some people see humanity moving in a progressive fashion" (Brian Miller, Executive Director - United for a Fair Economy (UFE) & co-author of the new book The Self-Made Myth).

Science plays an important role in laying the foundations of Neo-liberalism ideology so as to be accepted as true by society, and to resist criticism when markets fail:

"Not only does the myth of the Smithian economic accumulating savage provide a perceived “scientific” justification of minimizing the role of government in protecting society against the vicissitudes of market imbalances like unemployment, hunger, and poverty, but the classical market mythos “naturalizes” these inhuman conditions by argument of analogy, “The laws of commerce were the laws of nature and consequently the laws of God”(Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon Press, Kindle Edition, p.122).

This perceived scientific and naturalistic myth is actually an irrational reified philosophy that distort experience. Society (Community) and the Subject (Individual) are distorted according to narrow political interests by subtracting the community’s complexity and history through ideological abstraction. Yet, freedom in the reified theory of the self-regulated market is reduced to a “market view of society which equated economics with contractual relationships, and contractual relations with freedom”(Ibid., p. 266).

Reified concepts result in a reified intellectual life in which experience is distorted and impairs our ability to articulate the complexity of our own lives and world. Reification is radical objectivism that reduces the irreducible object to a limited false concept. Reification is a false consciousness that embraces a “Naive Realism” that gives epistemological validation to reified assumptions in which “the object is independent of subjectivity and is apprehended as it is in-itself. It presents the order of knowing as a fully given object being passively received by a subject”(Brian O'Connor, Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, p. 50). Radical empiricism, or positivism is distinguished as an epistemology of the passive subject: the passive knower merely collects data. The reified consciousness cannot conceive of objects that are not already reduced to pre-fabricated ossified concepts.