Error or absurdity? A non-cognitive approach to commodity fetishism

David Andrews

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2018, vol. 25, issue 5, 738-755

Abstract: Karl Marx presented his theory of commodity fetishism as an explanation of the mysterious appearance of social relations in a system of commodity production as natural phenomena. The standard interpretation of this as a failure to perceive capitalist social relations correctly depends on a particular modern sense of ‘natural’. If classical political economy and Marx used ‘natural’ in the Aristotelian sense, commodity fetishism appears quite differently: not as a cognitive error but rather as a manner of living under commodity production, one that is not wrong but absurd, the word fetishism tying commodity production to pre-Enlightenment, preliterate peoples.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2018.1475501 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:25:y:2018:i:5:p:738-755

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2018.1475501

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by Richard Sturn, Hans Michael Trautwein, Muriel Dal-Pont-Legrand and Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().