There is no doubt in my mind but that the notion of reification as elaborated upon by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness, particularly in the long chapter whose title begins with the word "Verdinglichung", played an enormously important and generally useful explanatory role in the social theory of the mid-twentieth century -roughly the middle fifty years of that century. This is so despite all the fuzziness and "fudging" of which he may be guilty in other writings. This complaint is raised against him by four former students, who have published a short commentary on the Ontology that he produced late in life; they urge a return to the treatment of the notion that is to be found in his classic of the 1920s.¹