Southwest Humanities is proud to announce that Chris O’Kane’s Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination in Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and Lefebvre, which we indexed, was recently published by Brill on 28 May 2026. O’Kane’s book is a major work of Marxist and critical social theory that revisits one of the most important—and frequently misunderstood—concepts in the Marxian tradition: fetishism. Rather than treating fetishism merely as a form of false consciousness, ideological illusion, or commodity mystification, O’Kane reconstructs how Karl Marx, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Henri Lefebvre each understood fetishism as a real and objective form of social domination. According to this interpretation, capitalist social relations generate abstract, impersonal structures that take on an apparently autonomous existence and come to govern the very people who collectively produce them. The book traces how each thinker developed this insight in distinctive ways, revealing a shared concern with the ways capitalist societies transform human beings into agents and bearers of forces beyond their conscious control.
The book’s significance lies in its effort to synthesize several major strands of Western Marxism into a coherent account of what O’Kane calls “social constitution” and “fetishistic social domination.” By bringing together Marx’s critique of political economy, Lukács’s theory of reification, Adorno’s analysis of abstract social totality, and Lefebvre’s work on everyday life and the production of space, O’Kane develops a framework for understanding how domination operates through seemingly objective social forms rather than solely through direct coercion or ideology. The result is an important intervention in contemporary debates within critical theory, political economy, sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies. It also contributes to ongoing efforts to renew Marxian social theory for the twenty-first century by showing how the concept of fetishism can illuminate contemporary forms of economic power, social reproduction, and everyday experience.
For more information about this important new contribution to Marxist scholarship, see the publisher’s website here.
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