Hegel’s philosophy also helps Lukács to solve another problem with his own model of praxis developed in History and Class Consciousness: the problematic relation between objectivation (Vergegenständlichung), externalization (Entäußerung) and alienation (Entfremdung). For Hegel’s idealism, the objectivation of spirit is a necessary but deficient stage of its development that has to be succeeded by a reappropriation of the externalized content (see also 1967: xxiv; 1948: 539–543; GW 13: 468–558). This claim directly touches upon the theory of reification: On the one hand, Lukács claims that Hegel is correct in seeing the products of human labor—and therefore also, indirectly, history—as the result of the externalization of the intentions of individuals, but that he is mistaken in describing nature as an objectivation of a (transpersonal) “spirit”. On the other hand, Hegel’s theory of externalization as applied to labor also proves to be an advancement beyond Lukács’ earlier thought. Hegel sees externalization (that is, the fact that the objects of our labor and the institutions of society are independent of our consciousness) not as a deficiency, but rather as a necessary stage in the development of self-consciousness. On this view, the externalization of the social is not problematic in itself. Rather, it is alienation (the causes of which Marx uncovered) that should be the object of the critique of reification (see also Pitkin 1987). This distinction entails the possibility of a critique of reification that does not require a complete reappropriation of objective social forms by a collective subject. Rather, Hegel’s thought suggests a conception of political praxis that acknowledges the mutual dialectical dependence of subject and object on each other (and thus avoids a naive instrumentalism in regards to social institutions) and avoids the reduction of the political totality to the expression of a privileged subject-object (an insight that Feenberg 2014 diagnoses to be already present in History and Class Consciousness).