We have become used to thinking of “materialism” as a name for demystification. Materialism is understood as that kind of thinking which relieves us of deluded beliefs in immaterial entities or of “ideological” conceptions of society. It has also, sometimes, been thought of as the easiest of all philosophical or social-scientific creeds to grasp. Only matter, and material needs, are real, it seems to say; any claims to know anything beyond them are “metaphysical,” or “idealist,” or “ideological.” Materialism's job is imagined as a relatively straightforward one: to break those idols and to leave us undeluded.

In practice this task of getting rid of illusions has proved much more difficult than the above remarks suggest. Materialism has found it hard to stand outside the illusions which it wants to dispel. It is easier to call oneself a materialist than it is to be one, because self-declared materialism has an unfortunate tendency to turn into its opposite. Something like this difficulty can be seen right at the origins of the tradition which came to be called “materialism.” For the early Greek philosopher Democritus, matter was the absolutely real. Amongst his chief principles was that “[n]othing will come of nothing and nothing which is can be annihilated.” The idea has had an impact well beyond Greek thought, right through to Newtonian physics and the modern common sense determined by it. Yet such an axiom already indicates how hard it is to separate the tradition of materialism from kinds of thinking with which one might expect it to have little in common. Here, for example, the Eleatic and very unmaterialist notion of substance as that which is eternal and can suffer no decay migrates into Democritus’ conception of matter: “Nothing which is can be annihilated.”