György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, seminal in the development of Western Marxism. His work departed from Soviet ideological orthodoxy, exploring concepts such as reification and advancing Marxist theories on class consciousness. Lukács's literary criticism profoundly influenced understandings of realism and the novel as a genre. He was also a key philosopher of Leninism, formalizing vanguard-party revolution.
In the fall of 1960, during a three-month visit to Hungary, Arthur Kahn unsuccessfully asked his hosts to arrange a meeting with Gyorgy Lukacs, a persona non grata to the Communist regime. Kahn arranged to meet Lukacs on his own and proposed translating some Lukacs essays never before appearing in English. During the three years Kahn worked on the translations, he and Lukacs engaged in a voluminous correspondence, investigating Marxism as it applied to contemporary events like the Vietnam war. Extracts from this correspondence will be included in a forthcoming volume of Kahns' autobiography, "The Education of a 20th Century Political Animal."
An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became
some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature
One of the greatest Marxist theorists of his generation, Georg Lukacs was a prolific writer of remarkably catholic, if moralistic, tastes. In The Lukacs Reader , his biographer Arpad Kadarkay represents the great range and variety of Lukacs's output. The reader includes, in original translations, and with introductory essays, Lukacs on: Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Ford, Strindberg, Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, Gaughin, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Also collected are: the autobiographical essay 'On the Poverty of Spirit', material from Lukacs's diary, and such key articles as: 'Aesthetic Culture', 'The Ideology of Modernism', 'Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem', and 'Class Consciousness'. What emerges is a figure very much at the centre of European thought whose value to modern culture and philosophy differs markedly from that which received opinion generally admits.
This is the first time one of the most important of Lukács' early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923, has been made available in English. The book consists of a series of essays treating, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of Historic Marxism, class consciousness, and the substantiation and consciousness of the Proletariat. Writing in 1968, on the occasion of the appearance of his collected works, Lukács evaluated the influence of this book as follows: "For the historical effect of History and Class Consciousness and also for the actuality of the present time one problem is of decisive importance: alienation, which is here treated for the first time since Marx as the central question of a revolutionary critique of capitalism, and whose historical as well as methodological origins are deeply rooted in Hegelian dialectic. It goes without saying that the problem was omnipresent. A few years after History and Class Consciousness was published, it was moved into the focus of philosophical discussion by Heidegger in his Being and Time, a place which it maintains to this day largely as a result of the position occupied by Sartre and his followers. The philologic question raised by L. Goldmann, who considered Heidegger's work partly as a polemic reply to my (admittedly unnamed) work, need not be discussed here. It suffices today to say that the problem was in the air, particularly if we analyze its background in detail in order to clarify its effect, the mixture of Marxist and Existentialist thought processes, which prevailed especially in France immediately after the Second World War. In this connection priorities, influences, and so on are not particularly significant. What is important is that the alienation of man was recognized and appreciated as the central problem of the time in which we live, by bourgeois as well as proletarian, by politically rightist and leftist thinkers. Thus, History and Class Consciousness exerted a profound effect in the circles of the youthful intelligentsia."
Georg Lukacs wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukacs's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukacs's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism.
Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) is now recognised as one of the most innovative and
best-informed literary critics of the twentieth century. Trained in the German
philosophic tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, he escaped Nazi persecution by
fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1933. He wrote and published his longest work
of literary criticism, The Historical Novel, in 1937.
Out of the chaos following Lenin’s death and the mounting fury against Lukács and his freshly penned History and Class Consciousness (1923), this book bears an assessment of Lenin as “the only theoretical equal to Marx.” Lukács shows, with unprecedented clarity, how Lenin’s historical interventions — from his vanguard politics and repurposing of the state to his detection of a new, imperialist stage of capitalism — advanced the conjunction of theory and practice, class consciousness and class struggle. A postscript from 1967 reflects on how this picture of Lenin, which both shattered failed Marxism and preserved certain prejudices of its day, became even more inspirational after the oppressions of Stalin. Lukács’s study remains indispensable to an understanding of the contemporary significance of Lenin’s life and work.
