Biography of the Day: Georg Lukacs

[altmariusideea]

Lukács, Georg (1885-1971)

Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who influenced the mainstream of European Communist thought during the first half of the 20th century. His major contributions include the formulation of a Marxist system of aesthetics that opposed political control of artists and defended humanism and an elaboration of Marx's theory of alienation within industrial society. His What is Orthodox Marxism? and The Changing Function of Historical Materialism, demonstrated his creative and independent approach to Marxist theory.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family, Lukács had read Marx while at school, but was more influenced by Kierkegaard and Weber. He was unimpressed with the majority of the theoretical leaders of the Second International such as Karl Kautsky, but had been impressed by Rosa Luxemburg. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lukács joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918. After the overthrow of Béla Kun's short-lived Hungarian Communist regime in 1919, in which Lukács served as Commissar for Culture and Education, the Hungarian white terror brutally persecuted former government members.

Fleeing the White Terror, Lukacs moved to Vienna, where he remained for 10 years. He edited the review Kommunismus, which for a time became a focal point for the ultra-left currents in the Third International and and was a member of the Hungarian underground movement. In his book History and Class Consciousness (1923), he developed these ideas and laid the basis for his critical literary tenets by linking the development of form in art with the history of the class struggle. He came under sharp criticism from the Comintern, and facing expulsion from the Party and consequent exclusion from the struggle against fascism, he recanted.

Lukács was in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, save for a short period in 1930-31, at which time he attended the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. In 1933 he left Berlin and returned to Moscow to attend the Institute of Philosophy. He moved back to Hungary in 1945 and became a member of parliament and a professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of culture at the University of Budapest. In 1956 he was a major figure in the Hungarian uprising, serving as minister of culture during the revolt. He was arrested and deported to Romania but was allowed to return to Budapest in 1957, where, stripped of his former power and status, he devoted himself to a steady output of critical and philosophical works.

In later years, Lukács repudiated many of the positions put in his early works which had formed the starting point for such writers as Adorno and Fromm, and other tendencies which not only rejected the Stalinised version of Marxism, but departed from Marx's central principles. He frequently clashed with Jean-Paul Sartre and others who combined Marxism with psychoanalysis, structuralism and other philosophical currents inherently incompatible with Marxism.

Lukács wrote more than 30 books and hundreds of essays and lectures. Among his other works are Soul and Form (1911), a collection of essays that established his reputation as a critic; The Historical Novel (1955); and books on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hegel, Lenin, Marxism, and aesthetics. In his Destruction of Reason, he launched a furious attack on Heidegger's accommodation with Nazism and the whole current of irrationalism which was dominant in the pre-war years.

Early Works

The Theory of the Novel (1914)
Tactics and Ethics (1919)
The Role of Morality in Communist Production (1919)
The Moral Mission of the Communist Party (1920)
Tagore’s Gandhi Novel (1922)

* * *

from History & Class Consciousness

Preface (December 1922)
What is Orthodox Marxism? (March 1919)
What is Orthodox Marxism? (sections 1 & 2) (sections 3, 4 & 5)(March 1919) (alternative translation)
The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg (Jan 1921)
Class Consciousness (March 1920)
Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat (1923)
I: The Phenomenon of Reification
II: Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought
Subject & Object In Hegel
III: The Standpoint of the Proletariat
1. Immediacy and Mediation
2. The point of Departure for the Proletariat
3. Immanent Critique
4. Dialectical Totality
5. Humanism, Reification and Fetishism
6. The Class Consciousness of the Proletariat
Legality and Illegality (July 1920)
Critical observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s Critique of the Russian Revolution (Jan 1922)
Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation (Sep 1922)

* * *

Lenin – Theoretician of Practice, 1924
Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought, 1924
Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics, 1926

Later Literary Criticism

Hölderlin’s Hyperion, 1934
Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1936
Eulogy for Maxim Gorky: A Great Proletarian Humanist, 1936

from “The Young Hegel” (1938)

Hegel's Economics, Frankfurt period
Rationale and Defence of Objective Idealism, Jena 1801-03

Post-1945 Works

Dostoyevsky, 1949
Existentialism, 1949
Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism, from The Destruction of Reason (1952)
Preface to The Theory of the Novel (1962)
Reflections on the Cult of Stalin (1962)

Preface to History & Class Consciousness (1967)
The Pure Alternative: Stalinism or Socialist Democracy, from Democratisation Today and Tomorrow