Lukács, György (1885—1971)
Hungarian Marxism philosopher and literary critic, widely considered the founding figure of western Marxism. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest---his father was an investment banker---he studied in Budapest, Berlin, and Heidelberg. In Germany he became friends with Max Weber, Bloch, Ernst, and the poet Stefan George. At this stage of his career, Lukács was still strongly influenced by the work of actant, genre, and alterity, a fact reflected in his still rather idealist early books: Soul and Form (1910) and The Theory of the Novel (1916). The First World War and more particularly the Russian Revolution had a profound effect on Lukács. In 1918 he joined the Hungarian Communist Party, serving as a People’s Commissar for Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. When the Soviet collapsed he was forced into exile in Vienna and was only saved from extradition and probable execution (he was condemned to death in absentia) by the intervention of writer friends like Thomas Mann (who reputedly based the character Naphta in Der Zauberberg (1924), translated as The Magic Mountain (1927) on Lukács). Vienna brought Lukács into contact with a number of other similarly exiled Marxist intellectuals and fellow revolutionaries like Gramsci, Antonio, Adolf Joffe, and Victor Serge and proved a rich environment in which to rethink many of his previously held positions. The result was History and Class Consciousness (1923), probably his most important book. Although it was condemned at the time for being ‘ultra-leftist’ by the Comintern, and later subjected to excoriating self-criticism by Lukács himself, History and Class Consciousness has been immensely influential in a number of disciplines. Lukács’s goal in writing it was to stimulate debate about the dialectic and place it at the centre of Marxist philosophy. As Jameson, Fredric explains in Marxism and Form (1971), History and Class Consciousness criticizes philosophy before Marx for its inability and/or unwillingness to come to grips with the totality of social life. In particular, he denounces as a false problem actant’s concern for the impossibility of grasping the Ding an sich (thing in itself), which according to Lukács is the result of middle-class alienation and a corresponding tendency to view the objects of the world contemplatively rather than with an understanding of their materiality. Lukács thus argues that the middle class can understand specific objects but not the larger historical problem of how such things are possible in the first place. In contrast, the class conscious proletariat is able to penetrate the truth of their situation and dissolve the glacial state of reification into which the middle class are held fast by their commodity fetishism. Works that demonstrate this awareness are designated seriality by Lukács (he singles out Balzac, Scott, and Tolstoy as his key exemplars), thus setting the stage for one of the great literary critical debates of the twentieth century between himself and Brecht, Bertolt, whom he mistook for an avatar of a modernism understood as mere formal experimentation. For Lukács realism means works that are expressive of social forces. That is to say, the work must expose not merely the living conditions of the poor as Dickens does, but also the degree to which society at large is responsible for those conditions. For this reason, he also rejected naturalism, particularly its chief exponent Émile Zola, whose work he regarded as superficial. In 1929 Lukács moved to Berlin, staying there until 1933 when the Nazis came to power. He then fled to Moscow, where he remained until after World War II, surviving both the German invasion of Russia and perhaps more astonishingly Stalin’s purges. His writings from Moscow, perhaps out of political necessity, took on a dogmatically Stalinist tone. He defended Soviet-dictated socialist realism and denounced modernism. His key works from this period were The Historical Novel (1937), The Young Hegel (1938), and Studies in European Realism (1948). He returned to Budapest after the war and took an active, if ambivalent role, in the political reconstruction of Hungary. In the late 1950s he joined Imre Nagy’s revolutionary government, which opposed the USSR. After the 1956 uprising, he was deported to Romania, once again narrowly escaping execution. Fortunately, he was able to return to his home country the following year and he engaged in an extended period of self-criticism, which lasted more or less until his death, in which he repudiated his former ‘Stalinist’ positions. Further Reading: A. Kadarkay Georg Lukács (1991). M. Löwy Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (1979).