Georg Lukács Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Georg Bernhard von Lukács von Szegedin (known in Hungarian as szegedi Lukács György Bernát (born Löwinger György Bernát; April 13, 1885 Budapest - June 4, 1971 Budapest) was a Hegelian and Marxist philosopher and literary critic. (Lukács is pronounced roughly like "lou-kotch.")
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His parents were József Löwinger (szegedi Lukács József, b. Szeged) (1855 - 1928) and Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél, b. Budapest) (1860 - 1917).
While he was not politically active prior to the first World War, Lukács rethought his ideas in the light of the war and the Russian revolutions of 1917. He became a communist in this period and joined the fledgling Communist Party of Hungary and was a member of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.
After the Soviet Republic was defeated, he remained active in the Communist Party but also turned his atentions to developing Leninist ideas in the field of philosophy, which task he commenced with his short study Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought. His major works in this period, however, were the essays collected in History and Class Consciousness. Although these essays display signs of what Lenin referred to as "ultra-leftism," they arguably carry through his effort of providing Leninism with a philosophical basis.
History and Class Consciousness was a major contribution to the Marxist theory of ideology and false consciousness. This book develops the concept of class consciousness and insists that "ideology" is really a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which functions to prevent the proletariat from attaining a real consciousness of its revolutionary position. Lukács presents the category of reification whereby, due to the commodity nature of capitalist society, social relations become objectified, precluding the ability for a spontaneous emergence of class-consciousness. It is in this context that the need for a party in the Leninist sense emerges, the subjective aspect of the re-invigorated Marxian dialectic.
In his later career, Lukács repudiated the ideas of History and Class Consciousness, but he wrote a defence of them as late as 1925 or 1926. This book he called A Defense of History and Class Consciousness and was only published in Magyar in 1996 and English in 2000. It is perhaps the most important "unknown" Marxist text of the twentieth century.
As a Hungarian exile Lukács lived in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War. After the war Lukács was involved in the establishment of the new Hungarian government as a member of the Hungarian Communist Party. Lukács was severely criticised in 1948, and was only rehabilitated in the 1950s. In 1956 Lukács became a minister of the brief communist revolutionary government led by Imre Nagy which opposed the Soviet Union. At this time Lukács' daughter led a brief-lived party of communist revolutionary youth. Lukács' position on the 1956 revolution was that the Hungarian Communist Party would need to retreat into a coalition government of socialists, and slowly rebuild its credibility with the Hungarian people. As such, while a minister in Imre Nagy's revolutionary government, Lukács also participated in the refoundation of the Hungarian Communist Party on a new basis. This party was rapidly coopted by Janos Kadar after 4 November 1956.(Woroszylski, 1957)
Unlike Nagy, Lukács survived the purges of 1956. Lukács publicly abandoned his positions of 1956 and engaged in self-criticism. Having abandoned his earlier positions, Lukács was to remain loyal to the Communist Party until his death in 1971. Lukács became more publicly critical of the Soviet Union and Hungarian Communist Party in his last years following the uprisings in France and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Lukács' complex and reasoned adherence to the general Soviet line in politics has lead some leftists to accuse him of being "an apologist for Stalinism." However, Lukács' own historical line was continuously critical of Stalinism, and Lukács was repeatedly forced to undertake public self-criticism during his political career in order to avoid being expelled from the official Communist movement.
In addition to his standing as a Marxist political thinker, Lukács was among the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century. His important work in literary criticism began early in his career, with The Theory of the Novel, a seminal work in literary theory and the theory of genre. The book is a history of the novel as a form, and an investigation into its distinct characteristics.
Lukács later repudiated The Theory of the Novel, writing a lengthy introduction that described it as erroneous, but nonetheless containing a "romantic anti-capitalism" which would later develop into Marxism. (This introduction also contains his famous dismissal of Theodor Adorno and others in Western Marxism as having taken up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss.")
Lukács's later literary criticism includes the well-known essay "Kafka or Thomas Mann?", in which Lukács argues for the work of Thomas Mann as a superior attempt to deal with the condition of modernity, while he criticizes Franz Kafka's brand of modernism. Lukács was steadfastly opposed to the formal innovations of modernist writers like Kafka, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, preferring the traditional aesthetic of realism. He famously argued for the revolutionary character of the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac. Lukács felt that both authors' nostalgic, pro-aristocratic politics allowed them accurate and critical stances because of their opposition to the rising bourgeoisie (albeit reactionary opposition). This view was expressed in his later book The Historical Novel.
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