Lukács Georg (1885–1971), Hungarian Marxist philosopher best known for his History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923). In 1918 he joined the Hungarian Communist Party and for much of the remainder of his career had a controversial relationship with it. For several months in 1919 he was People’s Commissar for Education in Béla Kun’s government, until he fled to Vienna and later moved to Berlin. In 1933 he fled Hitler and moved to Moscow, remaining there until the end of World War II, when he returned to Budapest as a university professor. In 1956 he was Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy’s short-lived government. This led to a brief exile in Rumania. In his later years he returned to teaching in Budapest and was much celebrated by the Hungarian government. His Collected Works are forthcoming in both German and Hungarian. He is equally celebrated for his literary criticism and his reconstruction of the young Marx’s thought.
For convenience his work is often divided into three periods: the pre-Marxist, the Stalinist, and the post-Stalinist. What unifies these periods and remains constant in his work are the problems of dialectics and the concept of totality. He stressed the Marxist claim of the possibility of a dialectical unity of subject and object. This was to be obtained through the proletariat’s realization of itself and the concomitant destruction of economic alienation in society, with the understanding that truth was a still-to-be-realized totality. (In the post–World War II period this theme was taken up by the Yugoslavian praxis theorists.) The young neo-Kantian Lukács presented an aesthetics stressing the subjectivity of human experience and the emptiness of social experience. This led several French philosophers to claim that he was the first major existentialist of the twentieth century; he strongly denied it. Later he asserted that realism is the only correct way to understand literary criticism, arguing that since humanity is at the core of any social discussion, form depends on content and the content of politics is central to all historical social interpretations of literature.
Historically Lukács’s greatest claim to fame within Marxist circles came from his realization that Marx’s materialist theory of history and the resultant domination of the economic could be fully understood only if it allowed for both necessity and species freedom. In History and Class Consciousness he stressed Marx’s debt to Hegelian dialectics years before the discovery of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Lukács stresses his Hegelian Marxism as the correct orthodox version over and against the established Engels-inspired Soviet version of a dialectics of nature. His claim to be returning to Marx’s methodology emphasizes the primacy of the concept of totality. It is through Marx’s use of the dialectic that capitalist society can be seen as essentially reified and the proletariat viewed as the true subject of history and the only possible salvation of humanity. All truth is to be seen in relation to the proletariat’s historical mission. Marx’s materialist conception of history itself must be examined in light of proletarian knowledge. Truth is no longer given but must be understood in terms of relative moments in the process of the unfolding of the real union of theory and praxis: the totality of social relations. This union is not to be realized as some statistical understanding, but rather grasped through proletarian consciousness and directed party action in which subject and object are one. (Karl Mannheim included a modified version of this theory of social-historical relativism in his work on the sociology of knowledge.) In Europe and America this led to Western Marxism. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it led to condemnation. If both the known and the knower are moments of the same thing, then there is a two-directional dialectical relationship, and Marxism cannot be understood from Engels’s one-way movement of the dialectic of nature. The Communist attack on Lukács was so extreme that he felt it necessary to write an apologetic essay on Lenin’s established views. In The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics (1938), Lukács modified his views but still stressed the dialectical commonality of Hegel and Marx. In Lukács’s last years he unsuccessfully tried to develop a comprehensive ethical theory. The positive result was over two thousand pages of a preliminary study on social ontology. See also MARXISM, PRAXIS. J.Bi.