Lukács, György

Lukács, György (1885–1971) A Hungarian Marxist philosopher who was a government minister during the short-lived Hungarian revolution of 1919, after which he spent many years in exile in Stalin's Russia, spending a short period there in prison.

Lukács came to Marxism via both Kant and Hegel. His early critical position is sometimes regarded as existentialist: this is particularly true of The Soul and its Forms (1911) and to a lesser extent of The Theory of the Novel (1920). He argued that Marxism offers a solution to the dualisms of classical European philosophy, in particular the reconciliation of subject and object. In History and Class Consciousness (1923), he maintains that the experience of the working class itself is that of the subject and the object of history, and that Marxism is able to construct this experience into a theory of the social totality. The notion of totality is, for Lukács, the most important concept in Marxism, because it enables one to penetrate the appearances of social reality (dominated by commodity fetishism and reification), to understand the real human relationships that underlie these surface manifestations. He developed a theory of political organization which reconciles the importance that Lenin gives to the party with Rosa Luxemburg's emphasis on spontaneity.

His political writings tend to be prominent during periods of left-inspired social upheaval and often forgotten in between. In the 1920s his political position came under attack in the Comintern and he concentrated instead on literary theory, developing a notion of socialist realism that goes beyond the crass simplicity of Stalinist orthodoxy, but which never succeeded in coming to terms with literary modernism. The good realist novel is seen as one which portrays underlying social relations rather than surface appearances. See in particular The Historical Novel (1947) and Studies in European Realism (1935–9). See also CRITICAL THEORY; IDEOLOGY.