Gyorgy Lukács Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Gyorgy Lukács (1885–1971) was a literary critic and Hungarian Marxist philosopher frequently considered to be one of the founders of Western Marxism. He made major contributions to Marxist thought and was an important figure in the Hungarian Communist Party.

Lukács was born in Budapest into a wealthy Jewish family. He studied at the universities of Budapest and Berlin, receiving a PhD from the latter in 1906. As a youth he was attracted to socialist ideas, and in Germany he made the acquaintance of figures such as sociologist and political economist Max Weber, philosopher Ernst Bloch, and sociologist Georg Simmel. Lukács began publishing literary criticism in 1910, and on his return to Budapest in 1915 he led a left-wing intellectual circle that included social theorist Karl Mannheim and economic historian Karl Polanyi. His The Theory of the Novel (1916) is a seminal work in literary theory and the theory of genre.

After World War I (1914–1918) and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Lukács turned to Marxism, joining the Hungarian Communist Party. He became part of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of Bela Kun, serving as People’s Commissar for Education and Culture. When this government fell, he fled to Vienna, Austria, before settling in Berlin, Germany. He published several works on Marxist and Leninist thought, including History and Class Consciousness (1923). This book contributed to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology, politics, and philosophy. It highlighted Karl Marx’s theory of alienation before many of the works of the young Marx had been published. Lukács’s work elaborates and expands on Marxist theories such as ideology, false consciousness, and class consciousness. For Lukács, ideology was a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which functions to prevent the proletariat from attaining its own real, revolutionary consciousness. Moreover, he emphasizes the concept of reification, in which, due to the commodity-based nature of capitalist society, social relations become objectified, precluding the ability for a spontaneous emergence of class consciousness. Rejecting dogmas attached to Marxist thought, he argued that Marxism was inherently dynamic, as it is based on dialectical materialism.

Although his work was attacked by Soviet leaders, Lukács left Berlin for Moscow in 1933, staying there through World War II (1939–1945).After the war, he was active in the creation of a communist government in Hungary and helped lead an assault against noncommunist intellectuals. He was, however, more liberal than others in the party, which led to him being purged from it in 1949. During the Hungarian revolution of 1956 he became a minister in the short-lived government of Imre Nagy. After the Soviets invaded, Lukács was exiled to Romania, but he, unlike Nagy, managed to avoid execution for his previous activities. Lukács returned to Budapest and professed his loyalty to the new government, although his defenders argued that his works such as The Young Hegel (1938) and The Destruction of Reason (1954) demonstrated his criticism of the Soviet version of communism. His final, unfinished manuscript, published in English in 2000 as A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, is considered one of the more important “discoveries” in Marxist thought in recent years.

Bibliography:

Kadarkay, Arpad, ed. The Lukács Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Lukács, Gyorgy. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
The Young Hegel. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975.
Parkinson, George H. R. George Lukács. London: Routledge, 1977.

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