Georg Lukacs 1885 – 1971
Georg Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, one of the founders of Western Marxism. His History and Class Consciousness reintroduced Hegelian categories into Marxist thought and developed the analysis of reification, the process by which social relations come to appear as relations between things. The book provoked sharp criticism from the Comintern and was for a time repudiated by its author. His later work in aesthetics, most notably the Theory of the Novel and the unfinished Aesthetics, made him one of the major Marxist theorists of literature.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Hungarian
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Marxism, Critical Theory
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Georg Lukacs:
“The novel tells of the adventure of interiority.”
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Attributed to Georg Lukacs:
“Reification is the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society.”
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Attributed to Georg Lukacs:
“Orthodox Marxism does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations; it refers exclusively to method.”
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Attributed to Georg Lukacs:
“The chapter dealing with the fetish character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of historical materialism.”
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Attributed to Georg Lukacs:
“Happy are the ages for which the starry sky is the map of all possible paths.”