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.

Gyorgy Lukacs was born in 1885 in Budapest into a wealthy Jewish banking family that had been ennobled by the Habsburg crown. He studied law and philosophy at Budapest, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he moved in the circles of Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Ernst Bloch. The early Soul and Form (1910) and Theory of the Novel (1916) belong to this neo-Kantian and Hegelian period.

His engagement with Bolshevism after the First World War took him to the Hungarian Communist Party, the brief Soviet Republic of 1919, and into Viennese and later Moscow exile. History and Class Consciousness (1923), with its essays on reification, the standpoint of the proletariat, and the question of orthodoxy in Marxism, was condemned by the Comintern; the recanted author returned to Hungary after the Second World War, served briefly in Imre Nagy's 1956 government, and produced in his last years the long books The Young Hegel, The Destruction of Reason, the Aesthetic, and the unfinished Ontology of Social Being.

Lukacs's interpretation of Hegel and Marx, his concept of reification as the dominant form of consciousness under modern capitalism, and his realist aesthetics of the historical novel made him the most influential Marxist philosopher of the twentieth century outside the Soviet Union, the founding mind of Western Marxism, and a decisive presence for the Frankfurt School and the New Left. He died at Budapest in June 1971.