Georg Lukacs Quotes
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 quotes below are attributed to Georg Lukacs, organized by topic.
Browse Georg Lukacs by topic
Georg Lukacs on Happiness
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Attributed to Georg Lukacs:
“Happy are the ages for which the starry sky is the map of all possible paths.”
Georg Lukacs on Knowledge
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“Only the dialectical conception of ... reality as a social process ... dissolves the fetishistic forms necessarily produced by the capitalist mode of production and enables us to see them as mere illusions which are not less illusory for being seen to be necessary.”
p. 13 -
“Unmediated concepts ... veil the relations between objects. ... They are, therefore, objects of knowledge, but the object which is known through them is not the capitalist system of production itself, but the ideology of its ruling class.”
pp. 13-14 -
“The function of these unmediated concepts that have been derived from the fetishistic forms of objectivity is to make the phenomena of capitalist society appear as supra-rational historical essences.”
p. 14
Georg Lukacs on Mind
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Attributed to Georg Lukacs:
“The novel tells of the adventure of interiority.”
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“The Destruction of Reason , Chapter 3, “Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period” § 3”
Admirers of the ‘purified’ Nietzsche have been hard put to unite his sanctioning of barbarity with an often subtle and rarefied cultural critique. But we can easily dispose of this dichotomy. In the first place, the union of ultra-refinement and brutality was by no means a personal quirk requiring psychological elucidation, but a universal, psychical-moral distinguishing mark of imperialist decade -
“In Marx the dialectical method aims at understanding society as a whole. Bourgeois thought concerns itself with objects that arise either from the process of studying phenomena in isolation, or from the division of labor and specialisation in the different disciplines.”
p. 28 -
“Bourgeois thought judges social phenomena conscious or unconsciously, naïvely or subtly, consistently from the standpoint of the individual. No path leads from the individual to the totality.”
p. 28 -
“At this point bourgeois thought must come up against an insuperable obstacle, for its starting-point and its goal are always, if not always consciously, an apologia for the existing order.”
p. 48
Georg Lukacs on Nature
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“Critical philosophy implies above all historical criticism. It dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins.”
p. 47 -
“History does not merely unfold within the terrain mapped out by these institutions . It does not resolve itself into the evolution of contents , of men and situations, etc., while the principles of society remain eternally valid. ... On the contrary, history is precisely the history of these institutions , of the changes they undergo as institutions which bring men together in societies. Such institutions start by controlling economic relations between men and go on to permeate all human relations (and hence also man's relations with himself and with nature).”
pp. 47-48
Georg Lukacs on Politics
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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:
“The chapter dealing with the fetish character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of historical materialism.”
Georg Lukacs on Truth
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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.”
Georg Lukacs on Virtue
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“Admirers of the ‘purified’ Nietzsche have been hard put to unite his sanctioning of barbarity with an often subtle and rarefied cultural critique. But we can easily dispose of this dichotomy. In the first place, the union of ultra-refinement and brutality was by no means a personal quirk requiring psychological elucidation, but a universal, psychical-moral distinguishing mark of imperialist decadence.”
The Destruction of Reason , Chapter 3, “Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period” § 3