György Lukács

Hungarian philosopher and literary critic

• Born: April 13, 1885
• Birthplace: Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Hungary)
• Died: June 4, 1971
• Place of death: Budapest, Hungary

Lukács is one of the most outstanding and respected Marxist philosophers and literary critics from Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.

Early Life

György Lukács (gyorg LOOK-ach) was the son of a wealthy Jewish banker. He became interested in the theories of Karl Marx while attending school. He also had an interest in drama and helped to found the Thalia Theater in his native city. In 1906, he received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Budapest. Later, before World War I, he continued his philosophical studies at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg. He became a serious Marxist around 1908 while in Germany. When he returned to Budapest, he joined the Social Democratic Party and fell under the influence of Ervin Szabo, the leader of the party’s radical wing. At that stage of his life, Lukács was interested in the sociological theories of Marx. Before the war, he was also influenced by the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, S ren Kierkegaard, and Georges Sorel. Besides Szabo, among Marxists, Rosa Luxemburg had an important effect on him. World War I and the Russian Revolution made a great impression on him, and his hatred of the capitalist system became even stronger. In 1918, he joined the Hungarian Communist Party and in 1919 was the minister for cultural affairs in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic established by Béla Kun. When the republic collapsed, he was arrested but soon released.

Life’s Work

Lukács is best known not as a political figure but as a cultural philosopher. He is one of the few, and certainly the best known, of twentieth century Marxist philosophers from Eastern Europe who have been accepted by the political authorities in the socialist world (although with some reservations) and at the same time have earned the respect of their colleagues in the West. His earliest pre-World War I works were chiefly on literary aesthetics, including Die Seele und die Formen (Soul and Form , 1974), published in 1911 his first major work and still regarded as one of his best. In this work, he presented many ideas that he developed later in his life as a Marxist the universality of experience and the role of the critic, for example. A drama, he wrote, is a play about humanity and fate a play in which God is the spectator. In 1911, he wrote A modern dráma fejlödésének története (the history of the development of modern drama), and immediately after the fall of the Kun government he published Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der grossen Epik (1920; The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature , 1971).

After the failure of the Marxist Revolution in Hungary, he was forced to live in exile. He went to Vienna, where he remained until 1929 editing the journal Kommunismus (communism). Lukács was not immune to attack from both the left and right wings of the socialist camp, but he still managed to produce valuable philosophical literature and continue participating in the international Marxist debates of the day. While in Vienna, he engaged in political debate with Kun, who sided with the extreme Left in the Communist International. Out of this came Lukács’s Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein: Studien über marxistische Dialektic (1923; History and Class Consciousness: Studies on the Marxist Dialectic , 1971), in which he first developed his own theories of dialectical historicism building on Marxism. He also began to examine the relationships between culture and class in historical development.

In History and Class Consciousness, he was heavily influenced by the struggle of the labor faction in the Soviet Party, which had brought its dispute against Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Leon Trotsky to the Communist International. Lukács believed that the greatest contribution of this work was the refutation of those philosophers who saw Marxism exclusively as a theory of society and not of nature, while he himself maintained that nature is a category of society. This deviation is most evident in economics, which he addresses in this treatise. In the new preface to History and Class Consciousness in the 1968 edition, he wrote that he specifically rejected the ideas of both Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, Lenin’s Bolshevik ally, and the Austrian Marxist Max Adlar, whom he regarded as Kantian in philosophy and a revisionist Social Democrat in politics. The difference between bourgeois and socialist outlooks, Lukács believed, is in the materialist view of nature, and “the failure to grasp this blurs philosophical debate and prevents the clear elaboration of the Marxist concept of praxis.”

In 1923, Lukács wrote and published an examination of Lenin’s theory and practice entitled Lenin: Studie über den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken (Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought , 1971). As an admirer of Lenin, Lukács wished to show how the Soviet leader was able to put his revolutionary theories into practice. In a 1967 edition, he wrote that he was attempting to find the spiritual center of Lenin’s personality, to find the objective and subjective forces that made Lenin’s action possible. Lukács saw Lenin as a counteraction against the dogmatism that was manifested in the age of Stalin.

In 1929, Lukács moved to Berlin, where he stayed until the advent of Adolf Hitler in 1933. During this period, he also briefly lectured at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and in 1933 he went back to Moscow to take a post at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Philosophy. After World War II, Lukács returned to Hungary, where he worked until his death in 1971. He participated in Hungarian politics as a member of the Hungarian delegation to the World Peace Council. He was also elected to the Hungarian parliament in the Communist-controlled one-slate elections and was a professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of culture at the University of Budapest. In 1956, he joined Imre Nagy’s dissident Communist government once more as minister of culture. When the invasion of Soviet troops toppled the government, Lukács was deported to Romania but returned to Budapest in 1957. He then retired to private life and continued writing. He had already begun his major exposition on Marxist aesthetics, which was published from 1963 to 1972. He also wrote a number of works of literary criticism on the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hegel, Thomas Mann, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Lukács’s work has earned much praise but has also provoked much criticism in the West as well as in Eastern Europe. In 1970, he received the Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt, but it has been the Frankfurt school that has bitterly attacked his aesthetics. When he first returned to Hungary after World War II, he was attacked by educational bureaucrats such as Joseph Revai. Western critics such as Morris Watnick have said that Lukács was, despite his Marxism, in fact an elitist. Alfred Kazin agrees, attributing this elitism to his bourgeois birth. Kazin also points out that Lukács did not, in general, analyze Soviet writers; indeed, with the exception of Mann, he was not interested in modern masters. His Der russische Realismus in der Weltliteratur (1949; partial translation in Studies in European Realism, 1964) contains essays on Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Émile Zola, and Leo Tolstoy. These nineteenth century writers were for Lukács not the mere continuation of schools of literature but purveyors of moral philosophy with lessons for their and modern generations.

In his 1969 critique of Solzhenitsyn, he courageously analyzed the dissident Soviet writer without heaping the condemnation on him that was in vogue with the writers’ unions of the socialist countries or fawning on him as in the West. He believed Solzhenitsyn to be a writer in the proletarian, but not Marxist, tradition. In Goethe und seine Zeit (1947; Goethe and His Age, 1969), Lukács defended German culture to show that Nazism was not a natural outgrowth of it. In fact, he believed that an anti-German attitude was not truly an antifascist attitude. He saw fascism, as well as all developments in Germany, as part of the class struggle and historical dialectic. Most of all, Lukács wished to demonstrate in this work that Goethe was not a reactionary, as many critics had maintained, but a progressive. Of the twentieth century German writers, Lukács’s favorite was Mann, an antifacist but bourgeois author. Lukács maintained that, with his critique of Mann, he was attempting “to interpret this ideological decay of the bourgeoisie in the work of the last great bourgeois writer.” For Lukács, it is the Faust legend as a condemnation of bourgeois society that links Goethe and Mann.

Significance

György Lukács stands as a unique figure in the cultural history of the twentieth century. He was a Marxist scholar who was able to survive the rigors of Stalinist totalitarian thought without compromising his principles and yet continue to make a contribution to his discipline. He was one of the most powerful aestheticists and literary critics of modern times, and his impact is felt in both East and West. He was a committed Marxist and philosophical materialist from his early student days, and his work is noted for its rigorous logic and uncompromising principles. His earliest work in the field of literary criticism led to the classic Soul and Form, in which he established the materialist basis of literary categories. During the short-lived Hungarian Soviet government, he played a key role as minister of education and culture and afterward became involved in the fighting that split both the Hungarian and international communist movement. As a supporter of Lenin, he became a defender of the Soviet Union and, because of the threat of fascism and Nazism, continued to do so even though he disagreed with Stalin’s methods. Nevertheless, he attacked fascism from a class basis and defended German ideology and literature.

As a Marxist professor and editor in Austria, Germany, and Moscow between the wars, Lukács built a solid reputation in the field of philosophy. His reputation continued to grow as a professor in Communist Hungary after the war. Lukács has been pilloried by socialist authorities for not being ideologically pure and by Western critics for not being a dissident, but his reputation has withstood all attacks. His consistent theme was always the unity of thought and action, theory and practice. All of his ideas proceed from his materialist conception of the universe based on his belief in Marxism. He believed that culture and literature also proceed from a materialist basis. His History and Class Consciousness was written to defy those communists who could not make the transition from coffeehouse intellectuals to molders of history in the real world. It is for this reason that he admired Lenin, who was for Lukács the ultimate practitioner of theory and practice of revolution. It may be true that he could find no author from the socialist world, save perhaps Maxim Gorky and Bertolt Brecht, whom he could admire and use as examples for his philosophy of culture. Aside from briefly looking at Solzhenitsyn, it was only Mann of twentieth century authors whom he wrote about. Although he admired Mann as writer and an heir to the best in German culture, he still classified him as part of the decadent bourgeoisie. His real heroes in literature were from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The genius of Lukács remains his ability to put theory and practice into his own life to meet his critics on their own ground. No other Marxist cultural figure from Eastern Europe in the twentieth century has accomplished this to the same degree.

Bibliography

Bahr, Ehrhard, and Ruth G. Kunzer. Georg Lukács. Translated by R. G. Kunzer. Rev. ed. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972. Part of the Literature and Life series, this work is an excellent short biography and analysis. Includes notes, a bibliography, a chronology, an index.

Fekete, Éva, and Éva Káradi, eds. György Lukács: His Life in Pictures and Documents. Translated by Péter Balabán. Budapest: Covina Kiado, 1981. A biography for the general public, chiefly containing pictures of Lukács and his contemporaries. Very useful for those who wish to learn more about the man. Includes illustrations.

Heller, Agnes, ed. Lukács Reappraised. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. A collection of scholarly essays examining Lukács’s works and ideas. Includes notes and an index.

Lapointe, François H. George Lukacs and His Critics: An International Bibliography with Annotations (1910-1982). Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. While not listing books by Lukács himself, this exhaustive annotated bibliography contains books about him in all languages. Includes appendixes for cross reference and an index.

Lichtheim, George. George Lukács. New York: Viking Press, 1970. Part of the Modern Masters series, this is a scholarly biography emphasizing Lukács’s philosophical development. Includes notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Lukács, Georg. Conversations with Lukács: Hans Heinz Holz, Leo Kofler, Wolfgang Abendroth. Edited by Theo Pinkus. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975. A series of conversations between Lukács and contemporary philosophers showing his ideas.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Livingstone Rodney. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. An important philosophical work showing Lukács’s philosophical development. Includes notes and an index.

Parkinson, George H. R. Georg Lukács. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. An excellent scholarly biography and analysis of Lukács’s thought. Includes notes and an index.

Tikhanov, Galin. The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A comparative study of the ideas of Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin concerning aesthetics, cultural theory, literary history, and philosophy.