From 1919 to 1929, the great Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács was one of the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party, immersed not simply in theorising but also in significant practical-political work. Along with labour leader Jenö Landler, he led a faction opposing an ultra-left sectarian orientation represented by Béla Kun. If seen in connection with this factional struggle, key works of Lukács in this period – History and Class Consciousness, Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought, Tailism (...) and the Dialectic and ‘The Blum Theses’ – can be seen as forming a consistent, coherent, sophisticated variant of Leninism. Influential readings of these works interpret them as being ultra-leftist or proto-Stalinist. Such readings distort the reality. Lukács’s orientation and outlook of 1923–9 are, rather, more consistent with the orientation advanced by Lenin and Trotsky in the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Communist International. After his decisive political defeat, Lukács concluded that it was necessary to renounce his distinctive political orientation, and completely abandon the terrain of practical revolutionary politics, if he hoped to remain inside the Communist movement. This he did, adapting to Stalinism and shifting his efforts to literary criticism and philosophy. But the theorisations connected to his revolutionary politics of the 1920s continue to have relevance for revolutionary activists of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The underlying assumption of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness is that “history” can be understood as a unified and meaningful meta-narrative, which can be read along the lines of a realist novel. Although the future is not guaranteed, the present contains “objective possibilities” which can be identified and realized through activist intervention in the world by those who are destined to “make” history, the proletariat. In the intervening century since the Russian Revolution, it has become impossible to read “history” as (...) a singular, triumphalist story leading to human emancipation or identify any one group as its subjective agent. To salvage the revolutionary potential of Lukács’ work, it has been read instead in terms of “fidelity to the Event” by such latter-day Leninists as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. But their recourse to a meta-historical notion of pre-figuration and future realization is itself no less beholden to a literary or rhetorical device, that of figura, which was traced by Erich Auerbach in originally religious terms. (shrink)

György Lukács’s Marxist phase is usually associated with his passage from neo-Kantianism to Hegelianism. Nonetheless, Nietzschean influences have been covertly present in Lukács’s philosophical development, particularly in his uncompromising distaste for the bourgeois society and the mediocrity of its quotidian values. A closer glance at Lukács’s corpus discloses that the influence of Nietzsche has been eclipsed by the Hegelian turn in his thought. Lukács hardly ever mentions the weight of Nietzsche on his early thinking, an influence that makes cameo appearances (...) throughout his lifetime writings. During the period of his adherence to a Stalinist approach to communism, his new subjectivity seems to be re-constituted through a disavowal of his earlier romantic anti-capitalism. Implicit in Lukács’s attack on Nietzsche in the Destruction of Reason (1952) is an acerbic reaction to the mute presence of the latter in his earlier thought. Apart from his ignorance of the unreliability of the collection of the Will to Power edited by Peter Gast and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, his battle against the anti-proletariat Nietzsche in the Destruction is waged on a metaphysical, non-historical plain. Lukács’s pre-Marxist works (Soul and Form, On Poverty of Spirit, and The Theory of the Novel) in a sense betray the instance of a writer who writes most of someone where he omits his name. Thus perceived, Lukács’s early corpus lends itself to a symptomatic reading. -/- This essay seeks to extract the Nietzschean undercurrents of Lukács’s work through a reflection on the romantic anti-capitalist tendencies that the young Lukács shared with Nietzsche. For although it may appear that Nietzsche lacked a clear politics, his criticism of the bourgeois ethos as a structure based on debt/guilt [Schuld], and his critique of modern value-system and nihilism paved the way for the emergence of Lukács’s theory of reification. Nietzsche’s category of 'transvaluation of values’ suggests a total transfiguration of reality, a radical rupture with the ordinary state of things, and as such carries within itself a revolutionary promise. Drawing a distinction between political romanticism and romantic politics, I argue that romantic anti-capitalism contains a potential for the latter. The essay further traces the link between Lukács’s ‘romantic politics’ and the persistence of a thought of the tragic (a ‘tragic vision’) in his texts that, despite its temporary decline during his realist period, is undismissable in different constellations of his thought. (shrink)

This article explores the young Georg Lukács through the prism of his early intellectual identifications and obsessions with Kierkegaard, his model, Mann, his poet, Dostoyevsky, his pro...

This paper attempts to explore a pedagogical form of writing in which students are allowed to have more room to converse with themselves, such that their own being is reflected in their work. The attempt is made as a response to the poverty of educationally orientated assessment methods for students' academic performance in the predominant evidence-based assessment culture of schooling today. Taking Lukács' Soul and Form as a good source for this exploration, especially his commitment to essay form as a (...) first-person, soul-searching journey to the truth, the paper tries to reconstruct the way he conceptually connects philosophical practice, our life-form and the essay form of writing. It attempts to provide insight into the ways in which a certain form of philosophical writing can in itself be an educational practice that provides students with a unique way of addressing their life-problems. (shrink)

This paper discusses exile and emigration as factors in the encounters of art, philosophy, cultural criticism, and political power in Soviet Russia under Stalin. While by now we possess considerable knowledge about emigration and exile from Eastern and Central Europe to the West in the 1920s and 1930s, we have tended to under-research and under-conceptualize the alternative destination. Seemingly less glamorous and lastingly tainted by the open glorification or silent acquiescence to Stalin and the purges, Moscow as a place of (...) emigration and exile of left East-Central European intellectuals in the 1930s presents a uniquely important trajectory, the study of which contributes to enriching and refining our understanding not just of the history of international communism, but also – and perhaps more importantly – of the formation of the intellectual and political elites that were to shape life in the Eastern Bloc after 1945. (shrink)

This paper is a background study. It gives an overview of the institutions, decisive trends and major achievements of Hungarian philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus light is shed on the philosophical scenery which forms the background to the Lukács Circle. The paper discusses the relation of the Lukács Circle at the turn of the century to "official" Hungarian philosophy. First, the introduction portrays the various phases of the evolution of Hungarian institutions of philosophy. Then it sketches (...) the institutional scene at the turn of the century. Thirdly, it attempts to determine the relation of the Lukács Circle to the official academic philosophy, and also sketches some of its aspects after 1919-1920. (shrink)