Georg Lukács |
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| Full name | Georg Lukács |
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| Born | 13 April 1885 Budapest, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 4 June 1971 (aged 86) Budapest, Hungary |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophers |
| School | Marxism |
| Main interests | Political philosophy, Social Theory, Politics, Literary theory, aesthetics |
| Notable ideas | reification, class consciousness |
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Influenced by
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György Lukács ( /ˈluːkɑːtʃ/; Hungarian pronunciation: [ˌɟørɟ ˈlukaːtʃ]; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the concept of reification to Marxist philosophy and theory and expanded Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. Lukács' was also an influential literary critic, especially in theories of realism and the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.
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Lukács's full name, in German, was Georg Bernhard Lukács von Szegedin, and in Hungarian was Szegedi Lukács György Bernát; he published under the names Georg or György Lukács.
He was born Löwinger György Bernát to a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest. His father was József Löwinger (later Szegedi Lukács József; 1855, Szeged – 1928), an investment banker, his mother was Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél; 1860, Budapest – 1917). Lukács studied at the universities of Budapest and Berlin, receiving his Ph.D. in 1906.
While attending grammar school and university in Budapest, Lukács's membership of various socialist circles brought him into contact with the anarcho-syndicalist Ervin Szabó, who in turn introduced him to the works of Georges Sorel. Lukács's outlook during this period was modernist and anti-positivist. From 1904 to 1908, he was involved in a theatrical group that produced plays by dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Gerhart Hauptmann.
Lukács spent much time in Germany: he studied in Berlin in 1906 and again in 1909–10, where he made the acquaintance of Georg Simmel, and in Heidelberg in 1913, where he became friends with Max Weber, Ernst Bloch and Stefan George. The idealist system Lukács subscribed to at the time was indebted to the Kantianism that dominated in German universities, but also to Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dilthey and Dostoyevsky. His works Soul and Form and The Theory of the Novel were published in 1910 and 1916 respectively.
Lukács returned to Budapest in 1915 and led an intellectual circle, the Sunday Circle, or the Lukács Circle, as it was called, which was preoccupied above all with cultural themes arising out of a shared interest in the writings of Dostoyevsky, along the lines of Lukács's interests in his last Heidelberg years, and which sponsored events that gained the participation of such eventually famous figures as Karl Mannheim, Béla Bartók, Béla Balázs and Karl Polanyi amongst others, some of whom also took part in its weekly meetings. In the last year of the war, the participants divided in their political loyalties, although several of the leaders joined Lukács in his abrupt shift to the Communist Party.
In light of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lukács rethought his ideas. He became a committed Marxist in this period and joined the fledgling Communist Party of Hungary in 1918. As part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács was made People's Commissar for Education and Culture (he was deputy to the Commissar for Education Zsigmond Kunfi).
During the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic Lukács was a major party worker and a political commissar of the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army. In this capacity he ordered the execution of eight persons in Poroszlo in May 1919, after his division was worsted.
After the Soviet Republic was defeated, Lukács fled from Hungary to Vienna. He was arrested but was saved from extradition thanks to the efforts of a group of writers which included Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the former of whom would later base the character Naphta in his novel The Magic Mountain on Lukács. During his time in Vienna in the 1920s, Lukács befriended other Left Communists who were working or in exile there, including Victor Serge, Adolf Joffe and Antonio Gramsci.
Lukács turned his attentions to developing Leninist ideas in the field of philosophy. His major works in this period were the essays collected in his magnum opus "History and Class Consciousness", first published in 1923. Although these essays display signs of what Lenin referred to as "ultra-leftism", they arguably carry through his effort of providing Leninism with a better philosophical basis than did Lenin himself. Along with the work of Karl Korsch, the book was attacked at the Fifth Comintern Congress in July 1924 by Grigory Zinoviev. In 1924, shortly after Lenin's death, Lukács also published the short study Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought. In 1925, he published a critical review of Nikolai Bukharin's manual of historical materialism.
As a Hungarian exile, he remained active on the left wing of Hungarian Communist Party, and was opposed to the Moscow-backed programme of Béla Kun. His 'Blum theses' of 1928 called for the overthrow of the counterrevolutionary regime of Admiral Horthy by means of a strategy similar to the Popular Fronts of the 1930s. He advocated a 'democratic dictatorship' of the proletariat and peasantry as a transitional stage leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lukács's strategy was condemned by the Comintern and thereafter he retreated from active politics into theoretical work.
In 1930, while residing in Vienna, Lukács was summoned to Moscow. This coincided with the signing of a Viennese police order for Lukács's expulsion. Leaving their children to attend their studies, Lukács and his wife ventured to Moscow in March 1930. Soon after his arrival Lukács was "prevented" from leaving and assigned to work alongside David Rjazanov ("in the basement") at the Marx-Engels Institute. Lukács, and his wife, were not permitted to leave the Soviet Union until after the Second World War. Lukács survived the "purges" of the "Great Terror," which claimed as much as 80% of the Hungarian emigres to the Soviet Union. There is much historical debate as the extent to which Lukács accepted Stalinism.
After the war Lukács was involved in the establishment of the new Hungarian government as a member of the Hungarian Communist Party. From 1945 Lukács was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1945 and 1946 he explosively criticised non-communist philosophers and writers. Lukács has been accused of playing an "administrative" (legal-bureaucratic) role in the removal of independent and non-communist intellectuals like Béla Hamvas, István Bibó, Lajos Prohászka, and Károly Kerényi from Hungarian academic life. Non-communist intellectuals like Bibó were often imprisoned, forced into menial and low waged mental labour (like translation work) or forced into manual labour during the 1946–1953 period.
Lukács's personal aesthetic and political position on culture was always that Socialist culture would eventually triumph in terms of quality, but that this conflict would be fought as one of competing cultures, not by "administrative" measures. In 1948–49 Lukács's position for cultural tolerance within the party and intellectual life was smashed in a "Lukács purge" when Mátyás Rákosi turned his famous salami tactics on the Hungarian Communist Party itself. Lukács was reintegrated into party life in the mid 1950s, and was used by the party during the purges of the writers association in 1955–56 (See Aczel, Meray Revolt of the Mind). However, Aczel and Meray both believe that Lukács was only present at the purge begrudgingly, and cite Lukács leaving the presidium and the meeting at the first break as evidence of this reluctance.
In 1956 Lukács became a minister of the brief communist revolutionary government led by Imre Nagy which opposed the Soviet Union. At this time Lukács's daughter led a short-lived party of communist revolutionary youth. Lukács's position on the 1956 revolution was that the Hungarian Communist Party would need to retreat into a coalition government of socialists, and slowly rebuild its credibility with the Hungarian people. As such, while a minister in Imre Nagy's revolutionary government, Lukács also participated in the refoundation of the Hungarian Communist Party on a new basis. This party was rapidly coopted by János Kádár after 4 November 1956.(Woroszylski, 1957).
During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution Lukács was present at debates of the anti-party and revolutionary communist Petőfi society, while remaining part of the party apparatus. During the revolution itself, as mentioned in "Budapest Diary," Lukács argued for a new Soviet aligned communist party. In Lukács's view the new party could only win social leadership by persuasion instead of force. Lukács envisioned an alliance between the dissident communist Party of Youth, the revolutionary Hungarian Social Democratic Party and Lukács's own Soviet aligned party as a very junior partner. After 1956 Lukács narrowly avoided execution, and was not trusted by the party apparatus due to his role in the revolutionary Nagy government. Lukács's followers were indicted for political crimes throughout the 1960s and 70s, and a number fled to the West. Lukács's books The Young Hegel and The Destruction of Reason have been used to argue that Lukács was covertly critical of Stalinism as an irrational distortion of Hegelian-Marxism.
Following the defeat of the Revolution, Lukács was deported to Romania with the rest of Nagy's government but unlike Nagy, he survived the purges of 1956. He returned to Budapest in 1957. Lukács publicly abandoned his positions of 1956 and engaged in self-criticism. Having abandoned his earlier positions, Lukács was to remain loyal to the Communist Party until his death in 1971. Lukács became more publicly critical of the Soviet Union and Hungarian Communist Party in his last years following the uprisings in France and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
In an interview undertaken just before his death Lukács remarked: "Without a genuine general theory of society and its movement, one does not get away from Stalinism. Stalin was a great tactician...But Stalin, unfortunately, was not a Marxist...The essence of Stalinism lies in placing tactics before strategy, practice above theory...The bureaucracy generated by Stalinism is a tremendous evil. Society is suffocated by it. Everything becomes unreal, nominalistic. People see no design, no strategic aim, and do not move...". Thus Lukács concludes "[w]e must learn to connect the great decisions of popular political power with personal needs, those of individuals." (Marcus & Zoltan 1989: 215–16)
Written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923, History and Class Consciousness initiated the current of thought that came to be known as Western Marxism. Lukács's work elaborates and expands upon Marxist theories such as ideology, false consciousness, reification and class consciousness.
In the first chapter, "What is Orthodox Marxism?", Lukács defined orthodoxy as the fidelity to the "Marxist method", and not to the "dogmas":
"Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders." (§1)
He criticised revisionist attempts by calling to the return to this Marxist method, which is fundamentally dialectical materialism. Lukács conceives "revisionism" as inherent to the Marxist theory, insofar as dialectical materialism is, according to him, the product of class struggle:
"For this reason the task of orthodox Marxism, its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and for all, of false tendencies. It is an ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat. Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process." (end of §5)
According to him, "The premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: 'It is not men’s consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.'... Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity." (§5). In line with Marx's thought, he thus criticised the individualist bourgeois philosophy of the subject, which founds itself on the voluntary and conscious subject. Against this ideology, he asserts the primacy of social relations. Existence — and thus the world — is the product of human activity; but this can be seen only if the primacy of social process on individual consciousness, which is but the effect of ideological mystification, is accepted. This doesn't entail that Lukács restrain human liberty on behalf of some kind of sociological determinism: to the contrary, this production of existence is the possibility of praxis.
Henceforth, the problem consists in the relationship between theory and practice. Lukács quotes Marx's words: "It is not enough that thought should seek to realise itself; reality must also strive towards thought." How does the thought of intellectuals be related to class struggle, if theory is not simply to lag behind history, as it is in Hegel's philosophy of history ("Minerva always comes at the dusk of night...")? Lukács criticises Engels' Anti-Dühring, charging that he "does not even mention the most vital interaction, namely the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves." This dialectical relation between subject and object gives the basis for Lukács's critique of Kant's epistemology, according to which the subject is the exterior, universal and contemplating subject, separated from the object.
For Lukács, "ideology" is really a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which functions to prevent the proletariat from attaining a real consciousness of its revolutionary position. Ideology determines the "form of objectivity", thus the structure of knowledge itself. Real science must attain, according to Lukács, the "concrete totality" through which only it is possible to think the current form of objectivity as a historical period. Thus, the so-called eternal "laws" of economics are dismissed as the ideological illusion projected by the current form of objectivity ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §3). He also writes: "It is only when the core of being has showed itself as social becoming, that the being itself can appear as a product, so far unconscious, of human activity, and this activity, in turn, as the decisive element of the transformation of being." ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?",§5) Finally, "orthodoxical marxism" is not defined as interpretation of Capital as if it were the Bible or as embracement of certain "marxist thesis", but as fidelity to the "marxist method", dialectics.
Lukács presents the category of reification whereby, due to the commodity nature of capitalist society, social relations become objectified, precluding the ability for a spontaneous emergence of class consciousness. It is in this context that the need for a party in the Leninist sense emerges, the subjective aspect of the re-invigorated Marxian dialectic.
In his later career, Lukács repudiated the ideas of History and Class Consciousness, in particular the belief in the proletariat as a subject-object of history" (1960 Postface to French translation), but he wrote a defence of them as late as 1925 or 1926. This unfinished manuscript, which he called Tailism and the Dialectic, was only published in Hungarian in 1996 and English in 2000 under the title A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. It is perhaps the most important "unknown" Marxist text of the twentieth century.
In addition to his standing as a Marxist political thinker, Lukács was an influential literary critic of the twentieth century. His important work in literary criticism began early in his career, with The Theory of the Novel, a seminal work in literary theory and the theory of genre. The book is a history of the novel as a form, and an investigation into its distinct characteristics.
Lukács later repudiated The Theory of the Novel, writing a lengthy introduction that described it as erroneous, but nonetheless containing a "romantic anti-capitalism" which would later develop into Marxism. (This introduction also contains his famous dismissal of Theodor Adorno and others in Western Marxism as having taken up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss".)
Lukács's later literary criticism includes the well-known essay "Kafka or Thomas Mann?", in which Lukács argues for the work of Thomas Mann as a superior attempt to deal with the condition of modernity, while he criticises Franz Kafka's brand of modernism. Lukács was steadfastly opposed to the formal innovations of modernist writers like Kafka, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, preferring the traditional aesthetic of realism. He famously argued for the revolutionary character of the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac. Lukács felt that both authors' nostalgic, pro-aristocratic politics allowed them accurate and critical stances because of their opposition to the rising bourgeoisie (albeit reactionary opposition). This view was expressed in his later book The Historical Novel, as well as in his 1938 essay Realism in the Balance.
The Historical Novel is probably Lukács's most influential work of literary history. In it he traces the development of the genre of historical fiction. While prior to 1789, he argues, people's consciousness of history was relatively underdeveloped, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars that followed brought about a realisation of the constantly changing, evolving character of human existence. This new historical consciousness was reflected in the work of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels use 'representative' or 'typical' characters to dramatise major social conflicts and historical transformations, for example the dissolution of feudal society in the Scottish Highlands and the entrenchment of mercantile capitalism. Lukács argues that Scott's new brand of historical realism was taken up by Balzac and Tolstoy, and enabled novelists to depict contemporary social life not as a static drama of fixed, universal types, but rather as a moment of history, constantly changing, open to the potential of revolutionary transformation. For this reason he sees these authors as progressive and their work as potentially radical, despite their own personal conservative politics.
For Lukács, this historical realist tradition began to give way after the 1848 revolutions, when the bourgeoisie ceased to be a progressive force and their role as agents of history was usurped by the proletariat. After this time, historical realism begins to sicken and lose its concern with social life as inescapably historical. He illustrates this point by comparing Flaubert's historical novel Salammbo to that of the earlier realists. For him, Flaubert's work marks a turning away from relevant social issues and an elevation of style over substance. Why he does not discuss Sentimental Education, a novel much more overtly concerned with recent historical developments, is not clear. For much of his life Lukács promoted a return to the realist tradition that he believed it had reached its height with Balzac and Scott, and bemoaned the supposed neglect of history that characterised modernism.
The Historical Novel has been hugely influential in subsequent critical studies of historical fiction, and no serious analyst of the genre fails to engage at some level with Lukács's arguments.
The initial intent of “Realism in the Balance”, stated at its outset, is debunking the claims of those defending Expressionism as a valuable literary movement. Lukács addresses the discordance in the community of modernist critics, whom he regarded as incapable of deciding which writers were Expressionist and which were not, arguing that “perhaps there is no such thing as an Expressionist writer.”
But although his aim is ostensibly to criticise what he perceived as the over-valuation of modernist schools of writing at the time the article was published, Lukács uses the essay as an opportunity to advance his formulation of the desirable alternative to these schools. He rejects the notion that modern art must necessarily manifest itself as a litany of sequential movements, beginning with Naturalism, and proceeding through Impressionism and Expressionism to culminate in Surrealism. For Lukács, the important issue at stake was not the conflict that results from the modernists’ evolving oppositions to classical forms, but rather the ability of art to confront an objective reality that exists in the world, an ability he found almost entirely lacking in modernism.
Lukács believed that desirable alternative to such modernism must therefore take the form of Realism, and he enlists the realist authors Maxim Gorky, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and Romain Rolland to champion his cause. To frame the debate, Lukács introduces the arguments of critic Ernst Bloch, a defender of Expressionism, and the author to whom Lukács was chiefly responding. He maintains that modernists such as Bloch are too willing to ignore the realist tradition, an ignorance that he believes derives from a modernist rejection of a crucial tenet of Marxist theory, a rejection which he quotes Bloch as propounding. This tenet is the belief that the system of capitalism is “an objective totality of social relations,” and it is fundamental to Lukács’ arguments in favour of realism.
He explains that the pervasiveness of capitalism, the unity in its economic and ideological theory, and its profound influence on social relations comprise a “closed integration” or “totality,” an objective whole that functions independent of human consciousness. Lukács cites Marx to bolster this historical materialist worldview: “The relations of production in every society form a whole.” He further relies on Marx to argue that the bourgeoisie’s unabated development of the world’s markets are so far-reaching as to create a unified totality, and explains that because the increasing autonomy of elements of the capitalist system (such as the autonomy of currency) is perceived by society as “crisis,” there must be an underlying unity that binds these seemingly autonomous elements of the capitalist system together, and makes their separation appear as crisis.
Returning to modernist forms, Lukács stipulates that such theories disregard the relationship of literature to objective reality, in favour of the portrayal of subjective experience and immediacy that do little to evince the underlying capitalist totality of existence. It is clear that Lukács regards the representation of reality as art’s chief purpose—in this he is perhaps not in disagreement with the modernists—but he maintains that “If a writer strives to represent reality as it truly is, i.e. if he is an authentic realist, then the question of totality plays a decisive role.” “True realists” demonstrate the importance of the social context, and since the unmasking of this objective totality is a crucial element in Lukács’ Marxist ideology, he privileges their authorial approach.
Lukács then sets up a dialectical opposition between two elements he believes inherent to human experience. He maintains that this dialectical relation exists between the “appearance” of events as subjective, unfettered experiences and their “essence” as provoked by the objective totality of capitalism. Lukács explains that good realists, such as Thomas Mann, create a contrast between the consciousnesses of their characters (appearance) and a reality independent of them (essence). According to Lukács, Mann succeeds because he creates this contrast, conversely, modernist writers fail because they portray reality only as it appears to themselves and their characters—subjectively—and “fail to pierce the surface” of these immediate, subjective experiences “to discover the underlying essence, i.e. the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce them.” The pitfalls of relying on immediacy are manifold, according to Lukács. Because the prejudices inculcated by the capitalist system are so insidious, they cannot be escaped without the abandonment of subjective experience and immediacy in the literary sphere. They can only be superseded by realist authors who “abandon and transcend the limits of immediacy, by scrutinising all subjective experiences and measuring them against social reality;” this is no easy task. Lukács relies on Hegelian dialectics to explain how the relationship between this immediacy and abstraction effects a subtle indoctrination on the part of capitalist totality. The circulation of money, he explains, as well as other elements of capitalism, is entirely abstracted away from its place in the broader capitalist system, and therefore appears as a subjective immediacy, which elides its position as a crucial element of objective totality.
Although abstraction can lead to the concealment of objective reality, it is necessary for art, and Lukács believes that realist authors can successfully employ it “to penetrate the laws governing objective reality, and to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible of relationships that go to make up society.” After a great deal of intellectual effort, Lukács claims a successful realist can discover these objective relationships and give them artistic shape in the form of a character's subjective experience. Then, by employing the technique of abstraction, the author can portray the character’s experience of objective reality as the same kind of subjective, immediate experience that characterise totality’s influence on non-fictional individuals. The best realists, he claims, “depict the vital, but not immediately obvious forces at work in objective reality. They do so with such profundity and truth that the products of their imagination can potentially receive confirmation from subsequent historical events. The true masterpieces of realism can be appreciated as “wholes” which depict a wide-ranging and exhaustive objective reality like the one that exists in the non-fictional world.
After advancing his formulation of a desirable literary school, a realism that depicts objective reality, Lukács turns once again to the proponents of modernism. Citing Nietzsche, who argues that “the mark of every form of literary decadence…is that life no longer dwells in the totality,” Lukács strives to debunk modernist portrayals, claiming they reflect not on objective reality, but instead proceed from subjectivity to create a “home-made model of the contemporary world.” The abstraction (and immediacy) inherent in modernism portrays “essences” of capitalist domination divorced from their context, in a way that takes each essence in “isolation,” rather than taking into account the objective totality that is the foundation for all of them. Lukács believes that the “social mission of literature” is to clarify the experience of the masses, and in turn show these masses that their experiences are influenced by the objective totality of capitalism, and his chief criticism of modernist schools of literature is that they fail to live up to this goal, instead proceeding inexorably towards more immediate, more subjective, more abstracted versions of fictional reality that ignore the objective reality of the capitalist system. Realism, because it creates apparently subjective experiences that demonstrate the essential social realities that provoke them, is for Lukács the only defensible or valuable literary school of the early twentieth century.
Later in life Lukács undertook a major exposition on the ontology of social being, which has been partly published in English in three volumes. The work is a systematic treatment of dialectical philosophy in its materialist form.
The following is a partial bibliography of the writings of Georg Lukács. Many of his works are compilations of essays written and published separately at an earlier date than that listed below.
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Zsigmond Kunfi |
People's Commissar of Education 1919 |
Succeeded by József Pogány |
| Preceded by József Darvas |
Minister of Culture 1956 |
Succeeded by post abolished |
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