Georg Lukács

Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary theorist, and political figure (1885–1971); author of Die Theorie des Romans (1916), Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923 — the single most important work for MP's engagement), Der junge Hegel (1948), and Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (1954); plus many essays on realism and literature (including Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels als Literaturhistoriker, 1947). Member of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic government in 1919, later a resident of the USSR through the Stalin period, returning to Hungary and playing a brief role in the 1956 uprising before being marginalized by the subsequent Kádár regime. For this wiki, Lukács is the protagonist of Ch 2 of *Adventures of the Dialectic* and the author whom MP calls the "Weberian Marxist" — the thinker who took Weber's methodological insights into the Marxist dialectic.

Key Points

  • *History and Class Consciousness* (1923): "the bible of Western communism" (AD 31, MP's characterization). The book's central claim is that Marxism, if taken seriously, relativizes the notions of subject and object — and in so doing preserves a sort of totality that is not pre-given. MP treats this as the strongest Marxist possibility: a Weberian Marxism.
  • Weber's student: Lukács studied with Weber at Heidelberg; the methodological ideal-types and the relativization of historical understanding that Weber deployed are taken over by Lukács and radicalized.
  • Proletariat as "intention of totality": the proletariat is neither subject (not "gods") nor object (not mere commodities); it is praxis — "objective possibility" (Weber's term) — a third mode of historical existence. This is the book's single most important move.
  • The Party as "mystery of reason": Lukács's Party is not command-and-obedience but communication, the institutional form in which proletarian praxis finds critical elaboration. "It is the place in history where the meaning which is understands itself, where the concept becomes life" (AD 75). MP reads this formulation sympathetically but diagnoses it as the sublime-point illusion.
  • Condemnation by orthodoxy: Lukács's 1923 book was condemned by both the Communist International (Zinoviev) and the Social Democratic orthodoxy (Kautsky). The condemnation is what MP takes as evidence of the book's seriousness.
  • Lukács's subsequent retractions and accommodations: Lukács retracted History and Class Consciousness in 1933 ("My Road to Marx") and never allowed it to be reprinted in his lifetime. He accommodated to Stalinist orthodoxy in his later work, concentrating on literary theory. MP reads these accommodations as both philosophical regression and symptom of what Marxism cannot sustain.

Details

The 1923 Project

History and Class Consciousness was written between 1918 and 1922, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the failed Hungarian Soviet Republic. Its central philosophical move: to carry the Marxian inheritance one step further by relativizing the notions of subject and object themselves. For Lukács, Marx's humanism is not only about human emancipation; it is about the reconstitution of the subject-object relation. In capitalist society, subjects are objectified (workers become commodities) and objects become subjects (capital acquires will-like behavior). This reification is the structural form of capitalist society.

Marxist critique, for Lukács, is not criticism of capitalism from outside (that is impossible — the critic is also a product of capitalism) but criticism of capitalism from within, through the recognition that the subject-object reification is historically produced and historically reversible. The proletariat is the historical position from which this recognition becomes possible, because the proletariat is the class that is objectively treated as a commodity and subjectively recognizes itself as such.

This is Lukács's "Weberian Marxism": Weber had shown that historical understanding is itself historical (historian is inside history); Lukács radicalizes this by showing that historical categories are also historical. The subject-object dichotomy is not the ultimate philosophical vocabulary but one historical form of the subject-object relation.

MP's Reading of Lukács in AD Ch 2

MP's Ch 2 is largely sympathetic to Lukács's 1923 project. MP extracts three theses:

  1. The socialization of society (Vergesellschaftung der Gesellschaft, AD 37): capitalism is "a homogeneous society" that first places all its members under the common denominator of work and exchange. This makes it possible for society to think itself — to have an "interior," a "center." Precapitalist societies had no interior because they were partitioned by "interworlds" of blood, sex, myth.
  2. Praxis as third mode: the proletariat is "less than a subject and more than an object" — not the god-like subject of pre-Hegelian idealism, not the brute object of mechanistic materialism, but praxis understood as an "objective possibility" inscribed in its situation (AD 47).
  3. Truth as nonfalsity: Marxist truth is not correspondence but the "maximum guarantee against error" (AD 52). The Stimmung of Lukács's Marxism is "on the threshold of truth" — always pursuing, never arriving (AD 53).

These three theses together constitute the strongest Marxist possibility MP can articulate. The rest of Ch 2 and much of the book is the demonstration that these theses cannot finally hold — that their internal pressure produces either a slide back to naturalism (Lukács's own later accommodations) or a defense on non-Marxist grounds (Sartre's ultrabolshevism).

The Failure MP Diagnoses

Lukács's later work, on MP's reading, shows the failure from within. By the time of Der junge Hegel (1948), Lukács writes that "the social is a second nature" (in quotation marks but now accepted), that historical reality has an "opacity which can never be completely eliminated," and that consciousness is a "reflection" of the dialectic which "unrolls itself objectively in men's lives, independently of their knowledge and their will."

This is a capitulation to Leninist gnosticism. Lukács has preserved the philosophical spirit of the 1923 book only in his theory of literature — where he still maintains (against his Hungarian Stalinist critics, Revai especially) that literature expresses the whole of history and is not reducible to the immediate political line. "What remains of his dialectic philosophy is his theory of literature" (AD 92).

MP's diagnosis: the dialectic could not be kept in philosophy while surrendering it in politics. "When one identifies spontaneity and consciousness, Bolshevik vertigo is not far away; and this is what Sartre pushes to its limit" (AD 154). Lukács's 1923 formulation was the strongest Marxist possibility, and its failure is not merely Lukács's personal capitulation but the structural failure of the Marxist project itself.

Key Passages from Lukács MP Engages

MP quotes History and Class Consciousness frequently. The most important passages:

  • "The question is not what goal is envisaged for the time being by this or that member of the proletariat... The question is what is the proletariat and what course of action will it be forced historically to take" (Marx, quoted by Lukács; AD 47).
  • "The identical subject-object of the capitalistic society is not identifiable with the unique subject of all history" (Lukács on the historical limits of his own thesis; AD 54).
  • "The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its own class struggle" (HCC p. 80; AD 46).
  • "Truth is a weapon that brings victory" (HCC p. 68; AD 45).
  • "The concrete unity of the group is projective, that is to say, that the unity is necessarily exterior to the group" (Lukács on charismatic power; MP uses this against Sartre's reading of the Party).

Lukács's Aesthetics

MP's engagement with Lukács's literary theory is most developed in the second half of AD Ch 2. Lukács's commitment to realism — his insistence that literature expresses the whole of history, that it cannot be reduced to propaganda, that the great bourgeois realists (Balzac, Stendhal) remain the measure for revolutionary literature — is read by MP as the last remainder of the dialectical Marxism of 1923. In this register, Lukács defends "snipers" — writers who travel with the Party but do not submit to it; he refuses to make Soviet "socialist realism" the standard; he continues to read Balzac's reactionary political prejudices as useful for seeing the totality of capitalist society.

This literary theory is rejected by the Stalinist orthodoxy (Revai): "What could the watchword, 'Zola? No, Balzac!' — formulated by Lukács in 1945 — give to Hungarian literature?" (Revai, quoted AD 94). MP replies: "Nothing, in effect, except culture. Is this so little for a literature?" (AD 94). The defense of literature as an autonomous order in which the whole of history can be expressed is MP's 1955 way of defending the distinction of unveiling from governing.

Connections

  • is Weber's student and develops Weber's methodology into a Marxist dialectic
  • is the protagonist of Ch 2 of AD
  • opposes Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism (though he later accommodates to it under orthodox pressure)
  • is attacked by the Stalinist orthodoxy — Zinoviev in 1924, Revai in Hungarian Party politics in the 1940s–50s
  • is rejected by Social Democratic orthodoxy — Kautsky in 1924
  • develops the concept of the interworld in seed (under the name "relations between persons") — MP takes up the concept from Lukács's reading of Marx
  • deploys the concept of praxis as "objective possibility" (Weber's term) — AD 47
  • inherits Marx's formulation of the proletariat as Selbstaufhebung
  • is the author of the formulation "on the threshold of truth" as the Stimmung of Marxism — AD 53
  • contrasts with Sartre's ultrabolshevism — Lukács preserves the dialectic even as he surrenders to orthodoxy; Sartre surrenders the dialectic and keeps the Party
  • defends the distinction of literature and politics as distinct orders — precursor of MP's unveiling/governing distinction
  • is in polemic with Josef Revai, Lukács's former fellow-Westerner, later his Hungarian Stalinist prosecutor

Open Questions

  • Is MP's reading of the 1923 book as "Weberian Marxism" historically accurate, or is it MP's phenomenological appropriation? Lukács himself did not use the phrase and would have preferred "dialectical Marxism."
  • How does MP's reading compare to Karl Korsch's Marxismus und Philosophie (1923)? Both books were written simultaneously and both condemned together by the Communist International. Korsch is mentioned in AD but Korsch's own formulation is less engaged.
  • Lukács's later Hungarian career (1956 and after) is not engaged in AD. In 1956 Lukács was Minister of Culture in the Imre Nagy government during the Hungarian uprising; after its suppression he was briefly imprisoned and then returned to academic work, producing the massive Aesthetics (1963) and the late Ontology of Social Being. Does MP's 1955 reading anticipate the trajectory?
  • Is Lukács's "ternary dialectic" (as MP reads him) the same as MP's own hyper-dialectic? The 1954–55 course explicitly distinguishes "binary" from "ternary" dialectic; the Ch 2 treatment of Lukács's praxis shares structural features.
  • What is the relation between Lukács's literary theory and MP's own aesthetic thought? Both defend literature as the expression of the whole; both refuse political reduction of literature. But the ontological frames differ: Lukács stays Hegelian-Marxist, MP moves to the flesh ontology.

Sources