The Hungarian literary critic and philosopher Gyorgy Lukács (1885-1971) was one of the foremost Marxist literary critics and theorists. His influence on criticism has been considerable in both Western and Eastern Europe.

Gyorgy Lukács was born April 13, 1885, in Budapest, into a wealthy, intellectual, Jewish banking family. He was a brilliant student and was given a cosmopolitan education in Hungary and Germany. Until 1917 he devoted himself to art and esthetics and was not interested in politics. Writing primarily in German, he achieved his first fame as a literary critic with The Soul and the Forms (Hungarian, 1910; German, 1911) and The Theory of the Novel (1916 as an article; 1920 as a book), a study of the spiritual aspects of the novel. During World War I he taught in a German university.

Because of the shock of the war and the impressions made on him by the Russian Revolution, Lukács completed a move from Neo-Kantianism through Hegelianism to Marxism and joined the Hungarian Communist party. Despite the party's often official displeasure with his intellectual work, he remained faithful to it. In 1919 he served as deputy commissar of culture in the revolutionary Béla Kun Communist government in Hungary. After the government was overthrown, he had to emigrate to Vienna and for about a decade participated actively in party affairs and disputes.

In 1923 he wrote History and Class Consciousness. This complex, theoretical, sociological work explored important but, until then, little-emphasized aspects of Marx's work: the strong connection with Hegel, the importance of the dialectic, and the concept of alienation. He also examined the nature of the working class's own self-consciousness. Lukács argued that genuine Marxism was not a body of rigid economic truths but a method of analysis which could enable the revolution to be created. His interpretation of Marxism influenced many European intellectuals but was attacked as dangerously revisionist by Soviet dogmatists, and his career in party politics was over by the late 1920s.

With the danger of fascism growing in Europe, Lukács emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1933. He worked as a literary editor and critic, emphasizing the relationship between a work of art and its sociohistorical period. Several times he publicly repudiated all his previous work and occasionally shifted his views to conform to the official party line and paid lip service to official Soviet socialist realism, but he later regarded this as a tactical necessity to survive physically in Stalin's Russia and still get his ideas heard. Despite occasional Marxist-Leninist dogmatisms, he wrote perceptive criticism and concentrated on realistic 19th-century literature. Whether through personal predilection or the exigencies of the Communist party line, he became cold to almost the entire modernist movement in literature.

Returning to Hungary in 1945, Lukács was active in cultural affairs and as a professor of esthetics and cultural philosophy, but he was again stigmatized for his heterodox views. Deeply affected by Nikita Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes, he spoke out publicly against Stalinist dogmatism in Hungary, and in 1956, joined the short-lived Imré Nagy government. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he was exiled to Romania, allowed to return in 1957, and forced to retire and go into seclusion. However, after 1965 he was again publicly honored in Hungary. Lukács died on June 4, 1971, in Budapest.

Further Reading

For a fairly complete bibliography of Lukács's work in Western European languages see G. H. R. Parkinson, ed., Georg Lukács: The Man, His Work and His Ideas (1970), which also has extensive biographical material. George Lichtheim, George Lukács (1970), is a study of Lukács's ideas; Lichtheim's The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (1967) contains a generally favorable discussion of Lukács's early career and considers that his later career was an intellectual disaster. Victor Zitta, Georg Lukács's Marxism: Alienation,Dialectics, Revolution; A Study in Utopia and Ideology (1964), is a detailed study of Lukács and his thought up to the 1920s. An interesting critique of Lukács is in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (1966).

Additional Sources

Lukács, Gyorgy, Record of a life: an autobiographical sketch, London: Verso, 1983.

Kadarkay, Arpad, Gyorgy Lukács: life, thought, and politics, Cambridge, Mass., USA: B. Blackwell, 1991.

Congdon, Lee, The young Lukács, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

(1885-1971) Marxist philosopher, and communist, born in Budapest and educated at the University of Berlin. His early writings such as The Theory of the Novel (1916) were concerned with applying a form of neo-Kantianism to investigate problems within aesthetics. After reading Hegel and Marx, however, he began to concentrate on the problem of the relationship between theory and practice in terms of the dialectical method. History and Class Consciousness (1923) takes up these issues explicitly. Lukács emphasizes the importance of the proletariat as a class-conscious ‘subject’ within the ‘object’ of capitalist society. It is only the proletariat, from its privileged class position, that can grasp society as a totality, as a unity between theory and practice. It is in this sense that Lukács could see the proletariat as the bearer of historical development in a capitalist system which attempted to negate that very fact. To this end the fetishized appearances of capital had to be subjected to a thoroughgoing dialectical critique. Even the categories which orthodox theory used to explain social reality needed to be understood as specific to their historical context. They were therefore steeped in the very bourgeois ideology that the dialectical method had to penetrate in order to discover ‘truth’. In The Young Hegel (1948), his emphasis on the direct influence of Hegel's thought on Marx was further established. Consequently Lukács has been seen as a founder of Hegelian Marxism.

— Ian Fraser

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Lukács, György (1885-1971) Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Lukács was briefly a minister in the Hungarian government in 1919 and again in 1956, although he spent years in exile in Russia. Lukács saw in Marxism the way to overcome the duality of subject and object inherent in western thought: the experience of the working class can become both the subject and the object of history, thereby achieving the necessary harmony and totality (the thought here depends on a Hegelian framework). At this point, too, the blinkers of capitalist ideology, and in particular commodity fetishism, would be transcended. Lukács wrote extensively on literary theory as well as the interpretation of Marx. His works include Die Seele und die Formen (1911, trs. as The Soul and its Forms 1971) and Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (1923, trs. as History and Class Consciousness, 1971).

(dyör'dyə lū'käch) , 1885–1971, Hungarian writer, one of the foremost modern literary critics. Converted to Communism in 1918, Lukács served (1919) in the cabinet of Béla Kun. On Kun's fall he fled and lived in Berlin until the rise of Hitler, when he went to the Soviet Union. In 1945 he returned to Hungary, became professor of aesthetics at Budapest, and was important in the Communist party and in national intellectual life. He was attacked for his sympathy for Western literature as expressed in The Destruction of Reason (1954), and after the Hungarian revolution he was stripped of political importance. Lukács' powerful criticism combines Marxist social theory with aesthetic sensibility, flexibility, and humanism. His central theme, expounded in History and Class Consciousness (1923, tr. 1971), is the link between creative works and the social struggle. His works include studies on Goethe (1947, tr. 1969), Hegel (1948), Lenin (1970), and Solzhenitsyn (1970, tr. 1971) as well as on Marxism and literary values. His other writings include The Historical Novel (1955, tr. 1962) and his outstanding Studies in European Realism (1946, tr. 1950). His Political Writings, 1919–1929 was translated in 1972.

Bibliography

See studies by G. Lichtheim (1970) and E. Bahn and R. G. Kunzer (1972).