People

Gyorgy Lukacs 1885-1971 - Hugary

Encyclopedia Entries

Columbian Encyclopedia

Questions of 

link between creative works and the social struggle

Reading

 History and Class Consciousness (1923, tr. 1971)

Destruction of Reason (1954)

Goethe (1947, tr. 1969)

Hegel (1948)

Lenin (1970)

Solzhenitsyn (1970, tr. 1971)

The Historical Novel (1955, tr. 1962) 

Studies in European Realism (1946, tr. 1950)

Writing available on the net

Commentaries

From the Radical Academy:

Gyorgy Lukacs (1885-1971)

Gyorgy Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary critic, and writer. One of the foremost Marxist theoreticians during the first half of the 20th century, Lukacs developed a Marxist aesthetic drawing a link between art and social struggle. His earliest works -- such as The Soul and the Forms (1910) and The Theory of the Novel (1920) -- were heavily influenced by the thoughts of Max Weber as well as Karl Marx.

After moving to Vienna, Lukacs wrote his major reevaluation of Marxism, History of Class Consciousness (1923). He was, however, promptly labeled a revisionist because he departed from standard Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he lived in Moscow, where he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute and at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Following World War II, Lukacs returned to Hungary to become a professor of philosophy and aesthetics in Budapest. Because of his idealist interpretation of Marxism, however, he often became the center of ideological controversy. His involvement in the revolution of 1956 pushed him into the background, but in 1965 he was rehabilitated.

Quotations