Georg Lukács

György Lukács

"The definitive study of Lenin's political theory" (OBSERVER). Lukacs's study remains one of the very few to offer a profound account of Leninism as a body of thought and is indispensable to an understanding of the true contemporary significance of Lenin's life and work.

A Study in the Unity of His Thought

Lenin

Georg Lukács was dubbed "the philosopher of the October Revolution" and his masterpiece History and Class Consciousness (1923) is commonly held to be the foundational text for the tradition known as "Western Marxism" which includes the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. As the liberating energies of the Russian Revolution were sapped by Stalinism, Lukács was subjected to ferocious attack for "deviations" from the "party line" in History and Class Consciousness. In the mid-1920s, he wrote Talism and the Dialectic, a sustained and passionate response to this onslaught. Unpublished at the time, Lukács himself thought the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now, for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English, in an accomplished translation by Esther Leslie and published here with an introduction from John Rees and a postface by Slavoj Zizek. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukács's oeuvre. "Some critiques of my book History and Class Consciousness have appeared (written by Comrades Rudas and Deborin) which I simply cannot let pass without a response ... It is certainly not my intention to defend the book itself. I would be only too glad if I could regard it as completely redundant, if I could see that its purpose had been full accomplished. What is this purpose? To demonstrate methodologically that the organisation and tactics of Bolshevism are the only possible consequence of Marxism; to prove that, of necessity, the problems of Bolshevism follow logically—that is to say logically in a dialectical sense—from the method of materialist dialectics as implemented by its founders. But my critics move instead in the opposite direction. They use their polemics to smuggle Menshevik elements into Marxism and Leninism. I have to retaliate. I am not defending my book. I am attacking the poen Menshevism of Deborin and the tail-ending of Rudas."

Tailism and the Dialectic

A Defence of History and Class Consciousness

.La forma es la voz con la que el ensayista dirige sus preguntas a la vida. La forma del ensayo, aún tenía que recorrer el camino hacia la independencia trazado ya por la poesía. En ese camino, debería hacerse cargo de la duplicidad de vivencias entre “la” vida y la “vida”, entre la imagen y la significación, entre el alma y las formas, una duplicidad que impedía continuamente que hubiera destino en los escritos de los ensayistas. Si el problema del destino ha determinado siempre el problema de la forma, los ensayos de “El alma y las formas” debían ser irónicos: el ensayista se refiere a las cuestiones más importantes de la vida desde la superficie, alejado de las profundidades de las que habla. El ensayista rechaza sus propias esperanzas de haber llegado alguna vez a lo último: «El ensayo crea por sí mismo los presupuestos de la fuerza de convicción y de la validez de lo que ha visto.»

Ensayos

El alma y las formas

Georg Luk cs wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Luk cs's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Luk cs's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism.

A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature

The Theory of the Novel

The Destruction of Reason

GyArgy LukAcs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. "Soul and Form" was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, LukAcs laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text. For this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which LukAcs wrote at the time of "Soul and Form," and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares LukAcs's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the LukAcsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience.

Soul and Form

Denis Maier

Gerhard Stapelfeldt

Gerhard Scheit

Joachim Bruhn

Stephan Grigat

Timothy Hall

Moishe Postone

Robert Fechner

Hans Martin Lohmann

Fabian Kettner

»Denn nur als Universalkategorie des gesamten gesellschaftlichen Seins ist die Ware in ihrer unverfälschten Wesensart begreifbar. Erst in diesem Zusammenhang gewinnt die durch das Warenverhältnis entstandene Verdinglichung eine entscheidende Bedeutung sowohl für die objektive Entwicklung der Gesellschaft wie für das Verhalten der Menschen zu ihr; für das Unterworfenwerden ihres Bewußtseins den Formen, in denen sich diese Verdinglichung ausdrückt; für die Versuche, diesen Prozeß zu begreifen oder sich gegen seine verheerenden Wirkungen aufzulehnen, sich von dieser Knechtschaft unter der so entstandenen ›zweiten Natur‹ zu befreien.« (Georg Lukács) Das einflußreichste Werk von Georg Lukács (1885-1971) ist die Aufsatzsammlung Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, ein Grundlagentext des westlichen Marxismus und der kritischen Theorie. 1923 erschienen, sorgte sie sofort für hitzige Kontroversen und brachte Lukács viel Kritik ein: dem sozialistischen Lager war sie zu marxistisch, den Leninisten nicht linientreu genug. Schon früh distanzierte sich Lukács von diesen Schriften, sowohl unter dem Eindruck ihrer immanenten theoretischen Widersprüche, als auch durch seine eigene Entwicklung zum stalinistischen Kader. An ihrer Wirkung änderte dies allerdings nichts. Der Band enthält Lukács’ Aufsätze »Was ist orthodoxer Marxismus?« und »Die Verdinglichung und das Bewußtsein des Proletariats« aus Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (mit den Seitenzahlen der Werkausgabe). Darum kreisen die Diskussionsbeiträge.

Von der Niederlage der Novemberrevolution zur kritischen Theorie

Verdinglichung, Marxismus, Geschichte

A classic of Western Marxism, The Destruction of Reason>/i> is Georg Lukacs's trenchant criticism of German philosophy after Marx and the role it played in the rise of National Socialism. Originally published in 1952, the book is a sustained and detailed polemic against post-Hegelian German philosophy and sociology from Kierkegaard to Heidegger. The Destruction of Reason is unsparing in its contention that with almost no exceptions, the post-Hegelian tradition prepared the ground fascist thought. In this, the main culprits are Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger who are accused, in turn, of introducing irrationalism into social and philosophical thought, pronounced antagonism to the idea of progress in history, an aristocratic view of the "masses," and, consequently, hostility to socialism, which in its classic expressions are movements for popular democracy-especially, but not exclusively, the expropriation of most private property in terms of material production. The Destruction of Reason remains one of Lukacs's most controversial, albeit little read, books. This new edition, featuring an historical introduction by Enzo Traverso, will finally see this classic come back in to print.

Studies in Marxist Dialectics

History and Class Consciousness

Wolfgang Abendroth

Hans Heinz Holz

Leo Kofler

Using the technique of prepared questions, Conversations with Lukacs is a brilliant gathering of thoughts and insights covering topics as ontology, the techniques of manipulative societies, the pitfalls of combating Stalinism with Stalinist methods, and the problems of intellectuals in advanced capitalist societies. Above all, there is the restatement of Lukacs unshaken conviction that the working class, with all the changes that have occurred in its way of life and composition, is still the historical carrier of social transformation. Lukacs's interlocutors in these four conversations are Hans Heinz Holz, Leo Kofler, and Wolfgang Abendroth. Each of them engages Lukacs in separate dialogues, on being and consciousness (Holz), on society and the individual (Kofler), and on the elements of scientific politics (Abendroth). Lukacs, Abendroth, and Holz work toward a "Provisional Summary" in the last conversation. The interlocutors and the editor write that "These conversations show very clearly the basis of abstraction in the experiences of everyday life.... This gives these conversations with Lukacs a more than anecdotal value; for the unmediated way in which thought is produced in conversation corresponds exactly to that primary level of experience, the data of everyday reality, whose theoretical value Lukacs emphasizes.... They aspire to bear witness to the living thought of one of the great men of our century, and to provide the opportunity to approach this thought by the simplest possible route."

Conversations with Lukács

Georg Lukács was one of the most controversial Marxist philosophers of this century. In this book, however, he appears in another guise: as a literary historian in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve and Belinsky, offering an advanced introduction to one of the richest periods of European literature.These previously untranslated essays - on Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph Eichendorff, Georg Büchner, Heinrich Heine, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane - were written between 1936 and 1950. They illuminate Lukács's enduring love of German literature and his faith in the humanist tradition. In all of them, moreover, he can be seen actively intervening in the cultural debates of the time - on the role of literature, on the literary tradition in society, and on the relationship between literature and politics.Although his defense of realism against the crudities of socialist realism is implicit throughout these essays, Lukács's main purpose was to illuminate the intellectual, historical, and literary context in which these great writers worked, to attain a fuller understanding of what they wrote, and also to settle accounts with contemporary German critics who were attempting to create a fascist pantheon.Rodney Livingstone, Reader in German at the University of Southampton, has edited and translated numerous works by Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and others.

German Realists in the Nineteenth Century

Georg Lukács (1885–1971) is now recognized as one of the most innovative and best-informed literary critics of the twentieth century. Trained in the German philosophic tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, he escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1933. There he faced a new set of problems: Stalinist dogmatism about literature and literary criticism. Maneuvering between the obstacles of censorship, he wrote and published his longest work of literary criticism, The Historical Novel, in 1937. Beginning with the novels of Sir Walter Scott, The Historical Novel documents the evolution of a genre that came to dominate European fiction in the years after Napoleon. The novel had reached a point at which it could be socially and politically critical as well as psychologically insightful. Lukács devotes his final chapter to the anti-Nazi fiction of Germany and Austria.

The Historical Novel

A T”örténelmi Regény

■ Puschkin Puschkins Platz in der Weltliteratur ‹Boris Godunow› ■ Tolstoi Tolstoi und die Probleme des Realismus Tolstoi und die westliche Literatur ■ Dostojewskij ■ Der große Oktober 1917 und die heutige Literatur ■ Fadejew ‹Die Neunzehn› ■ Makarenko ‹Der Weg ins Leben› ■ Scholochow ‹Der stille Don› ‹Neuland unterm Pflug› ■ Solschenizyn ‹Ein Tag im Leben des Iwan Denissowitsch› ■ Enzyklopädisches Stichwort: Auch Literaturrevolution ist politische Praxis ■ Quellennachweis ■ Personen- und Sachregister ■ Verzeichnis der erwähnten Werke

Georg Lukács

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