Lukács, Georg (1885–1971)

Hungarian philosopher and literary critic, one of the founders of ‘Western’ or ‘Hegelian’ Marxism, a philosophy opposed to the Marxism of the official communist movement. He also wrote on aesthetics and the sociology of literature.

In History and Class Consciousness (1923), he discussed the process of reification, reintroducing alienation as a central concept, and argued that bourgeois thought was ‘false consciousness’. Rejected by official socialist literati, he was also an outsider to the dominant literary movements of the West. He argued for realism in literature and opposed modernism, particularly the work of James Joyce and Franz Kafka.

Lukács joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918 and was deputy minister of education during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. When the Hungarian communist uprising was put down in 1919, he emigrated first to Germany and then, in 1930, to the USSR. His Marxist views were considered unorthodox by the Soviet leaders and he had to make a humiliating public retraction of his ‘errors’ in Moscow in 1930. He consistently protested against demands that literature should support Stalin's policies and misdeeds. In 1945 Lukács returned to Hungary. He was a member of the short-lived Hungarian revolutionary government of 1956 and was briefly imprisoned when it was ended with the arrival of Soviet tanks.

Influenced by the German sociologists Georg Simmel and Max Weber, Lukács wrote two of his best books on literature, Soul and Form (1910) and The Theory of the Novel (1916), before he became a communist.