György Lukács??

[StoneFrog]

Who is György Lukács? What are people thoughts on him?

[caramelpence]

Who is György Lukács? What are people thoughts on him?

He was one of the most important Marxist philosophers of the last century, especially within what has since become known as Western Marxism, and he was a leading participant in the Hungarian revolution. His most important work, History and Class Consciousness, is a collection of articles and essays, and one of the arguments that he is most associated with, as put forward in the essay What is Orthodox Marxism?, is the argument that the distinctive feature of Marxism is not a commitment to any particular set of hypotheses concerning the future development of capitalism but a dialectical method that analyzes society as a totality rather than splitting it up into distinct components. It is an understanding of society as a totality that Lukacs sees as the distinctive feature of Marxism as a methodological paradigm and he sees the hallmark of reification as the fragmentation of society and the individual.

[RedSunRising]

Very difficult at times to read but he is definitely worth struggling through. The destruction of reason I think is probably his best book. Essays on Thomas Mann is also well worth it. Sadly though he turned revisionist and it could be argued how much he ever broke from his bourgeois roots given that he was much more happy with the Popular Front line (which I think he advocated before the Comintern adopted it) than the so called "Third Period").

You can find a tone of stuff by him here. The pamphlet on Lenin is very good in my opinion.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/index.htm

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Sadly though he turned revisionist

Are you referring to the fact that he was Imre Nagy's Minister of Culture in 1956?

[RedSunRising]

Are you referring to the fact that he was Imre Nagy's Minister of Culture in 1956?

In part...Also his backing of the campaign of defamation against comrade Stalin, that is really what I was thinking about.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

In part...Also his backing of the campaign of defamation against comrade Stalin, that is really what I was thinking about.

I’ve always admired him for this: to all appearances he was just another Zhdanovite, especially in his quarrel with Brecht and others over the “reactionary” nature of Modernist literature. But in 1919, as People’s Commissar for Public Instruction and Culture he inaugurated the first University-level courses in psychoanalysis and promoted Bartók and Kodály.