A short life of the author
György Lukács (13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic who was the most important Marxist thinker on aesthetics, literature, and culture in the twentieth century. His works — The Theory of the Novel (1916), History and Class Consciousness (1923), The Historical Novel (1937), and Studies in European Realism (1950) — shaped the intellectual tradition now called Western Marxism and influenced thinkers from Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton.
Life
Lukács was born into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish banking family in Budapest. His father was the director of the Budapest Creditbank. He studied at the universities of Budapest, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he became a student of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and the neo-Kantian tradition. His early work — Soul and Form (1910) and The Theory of the Novel (1916) — belongs to this pre-Marxist, idealist phase.
In 1918, in a conversion he later compared to a religious experience, Lukács joined the Hungarian Communist Party. He served as People’s Commissar for Education and Culture during the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 under Béla Kun. When the republic fell, he went into exile — Vienna, Moscow, Berlin — and spent much of the interwar period in the Soviet Union, where he survived the purges (many of his Hungarian comrades did not) through a combination of self-criticism, strategic silence, and genuine belief in the Soviet project.
He returned to Hungary after 1945 and was briefly Minister of Culture during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, for which he was arrested and deported to Romania by the Soviets. He was eventually allowed to return to Budapest, where he spent his final years in relative intellectual freedom, writing prolifically until his death at eighty-six.
The Theory of the Novel (1916)
Written before Lukács’s Marxist turn, this early work draws on Hegel’s aesthetics to argue that the novel is the epic of a world in which meaning has become problematic — a world of “transcendental homelessness.” Where the ancient epic (Homer) expressed a society in which meaning was given, the novel expresses a society in which the individual must search for meaning in a world that no longer guarantees it.
The book’s categories — the “novel of abstract idealism” (Cervantes), the “novel of disillusionment” (Flaubert), the “educative novel” (Goethe) — remain influential in literary theory. Its melancholic, Hegelian tone is very different from Lukács’s later Marxist writing, and many critics prefer it to his more doctrinaire later work.
History and Class Consciousness (1923)
Lukács’s most influential and most controversial work — a collection of essays that is the founding text of Western Marxism. The key concept is “reification” (Verdinglichung): the process by which human relationships and activities are transformed into thing-like, commodity-like forms under capitalism. Building on Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, Lukács argued that reification pervades all aspects of bourgeois consciousness — philosophy, law, science, culture — creating a fragmented worldview incapable of grasping society as a “totality.”
Only the proletariat, Lukács argued, occupies a position from which totality can be understood — because the proletariat is simultaneously the subject and the object of history. This is the concept of “imputed class consciousness”: the consciousness that the proletariat would have if it fully understood its historical situation.
The book was condemned by the Communist International and Lukács was forced to repudiate it. Yet it became the most important Marxist philosophical work of the twentieth century, influencing the Frankfurt School (Adorno’s concept of the culture industry, Marcuse’s analysis of one-dimensional society), Sartre’s existential Marxism, and the entire tradition of Marxist cultural criticism.
The Historical Novel (1937)
Written during Lukács’s Moscow exile, this book argues that the historical novel — as pioneered by Walter Scott — is the literary form that best captures the relationship between individual lives and historical processes. Lukács’s reading of Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy, and other realist novelists demonstrates his central aesthetic principle: that great literature reveals the social forces that shape individual destiny without reducing characters to mere illustrations of historical laws.
Studies in European Realism (1950) and Aesthetic Theory
Lukács championed “critical realism” — the tradition of Balzac, Tolstoy, and Thomas Mann — against both naturalism (which he saw as merely descriptive) and modernism (which he attacked as decadent, subjective, and incapable of grasping social totality). His critique of modernism — particularly of Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett — provoked a famous debate with Theodor Adorno, who defended modernist art as the authentic expression of a reified society.
Critical Standing
Lukács remains central to Marxist literary theory and the philosophy of culture. History and Class Consciousness is one of the foundational texts of Western Marxism. The Theory of the Novel continues to be read independently of Marxism as a major work of literary philosophy. His championing of realism against modernism has been largely rejected — Adorno’s position won that debate — but his broader argument about the relationship between literature and society remains productive.
His personal history — the compromises, the self-criticisms, the survival of Stalinism — complicates any simple assessment. He was both a profound thinker and a man who made himself complicit with a murderous regime.
Collecting Lukács
German first editions of Die Theorie des Romans (Cassirer, 1920) and Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (Malik-Verlag, 1923) are rare and valuable. English translations (Merlin Press, MIT Press) from the 1960s and 1970s are the standard collected editions and are available for $20–$50.