György Lukács

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Before 1918 he wrote studies of literary form, including Soul and Form and The Theory of the Novel. After joining the Communist Party, he served as a commissar for education and culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. History and Class Consciousness (1923), written in Viennese exile, reread Marx through Hegel and introduced the idea of reification, shaping Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School. He later lived in Moscow, returned to Budapest in 1945, and was a minister in Imre Nagy's 1956 government.

Key ideas

• Under capitalism, relations between people take on the appearance of relations between things, which he called reification.
• The proletariat, by becoming conscious of its own position, can grasp society as a whole and transform it.
• Orthodox Marxism is defined by its method, the dialectical view of society as a totality, rather than by fixed doctrines.
• Realist literature reveals the social totality behind individual lives, a view he set against modernism.

Major works

• History and Class Consciousness (1923)
• Soul and Form (1911)
• The Theory of the Novel (1916)
• The Historical Novel (1937)
• The Destruction of Reason (1954)

In the Book corner

• History and Class Consciousness 1923 · Advanced
  A collection of essays on Marxist dialectics written by the Hungarian philosopher between 1919 and 1922, during and after the short-lived Hungarian…

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