Georg Lukács

Georg Lukács: The Baron Who Ordered Executions

In May 1919, at Poroszó, a Hungarian baron's son ordered eight soldiers shot. He was thirty-four, a philosopher of literary form who had spent his twenties in Heidelberg drawing rooms with Max Weber and Ernst Bloch, and he had joined the Communist Party barely a year earlier after publishing an essay rejecting Bolshevism on ethical grounds. He admitted the executions in an interview decades later. No other major twentieth-century philosopher has a biography like this one.

Budapest, Berlin, Heidelberg

He was born Bernát György Löwinger on 13 April 1885 in Budapest to József Löwinger, an investment banker, and Adele Wertheimer, from a wealthy Jewish family. His father received a baronial title from the empire, making the son a baron by inheritance; the family converted to Lutheranism in 1907. He took a first doctorate in economics and political sciences at the Royal Hungarian University of Kolozsvár in 1906 and a second in philosophy at Budapest in 1909 under Zsolt Beöthy, studying in Berlin in 1906-07, where he met Georg Simmel.

From 1904 to 1908 he belonged to a theatre troupe staging Ibsen, Strindberg and Hauptmann, and between 1906 and 1909 he wrote a thousand-page history of the development of modern drama, published in Hungary in 1911. Characteristically, he rejected a prize it won in 1908 on the grounds that the jury was not qualified to judge it. *Soul and Form* appeared in Berlin in 1911; *The Theory of the Novel* in 1916 and 1920. In Heidelberg from 1913 he was intimate with Max Weber, Emil Lask, Ernst Bloch and Stefan George, and his idealism drew on neo-Kantianism, Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dilthey and Dostoyevsky. In 1915 he led the Sunday Circle, a Budapest salon whose membership — Karl Mannheim, Béla Bartók, Béla Balázs, Arnold Hauser, Zoltán Kodály, Karl Polanyi — reads like a roster of the century's Hungarian intellect.

The Conversion

In 1918, persuaded by Béla Kun, he joined the Communist Party of Hungary. His final pre-Marxist publication, "Bolshevism as a Moral Problem," rejected Bolshevism on ethical grounds — a position he reversed within days. In the Hungarian Soviet Republic of March to August 1919 he served as People's Commissar for Education and Culture, deputy to Zsigmond Kunfi, and was a theoretician of the Hungarian red terror as well as a participant in it. When the republic fell he fled; writers including Thomas and Heinrich Mann helped save him from extradition. He had married the Russian activist Jelena Grabenko in 1914 and married the Hungarian communist Gertrúd Bortstieber in Vienna in 1919.

History and Class Consciousness

The Vienna years produced the book that founded Western Marxism. *History and Class Consciousness* (1923) introduced reification as the name for the mystified consciousness of capitalist society, in which, as the text has it, "human properties, relations and actions are transformed into properties, relations and actions of human-produced things, which become independent of them." It reworked class consciousness as the passage of a class from a thing in itself to a subject for itself, and it made an audacious claim about Marxism's identity: "Orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth." Lenin criticized the book for left-communist tendencies. Lukács followed with *Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought* in 1925 and a critical review of Bukharin. His 1928 "Blum theses," calling for the overthrow of Admiral Horthy through a democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry, were condemned by the Comintern, after which he withdrew into theory.

Moscow

Summoned to Moscow in March 1930 and prevented from leaving, he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute alongside David Riazanov. He returned to Berlin in 1931 and then, in 1933, to Moscow and the Institute of Philosophy, where he first read the unpublished early Marx — a discovery that confirmed his own lines of argument. The NKVD arrested him on 29 June 1941 and released him on 26 August; he was evacuated to Tashkent with German-speaking writers and befriended Johannes Becher. He survived the Great Terror, which few of his stature did.

Realism Against Modernism

His criticism was a defence of nineteenth-century realism against everything that came after. *The Theory of the Novel* had coined "transcendental homelessness" — the soul's longing for "the place in which they once belonged" and for "utopian perfection" — and declared that "the novel is the necessary epic form of our time," a judgment he later repudiated while conceding its "romantic anti-capitalism" had led him to Marxism. *The Historical Novel* traced how the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars produced historical consciousness, and how Walter Scott's typical characters dramatized social conflict; after 1848, he argued, historical realism declined as the bourgeoisie ceased to be progressive. He opposed Kafka, Joyce and Beckett with unusual stubbornness, holding that modernism "is deprived of a historical perspective, tying the person to positions and situations that are not really historically and socially determined." Socialist realism he ranked highest of all: "The greatness of socialist realism lies in the fact that the historical totality, directed towards communism, becomes clear as daylight in any fragment of a given work." He welcomed Solzhenitsyn as the century's greatest plebeian realist.

1956, and After

He returned to Hungary in 1945, joined the new government's establishment and the Academy of Sciences, and has been accused of an administrative role in removing non-communist intellectuals — Béla Hamvas, István Bibó, Lajos Prohászka, Károly Kerényi — from academic life, before being caught himself in a "Lukács purge" of 1948-49 as Mátyás Rákosi applied salami tactics. In 1956 he became a minister in Imre Nagy's revolutionary government, arguing for coalition and for a communist party that would win by persuasion. He was deported to Romania and narrowly escaped execution, returned to Budapest in 1957, publicly abandoned his positions and performed self-criticism. He remained loyal to the party until his death on 4 June 1971, though after 1968 he grew openly critical of Moscow. Near the end he wrote: "Without a genuine general theory of society and its movement, one does not get away from Stalinism. Stalin was a great tactician... But Stalin, unfortunately, was not a Marxist... The essence of Stalinism lies in placing tactics before strategy, practice above theory... The bureaucracy generated by Stalinism is a tremendous evil."

Why György Is Called a Genius

The intellectual quality is a rare capacity for totality — the ability to hold economics, philosophy, literary form and political strategy as aspects of one structure, and to move between them without changing gears. Reification is the exemplary product: a single concept that explains simultaneously a feature of commodity exchange, a mode of consciousness, a philosophical problem inherited from Kant and a property of the novel. Nothing in Marx says quite this, and virtually all subsequent Western Marxism — the Frankfurt School above all — works downstream of it. He is regarded as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era and a founder of Western Marxism, and Thomas Mann thought him sufficiently formidable to model Naphta in *The Magic Mountain* on him.

The counter-case is severe and inseparable from the achievement. The same drive toward totality produced a critic who could not read Kafka, Joyce or Beckett except as symptoms, and who ranked socialist realism above them — a judgment now almost universally considered wrong, and wrong in a way that reveals a system overriding perception. He reversed his own most serious moral position within days. He theorized and executed terror. He denounced colleagues and then recanted under pressure, more than once. Historians still dispute whether his Stalin-era works were coded criticism or genuine service. A mind of enormous synthesizing power that repeatedly subordinated itself to a party line is a hard case, and honesty requires holding both halves.

Legacy

His late systematic work on the ontology of social being, partly translated into English in three volumes, remains the least read of his projects. What survives is reification, class consciousness and the theory of the realist novel — concepts that shaped Adorno, Goldmann, Jameson and most of what the twentieth century meant by cultural criticism, produced by a man whose own century kept demanding that he betray them.