György Lukács (born Bernát György Löwinger; ; ; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician.György Lukács – Britannica.com He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Vladimir Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
Lukács was especially influential as a critic due to his theoretical developments of literary realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was appointed the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919). Lukács has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though assessing his legacy can be difficult as Lukács seemed both to support Stalinism as the embodiment of Marxist thought, and yet also to champion a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism.Leszek Kołakowski (, 2008), Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3: The Breakdown, W. W. Norton & Company, Ch VII: "György Lukács: Reason in the Service of Dogma", W.W. Norton & Co.
Life and politics Lukács was born Bernát György Löwinger in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, to the investment banker József Löwinger (later: szegedi Lukács József; 1855–1928) and his wife Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél; 1860–1917), who were a wealthy Jewish family. He had a brother and sister. He and his family converted to Lutheranism in 1907.
His father was knighted by the empire and received a baronial title, making Lukács a baron as well through inheritance.Lunching under the Goya. Jewish Collectors in Budapest at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, Konstantin Akinsha, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History As a writer, he published under the names Georg Lukács and György Lukács. Lukács participated in intellectual circles in Budapest, Berlin, Florence and Heidelberg.Georg Lukács, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He received his doctorate in economic and political sciences (Dr. rer. oec.) in 1906 from the Royal Hungarian University of Kolozsvár.Júlia Bendl, "Lukács György élete a századfordulótól 1918-ig" , 1994 (Hungarian) In 1909, he completed his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Budapest under the direction of Zsolt Beöthy.L. Ferenc Lendvai, A fiatal Lukács: utja Marxhoz, 1902–1918, Argumentum, 2008, p. 46; István Hermann, Georg Lukács: sein Leben und Wirken, Böhlau, 1986, p. 44.
Pre-Marxist period Whilst at university in Budapest, Lukács was part of socialist intellectual circles through which he met Ervin Szabó, an anarcho-syndicalist who introduced him to the works of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), the French proponent of revolutionary syndicalism. In that period, Lukács's intellectual perspectives were modernist and anti-positivist. From 1904 to 1908, he was part of a theatre troupe that produced modernist, psychologically realistic plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Gerhart Hauptmann.
Between 1906 and 1909 while in his early twenties, he worked on his 1,000 page A modern dráma fejlődésének története (). It was published in Hungary in 1911. (2 volumes)See also: He was dismayed when it won a prize in 1908 because he did not think the jury was fit to judge it.
Lukács spent much time in Germany, and studied at the University of Berlin from 1906 to 1907, during which time he made the acquaintance of the philosopher Georg Simmel. Later in 1913 whilst in Heidelberg, he befriended Max Weber, Emil Lask, Ernst Bloch, and Stefan George. The idealist system to which Lukács subscribed at this time was intellectually indebted to neo-Kantianism (then the dominant philosophy in German universities) and to Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In that period, he published Soul and Form (, Berlin, 1911; tr. 1974) and The Theory of the Novel (1916/1920; tr. 1971).
After the beginning of the First World War, Lukács was exempted from military service. In 1914, he married the Russian political activist Jelena Grabenko.
In 1915, Lukács returned to Budapest, where he was the leader of the "Sunday Circle", an intellectual salon. Its concerns were the cultural themes that arose from the existential works of Dostoyevsky, which thematically aligned with Lukács's interests in his last years at Heidelberg. As a salon, the Sunday Circle sponsored cultural events whose participants included literary and musical avant-garde figures, such as Karl Mannheim, the composer Béla Bartók, Béla Balázs, Arnold Hauser, Zoltán Kodály and Karl Polanyi; some of them also attended the weekly salons. In 1918, the last year of the First World War (1914–1918), the Sunday Circle became divided. They dissolved the salon because of their divergent politics; several of the leading members accompanied Lukács into the Communist Party of Hungary.
Pivot to communism In the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lukács rethought his ideas. He became a committed Marxist in this period and joined the fledgling Communist Party of Hungary in 1918. Up until at least September 1918, he had intended to emigrate to Germany, but after being rejected from a habilitation in Heidelberg, he wrote on 16 December that he had already decided to pursue a political career in Hungary instead. Lukács later wrote that he was persuaded to this course by Béla Kun. The last publication of Lukács' pre-Marxist period was "Bolshevism as a Moral Problem", a rejection of Bolshevism on ethical grounds that he apparently reversed within days.
Communist leader
As part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács was made People's Commissar for Education and Culture (he was deputy to the Commissar for Education Zsigmond Kunfi).
It is said by József Nádass that Lukács was giving a lecture entitled "Old Culture and New Culture" to a packed hall when the republic was proclaimed, which was interrupted due to the revolution.
During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács was a theoretician of the Hungarian version of the red terror.The hinterland of the white terror. Wien, 1920. Online: https://www.marxists.org/magyar/archive/lukacs/fth.htm In an article in the Népszava, 15 April 1919, he wrote that "The possession of the power of the state is also a moment for the destruction of the oppressing classes. A moment, we have to use".Népszava, 1919.04.15. Online: https://adtplus.arcanum.hu/hu/view/Nepszava_1919_04/?pg=0&layout=s Lukács later became a commissar of the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army, in which capacity he ordered the execution of eight of his own soldiers in Poroszló, in May 1919, which he later admitted in an interview.Georg Lukács. Revolutionäres Denken. Eine Einführung in Leben und Werk (hg. v. Frank Benseler), Darmstadt-Neuwied, 1984, p. 64.Lengyel András: A "tizedeltető" Lukács. Egy politikai folklór-szüzsé történeti hátteréhez. In Forrás, 2017-01. Online: http://www.forrasfolyoirat.hu/1701/lengyel.pdf p. 75.Váry Albert: A vörös uralom áldozatai Magyarországon (The victims of the Reds in Hungary. Online: http://mtdaportal.extra.hu/books/vary_albert_a_voros_uralom_aldozatai.pdf
After the Hungarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Lukács was ordered by Kun to remain behind with Ottó Korvin, when the rest of the leadership evacuated. Lukács and Korvin's mission was to clandestinely reorganize the communist movement, but this proved to be impossible. Lukács went into hiding, with the help of photographer Olga Máté. After Korvin's capture in 1919, Lukács fled from Hungary to Vienna. He was arrested but was saved from extradition due to a group of writers including Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Thomas Mann later based the character Naphta on Lukács in his novel The Magic Mountain.
He married his second wife, Gertrúd Bortstieber in 1919 in Vienna, a fellow member of the Hungarian Communist Party.
Around the 1920s, while Antonio Gramsci was also in Vienna, though they did not meet each other, Lukács met a fellow communist, Victor Serge, and began to develop Leninist ideas in the field of philosophy. His major works in this period were the essays collected in his magnum opus History and Class Consciousness (, Berlin, 1923). Although these essays display signs of what Vladimir Lenin referred to as "left communism" (with later Leninists calling it "ultra-leftism"), they provided Leninism with a substantive philosophical basis. In July 1924, Grigory Zinoviev attacked this book along with the work of Karl Korsch at the Fifth Comintern Congress.
In 1925, shortly after Lenin's death, Lukács published in Vienna the short study Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought (). In 1925, he published a critical review of Nikolai Bukharin's manual of historical materialism.
As a Hungarian exile, he remained active on the left wing of the Hungarian Communist Party, and was opposed to the Moscow-backed programme of Béla Kun. His "Blum theses" of 1928 called for the overthrow of the counter-revolutionary regime of Admiral Horthy in Hungary by a strategy similar to the Popular Fronts that arose in the 1930s. He advocated a "democratic dictatorship" of the proletariat and peasantry as a transitional stage leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat. After Lukács's strategy was condemned by the Comintern, he retreated from active politics into theoretical work.
Lukács left Vienna in 1929, first for Berlin, then for Budapest.
Under Stalin and Rákosi In 1930, while residing in Budapest, Lukács was summoned to Moscow. This coincided with the signing of a Viennese police order for his expulsion. Leaving their children to attend their studies, Lukács and his wife went to Moscow in March 1930. Soon after his arrival, Lukács was "prevented" from leaving and assigned to work alongside David Riazanov ("in the basement") at the Marx–Engels Institute.
Lukács returned to Berlin in 1931 and in 1933 he once again left Berlin for Moscow to attend the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. During this time, Lukács first came into contact with the unpublished works of the young Marx.
Lukács survived the purges of the Great Terror, but he and his wife were not permitted to leave the Soviet Union until after the Second World War. Shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 29, 1941 Lukács was arrested by the NKVD, but released on August 26. He was then evacuated to Tashkent with a group of German-speaking writers, where he and Johannes Becher became friends.Clark, Katerina, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Harvard University Press, 2011), 339-340. There is much debate among historians concerning the extent to which Lukács accepted Stalinism at this period.
In 1945, Lukács and his wife returned to Hungary. As a member of the Hungarian Communist Party, he took part in establishing the new Hungarian government. From 1945 Lukács was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1945 and 1946, he strongly criticised non-communist philosophers and writers. Lukács has been accused of playing an "administrative" (legal-bureaucratic) role in the removal of independent and non-communist intellectuals such as Béla Hamvas, István Bibó, Lajos Prohászka, and Károly Kerényi from Hungarian academic life. Between 1946 and 1953, many non-communist intellectuals, including Bibó, were imprisoned or forced into menial work or manual labour.