György Lukács
György Lukács (born György Bernát Löwinger; Hungarian: szegedi Lukács György Bernát; German: Georg Bernard Baron Lukács von Szegedin; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. 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 Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
György Lukács | |
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Lukács in 1952 | |
| Born | György Bernát Löwinger 13 April 1885 |
| Died | 4 June 1971 (aged 86) Budapest, Hungarian People's Republic |
| Education | Royal Hungarian University of Kolozsvár (Dr. rer. oec.) University of Berlin Royal Hungarian University of Budapest (PhD) |
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| Awards | Order of the Red Banner (1969) |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Neo-Kantianism (1906–1918) Western Marxism/Hegelian Marxism (after 1918) |
| Thesis | A drámaírás főbb irányai a múlt század utolsó negyedében (The Main Directions of Drama-Writing in the Last Quarter of the Past Century) (1909) |
| Doctoral advisor | Zsolt Beöthy (1909 PhD thesis advisor) |
| Other academic advisors | Georg Simmel |
| Doctoral students | István Mészáros, Ágnes Heller |
| Other notable students | György Márkus |
Main interests | Political philosophy, social theory, literary theory, aesthetics, Marxist humanism |
Notable ideas | Reification, class consciousness, transcendental homelessness, the genre of tragedy as an ethical category |
As a critic, Lukács was especially influential 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.