In January 2017, the City Council of Budapest voted to remove from a central park the statue of a philosopher who had died nearly half a century before.1 Head bowed pensively, clad in an overcoat perhaps a size or more too large, and grasping for support on a railing, this was no glorification of its subject. Yet for Marcell Tokody, the councillor who proposed its removal, the statue depicted a man who represented all that he saw as a threat to his vision of Hungary: it was, of course, Georg Lukács, arguably the greatest philosopher and critic Hungary has yet produced.
Tokody’s attack is not especially surprising in the context of contemporary Hungarian politics. Though he himself is a member of the neo-Nazi Jobbik party, his motion was eagerly supported by the governing Fidesz, whose leader Viktor Orbán has shown little compunction in throwing around thinly disguised anti-Semitic rhetoric about international plots against Hungary led by the Jewish financier George Soros. Indeed, the removal of the statue was not the first attack on Lukács: a year earlier, the Orbán administration announced the removal of the philosopher’s papers from the archive located in his apartment, a process that was completed by early 2018. As a Marxist of Jewish descent, as an intellectual, and as a global cultural figure, Lukács represents all that these far-right parties detest.
Yet condemnation of Lukács is not confined to the far right, for his sternest critics include many of those who drew directly on his work. It is hard to question his significance: History and Class Consciousness , his most theoretically ambitious work, opened up Marxian thought beyond political economy and revolutionary practice by placing it in dialogue with the German post-Kantian tradition. In so doing, Lukács went far beyond the often-vulgar and reductionist Marxism of his time, reframing Marx’s thought so as to apply it to basic philosophical questions of subjectivity, agency, and identity. His, though, was no coldly abstract analysis; rather, building on themes he had introduced in his pre-Marxist works such as Theory of the Novel , Lukács described capitalism from the perspective of living subjects who felt distanced from and powerless in the face of an impersonal, mechanized society that reduced the relations between humans to those between commodities. History and Class Consciousness offered both a name and a theoretical explanation of this reification, grounded in the structures of modern society. The rediscovery of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts a few years later along with the rise of existentialism from the 1930s only reinforced Lukács’s diagnosis: reification seemed to describe something fundamental about the situation of the individual under capitalism.
Of course, Lukács’s account was quite out of kilter with the ossifying orthodoxy of 1920s Bolshevism. Already criticized by Lenin in 1920 for his ultra-leftism, Lukács came under even heavier attack after the publication of History and Class Consciousness in 1923: Zinoviev denounced him by name at the fifth Comintern Congress in 1924.2 As the Bolshevik government hardened into Stalinist totalitarianism, Lukács was obliged to issue a series of autocriticisms in order to ensure his survival. As a result of this ostracism by the Stalinists, he became a figurehead of dissident Marxism for reformist groups in the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet hegemony; he was subsequently arrested and sent for ‘re-education’ for his participation in the Nagy government. Expelled from the party, his status was questionable for the remainder of his life.3
Stalinist disapproval was not sufficient to save Lukács from the insinuation that he himself had become a Stalinist hack—an accusation made not just by conservatives and centrist liberals, but also by the likes of Theodor Adorno, who drew heavily on Lukács’s account of reification and his analysis of the relations between Marxism and the Kantian-Hegelian tradition.4 For Adorno, Lukács’s decision to remain loyal to the Soviet regime made him complicit in totalitarianism, a producer of ideology on demand. Subsequent interpreters such as Moishe Postone or Andrew Arato and Paul Breines have seen Lukács’s choice as no coincidence, but rather as stemming from one of the central motifs of his thought: his identification of the industrial working class, the proletariat, as the sole agents of emancipatory social revolution .5 As early as 1929, the Frankfurt School had begun to doubt this, with Erich Fromm’s psychological study of the German working class seeking to understand their failure to rise up in revolt, a problem confirmed by later studies such as The Authoritarian Personality.6 Of course, the rise of the New Left along with the emergence of postmodern and poststructural thought in the 1960s and 1970s marked a shift away from class as the primary dimension of analysis, to be replaced by categories of gender, race, sexuality, and so on. But for Lukács’s critics, his preoccupation with class is more than just anachronistic: because the massed proletariat failed to fulfil his dreams, they argue, he turned instead to the dictatorial centralist Party that ‘represented’ them—and so opened the way to a deification of the centralized organs of control and a blood-stained dictatorship of the proletariat. Notwithstanding his participation in Imre Nagy’s reformist government in 1956 (for which he was arrested when the Soviet tanks rolled in), Lukács largely remained loyal to the Soviet regime even during the depths of Stalinism. It is quite understandable that this adherence to an ‘official’ Marxism propagated by an unquestionably repressive authority made his theory unappealing by association during the Cold War.
Recent years have, however, seen a resurgence of interest in Lukács; perhaps as the Cold War fades into history, it has become possible once again to review his thought on its own merits, rather than implicated in Stalinism. It is the concept of reification above all that has been at the centre of attention, evocatively described the title of Timothy Bewes’s 2002 book as the ‘anxiety of late capitalism.’7 Bewes’s account was followed in 2005 by Axel Honneth’s innovative reinterpretation of the term as an intersubjective pathology rather than a social-structural problem.8 Though Honneth’s version of Lukács has been the target of a great deal of justified criticism, his status as head of the Institut für Sozialforschung (with its own relation to the Western Marxist tradition) meant that his attention helped turn more attention towards reification. Further testament is provided by two stimulating essay collections in 2011 (one edited by Michael Thompson, the other by Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall), another collection by János Kelemen, a thoroughly revised new edition of Andrew Feenberg’s important monograph on Lukács in 2014, and Konstantinos Kavoulakos’s account of the Neo-Kantianism of the young Lukács.9 His thought may not yet be quite as easy to bury as the likes of Marcell Tokody would hope.
But even these sympathetic reappraisals of Lukács’s thought have rarely been willing to endorse the class-focused theory of subjectivity normally attributed to him. His account seems fatally reliant on the unjustifiable assumption that some kind of labouring proletarian subject stands outside society and history, capable in principle of free and spontaneous action that could reshape social relations at will. The same criticisms he made against German Idealist and Romantic thought, it is assumed, can be made against him: he overstates the capacity of this mythological subject to throw off the social structures that restrain it and so liberate humanity.
These criticisms, I will argue, are mistaken. Lukács’s theory does not rely on a subject acting as deus ex machina because he does not in fact treat the relation of subject to objectivity as the interaction of two mutually external entities. Instead, he defines the two as inseparably entangled. His social theory tacitly assumes a notion of intentionality: social practices constitute objects as meaningful by the ways in which they direct subjects towards objects. Subjectivity, then, is defined by these practices. Rather than standing outside reality as an observer, the subject is best understood in terms of a particular manner of relating to it—determined by the formal meaning-structure of that objective world. While Lukács’s account of the unique potential of the proletariat is still unsuccessful, I will argue, it fails in more interesting ways than is normally understood to be the case. Reading Lukács as a phenomenologist of reification in capitalist society, he can provide a rich theoretical model for understanding the determination of different kinds of objective reality by social forms and the possible subjective stances thereto. My aim in this book, therefore, is to offer a comprehensive re-reading of the central essays of History and Class Consciousness on this basis. By doing so, I hope to extend the potential of Lukács’s theory as a whole for understanding our position in society.
1 Romantic Anti-capitalism
Some of the key elements of the social theory of History and Class Consciousness were formed, I will argue, in Lukács’s attempts to write a philosophy of art between 1912 and 1918, while studying in Heidelberg. His explorations of subjectivity and objectivity at this time shaped his later accounts of the same concepts...