No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface. It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marxs thought. This circumstance led Lukacs, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegels intellectual development are examined: "Hegels early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegels views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and " The Phenomenology of Mind."" Lukacs completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work."

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The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since. Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers. Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Lukacs, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jir?i Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, Joao Pedro Stedile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi. New Left Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base ever since. In fifty years of publication, it has won an international reputation as an independent journal of socialist politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every part of the world. A Spanish-language edition is published bi-monthly from Madrid.

A classic of Western Marxism, The Destruction of Reason is Georg Lukacs's trenchant criticism of German philosophy after Marx and the role it played in the rise of National Socialism. Originally published in 1952, the book is a sustained and detailed polemic against post-Hegelian German philosophy and sociology from Kierkegaard to Heidegger. The Destruction of Reason is unsparing in its contention that with almost no exceptions, the post-Hegelian tradition prepared the ground fascist thought. In this, the main culprits are Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger who are accused, in turn, of introducing irrationalism into social and philosophical thought, pronounced antagonism to the idea of progress in history, an aristocratic view of the "masses," and, consequently, hostility to socialism, which in its classic expressions are movements for popular democracy-especially, but not exclusively, the expropriation of most private property in terms of material production. The Destruction of Reason remains one of Lukacs's most controversial, albeit little read, books. This new edition, featuring an historical introduction by Enzo Traverso, will finally see this classic come back in to print.

The essays in this book - on Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph Eichendorff, Georg Buchner and Heinrich Heine, and on the novelists Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe and Theodor Fontane - were mostly written between 1936 and 1944, when Lukacs was in exile in Moscow. After the literary polemics of the earlier thirties, Lukacs increasingly turned to the literature he knew and loved best - the German classics and 19th century realists. His defence of realism against the crude simplicities of "socialist realism" and against all didactic literature, is implicit and occasionally explicit, throughout these studies. Lukacs appears in this volume as a literary historian, ready to make illuminating comparisons between Kleist and Schiller, Buchner and Shakespeare, Heine and Balzac, Keller and Tolstoy, Raabe and Dickens, or Fontane and Thackeray. He appears as a critic whose discussions and assessments of indivudual works, whether plays, novels, short stories or poems, are enlivened by the exploration of the relations betwen historical period, style and aesthetic form, which runs through all his literary work.

Lukacs explores problems of consciousness and organization, drawing on Luxemburg and Lenin. "When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the existing social order," Marx declares, "it does no more than disclose the secret of its own existence, for it is the effective dissolution of that order." ..theory is essentially the intellectual expression of the revolutionary process itself. In it every stage of the process becomes fixed so that it may be generalised, communicated, utilised and developed. Because the theory does nothing but arrest and make conscious each necessary step, it becomes at the same time the necessary premise of the following one -

With a new introduction by Dr Gary Day, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK An argument for literary realism as opposed to modernism, contrasting Mann and Kafka. The book also argues for socialist as opposed to critical realism in literature.

A great 20th century literary critic discusses the 19th century European novel.

In an essay of prophetic vision, Lukacs defines a critical realism: 'anyone who wants to become more intimately acquainted with the prehistory of the important ideologies of the nineteen-] twenties and thirties ... will be helped by a critical reading of this book.'

Out of the chaos following Lenin's death and the mounting fury against Lukacs and his freshly penned History and Class Consciousness (1923), this book bears an assessment of Lenin as "the only theoretical equal to Marx." Lukacs shows, with unprecedented clarity, how Lenin's historical interventions-from his vanguard politics and repurposing of the state to his detection of a new, imperialist stage of capitalism-advanced the conjunction of theory and practice, class consciousness and class struggle. A postscript from 1967 reflects on how this picture of Lenin, which both shattered failed Marxism and preserved certain prejudices of its day, became even more inspirational after the oppressions of Stalin. Lukacs's study remains indispensable to an understanding of the contemporary significance of Lenin's life and work.

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface.It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx's thought. This circumstance led Lukacs, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel's intellectual development are examined: "Hegel's early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegel's views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and The Phenomenology of Mind." Lukacs completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work.

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This is the first time one of the most important of Lukacs' early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923, has been made available in English. The book consists of a series of essays treating, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of Historic Marxism, class consciousness, and the substantiation and consciousness of the Proletariat.Writing in 1968, on the occasion of the appearance of his collected works, Lukacs evaluated the influence of this book as follows: "For the historical effect of History and Class Consciousness and also for the actuality of the present time one problem is of decisive importance: alienation, which is here treated for the first time since Marx as the central question of a revolutionary critique of capitalism, and whose historical as well as methodological origins are deeply rooted in Hegelian dialectic. It goes without saying that the problem was omnipresent. A few years after History and Class Consciousness was published, it was moved into the focus of philosophical discussion by Heidegger in his Being and Time, a place which it maintains to this day largely as a result of the position occupied by Sartre and his followers. The philologic question raised by L. Goldmann, who considered Heidegger's work partly as a polemic reply to my (admittedly unnamed) work, need not be discussed here. It suffices today to say that the problem was in the air, particularly if we analyze its background in detail in order to clarify its effect, the mixture of Marxist and Existentialist thought processes, which prevailed especially in France immediately after the Second World War. In this connection priorities, influences, and so on are not particularly significant. What is important is that the alienation of man was recognized and appreciated as the central problem of the time in which we live, by bourgeois as well as proletarian, by politically rightist and leftist thinkers. Thus, History and Class Consciousness exerted a profound effect in the circles of the youthful intelligentsia."George Lichtheim, also in 1968, writes that ..".The originality of the early Lukacs lay in the assertion that the totality of history could be apprehended by adopting a particular 'class standpoint': that of the proletariat. Class consciousness;not indeed the empirical consciousness of the actual proletariat, which was hopelessly entangled with the surface aspects of objective reality, but an ideal-typical consciousness proper to a class which radically negates the existing order of reality: that was the formula which had made it possible for the Lukacs of 1923 to unify theory and practice.""

In the fall of 1960, during a three-month visit to Hungary, Arthur Kahn unsuccessfully asked his hosts to arrange a meeting with Gyorgy Lukacs, a persona non grata to the Communist regime. Kahn arranged to meet Lukacs on his own and proposed translating some Lukacs essays never before appearing in English. During the three years Kahn worked on the translations, he and Lukacs engaged in a voluminous correspondence, investigating Marxism as it applied to contemporary events like the Vietnam war. Extracts from this correspondence will be included in a forthcoming volume of Kahns' autobiography, "The Education of a 20th Century Political Animal."

In the mid 1920s Lukacs wrote a sustained and passionate response to Stalin's onslaught on his earlier seminal work History and Class Consciousness. Unpublished at the time, Lukacs himself thought that the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukacs's oeuvre.

This revealing autobiography of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs is centered on a series of interviews that he gave in 1969 and 1971, shortly before his death on 4 June 1971. Stimulated by the sympathetic yet incisive questioning of the interviewer, the Hungarian essayist Istvan Eoersi, Lukacs discusses at length the course of his life, his years of political struggle, and his formation and role as a Marxist intellectual. From a highly evocative account of his childhood and school years, Lukacs proceeds to discuss his political awakening; the debates within the socialist movement over the First World War form the prelude to an assessment of Tactics and Ethics, written in 1919; from there the discussion turns to Lukacs's early major contribution to Marxist philosophy, History and Class Consciousness. After considering at length the years of emigration in Vienna and the Soviet Union, Lukacs finally recalls his return to Hungary after the Second World War, and his new position as a revolutionary left critic of actually existing socialism. "By socialist democracy," he wrote in 1970, "I understand democracy in ordinary life, as it appears in the Workers' Soviets of 1871, 1905 and 1917, as it once existed in the socialist countries, and in which form it must be re-animated." This Record of a Life, which includes an introduction by Istvan Eoersi, furnishes a compelling tribute to a remarkable man.

The articles and essays collected in this book were written during the decade of Lukacs's life when he was most active in politics. The first texts mark his transition from an anti-bourgeois aestheticism to Marxism and the newly founded Hungarian Communist Party. They are followed by material which displays the full range of his activity and thought during the subsequent ten years. Some of these essays were written when Lukacs was deputy commissar of education in the embattled, short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Others include the famous article on parliamentarianism which earned its author the respectful yet severe criticism of Lenin.
The volume includes short studies on German revisionism, Bukharin's Marxism, and Karl Wittfogel, and longer pieces on Lassalle and Moses Hess. The collection ends with the theses Luckas wrote, under his cover name "Blum," in opposition to the policies of the Third Period of the Comintern.