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"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.
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.
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Aesthetics and Politics (Paperback)
Fredric Jameson; Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, …
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R338
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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.
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.'
GyArgy LukAcs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and
literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought.
"Soul and Form" was his first book, published in 1910, and it
established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic
expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard,
Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques
these thinkers developed, LukAcs laid the groundwork for his later
work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical
and political implications of text.
For this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis
add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which LukAcs wrote
at the time of "Soul and Form," and an introduction by Judith
Butler, which compares LukAcs's key claims to his later work and
subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an
afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the LukAcsian system within
his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of
alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic
form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human
condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form,
the history that form implies, and the historicity that form
embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern
times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born
from lived experience.
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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.
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.""
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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.
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."
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