Georg Lukacs: Life, Thought, and Politics

Georg Lukacs, (1885-1971) was one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century and arguably the most original and profound thinker ever to have worked within the Marxian tradition. This is his biography. The author has drawn upon all Lukacs’s writings, from the dramas of his youth to his major works in political and literary theory, and made use of archive material to which few Western scholars have had broad access. Lukacs stood at the epicentre of almost every major historical event of the turbulent 20th century, from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the Hungarian uprising and its aftermath in 1956. He was both a philosopher and an actor. In striving to imbue the power to Communism with dignity in its thought and with tolerance in its realization he suffered both exile and persecution, goading the powerful into attacking him at the very moment he achieved world wide recognition as a philosopher of the first rank. His final realization that the attempt to achieve a Communist utopia had been a moral disaster has by no means diminished the value of his interpretation of the interactions between politics, culture and moral philosophy.