Search results for ""Author Georg Lukács""

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 -

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

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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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Georg Lukacs most recent work of literary criticism, on the Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, hails the Russian author as a major force in redirecting socialist realism toward the level it once occupied in the 1920s when Soviet writers portrayed the turbulent transition to socialist society.In the first essay Lukacs compares the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to short pieces by "bourgeois" writers Conrad and Hemingway and explains the nature of Solzhenitsyns criticism of the Stalinist period implied in the situation, characters, and their interaction. He also briefly describes Matrionas House, An Incident at the Kretchetovka Station, and For the Good of the Cause -- stories that depict various aspects of life in Stalinist Russia.In the second, longer section, Lukacs greets Solzhenitsyns novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward, which were published outside Russia, as representing "a new high point in contemporary world literature." These books mark Solzhenitsyn as heir to the best tendencies in postrevolutionary socialist realism and to the literary tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Moreover, from the point of view of the development of the novel, Lukacs finds the Russian author to be a successful exponent of innovative methods originating in Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain.The central problem of contemporary socialist realism is a predominant theme in the book: how to come to critical terms with the legacy of Stalin. The enthusiasm with which Lukacs acclaims Solzhenitsyn will not surprise those who have followed his persistent refusal to endorse the so-called socialist realist writers of the Stalinist era. He outlines the aspects of Solzhenitsyns creative method that allows him to cross the ideological boudaries of the Stalinist tradition, yet he finds a basic pessimism in Solzhenitsyns work that makes him a "plebeian" rather than a socialist writer.Of Ivan Denisovich and the future of socialist realist literature, Lukacs urges: "If socialist writers were to reflect upon their task, if they were again to feel an artistic responsibiliity towards the great problems of the present, powerful forces could be unleashed leading in the direction of relevant socialist literature. In this process of transformation and renewal, which signifies an abrupt departure from the socialist realism of the Stalin era, the role of landmark on the road to the future falls to Solzhenitsyns story."

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A classic of Western Marxism, The Destruction of Reason is Georg Lukács'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 Martín 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 Lukács'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.

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History and Class Consciousness was the most important of Georg Lukács's early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923. The subject of high praise and passionate criticism, it had a major impact on all the Marxist debates that followed, introducing key new concepts such as 'totality', 'reification' and 'imputed class consciousness'. This centenary edition, with a new preface by Michael Löwy, comprises a series of essays exploring, 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, and the substantiation and consciousness of the proletariat. This classic book has influenced many key philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Adorno, Debord, Heidegger, Lefebvre, Merleau-Ponty and Zizek, and it can lay claim to being one of the cornerstones of contemporary thought.

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Gyorgy 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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