Reception history of Georg Lukács | Philosophical new readings

The Marxist philosopher and literary scholar Georg Lukács in his apartment, Budapest 1969. Photo: picture alliance / akg-images / Károly Forgács The dominance of critical theory in this country and in Western countries in general has made an appropriate reception of Georg Lukács, the classic of Marxist philosophy, very difficult. Adorno's verdict against the supposedly conformist dogmatist still plays an inglorious role today. The controversial interest that his best-known work, History and Class Consciousness, aroused among the rebellious students of 1968 undoubtedly put the damage into perspective and secured him a better place in Marxist memory. Against the marginalization of Lukács, the International Georg Lukács Society (IGLG), which is celebrating its 30th birthday this year, wants to draw attention to his status as - alongside Gramsci - the most important practical philosopher, as is already the case in Latin America.

The fruit and component of these efforts is the 20th anthology of the IGLG: “Lukács Works Volume 3.2,” which was published a few months ago. It collects contributions from the years 2024/25. A special feature of the IGLG publications is that there is no ad hoc academic association behind them, but rather a lively, ongoing dialogue community that has existed for three decades and offers every Lukács researcher a cross-generational and cross-national discussion platform.

The book brings together contributions from 17 Lukács researchers from different countries. The broad thematic diversity and the different academic styles of the contributions make for stimulating reading. The author and editor Rüdiger Dannemann succeeds very well in keeping the curiosity of the reader interested in Marxism alive throughout the 300 pages. Roughly speaking, three strands can be distinguished in the anthology: new philosophical readings, a dossier on the year 1923 and its afterlife surrounding the event in 1968, and reports on reception under conditions of persecution.

The three strands are preceded by Rüdiger Dannemann's introduction. His opening of the volume offers a diagnosis of the times, according to which the threat of fascisation and the expansion of the logic of war (and the reality of war) of our time make a return to the Hungarian philosopher's concepts about the nature of capitalism and its distortions sorely necessary. The analysis of the current situation is followed by an inventory of the international theoretical literature on Lukács' work, before a text by Lukács himself begins the actual discussion.

This text is the foreword to the groundbreaking monograph “Everyday Life” by Lukács’ student and later important Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller. Lukács wrote it in the penultimate year of his life. The preface is based on the relationship between part and whole, between the “particularity” of the individual and the “genericity” of the human being. This is a topic that equally preoccupied 20th-century philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre, movements such as the International 1968 and finally the Marxist-feminist debate about the relationship between private and public.

The text addresses the question of whether everyday life should be the subject of philosophy and answers it positively. At the same time, beyond the boundaries of philosophy, it inevitably arouses in the reader thoughts about the life we ​​lead: Does the de facto capitalistically organized life allow for the collective - and to what extent does this succeed in opening up cracks in the capitalist world?

Can the insights of Marxist philosophy be translated into meaningful organized action?

The style of the posts meets a wide range of preferences. The philosophically versed reader will discover contributions that courageously do not “take Lukács at his word” when it comes to his self-critical statements about his early work. One is also reminded of Louis Althusser, who called on readers to reconstruct the texts beyond the announced intentions of their authors - that is, systematically.

On the one hand, this first strand of the anthology texts contains contributions that agree in their intention to counteract the idea of ​​an apparent discontinuity in Lukács's work with its continuous core. Konstantinos Kavoulakos' contribution examines, among other things, the philosopher's conception of history and establishes an understanding of history as "becoming," as a "dialectically structured process of the emergence of the new," both in the young Lukács of "History and Class Consciousness" and in the late Lukács of "Ontology."

Similarly, Matthew J. Smetona reads Lukács's late work, particularly the realist writings often dismissed as Stalinist adaptations, as a continuation of “History and Class Consciousness.” This is all about the criticism of reification from the standpoint of dialectical totality. On the other hand, there are contributions that critically examine Lukács' terms or apply them to new objects.

Daniel Göcht considers the working concept of “ontology” to be too focused on purpose-setting consciousness; Spyridon Potamias reads Arnold Schönberg's music with the categories of "history and class consciousness", and Konstantin Baehrens reports on the "Lukács Marathon" as part of the Historical Materialism Conference 2023 in Athens - organized by Mariana Teixeira and Victor Strazzeri - in which the book was re-read essay by essay by ten researchers from seven countries.

The demanding work of the conceptual anatomists is complemented by a no less complex but intellectually more accessible journey through the “Janus-faced” Weimar period around 1923 and its afterlife around 1968. These contributions can be found in the second half of the volume in the “Dossier: Sattelzeit – 100 years of “History and Class Consciousness”, which emerged from a conference on the 100th anniversary of the work in 2023.

In his introduction, Patrick Eiden-Offe, co-organizer of that conference, describes 1923 as the “saddle time of the revolution,” in which cultural awakening and political defeat coincided. In their contributions, Caroline Adler and Sophia Buck show how Walter Benjamin Lukács read “against Lukács,” while Morten Nissen as well as Eva Heubach and Philipp Weber confront him with Carl Schmitt and Sigmund Freud. Amália Kerekes reconstructs the context in which the book was created at Malik Verlag. Last but not least, Moritz Neuffer and Johanna-Charlotte Horst follow his afterlife around 1968 with Karl Korsch and Georges Perec.

The volume concludes thematically with a review of the reception of Lukács under conditions of persecution. On the one hand, it is about the efforts of the Spanish Marxists who were expelled to Mexico during the Franco dictatorship and, according to Diego Fernando Correa Castañeda, translated Lukács' work from exile and disseminated it in Spain during the dictatorship. Even in Colombia it could only be read in secret. On the other hand, Hassan Maarfi Poor traces the Iranian reception of Lukács under the Shah and in the Islamic Republic; The readings are contested among persecuted communists, academic liberals and actors close to the regime.

The last pages are dedicated to the memory of the Marxist philosopher Erich Hahn, who was chairman of the Scientific Council for Marxist-Leninist Philosophy in the GDR until 1989 and who died in the summer of 2025. Rüdiger Dannemann outlines Hahn's connection to the IGLG since the end of the 1990s and the expected reluctance of society given the GDR official's political background.

Hahn had long been hostile to Lukács; In 1956, he and like-minded people even briefly considered going to Budapest to confront the "counter-revolution" there. In the late 1990s, however, he first discovered “ontology” and then “history and class consciousness” and made a philosophical new beginning. He understood Lukács' development as a constant learning process towards the recovery of original Marxism.

When asked, editor Rüdiger Dannemann wrote to the author: "It is to be hoped that Lukács' theory of reification will be further developed into an effective contemporary diagnosis of our brave new digital world." Ultimately, the question arises as to whether Lukács' philosophy, but also Marxist philosophy as a whole, can still make a contribution to the critical analysis of today's capitalism 100 years later - and whether their insights can be translated into meaningful organized action.

As for the latter, it can be said that History and Class Consciousness was written in complex philosophical language and aimed to overcome the bourgeois philosophy of its time by criticizing the reified relations that the capitalist commodity economy inevitably produces. Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, Lukács wanted to end the work with an essay on the question of organization.

With us, no one has to pay to be informed. Sounds like a bad business model? It is too. But independent journalism and participation for everyone are more important to us than profit. Journalism still costs money: research, printing and all the people who do it. That's why we depend on you. We need 300,000 euros by the end of the year.

Donate once or regularly, every amount counts. So that nd remains.