Georg Lukács

Georg (György) Lukács (b. 13 April 1885–d. 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist of Jewish origin. His work substantially determined the 20th-century theoretical current of Western Marxism. Lukács had a long and often turbulent life due to his constant (not necessarily successful) efforts to unify theory and political practice. Consequently, his intellectual trajectory is marked by important theoretical shifts—a fact that makes it impossible to refer to central themes of his work without simultaneously distinguishing its main periods. There is, of course, a central idea, which permeates his investigations throughout his work. It is the critical analysis of the domination of subjectivism in modern society and culture that causes men’s alienation from their historical reality. One can distinguish three main periods in which Lukács was occupied by this question in different ways and on different levels: Lukács’s early work divided into his early pre-Marxist period, ranging from his young age to his turn to Marxism at the end of 1918, and his early revolutionary Marxist work of the 1920s (the most representative and influential of it being the collection History and Class Consciousness (1923)); his middle Marxist period, from his emigration to Moscow in 1930 to his return to Hungary in 1945; and his later Marxist period (among others, his mature works on aesthetics and social ontology). Lukács’s early (pre-Marxist and Marxist) work substantially influenced intellectuals of the wider tradition of critical theory, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lucien Goldman, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal Jürgen Habermas, Michael Löwy, Andrew Feenberg, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others. His middle and later work had an important impact on his disciples, the members of the Budapest school (Ágnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus, Mihály Vajda). After a period of vivid interest in Lukács in the 1960s and 1970s, a more subterranean process of reception of his work followed. Since 2010 a significant revitalization of the international interest in his work has been observed. At the same time, his works on realist literature are often considered as part of the canon of literary studies. Bibliography of and on Lukács is vast; therefore, its presentation has to be selective. This bibliography emphasizes the general overviews and collective volumes that offer multifaceted analyses of his work. As for the original works and the relevant special secondary literature we prioritize writings published in English.