György Lukács
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- Died:
- June 4, 1971, Budapest
György Lukács (born April 13, 1885, Budapest, Hungary—died June 4, 1971, Budapest) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who influenced the mainstream of European communist thought during the first half of the 20th century. His major contributions include the formulation of a Marxist system of aesthetics that opposed political control of artists and defended humanism, and an elaboration of the theory of alienation within industrial society originally developed by Karl Marx (1818–83).
Lukács, who was born into a wealthy Jewish family, became a Marxist and in 1918 joined the Hungarian Communist Party. After the overthrow of the short-lived Hungarian communist regime of Kun Béla in 1919, in which Lukács served as commissar for culture and education, he moved to Vienna, where he remained for 10 years. He edited the review Kommunismus and was a member of the Hungarian underground movement. During this period he wrote History and Class Consciousness (1923), in which he developed a unique Marxist philosophy of history and laid the basis for his critical literary tenets by linking the development of form in art with the history of the class struggle. Turning his back on the claims of Marxism to be a strictly scientific analysis of social and economic change, Lukács recast it as a philosophical worldview. Strikingly, he held that, even if all of Marx’s predictions were false, Marxism still would retain its validity as a perspective on life and culture. In his later critiques of literature, Lukács showed himself partial to the great bourgeois realist novelists of the 19th century, a preference that was denounced by proponents of the prevailing official doctrine of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union.
Except for a brief period in 1930–31, during which he attended the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, Lukács lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933. In 1933 he once again left Berlin for Moscow to attend the Institute of Philosophy. In 1945 he moved back to Hungary, where he became a member of parliament and a professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of culture at the University of Budapest. In 1956 he was a major figure in the Hungarian uprising, serving as minister of culture during the revolt. He was arrested and deported to Romania but was allowed to return to Budapest in 1957. Although stripped of his former power and status, he produced a steady output of critical and philosophical works. Lukács wrote more than 30 books and hundreds of essays. Among his works are Soul and Form (1911), a collection of essays that established his reputation as a critic; The Historical Novel (1955); and books on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx and Marxism, and aesthetics.
