TheCriticalThoughtofGyrgyLukcs

TheCriticalThoughtofGyrgyLukcs

byMihailoMarkovi

Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:1/1986,pages:8294,onwww.ceeol.com.

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THE CRITICAL THOUGHT OF GYRGY LUKCS

Mihailo Markovi Gyrgy Lukcs belongs to the most authentic, original and creative Marxist thinkers in the Twentieth Century. Being authentically Marxist means being praxis-oriented, being engaged in changing the world, which, to be sure, involves a rich network of theoretical mediations from building the most abstract methodological and anthropological grounds to elaborating the most specific projects for radically restructuring individual societies and communities. However, for a theory to be praxis-oriented means first of all that it must be critical. Social structures, political institutions, patterns of social behavior, the world of culture cannot be regarded as given objects for detached contemplation, impartial description, value-free analysis and explanation, or mere understanding. The entire social world, including that part of nature which has been transformed into our immediate environment, must be seen as a human product; therefore, as a phase of history, an incomplete work that both fulfills and frustrates human aspirations. Alongside these forms of life that are indispensable for any meaningful human future, there are also glaring limitations which cripple the best human efforts, that cause continuing human suffering, and which therefore await being overcome. In that sense of dialectical Aufhebung, Lukcs is a first-rate critical thinker. 1. The Historical Conditions of Lukcs Work However, it must be immediately emphasized that the epoch in which Lukcs reached maturity and produced his life-work was essentially different from the one which ended in 1917. For Marx and Engels, for Labriola, Kautsky, Plekhanov, and even for Luxemburg and Lenin, it was still possible to believe that critique was only one of the mediating links between a negative reality and the ideal project of a radically emancipated humankind. It was possible for them to assume a unilinear dialectic of history that, in the long run, allowed only the progressive resolution of contradictions (Aufhebung). They could assume that economic laws existed which relentlessly led to the breakdown of capitalism and the emergence of a classless society. Under the pressure of increasing exploitation and oppression the proletariat had to acquire revolutionary consciousness and to make the decisive step from the class in itself to the class for itself. The party of the working class, the most articulated expression of its revolutionary consciousness and will, guaranteed not only that the class rule of the bourgeoisie would effectively be over-thrown but also that the transitionary form of the dictatorship of the proletariat would as quickly as possible give way to a new self-governing democracy to a federation of associations of Redigitized 2004 by Central and Eastern European Online Library C.E.E.O.L. ( www.ceeol.com )

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immediate producers. A relentless criticism of all existing reality, as Marx put it, had to bring to consciousness what existed in itself as a real possibility of the movement of history. Such criticism had to raise consciousness to a high level, understanding the historical process in its totality, and to provide the necessary theoretical guidance for action. Philosophy had to be the head of the revolution; without the realization of philosophy the transcendence of the proletariat as propertyless, oppressed, alienated class would not be possible. In contrast to his positivistic followers and his own occasional attacks on moralism, Marx emphasized the role of ethical principles. Very early he formulated the categorical imperative of his entire emancipatory project: abolition of all those social relations in which human beings are oppressed, abandoned and despised beings. Such an ethical imperative provided the basic standard of critical evaluation. It was supposed to direct existing mediating forces, but not to act as an abstract ought for human energies that spontaneously strove in completely different directions. When Bloch, Korsch and Lukcs appeared as critical thinkers on the world-historical scene, bourgeois society was still ugly, reified, fragmented and dominated by a tremendous amount of alienated economic and political power. Communism as projected by Marx still appeared as a most attractive ideal but mediating forces hardly existed. The Weltgeist fell asleep or forgot its emancipatory end. Revolutions failed in Germany, Finland, Hungary and Bulgaria. Right-wing social democrats undertook to stabilize capitalist society. In United States, the October revolution sounded the signal for the beginning of a wholesale destruction of all socialist forces. Most disturbing of all, the Russian revolution passed its own Thermidorian reaction, involving the massacre of almost the entire revolutionary leadership, eventually ending up in an authoritarian bureaucratic society which indeed destroyed private property and socially promoted large segments of the working class but, from the point of view of human emancipation, bore hardly any resemblance to the Marxian project. In the West, capitalism managed to survive the crisis of the 30s, and entered an age of consumerism and welfare which effectively blocked any rise of revolutionary consciousness. With the collapse of all mediating forces, Marxist critical thought found itself in a rarified atmosphere. With communist parties aspiring and clinging to power, hostile to confused intellectuals who pathetically tried to remind them of their great emancipatory tasks, with trade unions struggling for small improvements within the capitalist framework, with workers increasingly coopted into the consumer society, with third world radical movements struggling for basic preconditions of industrialization and urbanization, it may have appeared that appeals to a normative, moral consciousness remained the only mediating link between reality and the ideal. Both Bloch and Lukcs were well aware of the weaknesses of a purely moralist position, of merely preaching what ought to be done in a situation when people, for all kinds of reasons, were not motivated to do it. Bloch came up with a radical solution in this new situation. Great emancipatory values

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could be kept alive as a part of a spirit of utopia which could not die simply because it did not prescribe anything for here and now, but rather sustained a hope that historical conditions might be created under which those values could be implemented. Lukcs, a more contradictory and, to some extent, even a split personality, adopted a dualistic position. On the one hand, one finds in his work dramatic, passionate appeals to ought which to some extent could be attributed to the influence of his friends, the great Hungarian writers Endre Ady and Bla Balzs. For Ady, Either this faith of ours turns into reality, or bereft of reason we are doomed to the last. The way Lukcs writes about Balzs is most characteristic. He sees in Balzss work the triumph of dramatic decisions over opportunistic accommodation, the triumph of living in the spirit of either-or over the philosophy of one could have it both ways.1 But the truth is that while he was passionately longing to live in the spirit of either-or, and he ventured to live that way several times (which almost cost him his life), most of the other time he lived the life of both ways. Ought was ideologically construed as if, at least to some extent, it already was, ideals were translated into end-products of already existing trends, organizations, institutions; daily struggles were rationalized and idealized in order to make personal participation in them meaningful. 2. Phases in Lukcs Critical Activity As every truly radical intellectual in our age, Lukcs was a tragic personality. The hiatus between the optimal historical possibility of human emancipation to which he committed himself and a retarded reality which refused to become reasonable and emancipated was so huge that one had either to perish in the incessant clashes with the establishment of one kind or the other (like Gramsci and many old Bolsheviks), despair and withdraw (like Karl Korsch), or adapt, be cunning and cautious, in the attempt to survive. Lukcs combined the first and the third. He took all the risks in the two revolutionary situations in which he found himself (in 1918 and 1956), and each time barely survived. For the rest of the time, in the situations which clearly were not revolutionary, he tended towards conformity, in order to remain in the working class movement. And yet, no matter how different the various phases of his life, there remained an invariant structure to his thought: a radical critique of the bourgeois reality and culture of his time, and more specifically a radical critique of German philosophy and literature. He fell sway to many significant intellectual influences: Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Emil Lask, Ervin Szab, Georges Sorel, Heinrich Rickert and Max Weber. But the really decisive influence was that of Hegel and Marx. This is why he treats the society of his time as a totality, interprets cultural phenomena in the context of history, focuses on the antinomies of bourgeois thought and searches for the possibilities of a radical transcendence (Aufhebung). Although Lukcs came from a rich Jewish family (his father was the director of the Hungarian General Credit Bank in Budapest), from his early

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youth he remained, from his early youth, critical of the conservatism and bureaucratic inertia of Hungarian society. In this early stage of his intellectual development, Lukcs concentrated on literary criticism. In 1906-7 he wrote his first large work, The History of the Development of Modern Drama,2 in 1908 he completed The Soul and its Forms,3 worked on his Aesthetics in 1911-14 (which he did not finish nor publish) and one year later wrote his Theory of the Novel.4 The main problem Lukcs wrestled with in this early period was fragmentation, subjectivity and partiality, which he sought, yet never succeeded to overcome. He writes in The Soul and its Forms: Human knowledge is a psychological nihilism. We see a thousand relations, yet never grasp a genuine connection. The landscapes of our soul exist nowhere, yet in them every tree and every flower is concrete.5 The way he writes about Kassners style is characteristic. He says: Kassner sees synthesis only, as it were, with his eyes closed in the realm of values. But honesty immediately compels him to look at them again and once more they are separated, isolated, without air. The oscillation between these two poles determines Kassners style.6 Lukcs deals in those essays with partial problems and sets out to find concrete solutions to them; he writes, therefore, in an essayistic form without any general theme, ending up in frustration. The concreteness of the trees and flowers devoid of landscape is a meaningless concreteness, and a synthesis is not possible in the realm of values. Therefore, he longs for an objective totality and this longing will remain his basic philosophical concern for the rest of his intellectual life. He looks again for synthesis in The Theory of the Novel but does not find it. The works analyzed here are only pillars of an intellectual construction without real structure. Lukcs himself referred to this work as a six-legged monster.7 The objective totality was not to be found, and he passed through a deep personal crisis. The October Revolution seemed to offer that objective totality he aspired to: The unified party the expression of the unified will of the unified proletariat the practical objectification of the logos of history. The Hungarian revolution of 1918 is the crucial event with which the second phase of his critical thought begins. He is extremely pessimistic at the beginning of the World War. He anticipates the destruction of the great empires in Central and Eastern Europe: Austrian, German and Russian. But he is sceptical about the superficial empiricism and liberalism of the West, and desperately asks the question Who will save us from Western Civilization? Back from Heidelberg in Budapest he found a discussion circle (the Sunday Circle, with Bla Balzs, Bla Fogarasi, Karl Mannheim and others). In 1917 the group offered a series of public lectures within the framework of what they called Free School of the Sciences of the Spirit. Lukcs greeted the October Revolution with enthusiasm, joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918, and played a leading role in this Hungarian revolution. He was a member of the Central Committee, the Minister of Education and Political Commissar of the 5th Division of the Hungarian Red Army. After the collapse of the Hungarian revolution, Lukcs lived in exile in Vienna. There he wrote his

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most important philosophical work, History and Class Consciousness. The rest of his time was taken up by political activity, as a member of the more liberal Landler fraction of the Hungarian Communist Party in exile. The years from 1918 to 1928 constitute the period of Lukcs most intensive and coherent critical activity. The direct participation in a revolution as a form of practical criticism of a stagnant, conservative, anachronic society gave way to a deeper and more general critical inquiry of the crisis of bourgeois society and of the antinomies of its thought.8 This again led in the period 1923-28 to a concrete political critique of dogmatism in the Hungarian workers movement, in order to politically prepare for another revolutionary attempt. Lukcs philosophical critique of capitalism is humanistically founded, thus the basic limitation of bourgeois society is traced to reification.9 In extremely rationalized and mechanized society with specialized production and an exchange of commodities, both object and subject became fragmented. Human beings are reduced to mechanical parts incorporated into a mechanical system and all human activity whether in the field of economy or politics and law or culture and everyday life becomes calculative, subordinated to fixed heteronomous rules, measured by purely quantitative criteria. A brilliant example of a philosophical critique of culture is his examination of the basic contradictions implicit in bourgeois thought, those between form and content, object and subject, fact and value, individual and community. At the same time, Lukcs fought an already existing and increasingly influential antihumanist tendency within Marxism. In 1925, he published a severe critique of mechanistic determinism in Bukharins book on historical materialism10 a courageous move considering that Bukharin at that time was the leading theoretician of the Russian Bolshevik Party and of the Third International. The main target of his political criticism in Hungarian Party was the dogmatism and secretarianism of Bla Kun, the leader of the unsuccessful Hungarian revolution. In the Blum Theses, a programmatic text prepared by Lukcs for the 1928 Congress of the Hungarian Party,11 he offers the perspective of an alliance between all the anti-totalitarian forces struggling for a democratic republic in Hungary. These theses anticipated the Peoples front strategy which were defeated, mainly owing to the intervention of the Executive of the Communist International. They were labelled a replacement of the Lenins theory of proletarian revolution by a half-social democratic liquidationist theory. This event marks another turning point in Lukcs critical activity. Condemned for his philosophical humanism (which was labelled idealism) and for his political commitment to the struggle for democratization, which was characterized as the betrayal of true revolutionary goals, he turned to pure philosophy which would be more materialistic, more in line with Lenin. In 1929 Lukcs moved to Moscow, to the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. With an exception of two years he spent in Berlin (1931-33), he stayed in Moscow until the end of World War Two. He did not publish much mostly articles which conformed to the very severe ideological conditions of the growing Stalinization. But he completed a major work, The Young Hegel,

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published in 1948.12 Through a critique of Hegel he settled accounts with his own philosophical youth. The will to adapt turned into the will to believe that his earlier writings were much less valuable than they really were. However, a bright spot in his critical activity during this period was his struggle together with Mikhail Lifshitz against the literary secretarianism of the Proletcult, and against a Zhdanovist version of socialist realism. A new period begins in 1945, when Lukcs returned to Budapest. He became a member of the Hungarian parliament, holder of a chair in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture at Budapest University, and a member of the Presidium of the Hungarian Academy of Science. He could now publish whatever he liked and did publish much. He sought to fight on two fronts. On the one hand, as a Marxist philosopher in a peoples democracy with very limited socialist cultural forces, he launched an attack on bourgeois philosophy, on existentialism,13 on the degenerate irrationalist 19th century German idealism,14 on modernistic art.15 On the other hand, especially before 1949, he raised the issue of democracy in culture (in Hungarian Intellectuals and Democracy 1945, Cultural Problems of the Hungarian Democracy, The Crisis of Democracy or its Right wing Critique, Democracy and culture, all published in 1946). He was savagely attacked in 1949, in connection with Rajks trial, but emerged on the move again after Stalins death. In 1956, he was very active in the Petfy Circle, presiding over the philosophy debate in the Circle on June 15. On October 24, 1956 he became a member of the enlarged Central Committee of the Party and Minister of culture in Imre Nagys government. After the Soviet military intervention, Lukcs took refuge, together with Nagy, in the Yugoslav embassy. As soon as he left the embassy he was arrested and deported to Romania (while Nagy was shot). The last period of Lukcs work begins with his return from deportation to Budapest on April 10th, 1957. He wrote his two monumental works: Aesthetics in two volumes on which he worked from 1957 to 196216 and Ontology of Social Being, which he was not able to complete.17 These are not polemical or explicitly critical works, although in a sense we did not consider here, all theory is implicitly critical with respect to other theories. However, it is to Lukcss credit that even after the major political showdown with Stalinism, which nearly cost him his life, he continued to occassionally take a sharp critical position toward Stalinism. Two examples are a Postscript that he wrote in 1957 for an Italian edition of My Road to Marxism,18 and an open letter to Alberto Carocci, editor of Nuovi Argomenti.19 He also strongly protested against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslavakia in 1968. After that he expressed his critique of political bureaucracy and called for destabilization in a series of interviews and articles.20 But he also rejoined the party in his 84th year, two years before his death. To the end of his life Gyrgy Lukcs avoided either-or as much as he could. He had it both ways. He is now celebrated both by truly independent radical critical thinkers and by the official establishment of his home country. The former admire his originality, creativity, enormous erudition, complete dedication to his great intellectual projects, his occassional extraordinary boldness which carried him beyond the borders of the possible or permitted

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by the existing powers. They also deplore his occassional falls and take him as one of the drastic examples of what primitive despotism and the Untertan mentality can do to one of the greatest minds of our century. On the other hand, the official establishment does everything to coopt him. A Lukcs monument was erected in Budapest recently, an exhibition opened, a conference organized to celebrate him, in which exclusively loyal scholars and party functionaries were scheduled to give long papers about him, and in which no discussion whatsoever was allowed. The story presented was of a long journey through the mists of idealistic petty-bourgeois confusion until eventually, owing to his coming to Moscow, he saw the light and became a real Leninist, who inspite of occasional deviations stayed the course to the end. The truth is that Lukcs deserves both treatments. 3. Characteristic Limitations of Lukcs Critical Thought In the following critical analysis of Lukcs thought I shall compare him with Ernst Bloch, his peer, opponent and ally, whose Hundredth birthday was also celebrated recently. First, inspite of all his continuing concern for the ought and the ethical grounds of critique, Lukcs always searched for a deterministic view of history, for a dialectical necessity of the totality of historical process, which would involve a transcendence of capitalism. When such necessity is made conscious and understood a decisive step occurs in the historical process toward its proper end. That is what Lukcs wrote in History and Class Consciousness: The facts no longer appear strange when they are comprehended in their coherent reality, in the relation of all partial aspects of their inherent but hitherto unelucidated roots in the whole: we then perceive the tendencies which strive towards the centre of reality, to what we will call the ultimate goal. This ultimate goal is not an abstract ideal opposed to the process, but an aspect of truth and reality. It is the concrete meaning of each stage reached out an integral fact of the concrete moment. Because of this, to comprehend it is to recognize the direction taken (unconsciously) by events and tendencies towards the totality . . . The total process is the emancipation of the proletariat.21 The basic thesis here is obviously that reality itself tends towards this emancipation of the proletariat. Facts can only be properly understood against this inherent tendency in the objective historical process. More than four decades later in Ontology of Social Being, Lukcs elaborates the view that inspite of all that happens to individuals at the phenomenal level, there is an objective dialectic of economic processes, which have an ontologically immanent intention towards the humanization of men in the broadest sense. Economic laws that run beyond the will of any individual man, produce and reproduce social man at an ever higher level. Lukcs says that this contention is in itself completely value-free and it only emphasises the simple fact of existence.23 The form of a value-free ontology only makes worse the tendency towards historical determinism which stems from Marx, and which is one of the most

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vulnerable elements of Marxs theory. In this respect, Blochs treatment of possibility as the basic modal category of a philosophy of history better serves the needs of a contemporary Marxist critical theory. Once we stop reifying society, the proletariat and the Party as collective subject-object entities., above and beyond the individuals that constitute them, once we stop projecting individual preferences into ontological laws, history must be seen as a process in which nothing in the future is inevitable and guaranteed, a process in which at every juncture there are open alternative possibilities, the realization of which depend on free and creative, and therefore, unpredictable human practice. Second, a favorite target of Lukcss critique is utopian consciousness. He searches for objective knowledge, for truth. This is understandable. A critical theory that intends to contribute to real social change must be seriously concerned about all available knowledge. There is, however, a tendency in Lukcs to reduce theory to knowledge, and revolutionary consciousness to self-knowledge. Again in a deterministic sense the faith is expressed that truth must eventually win. Lukcs liked to paraphraze Zola: La verit est lentemant en marche et la fin des fins rien ne larretera. (Truth is slowly on the move and at the end of all ends nothing will stop it).23 But of course if there is no social inevitability there is no certainty. Blochs principle of hope expressed well this non-cognitive, passionate dimension of revolutionary consciousness. Commitment to humanization, autonomy, geniune community, creativity short of any guarantees for their realization cannot but have a utopian character. In that sense and precisely to the extent to which he acted as a revolutionary, Lukcs himself was utopian. Third, Lukcs believed that true critical practical activity was possible only within an organization, or at least that one could not successfully participate in a struggle for workers liberation, for democracy, or against fascism outside of an organized political movement. The element of truth in this attitude is, of course, that within organizations ideas have a chance of becoming material forces, and that only organizations and movements have the energy necessary to practically restructure social institutions. The question however is, first, what kind of organization are we speaking of and, second, is it a real dilemma that one has to either cling to an organization at any cost or be condemned to a solitary, passive existence. As to the first, Lukcs must have gradually learnt that the Stalinist parties to which he belonged were distorting beyond recognition the great revolutionary goals to which he was committed. He was rudely attacked, insulted, humiliated, compelled to renounce his best convictions, arrested in 1941 in Moscow, deported in 1956 from Budapest to Romania he barely escaped death at the hands of comrades. Nothing affected his almost religious loyalty. This leads us to the second question concerning the possible alternatives to acting as an organization man. Lukcs explanation of his strange attitude was that staying in the Party was the entry ticket to continuing political activity, and for participation in the struggle against fascism. It is, of course, true that joining the Hungarian Communist Party in December 1918 offered him the opportunity to participate and lead in a genuine socialist revolution. After the

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failure of this revolution and his escape to Vienna, he remained politically active until 1929. Once he was defeated and forced to publicly recant, his career as a political personality in the organization was over. It is not at all clear that staying in the Party all those subsequent decades gave him a chance to contribute to the cause of socialism, more than, say, by educating young people, writing in mass media, and of course publishing important books, all of which were done by Bloch, Goldmann, Marcuse, Fromm, Lfbvre, E. P. Thompson, Miliband and other independent critical thinkers. Fourth, and the final point of difference between Bloch and Lukcs. More than any other contemporary critical thinker, Bloch conveyed a sense of enormous human dignity which was theoretically articulated in his idea of staying upright. Indeed, dignity is as important to a critical thinker as his reason, the passion of his convictions and his civil courage. All relevant and especially radical criticism, criticism that challenges the entire human condition in a society, is regarded as subversive by governing powers. There is hardly one single Marxist critical thinker, whether in the East or in the West, who was not at least once been insulted and expelled from his own Party and who did not lose friends, family, job, motherland and in some cases life itself. (For example, most Soviet philosophers criticized by Mitin on Stalins orders in 1931, perished in the purges 1936-38). Lukcs found himself under a devastating onslaught three times. In the year of Lenins death, 1924, soon after the appearance of History and Class Consciousness (the book was attacked first by his former supporter Lszl Rudas, then by Bukharin and Zinoview). Zinoview, at that time the general secretary of the Komintern, finished with Korsch and Lukcs two most brilliant Marxist minds of that time in the following simple way: If a few more of those professors come and dish out their Marxist theories, our cause will be in a bad shape. We can not allow theoretical revisionism of this kind to go unpunished in our Communist International.24 In 1929, the political platform for the Second Congress of the Hungarian Communist Party that was prepared by Lukcs in the name of the more flexible and democratically minded Landler faction, was viciously attacked by the sectarian group of Bela Kun (who enjoyed the support of Zinoview). Lukcs was labelled an opportunist and a liquidator who should be expelled from the party. This was the end of Lukcs5 political career. The third attack came after the few years of feverish activity after his return to Hungry in 1945. 1949 was the year of the cominformist pressures on Yugoslavia, the preparation for Rajks trial, militant Stalinist offensive on the cultural front in all peoples democracies. Two volumes of essays published by Lukcs (Literature and Democracy and For a New Hungarian Culture) were viciously attacked by his old friend Rudas, who accused him of revisionism, right-wing deviationism, cosmopolitism, of having insulted Lenin, of being objectively a servant of imperialism. Then came Fadeyevs attack in Pravda, which threatened severe punishment. These are all well known facts; the reason I mention them here is to permit the following two questions: First: Did the critical thought of Lukcs, or of Bloch, Kosik, Kolakowski,

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the Yugoslav journal Praxis, Lukcs younger followers from the Budapest school, really effectively, damage the cause of socialism and thus provoke some understandable and justifiable self-defense measures from the ideological establishment in all the affected countries? Second: What should the proper response of critical intellectuals be to such repression? The answer to the first question is simple and brief. As a rule, the victims of ideological repression are precisely those critical intellectuals who have offered the most creative contributions to contemporary Marxist socialist theory. Their crime is that they keep the spirit alive, that they remind former revolutionary activists of the meaning of their original project. They serve as the conscience of the order which emerged, rigid and ossified, out of a promising revolutionary movement. The usurpers of power who are invariably extremely successful in producing bad conscience among intellectuals and in ideologically manipulating the rest of the population, look at those few critical intellectuals with growing apprehension: at least they surely understand what is going on in the society. Spreading that understanding would undermine the system, since it rests on false pretenses. That is why a critical thinker must sooner or later face the following options: either continue to walk upright no matter what, or one of the following three variants: 1) pretending that one does not see what one sees, 2) escaping into abstractions, which the man in the street will not be able to understand, 3) making self-criticism from time to time. This leads us to the discussion of the second question. Lukcs survived by combining all three variants of the second strategy. He pretended not to see what he must have seen, maybe better than anybody else. As late as 1967, he mentioned that he agreed with Stalin about the necessity for socialism in one country.25 How could he still believe that what had emerged in USSR was socialism? He withdrew after 1929 and again after 1957 into a world of abstract philosophy: The Young Hegel, Aesthetics, Ontology of social being. This is clearly the most reasonable alternative to boldly continuing ones work no matter what. Unfortunately, Lukcs also kept making quite humiliating self-criticisms. The first time was after the failure of the Blum Theses. Four decades later he said I was indeed firmly convinced that I was in the right, but I knew also from the fate that had befallen Karl Korsch that to be expelled from the Party meant that it would no longer be possible to participate actively in the struggle against Fascism.26 The second self-criticism was published in 1949. The third, and in a way worst of all, appeared in 1968: It was a preface to the new edition of History and Class Consciousness. This time it was a self-criticism in advance, before the book was even republished after a long interval of forty five years. Lukcs obviously felt that it was a price that had to be paid for the reappearance of his greatest work. It is a sad thing to have to defend from its own author this extraordinary book, one of the most original philosophical works in this century. It is simply

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not true that the work lacks any genuine economic foundation, that the conception of praxis in the book is idealistic, that the category of totality is a source of confusion, that the concept of alienation is treated in purely Hegelian terms, that the entire book is based on mistaken assumptions.27 To the praise that has followed his work since it first appeared, let me add only one: the analysis of political reification in modern bureaucratic states not only fills a gap in Marxist theory but constitutes one of the major contributions to twentieth century political philosophy. It was depressing to read Lukcs words in 1968: I sincerely did believe that History and Class Consciousness was mistaken and I think that to this day.28 We can no longer help Gyrgy Lukcs, neither by passing harsh moral judgments on him nor by defending him. It is perhaps also irrelevant to discuss to what extent his self-critical statements are purely tactical devises for reducing hostility toward him, or to what extent they are rationalizations of expressions of a will to believe what was in his interest. The more one knows about Lukcs personality, the more one begins to understand the nature of the basic duality in his thought. It seems (especially on the basis of the revelations of Agnes Heller, written on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of her teacher) that in Lukcs the man, a very fundamental characteristic of entire modern culture was reflected. This is the tendency to separate knowledge and morality. In interpersonal relations, Lukcs seemed to be a cold, cerebral man interested exclusively in the intellectual capacities and achievements of his colleagues and students. Their emotional, moral and other life problems did not at all interest him: he avoided any emotional contact with even the closest of people. Friends were ideological allies, pupils were knights selected to spread the true ideas of the master. Lukcs behaved as if he were the objectification of the Absolute Spirit. But this spirit was pure reason, logos, without emotion, without moral passion. It is very revealing that while he assumed that many young people were intellectually gifted, he never assumed that people had the capacity for being moral. Disloyalty, even betrayal by friends and his closest pupils did not really bother him. But when someone passed a moral test, he would consider that an extraordinary event, a miracle, a true gift. His entire life was extremely limited, ascetic, poor in needs, entirely dedicated to intellectual work. More and more it becomes clear that if one, in the name of rationality and objectivity, disregards morality and isolates it from knowledge (which is very characteristic of the entire epoch of modernity); if one believes that knowledge itself will eventually emancipate people and secure progress, and that therefore the most important spiritual work is spreading truth (conceived in a purely rational way), then one becomes less sensitive about morality and more ready to play all kinds of tricks with the establishment in order to survive and make it possible for the truth to continue its march. It would also be interesting to establish, although I cannot enter into this here, to what extent Lukcs was under influence of his friend (and opponent on the issue of expressionism) Brecht. Brecht defended the view that those

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individuals who were the carriers of knowledge had a special task and responsibility all to themselves to survive. In the play Galileo and in the stories about Herr Keuner, this view was spelled out. It is of course not at all clear whether a heroic, upright Lukcs would at all have survived the Thirties, once he made the dangerous decision to go and live under Stalin. Then, all those books from The Young Hegel to Aesthetics and Social Ontology of Labor would not have been written, and the Budapest school, composed of his students from the Fifties, would probably not be what it is. However, I should like to emphasize another dimension of this problem. Galileo could renounce his teachings about the movement of celestial bodies without affecting either the meaning or the truth of his theories. It is different with the statements of a critical humanist theory. An essential part of the meaning of those statements is that they project a potential human behavior in an ideal human community. What characterizes this potential human behavior is, among other things: sincerity, integrity, reliability, courage and dignity. The point here is that a critical thinker does not persuade his audience by producing syllogisms, or by deriving his statements from ever higher and more general principles. That the projected possibility really exists, he must demonstrate in his own praxis. The unity of theory and praxis does not consist in the fact that what one person says the other will practically bring to life. It consists, on the contrary, in the fact that one lives ones philosophy, that ones own practical behavior demonstrates the existence of the possibility one speaks about. And this is where Lukcs failed. His socialist project could be realized only if millions of people were to risk whatever established existence they had (and usually nowadays this existence involves having more than just chains). In order to decide to take such a risk, these people must believe not only that there is in principle a better, more human alternative in comparison with the situation in which they find themselves, but also that the kind of people that the new, more human world requires do really exist. That is why the failure of a critical humanist thinker to live according to the ethical demands which are implicit in his theoretical projects is utterly self-destructive. His ideas may exert great intellectual influence, his works may remain lasting contributions to human knowledge; but they will not be able to spark noble motives, to inspire people to take bold ethical choices. And in that case, the true name of the brave new world will at best be gulag socialism.

NOTES
1 Istvan Mszros, Lukcs Concept of Dialectics, London: The Merlin Press, 1972, p. 125-6. 2 A modern drma fejldsnek trtnete (History of the Development of Modem Drama), 2 vols., Budapest: Franklin 1911. 3 Lukcs, Die Seele und die Formen, Berlin: Egon Fleischel & Co., 1911. (A llek s a formak, Budapest: Franklin, 1910). 4 Die Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch ber die Formen der grossen Epik. Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1920. 5 Die Seele und die Formen, p. 189 (The Theory of the Novel, London: Merlin Press, 1971).

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6 Op. dt., p. 54. 7 I. Mszros, p. 50. 8 History and Class Consciousness, London: The Merlin Press, 1971 (Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1923). 9 Op. dt., Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, pp. 83-223. 10 N, Bucharin: Theorie des historischen Materialismus (Archiv fr die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1925). 11 Blum: Declaration (j Mrcius), 1929. 12 Der junge Hegel. ber die Beziehungen von Dialektik und konomie, Zrich & Wien: Europe Verlag, 1948. 13 Existentialisme ou marxisme, Paris: Nagel, 1948. 14 Die Zerstrung der Vernunft, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1954. 15 Essays ber Realismus, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag 1948; Deutsche Realisten der 19 Jahr hunderts, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1948; Balzac und der franzsische Realismus, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1952; Der russische Realismus in der Weltliteratur, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag 1952; Probleme des Realismus, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955. 16 Die Eigenart des sthetischen, Werke Bd. 11 & 12, Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963. 17 Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins. Hegels falsche und echte Ontologie, Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971. 18 La mia via al marxismo: Postscriptum 1957, Nuovi Argomenti, 1958. 19 Lettera a Alberto Carocci, Nuovi Argomenti, 1962. 20 Gesprche mit Georg Lukcs, Hans Heinz Holz, Leo Kofler, Wolfgang Abendroth, ed. by Theo Pinkus, Reinback: Rowohlt, 1967; An Interview with G. Lukcs: On his life and work, New Left Review, London, 1971. 21 What is orthodox Marxism, History and Class Consciousness, p. 23. 22 The Ontology of Social Being, 3. Labour, London: The Merlin Press, 1980, pp. 85-88. 23 Postscriptum 1957 zu Mein Weg zu Marx (Georg Lukcs, Schriften zur Ideologie und Politik, Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand, 1967, p. 657). 24 Ibid, p. 720-721. 25 Preface to the new edition, History and Class Consciousness, p. xxviii. 26 Ibid, p. xxx. 27 Ibid, p. xxxvii. 28 Ibid, p. xxxviii.

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