Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Born in Budapest of a prominent banking family, Georg Lukács was among the most influential, if not always the most beloved, Marxist philosophers and social theorists of the twentieth century. His book of essays History and Class Consciousness (1971: HCC ) ranks as a major contribution to Marxism, albeit of a distinctly unorthodox kind. And, adopting some of Weber's key concepts, especially the notion of the ideal type, he made huge contributions to the sociology of literature. An outstanding scholar of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, as well as the nineteenth and twentieth-century realist novels of Balzac, Scott, Dickens, Mann, and Solzhenitsyn, he was, at the same time, one of the twentieth century's outstanding public intellectuals. He served as a minister of culture and education in two different Hungarian communist governments – that of the short-lived revolutionary regime of 1919 and the reform government of Imre Nagy in 1956. He was a leading figure in German and Hungarian intellectual life after the publication of his first book, Soul and Form (1974), when he was 26 years old and his widely read Theory of the Novel (1973), which earned him a European-wide reputation in the years prior to World War I. In 1912 Lukács became a member of Max Weber's Sunday Circle in Heidelberg. The circle included the historian Karl Polanyi and, important for Lukács's future development, Georg ... log in or subscribe to read full text