Book Description
Georg Lukÿcs was dubbed "the philosopher of the October Revolution" and his masterpiece History and Class Consciousness (1923) is commonly held to be the foundational text for the tradition known as "Western Marxism" which includes the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. However, as the liberating energies of the Russian Revolution were sapped by Stalinism, Lukÿcs was subjected to ferocious attack for "deviations" from the "party line". In the mid-1920s, Lukÿcs wrote a sustained and passionate response to this onslaught. Unpublished at the time, Lukÿcs himself thought the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now, for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukÿcs's oeuvre.
About the author
Georg Lukács was born in Hungary in 1885 and died there in 1971. A leading communist militant and a foremost Marxist philosopher, he was also, in 1919 and 1956, a government minister. His other books include History and Class Consciousness, The Historical Novel, Political Writings, Record of A Life, and Lenin.
