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György
Lukács
(1885-1971)
b. Budapest, Hungrary History and Class Consciousness Totality,
Realism Hegel, Marx, Adorno/ Frankfurt
School e.g. Istvan Meszaros, Guy Debord
One of the few exiles before the
war to head to the Soviet Union |
Lukács
is well known for placing the concept of totality at the heart of Marx’s
system. For Lukács, orthodox marxism was characterised not by anyone of
Marx’s own conclusions, but by the methodological centrality of the concept or
method of totality. In history and Class Conciousness, Lukács argued
that totality was the crucial form of the revolutionary class subjects
objective identity with historical progress; for Lukács, class was the subject
and object of knowledge. His concern for holistic modes of thinking however
dates back to well before his engagement with Marxism. In 1909 Lukács wrote to
Thomas Mann (the reknowned German novelist) praising him for showing the
objective interconnectedness of thingas. However, there are also strong
polemics that discuss how things merge into one, and how the very nature of
life defeats the attempt to know it as a total whole. As Martin Jay( 1984
pp.14) has pointed out, Lukács is on
the face of it wrong to distinguish Marxism from Bourgeois thought by its
adoption of point of view of totality because non-marxian non-radical holistic
theories have been developed. As the defining feature of Marxian thought, the
totality failed to bear up to scrutiny. This is a serious problem for a
critique that had as its underlying premise “the belief that in Marx’s theory
and method the true method by which to understand soceity and history
has finaly been discovered” (pp xliii H&CC) The particular union between
society and history and class and objective knowledge that Lukács seeks to
perfect underlies his particular formulation that the ‘pre-eminent aim’ of
Marxist method is ‘knowledge of
the present’ (ibid.)
However,
Lukcas had a large influence upon the development of western though, remaining
one of the cornerstones of historical
(“[Marx’s] method is historical through and through”), humanist and
hegelian Marxisms developing in the Western world through the C20th.
It
is worthwhile dwelling on the preliminary remarks Lukács makes in his 1922
Preface concerning Marx’s relation to Hegel. He quotes Marx’s correspondence
with Engels on the bad treatment of Hegel as a dead dog, and of the failure of
serious thinkers to engage with Hegel. He also however quotes Marx’s last
comment on the role of the hegelian dialectic in Das Kaptial, i.e. Marx’s
‘flirtation’ with Hegel’s mode of expression. For Lukcas:
“This
has freqeuntly misled people into believing that for Marx the dialectic was no
more than a superficial stylistic ornament”….”they failed to notice that a
whole series of catergories of central importance and in constant use stem
directly from Hegel’s logic” ( pp xliv). The mentioned categories are here
those of mediation and immediacy. Lukács approving quotes Lenin that “all good
marxists should form”…”a kind of society of the materialist friends of the
Hegelian dialectic”. (xlv). After this Lukcas goes on to make a series of
curious statements. Marx’s system being coherent must be preserved. The
Hegelian system is the reverse of this, and thus cannot be maintained in its
total integrity, it belongs to the past. Lukcas seeks to rescue Hegel’s ‘vital
intellectual force’ yet the ‘dead architecure of the system’ must be
demolished, ‘release the modern sides of his though’ and resussiate them as a
‘effective force for the present’.
What
then is this vital force? Clearly it is the force of dialectic, it is a form of
understanding. Yet there is something more to it, in Lukcas there is an
intimate connection between history and consciousness…a quasi hegelian
unity…which is brought together in a historical subjectivty, in class. This
passage is worth quoting at length:
“The
dialectical method is distinguished from bourgeois thought not only by the fact
that it alone can lead to knowledge of totality; it is also significant that
such knowledge is only attainable because the relationship between parts and
whole has become fundamentally different from what it is in htouh based on the
categories of reflection. In brief, from this point of view, the essence of the
dialectical methid lies in the fact that in every aspect correctly graped by
the dialectic the whole totlaity is comphrehened and that the whole method can
be unravelled from every single aspect. It is has often been claimed – and not
without a certain justification – that the famous chapter in Hegel’s Logic
treating of Being, Non-Being and Becoming contains the whole of his philosophy.
It might be claimed with perhaps equal justification that the chapter dealing
with the fetish character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of
historical materialism and the whole self-knowledge of the proletariat seen as
the knowledge of captialisit society (and of the societies that preceded it).
Obviously,
this should not be taken to mean that the whole of history with its teeming
abudance should be thought of as being superfluous. Quite the reverse. Hegel’s
programme: to see the abolsute, the goal of his philosophy, as a result remains
valid for Marxism with its very different objects of knowledge, and is seen to
be identical with the course of history. The theoretical point we are anxious
to emphasise here is merely thje structural fact that the single aspect is not
a sefment of a mechanical totality that could be put together out of such
segments, for this would lead us to see knowledge a s an infinite progression.
It must e seen instead as containing the possibility of unraveeling the whole
abundance of the totality from within itsef. But this in turn can only be done
if the aspect is seen as aspect, i.e. as a point of transition to the totality;
if every movement beyond the immediacy that had made the aspect and apsect of
the dialectical process (whereas before it had been nothing more than the
evident contradiction of two categoriesof thought) is not to freeze one more in
a new rigidity and a new immediacy.” (pp.
170 H&CC)
In
H&CC Lukacs propounds the idea that objectification and alienation were one
and the same process. Yet after reading Marx’s economic and philosphical
manuscripts in 1930, he saw there argued that ‘objectivity was the pimary
material attribute of all things and relations’...’ objectification is a
natural means by which man masters the world and as such it can be either a
positive or a negative fact.’ ‘By contrast, alienation is a special variant of
that activity that becomes operative in definite social conditions’ – it
shattered the central point of his work. As such the contradictions of Hegel
repeat themselves in Lukacs.
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Resources Biographical |
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Georg Lukacs Archive –
contains texts of H&CC and the Young Hegel http://www.othervoices.org/blevee/lukacs.html |
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Bibliography Secondary |
History and Class Consciousness The meaning of contemporary
realism The ontology of social being The historical novel Jay,
Martin." The Concept of Totality in Lukacs and Adorno." Telos (Summer 1977), 32:117-137.
Reprinted in Shlomo Avineri, ed., Varieties
of Marxism,
pp. 147-174. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1976. In Marshall Berman’s adventures
in Marxism, there is an essay which describes the re-discovery of Lukacs in
60s America. |
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