Founder of Western Marxism: the Hungarian thinker who reoriented 20th-century Marxist philosophy with History and Class Consciousness
“Now, after the collapse of actually existing socialism, his questions look like the only surviving form of Marxism.” — from a late-life interview
Hungarian Marxist philosopher who founded Western Marxism with History and Class Consciousness (1923), establishing the concepts of reification and class consciousness. Served as commissar/minister of culture in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic and the 1956 Imre Nagy government.
Career Timeline
- 1902–1906Graduates Budapest law faculty; doctorate in law from Kolozsvár University
- 1909PhD in philosophy from Budapest University with The Form of Drama
- 1912–1918Lives in Heidelberg, studying with Simmel, Weber and Bloch
- 1918Joins the Hungarian Communist Party (KMP)
- 1919.3–8Deputy People's Commissar for Culture; political commissar, Hungarian Red Army
- 1919–1929Exile in Vienna; elected KMP CC General Secretary 1928, removed for right deviation
- 1923Publishes History and Class Consciousness; denounced as revisionist by Comintern
- 1929–1945Resides in Moscow; Marx-Engels Institute and Literary Critic journal
- 1941Arrested by NKVD; released after 2 months on Dimitrov's intervention
- 1942Defends The Young Hegel dissertation, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1945–1958Professor of aesthetics, University of Budapest; member of parliament
- 1956.10–11Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy government; interned in Romania
- 1957–1967Expelled from party; reinstated 1967. The Specificity of the Aesthetic
Related historical events
Reification and Class Consciousness — History and Class Consciousness (1923)
Lukács's major work History and Class Consciousness, a collection of eight essays published in German in 1923, is widely regarded as the founding text of Western Marxism. Expanding Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, Lukács formulated 'reification' (Verdinglichung) as the universal structure of capitalist society: human social relations appear as relations between things, and the products of labor confront their creators as an autonomous 'second nature' governed by its own laws. He argued that reification penetrates far beyond the economic sphere: into law, administration, philosophy, and even the consciousness of the proletariat itself.
Against this, Lukács advanced the method of 'class consciousness' and 'totality.' The proletariat occupies a unique dual position in capitalist society as both subject and object; the moment it grasps its own situation, it can apprehend the truth of the whole. Totality, for Lukács, is not the empirical sum of isolated facts but a dialectical method that mediates between part and whole. He famously declared: 'Orthodox Marxism does not imply uncritical acceptance of Marx's results. It refers exclusively to method.'
The book drew fierce condemnation from the Comintern as 'revisionist,' and Lukács himself later repudiated it publicly. Yet its influence proved immense, shaping the Frankfurt School, Guy Debord's Situationism, and later thinkers from Lucien Goldmann to Slavoj Žižek. A defensive manuscript Lukács wrote in 1925–26, Tailism and the Dialectic, remained unpublished until 1996, revealing that his self-criticism was likely a strategic gesture rather than a genuine retraction.