Lukács before Marx

Georg Lukács (1885-1971) is the one Eastern European critic and philosopher who still commands an audience in the West. In the East, where he must have had a great effect on the formulation of Marxist aesthetics and the concept of realism, he has been relegated into the past as a “revisionist.” Only in Hungary is there a devoted circle of followers still flourishing. His influence in Germany and Italy was and is enormous. In Germany, there is a collected edition of his writings which, still incomplete, runs to twelve stout volumes, and a large, often polemical literature on about every aspect of his wide-ranging work. Theodor Adorno, the most prominent member of the Frankfurt School, although he attacked Lukács strongly, spoke of the “halo” which surrounds his name, due to the writings of his youth: The Soul and the Forms (1911), The Theory of the Novel (1916), and...