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65-600: Lask may refer to: People [ edit ] Emil Lask , (1875-1915) German philosopher Berta Lask , (1878–1967) German writer Louis Jacobsohn-Lask , (1863–1941) German neurologist and neuroanatomist Abraham ben Samuel Cohen of Lask eighteenth century Jewish ascetic J. J. Lask , American writer Places [ edit ] Łask , city in Poland, county seat of Łask County, and seat of Gmina Łask Gmina Łask an administrative division in Łask County Łask County

130-525: A habilitation in Heidelberg, he wrote on 16 December that he had already decided to pursue a political career in Hungary instead. Lukács later wrote that he was persuaded to this course by Béla Kun . The last publication of Lukács' pre-Marxist period was "Bolshevism as a Moral Problem", a rejection of Bolshevism on ethical grounds that he apparently reversed within days. As part of the government of

195-439: A "class for itself". Lukács's theory of class consciousness has been influential within the sociology of knowledge . In his later career, Lukács repudiated the ideas of History and Class Consciousness , in particular the belief in the proletariat as a " subject - object of history" (1960 Postface to French translation). As late as 1925–1926, he still defended these ideas, in an unfinished manuscript, which he called Tailism and

260-542: A Hungarian exile, he remained active on the left wing of Hungarian Communist Party, and was opposed to the Moscow-backed programme of Béla Kun . His "Blum theses" of 1928 called for the overthrow of the counter-revolutionary regime of Admiral Horthy in Hungary by a strategy similar to the Popular Fronts that arose in the 1930s. He advocated a "democratic dictatorship" of the proletariat and peasantry as

325-412: A county in Poland Łask railway station Football teams [ edit ] ŽFK LASK , Serbian first class women's football team LASK Linz , Austrian football club LASK Juniors OÖ, (2014-2018) a syndicated football team combining FC Juniors OÖ and the second team of LASK Linz Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with

390-561: A critic due to his theoretical developments of literary realism and of the novel as a literary genre . In 1919, he was appointed the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919). Lukács has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though assessing his legacy can be difficult as Lukács seemed both to support Stalinism as

455-450: A fellow communist, Victor Serge , and began to develop Leninist ideas in the field of philosophy. His major works in this period were the essays collected in his magnum opus History and Class Consciousness ( Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein , Berlin, 1923). Although these essays display signs of what Vladimir Lenin referred to as " left communism " (with later Leninists calling it " ultra-leftism "), they provided Leninism with

520-404: A historical period. Thus, the so-called eternal " laws " of economics are dismissed as the ideological illusion projected by the current form of objectivity ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §3). He also writes: "It is only when the core of being has showed itself as social becoming, that the being itself can appear as a product, so far unconscious, of human activity, and this activity, in turn, as

585-852: A member of the Hungarian Communist Party , he took part in establishing the new Hungarian government. From 1945 Lukács was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . Between 1945 and 1946 he strongly criticised non-communist philosophers and writers. Lukács has been accused of playing an "administrative" (legal-bureaucratic) role in the removal of independent and non-communist intellectuals such as Béla Hamvas , István Bibó , Lajos Prohászka , and Károly Kerényi from Hungarian academic life. Between 1946 and 1953, many non-communist intellectuals, including Bibó, were imprisoned or forced into menial work or manual labour. Lukács's personal aesthetic and political position on culture

650-472: A new Soviet-aligned communist party. In Lukács's view, the new party could win social leadership only by persuasion instead of force. Lukács envisioned an alliance between the dissident communist Hungarian Revolutionary Youth Party , the revolutionary Hungarian Social Democratic Party and his own Soviet-aligned party as a very junior partner. Following the defeat of the Revolution, Lukács was deported to

715-506: A phantom objectivity. There are two sides to commodity fetishism: "Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their movements on the market) Subjectively – where the market economy has been fully developed – a man's activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article." A man

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780-536: A prize in 1908 because he did not think the jury was fit to judge it. Lukács spent much time in Germany, and studied at the University of Berlin from 1906 to 1907, during which time he made the acquaintance of the philosopher Georg Simmel . Later in 1913 whilst in Heidelberg, he befriended Max Weber , Emil Lask , Ernst Bloch , and Stefan George . The idealist system to which Lukács subscribed at this time

845-584: A salon, the Sunday Circle sponsored cultural events whose participants included literary and musical avant-garde figures, such as Karl Mannheim , the composer Béla Bartók , Béla Balázs , Arnold Hauser , Zoltán Kodály and Karl Polanyi ; some of them also attended the weekly salons. In 1918, the last year of the First World War (1914–1918), the Sunday Circle became divided. They dissolved the salon because of their divergent politics; several of

910-482: A seminal work in literary theory and the theory of genre . The book is a history of the novel as a form, and an investigation into its distinct characteristics. In The Theory of the Novel , he coins the term " transcendental homelessness ", which he defines as the "longing of all souls for the place in which they once belonged, and the 'nostalgia… for utopian perfection, a nostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be

975-633: A substantive philosophical basis. In July 1924, Grigory Zinoviev attacked this book along with the work of Karl Korsch at the Fifth Comintern Congress. In 1925, shortly after Lenin's death, Lukács published in Vienna the short study Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought ( Lenin: Studie über den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken ). In 1925, he published a critical review of Nikolai Bukharin 's manual of historical materialism . As

1040-696: A transitional stage leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat . After Lukács's strategy was condemned by the Comintern , he retreated from active politics into theoretical work. Lukács left Vienna in 1929 first for Berlin, then for Budapest. In 1930, while residing in Budapest, Lukács was summoned to Moscow . This coincided with the signing of a Viennese police order for his expulsion. Leaving their children to attend their studies, Lukács and his wife went to Moscow in March 1930. Soon after his arrival, Lukács

1105-420: A whole. Bourgeois rationalism has no interest in phenomena beyond what is calculable and predictable. Only the proletariat , which has no interest in the maintenance of capitalism, can relate to reality in a practical revolutionary way. When the proletariat becomes aware of its situation as a mere commodity in bourgeois society, it will be able to understand the social mechanism as a whole. The self-knowledge of

1170-404: Is a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie , which functions to prevent the proletariat from attaining consciousness of its revolutionary position. Ideology determines the "form of objectivity ", thus the very structure of knowledge. According to Lukács, real science must attain the "concrete totality" through which only it is possible to think the current form of objectivity as

1235-456: Is an ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat. Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process. According to him, "The premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: 'It is not men's consciousness that determines their existence, but on

1300-426: Is little known, due to his early death, but also because of the decline of neo-Kantianism. His published and some unpublished writings were collected in a three volume edition by his pupil Eugen Herrigel with a notice by Lask's former teacher Rickert in 1923 and 1924. Lask is of interest to philosophers because of his uncompromising attitude and to historians of philosophy because of his influence on György Lukács and

1365-499: Is no longer a specific individual but part of a huge system of production and exchange. He is a mere unit of labour power , an article to be bought and sold according to the laws of the market. The rationalisation of the productive mechanism based on what is and can be calculated extends to all fields, including human consciousness. Legal systems disregard tradition and reduce individuals to juridical units. Division of labour becomes increasingly specialised and particularised, confining

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1430-452: Is not enough that thought should seek to realise itself; reality must also strive towards thought." How does the thought of intellectuals relate to class struggle, if theory is not simply to lag behind history, as it is in Hegel's philosophy of history ("Minerva always comes at the dusk of night...")? Lukács criticises Friedrich Engels 's Anti-Dühring , saying that he "does not even mention

1495-402: Is the central structural problem of capitalist society. The essence of the commodity structure is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing. Society subordinates production entirely to the increase of exchange-value and crystallises relations between human beings in to object-values. The commodity's fundamental nature is concealed: it appears to have autonomy and acquires

1560-550: The First World War , Lukács was exempted from military service. In 1914, he married the Russian political activist Jelena Grabenko. In 1915, Lukács returned to Budapest, where he was the leader of the " Sunday Circle ", an intellectual salon . Its concerns were the cultural themes that arose from the existential works of Dostoyevsky, which thematically aligned with Lukács's interests in his last years at Heidelberg. As

1625-540: The Hungarian Writers' Union in 1955–1956. Tamás Aczél and Tibor Méray (former Secretaries of the Hungarian Writers' Union) both believe that Lukács participated grudgingly, and cite Lukács leaving the presidium and the meeting at the first break as evidence of this reluctance. In 1956, Lukács became a minister of the brief communist revolutionary government led by Imre Nagy , which opposed

1690-686: The Socialist Republic of Romania with the rest of Nagy's government. Unlike Nagy, he avoided execution, albeit narrowly. Due to his role in Nagy's government, he was no longer trusted by the party apparatus. Lukács's followers were indicted for political crimes throughout the 1960s and '70s, and a number fled to the West. Lukács's books The Young Hegel ( Der junge Hegel , Zurich, 1948) and The Destruction of Reason ( Die Zerstörung der Vernunft , Berlin, 1954) have been used to argue that Lukács

1755-474: The Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification , and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx 's theory of class consciousness . He was also a philosopher of Leninism . He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution . Lukács was especially influential as

1820-550: The University of Budapest under the direction of Zsolt Beöthy . Whilst at university in Budapest, Lukács was part of socialist intellectual circles through which he met Ervin Szabó , an anarcho-syndicalist who introduced him to the works of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), the French proponent of revolutionary syndicalism . In that period, Lukács's intellectual perspectives were modernist and anti-positivist . From 1904 to 1908, he

1885-418: The "Grand Hotel Abyss".) Lukács's later literary criticism includes the well-known essay "Kafka or Thomas Mann?", in which Lukács argues for the work of Thomas Mann as a superior attempt to deal with the condition of modernity , and criticises Franz Kafka 's brand of modernism . Lukács steadfastly opposed the formal innovations of modernist writers like Kafka, James Joyce , and Samuel Beckett , preferring

1950-698: The Communist Party until his death in 1971. In his last years, following the uprisings in France and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Lukács became more publicly critical of the Soviet Union and the Hungarian Communist Party. In an interview just before his death, Lukács remarked: Without a genuine general theory of society and its movement, one does not get away from Stalinism. Stalin was a great tactician... But Stalin, unfortunately,

2015-530: The Dialectic. It was not published until 1996 in Hungarian and English in 2000 under the title A Defence of History and Class Consciousness . Lukács argues that methodology is the only thing that distinguishes Marxism : even if all its substantive propositions were rejected, it would remain valid because of its distinctive method: Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of

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2080-559: The Hungarian Communist Party on a new basis. This party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party , was rapidly co-opted by János Kádár after 4 November 1956. During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution , Lukács was present at debates of the anti-party and revolutionary communist Petőfi Society while remaining part of the party apparatus. During the revolution, as mentioned in Budapest Diary, Lukács argued for

2145-485: The Hungarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Lukács was ordered by Kun to remain behind with Ottó Korvin , when the rest of the leadership evacuated. Lukács and Korvin's mission was to clandestinely reorganize the communist movement, but this proved to be impossible. Lukács went into hiding, with the help of photographer Olga Máté . After Korvin's capture in 1919, Lukács fled from Hungary to Vienna. He

2210-457: The Marxist theory of class consciousness - the distinction between the objective situation of a class and that class's subjective awareness of this situation. Lukács proffers a view of a class as an "historical imputed subject ". An empirically existing class can successfully act only when it becomes conscious of its historical situation, i.e. when it transforms from a "class in itself" to

2275-590: The Soviet Union until after the Second World War . During Stalin's Great Purge , Lukács was sent to internal exile in Tashkent for a time, where he and Johannes Becher became friends. Lukács survived the purges of the Great Terror . There is much debate among historians concerning the extent to which Lukács accepted Stalinism at this period. In 1945, Lukács and his wife returned to Hungary. As

2340-469: The Soviet Union. At this time Lukács's daughter led a short-lived party of communist revolutionary youth. Lukács's position on the 1956 revolution was that the Hungarian Communist Party would need to retreat into a coalition government of socialists, and slowly rebuild its credibility with the Hungarian people. While a minister in Nagy's revolutionary government, Lukács also participated in trying to reform

2405-450: The contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.' ...Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity." (§5). In line with Marx's thought, he criticises the individualist bourgeois philosophy of the subject , which founds itself on the voluntary and conscious subject. Against this ideology , he asserts

2470-677: The current of thought that came to be known as " Western Marxism ". At Lukács' direction, there was no reprinting in his lifetime, making it rare and hard to acquire before 1968. Its return to prominence was aided by the social movements of the 1960s. The most important essay in Lukács's book introduces the concept of " reification ". In capitalist societies, human properties, relations and actions are transformed into properties, relations and actions of human-produced things, which become independent of them and govern their life. These human-created things are then imagined to be originally independent of

2535-519: The decisive element of the transformation of being." ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §5) Finally, "orthodoxical Marxism" is not defined as interpretation of Capital as if it were the Bible or an embrace of "marxist thesis", but as fidelity to the "marxist method", dialectics . Drawing from the insights of Max Weber and Georg Simmel and Marx's magnum opus Capital , as well as Hegel 's concept of appearance, Lukács argues that commodity fetishism

2600-500: The embodiment of Marxist thought, and yet also to champion a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism. Lukács was born Löwinger György Bernát in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , to the investment banker József Löwinger (later Szegedi Lukács József; 1855–1928) and his wife Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél; 1860–1917), who were a wealthy Jewish family. He had a brother and sister. He and his family converted to Lutheranism in 1907. His father

2665-453: The human. Moreover, human beings are transformed into thing-like beings that do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. This essay is notable for reconstructing aspects of Marx's theory of alienation before the publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 — the work in which Marx most clearly expounds the theory. Lukács also develops

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2730-406: The individual's productive activity to a narrower and narrower range of skills. As the bourgeoisie plays the dominant role in this system, it is contrary to its own interests to understand the system's transient historical character. Bourgeois consciousness is mystified. Bourgeois philosophy understands only empirical reality or normative ethics; it lacks the cognitive ability to grasp reality as

2795-534: The leading members accompanied Lukács into the Communist Party of Hungary . In the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 , Lukács rethought his ideas. He became a committed Marxist in this period and joined the fledgling Communist Party of Hungary in 1918. Up until at least September 1918, he had intended to emigrate to Germany, but after being rejected from

2860-421: The most vital interaction, namely the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves." This dialectical relation between subject and object is the basis of Lukács's critique of Immanuel Kant 's epistemology , according to which the subject is the exterior, universal and contemplating subject, separated from the object. For Lukács, "ideology"

2925-403: The one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch. Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values. In addition to his standing as a Marxist political thinker, Lukács was an influential literary critic of the twentieth century. His important work in literary criticism began early in his career, with The Theory of the Novel ,

2990-514: The only true reality'". Lukács maintains that "the novel is the necessary epic form of our time." Lukács later repudiated The Theory of the Novel , writing a lengthy introduction that described it as erroneous, but nonetheless containing a "romantic anti-capitalism" which would later develop into Marxism. (This introduction also contains his famous dismissal of Theodor Adorno and others in Western Marxism as having taken up residence in

3055-460: The primacy of social relations. Existence – and thus the world – is the product of human activity; but this can be seen only if the primacy of social process on individual consciousness is accepted. Lukács does not restrain human liberty for sociological determinism : to the contrary, this production of existence is the possibility of praxis . He conceives the problem in the relationship between theory and practice. Lukács quotes Marx's words: "It

3120-411: The proletariat is more than just a perception of the world; it is a historical movement of emancipation, a liberation of humanity from the tyranny of reification. Lukács saw the destruction of society as a proper solution to the "cultural contradiction of the epoch". In 1969 he cited: “Even though my ideas were confused from a theoretical point of view, I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as

3185-422: The results of Marx's investigations. It is not the 'belief' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred' book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. He criticises Marxist revisionism by calling for

3250-402: The return to this Marxist method, which is fundamentally dialectical materialism . Lukács conceives "revisionism" as inherent to the Marxist theory, insofar as dialectical materialism is, according to him, the product of class struggle: For this reason the task of orthodox Marxism, its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and for all, of false tendencies. It

3315-555: The short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic , Lukács was made People's Commissar for Education and Culture (he was deputy to the Commissar for Education Zsigmond Kunfi ). It is said by József Nádass that Lukács was giving a lecture entitled "Old Culture and New Culture" to a packed hall when the republic was proclaimed which was interrupted due to the revolution. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic , Lukács

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3380-440: The title Lask . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lask&oldid=894850224 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Emil Lask Lask

3445-645: The young Martin Heidegger . In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger credited Lask with being the only person to have taken up Edmund Husserl 's investigations "positively from outside the main stream of phenomenological research", pointing to Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1901) as an influence on Lask's Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre (1911) and Die Lehre vom Urteil (1912). Lask's ideas were also influential in Japan, due to Herrigel, who lived and taught there for several years. His sister

3510-624: Was "prevented" from leaving and assigned to work alongside David Riazanov ("in the basement") at the Marx–Engels Institute . Lukács returned to Berlin in 1931 and in 1933 he once again left Berlin for Moscow to attend the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences . During this time, Lukács first came into contact with the unpublished works of the young Marx . Lukács and his wife were not permitted to leave

3575-788: Was a theoretician of the Hungarian version of the red terror . In an article in the Népszava , 15 April 1919, he wrote that "The possession of the power of the state is also a moment for the destruction of the oppressing classes. A moment, we have to use". Lukács later became a commissar of the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army , in which capacity he ordered the execution of eight of his own soldiers in Poroszló , in May 1919, which he later admitted in an interview. After

3640-529: Was always that socialist culture would eventually triumph in terms of quality. He thought it should play out in terms of competing cultures, not by "administrative" measures. In 1948–49, Lukács' position for cultural tolerance was smashed in a "Lukács purge," when Mátyás Rákosi turned his famous salami tactics on the Hungarian Working People's Party . In the mid-1950s, Lukács was reintegrated into party life. The party used him to help purge

3705-439: Was arrested but was saved from extradition due to a group of writers including Thomas and Heinrich Mann . Thomas Mann later based the character Naphta on Lukács in his novel The Magic Mountain . He married his second wife, Gertrúd Bortstieber in 1919 in Vienna, a fellow member of the Hungarian Communist Party . Around the 1920s, while Antonio Gramsci was also in Vienna, though they did not meet each other, Lukács met

3770-591: Was born in Austrian Galicia , as a son of Jewish parents. After completing his philosophical education at Freiburg , he was made lecturer at Heidelberg in 1905, and he was elected professor there just before the outbreak of World War I . When war began in 1914 Lask immediately volunteered. Since, as a Heidelberg professor, he would have been regarded as indispensable on the home front, he did not have to enlist. But, conscientious and idealistic, Lask believed that he had an obligation to serve his country. Lask

3835-458: Was covertly critical of Stalinism as a distortion of Marxism. In this reading, these two works are attempts to reconcile the idealism of Hegelian- dialectics with the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, and position Stalinism as a philosophy of irrationalism . He returned to Budapest in 1957. Lukács publicly abandoned his positions of 1956 and engaged in self-criticism. Having abandoned his earlier positions, Lukács remained loyal to

3900-452: Was intellectually indebted to neo-Kantianism (then the dominant philosophy in German universities) and to Plato , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Søren Kierkegaard , Wilhelm Dilthey , and Fyodor Dostoyevsky . In that period, he published Soul and Form ( Die Seele und die Formen , Berlin, 1911; tr. 1974) and The Theory of the Novel (1916/1920; tr. 1971). After the beginning of

3965-558: Was knighted by the empire and received a baronial title, making Lukács a baron as well through inheritance. As a writer, he published under the names Georg Lukács and György Lukács. Lukács participated in intellectual circles in Budapest , Berlin , Florence and Heidelberg . He received his doctorate in economic and political sciences ( Dr. rer. oec. ) in 1906 from the Royal Hungarian University of Kolozsvár . In 1909, he completed his doctorate in philosophy at

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4030-577: Was made a sergeant and sent to Galicia on the Eastern front, despite a frail constitution and severe myopia—which also meant that he could not shoot, but he still felt obliged to remain at the front. Lask died during the war, not far from the city of his birth, in the Galician Campaign . Wilhelm Windelband refused to request his return to Heidelberg as indispensable to philosophy. Lask was an important and original thinker whose rewarding work

4095-698: Was not a Marxist... The essence of Stalinism lies in placing tactics before strategy, practice above theory... The bureaucracy generated by Stalinism is a tremendous evil. Society is suffocated by it. Everything becomes unreal, nominalistic. People see no design, no strategic aim, and do not move..." Thus Lukács concludes "[w]e must learn to connect the great decisions of popular political power with personal needs, those of individuals. Written between 1919 and 1922 and published in 1923, Lukács's collection of essays History and Class Consciousness contributed to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology , politics and philosophy . With this work, Lukács initiated

4160-539: Was part of a theatre troupe that produced modernist , psychologically realistic plays by Henrik Ibsen , August Strindberg , and Gerhart Hauptmann . Between 1906 and 1909 while in his early twenties, he worked on his 1,000 page A modern dráma fejlődésének története ( English: History of the Development of the Modern Drama ). It was published in Hungary in 1911. He was thrown into despair when it won

4225-445: Was the poet Berta Lask . Gy%C3%B6rgy Luk%C3%A1cs György Lukács (born György Bernát Löwinger ; Hungarian : szegedi Lukács György Bernát ; German : Georg Bernard Baron Lukács von Szegedin ; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher , literary historian , literary critic , and aesthetician . He was one of the founders of Western Marxism , an interpretive tradition that departed from

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