Aesthetic Culture

Born Bernát György Löwinger into an assimilated, affluent home in Budapest, Georg Lukács was part of a family that became Hungarian nobility in 1899 (hence his Magyarized family name). Studying in Kolozsvár and Budapest, and later in Berlin and Heidelberg, where he was influenced by Georg Simmel and Max Weber, Lukács began to develop a complex philosophical and sociological account of modernity and the modern novel and drama before World War I that was shaped by both German idealist and proto-existentialist ideas. Active in Budapest’s famed Sunday Circle, which brought together the leading lights of Hungarian culture during World War I, Lukács moved toward communism and, in 1919, participated in Béla Kun’s short-lived communist-socialist regime in Hungary. Fleeing to Berlin after the Hungarian nationalist-rightist counterrevolution, Lukács wrote his first mature work of Marxist thought, History and Class Consciousness (1923), which extended Marxist accounts of capitalism and exploitation into a general theory of how capitalist social relations deform all aspects of human life and thought through effects of alienation that drive us to relate to others and to ourselves as objects. By the 1930s and thereafter, Lukács became a kind of house philosopher of Soviet Communism, first in Stalin’s Soviet Union and then in postwar communist Hungary. Although some readers believe they can find subtle departures from Stalinism in his late works, Lukács actively helped enforce Stalinist orthodoxy in Soviet and Hungarian intellectual life throughout the forty year period of his life in the Eastern Bloc.