Gyorgy Lukacs
Posted: 30 Jun 2019 20:21
By Vladimir Tismaneanu-February 22, 2017
Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Post-Communist
Remembering Gyorg Lukacs
Against a repressive act of forgetting.
In Hungary there is a removing statue of philosopher Gyorgy (Georg) Lukacs: He was a Marxist and Jewish," so read a
headline in the Hungarian Free a press," with an opening note that this is something one would expect from
the "Nazi Germany in the 1930s but not Budapest in 2017.
Hegelian Marxism and with it the whole tradition of Eastern Europe's critical (humanist, revisionist etc.)
Marxism under attack. I read Georg (Gyorgy) Lukacs when I was 18. I knew from family that he was celebrated
thinker and had served as minister of culture in Imre Nagy's family government, before the Soviet tanks
crushed the Hungarian revolution.
The book I read was a collection of his writings on literature and art translated into Romanian, with a foreword
by N. Tertulian.
As a college student, I read a "History and Consciousness" in the "special fund" of the central University
Library. To do it, I need a recommendation from a professor, the book was considered seditious.
At a certain moment, Lukacs was regarded as the great hope of neo-Kantian philosophy.
His conversion to Marxism resulted in the writing of "Geschichte and Klassenbewussein, published in 1923,
immediately attacked by the Comintern's chairman, the vainglorious Grigory Zinoviev and anathematised for
decades. It is arguably, one of the most significantly influential works in the field of decades.
Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Post-Communist
Remembering Gyorg Lukacs
Against a repressive act of forgetting.
In Hungary there is a removing statue of philosopher Gyorgy (Georg) Lukacs: He was a Marxist and Jewish," so read a
headline in the Hungarian Free a press," with an opening note that this is something one would expect from
the "Nazi Germany in the 1930s but not Budapest in 2017.
Hegelian Marxism and with it the whole tradition of Eastern Europe's critical (humanist, revisionist etc.)
Marxism under attack. I read Georg (Gyorgy) Lukacs when I was 18. I knew from family that he was celebrated
thinker and had served as minister of culture in Imre Nagy's family government, before the Soviet tanks
crushed the Hungarian revolution.
The book I read was a collection of his writings on literature and art translated into Romanian, with a foreword
by N. Tertulian.
As a college student, I read a "History and Consciousness" in the "special fund" of the central University
Library. To do it, I need a recommendation from a professor, the book was considered seditious.
At a certain moment, Lukacs was regarded as the great hope of neo-Kantian philosophy.
His conversion to Marxism resulted in the writing of "Geschichte and Klassenbewussein, published in 1923,
immediately attacked by the Comintern's chairman, the vainglorious Grigory Zinoviev and anathematised for
decades. It is arguably, one of the most significantly influential works in the field of decades.