Lukács: Philosoph eines Jahrhunderts

György Lukács is an intellectual ‘heavyweight’ of that century which, since Eric Hobsbawm, we have called a short one, although the years from 1900 to 1914 and from 1989 to 2000 do not fit into the picture of a century that was defined by war and civil war, by ideological trench warfare, by the Shoah and the Gulag, by the Cold War and decolonisation, by new art forms and media. With his early books The Soul and the Forms and his Theory of the Novel, he made an enduring contribution to aesthetic modernity; with History and Class Consciousness, his first work in the footsteps of Hegel and Marx, he made a pioneering attempt to place Marxism on philosophical feet and, like Antonio Gramsci or Karl Korsch, to correct the theoretically non-ambitious, Darwinian-influenced Marxism of the last quarter of the 19th century. It is seen in this essay as a work of discontinuity in continuity.