num_pages: 219
description: The philosophical and political development that converted Georg Luk�cs from a distinguished representative of Central European aesthetic vitalism into a major Marxist theorist and Communist militant has long remained an enigma. In this absorbing scholarly study, Michael L�wy for the first time traces and explains the extraordinary mutation that occurred in Luk�cs's thought between 1909 and 1929. Utilizing many as yet unpublished sources, L�wy meticulously reconstructs the complex itinerary of Luk�cs's thinking as he gradually moved towards his decisive encounter with Bolshevism. The religious convictions of the early Luk�cs, the peculiar spell exercised on him and on Max Weber by Dostoyevskyan images of pre-revolutionary Russia, the nature of his friendships with Ernst Bloch and Thomas Mann, are amongst the discoveries of the book. Then, in a fascinating case-study in the sociology of ideas, L�wy shows how the same philosophical problematic of Lebensphilosophie dominated the intelligentsias of both Germany and Hungary in the pre-war period, yet how the different configurations of social forces in each country bent its political destiny into opposite directions. The famous works produced by Luk�cs during and after the Hungarian Commune- Tactics and Ethics, History and Class Consciousness and Lenin -are analysed and assessed. A concluding chapter discusses Luk�cs's eventual ambiguous settlement with Stalinism in the thirties, and its coda of renewed radicalism in the final years of his life.
language: English
title: Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism
titlecomplete: Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism
genres: Philosophy, Theory, Biography, History
ratings_count: 13
publisher: NLB