The Lukacs Reader
Georg Lukacs was a Marxist-humanist?and a bourgeois romantic who once added "von" to his name. The romantic never died, and the Marxist was always unorthodox. That helps to explain why he is rivaled now only by Ernst Bloch as a Marxist worthy to be saved from the rubble of the political hopes of his fellow believers. This collection of essays emphasizes the romantic. It includes an early essay in which Lukacs compares the strangest of his own love affairs with Kierkegaard's, as well as essays on Strindberg, Ibsen, Wilde, and Shaw. There is an essay on Nietzsche that starts sympathetically and ends nastily with a portrait of Nietzsche as determined to destroy socialism and a serious but destructive essay on Heidegger. Two essays examine Marxist topics. One asks bluntly if good can be achieved through tyranny. The answer is "no." The second explores class consciousness and urges the proletariat to critical self-reflection. The balance could be better, but this book does bring together work still worth reading and conveys the curious concatenations of Lukacs's mind. General readers with a taste for ideas will find almost all of it readable.?Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa, OntarioCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.