Last Rites
In these writings concerned with his thoughts and beliefs rather than his life per se, the great twentieth-century historian touches on two major themes of his interpretive (and imaginative) A Thread of Years (1997) and At the End of an Age (2002). One is that the modern (or, more properly, Lukacs says, the bourgeois) age is over; its great intellectual construction, liberalism, exhausted. The other, more important, is that history as knowledge is personal and participant. Objective history is impossible, Lukacs maintains, for each person, including the historian and the thinker (lofty or humble) about history, is enmeshed in human relations and has particular perspectives on events. But those philosophical convictions do not monopolize Lukacs here. Vast and public as well as personal matters, including the connections of physics and history, Lukacs’ situation as a man of two nations (Hungary and America), Churchill (the subject of his most famous histories), and in the lovely, musical last chapter, his three wives, also fall within the purview of his thoughtful, measured prose. --Ray Olson