Orthodox Marxism
"History and Class Consciousness" is influential and the work for which Lukács is best known. Lukács' pronouncements in "What is Orthodox Marxism?" have become famous. "History and Class Consciousness" helped to create Western Marxism in Europe and the United States and influenced the sociologist Karl Mannheim's work on the sociology of knowledge. However, it led to Lukács being condemned in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In response to the Communist attack on his work, Lukács wrote an essay on the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin's views ("Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought", 1924). In his later career, Lukács repudiated the ideas of "History and Class Consciousness", in particular the belief in the proletariat as a "subject-object of history". As late as 1925-1926, he still defended these ideas, in an unfinished manuscript, which he called "Tailism and the Dialectic." It was not published until 1996 in Hungarian. It appeared in English in 2000 under the title "A Defence of History and Class Consciousness".