Recovering the Later Georg Lukács

New resources for the critique of capitalism in culture from the late writings of Georg Lukács, one of the first authors in the tradition of Western Marxism.

The Hungarian literary critic, philosopher, and Marxist social theorist Georg Lukács is best known for his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, in which he offered an influential critique of reification from the standpoint of a dialectical conception of totality. While Lukács’s early works have been central to the study of Marxist thought, his later works have often been dismissed as political accommodations to Stalinism. In this new study, Matthew Smetona argues for a revisionist interpretation of Lukács’s later writings on topics as diverse as aesthetics, politics, and ontology. 

Smetona demonstrates that these writings reveal a methodological unity that follows directly from History and Class Consciousness, in which realism, in both literary and extraliterary senses, becomes the basis for the critique of reification. As Lukács had demonstrated, reification is that process by which the social relations between persons seem to take on the character of a thing. Rooted in Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, the critique of reification proved, in Lukács’s hands, to be a flexible tool capable of clarifying all manner of obfuscations that arise within the social relations that capitalism produces. To recover the later work of Lukács is to open up new horizons for Marxist cultural criticism.Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1 Essays on Realism 1: 1931-1938 27
2 Essays on Realism 2: 1938-1957 73
3 From Balzac and Stendhal to Tolstoy and Gorky 109
4 The Historical Novel 135
5 On Particularity as the Category of Aesthetics 1 163
6 On Particularity as the Category of Aesthetics 2 187
7 Lenin, Tailism and the Dialectic, and Review Essays 229
8 The Young Hegel 1 267
9 The Young Hegel 2 297
Conclusion: Reading Lukács Today 343
Notes 357
Bibliography 367
Index 371“Shedding valuable light on Lukács’s often-neglected later works and arguing persuasively for the unity of his thought, Smetona’s study is an essential addition to the scholarly literature.”
—Richard Westerman, University of Alberta; author of Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism: Reification Revalued
 
“Through his bold ‘recovery’ of Lukács’s decades of writings on literature, philosophy and politics after History and Class Consciousness, Smetona fundamentally renews our understanding of this key twentieth-century Marxist thinker.”
—Tyrus Miller, University of California, Irvine; author of Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetics, History, Utopia and Modernism and the Frankfurt SchoolMatthew J. Smetona is Associate Professor of Instruction at Temple University. His work centers on critical theory, the history of political thought, and the history of the novel. He is the author of Recovering the Later Georg Lukács: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (MIT Press).