Recovering the Later Georg Lukács: A Study on the Unity of His Thought

New resources for the critique of capitalism in culture from the late writings of Georg Lukacs, one of the first authors in the tradition of Western Marxism. New resources for the critique of capitalism in culture from the late writings of Georg Lukacs, one of the first authors in the tradition of Western Marxism. The Hungarian literary critic, philosopher, and Marxist social theorist Georg Lukacs 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 Lukacs'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 Lukacs'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 Lukacs 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 Lukacs'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 Lukacs is to open up new horizons for Marxist cultural criticism.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
Matthew 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 Lukacs- A Study on the Unity of His Thought (MIT Press).