Agnes Heller

Works

• 1970Everyday Life

  Everyday life is the sum of activities by which individuals reproduce themselves and society; humanising it is the task of a socialist transformation.

• 1987Beyond Justice

  Examines the concepts of justice from Plato to modern theories and argues that the good life lies beyond justice, though it presupposes it.

Position

Heller started from a humanist reading of Marx prepared by Lukács. In “Everyday Life” (1970) she analysed the everyday as the sphere in which individuals reproduce themselves and society; in “The Theory of Need in Marx” (1974/76) she argued that capitalism produces “radical needs” it cannot satisfy. With Fehér and Márkus she described Soviet-type societies in “Dictatorship over Needs” (1983) as a social formation of their own, neither socialist nor capitalist. In exile she moved away from Marxism: in “Beyond Justice” (1987), in a three-part ethics (“General Ethics”, 1988; “A Philosophy of Morals”, 1990; “An Ethics of Personality”, 1996) and in “A Theory of Modernity” (1999) she asked how a good and decent person is possible under the contingent and plural conditions of modernity. Her work links Eastern European dissident Marxism with Hannah Arendt’s political thought and with Western debates on postmodernity; in 2006 she received the Sonning Prize. Commentators debate whether her later work breaks with her Marxist beginnings or carries on their humanist core. Her ethics of personality, drawing on Kierkegaard’s “choice of oneself”, has been read by some as an existentialist turn, by others as an ethics too close to the educated individual to answer questions of social justice.

Life & context

Agnes Heller was born on 12 May 1929 in Budapest into a Jewish family. Her father, Pál Heller, was deported in 1944 and murdered in Auschwitz; she and her mother survived in Budapest. From 1947 she studied at the University of Budapest, turned from the natural sciences to philosophy after hearing György Lukács and became his student and later his assistant. After 1956 she was expelled from the Communist Party and in 1958 dismissed from the university; until 1963 she taught at a secondary school, then joined the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Around Lukács a circle formed with Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus and Mihály Vajda, which Lukács in 1971 called the “Budapest School”. After its members protested against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, they lost their posts in 1973. In 1977 Heller and Fehér emigrated to Australia, where she taught at La Trobe University in Melbourne; from 1986 she held the Hannah Arendt chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. After 1989 she worked in Hungary again and criticised the government of Viktor Orbán. She died on 19 July 2019 while swimming in Lake Balaton.

Further main works

• Renaissance Man (A reneszánsz ember, 1967)
• The Theory of Need in Marx (La teoria dei bisogni in Marx, 1974)
• Dictatorship over Needs (with F. Fehér and G. Márkus, 1983)
• A Theory of Modernity (1999)