History and Class Consciousness

Introduction

Lukács collected eight essays written between 1919 and 1922, partly in Viennese exile after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and published them in Berlin in 1923. The longest, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”, links Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism with Max Weber’s theory of rationalisation: calculability penetrates factories, bureaucracy, law and even philosophy, whose antinomies since Kant reflect it. The book defends dialectics and the category of totality against a Marxism modelled on natural science. Communist officials condemned it in 1924 and Lukács later distanced himself from it, but it became a founding text of Western Marxism, anticipating themes of Marx’s early manuscripts, which were published only in 1932.

Connections

Builds on

• Phenomenology of Spirit1807 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Capital1867 · Karl Marx
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism1905 · Max Weber

Taken up in

• Ideology and Utopia1929 · Karl Mannheim
• Traditional and Critical Theory1937 · Max Horkheimer
• Dialectic of Enlightenment1944 · Theodor W. Adorno

Criticized in

• The Theory of Communicative Action1981 · Jürgen Habermas