Abstract

This text was Lukacs' response to the Soviets' crushing of the Dubeck reform movement in August 1968. As Norman Lavine notes, it was written in great haste between September and December 1968, and Lukacs was not satisfied with the result. It seemed "too much of a summary to be a true scientific work and too scientific for a good summary". Lukacs intended to revise the text as part of a projected work on ethics. I would suggest that The Process of Democratization's literary form is "manifesto." Like its famous predecessor, the book brings a lifetime devoted to a dialectical reading of social experience to bear on a specific revolutionary situation. Unlike the text of Marx and Engels, however, the task of this dialectical inquiry is to explain the emergence of alienating repression within a praxis supposedly guided by Marxist-Leninist principles, and to point toward an overcoming of the alienation that remains within Marxism.