György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. Soul and Form was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, Lukács laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text. (...) For this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which Lukács wrote at the time of Soul and Form, and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares Lukács's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the Lukácsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience. (shrink)

How is it possible that works of art exist? How do we become receptive aesthetic subjects? The Specificity of the Aesthetic extends these fundamental ontological and phenomenological questions around which Georg Lukács's theory of art was organised. This late work of aesthetics seeks to solve a puzzle that neither philosophy nor socialist politics was able to: the fundamental ethical question of what individuals and humanity as a whole ought to do. Art offers Lukács the already-existing means through which the (...) damaged edifice of Marxism might be reconstructed on a durable basis on which to rest the philosophy, politics, and ethics of a non-Soviet-style Marxism. Erik M. Bachman, Ph.D. (2011), University of California at Santa Cruz, is a Lecturer at that university. Author of Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism after Modernism (2018), he has also published numerous essays on modernism, film, and Lukács. Tyrus Miller, Ph.D. (1994), Stanford University, is the Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. He has published and edited many notable monographs and essays on modernism, critical theory, and the avant-garde. (shrink)

Georg Lukacs's The Process of Democratization provides indispensable reading for an understanding of the revolution that swept Russia and Eastern Europe during 1989-1990. Lukacs, a spokesman for anti-Bolshevik communism, was the advance guard of anti-Stalinist reform. Written in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, his book was a precursor to many of the Gorbachev reforms. Lukacs was the leading communist intellectual in the world until his death. During his last 15 years, he embarked upon a massive effort to revive Marxism (...) as philosophy, as aesthetics, and as politics. The Process of Democratization was part of this attempt at a Marxist renaissance. He would probably be surprised to find that the Second Russian Revolution of 1989-1990 moved far beyond his reformism, overthrowing even the anti-Stalinist communism that he fought to retain. (shrink)

1. Művészet és társadalom; válogatott esztétikai tanulmányok.--2. Világirodalom; válogatott világirodalom tanulmányok 2 v.

This book offers a radical new interpretation of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, showing for the first time how the philosophical framework for his analysis of society was laid in the drafts of a philosophy of art that he planned but never completed before he converted to Marxism. Reading Lukács’s work through the so-called “Heidelberg Aesthetics” reveals for the first time a range of unsuspected influences on his thought, such as Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, and Alois (...) Riegl; it also offers a theory of subjectivity within social relations that avoids many of the problems of earlier readings of his text. At a time when Lukács’s reputation is once more on the rise, this bold new reading helps revitalize his thought in ways that help it speak to contemporary concerns. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is a vast labyrinth that anyone interested in modern aesthetic theory must at some time enter. Because of his immense difficulty of the same order as Derrida - Adorno's reception has been slowed by the lack of a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the intentions of his aesthetics. This is the first book to put Aesthetic Theory into context and outline the main ideas and relevant debates, offering readers a valuable guide through this huge, difficult, (...) but revelatory work. Its extended argument is that, despite Adorno's assumptions of autonomism, cognitivism, and aesthetic modernism, his idea of artistic truth content offers crucial insights for contemporary philosophical aesthetics.The eleven chapters are divided into three parts: Context, Content, and Critique. The first part offers a brief biography, describes Adorno's debates with Benjamin, Brecht, and Lukács, and outlines his philosophical program. The second part is an interpretation of Adorno's aesthetics, examining how he situates art in society, production, politics, and history and uncovering the social, political, and historical dimensions of his idea of artistic truth. The third part evaluates Adorno's contribution by confronting it with the critiques of Peter Bürger, Frederic Jameson, and Albrecht Wellmer.Lambert Zuidervaart is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College. (shrink)

Before he joined the Communist Party, the young György Lukács published an outstanding history of the modern drama in which he combined sociological analysis with aesthetic judgment. By doing so he called his countrymen's attention to a new and insightful approach to the study of literature. At the same time, he made a strong case for the superiority of neoclassical tragedy—largely inspired by personal experience.

Before he joined the Communist Party, the young György Lukács published an outstanding history of the modern drama in which he combined sociological analysis with aesthetic judgment. By doing so he called his countrymen's attention to a new and insightful approach to the study of literature. At the same time, he made a strong case for the superiority of neoclassical tragedy—largely inspired by personal experience.

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface. It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx's thought. This circumstance led Lukacs, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in (...) the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel's intellectual development are examined: "Hegel's early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegel's views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and " The Phenomenology of Mind."" Lukacs completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work.". (shrink)

György Márkus, as a leading member of the Budapest School led by György Lukács in Hungary, is closely concerned with aesthetics. His final unfinished writings in political exile in Sydney were focused on the question of modern cultural autonomy. From the 1960s to the new century, from Budapest to Sydney in Australia, he established a new form of Neo-Marxist aesthetics on the basis of critical theory drawn from Lukács to the Frankfurt School. His aesthetics includes three dimensions: (...) an aesthetics of praxis, a reconstruction of Lukács’s aesthetics and a theory of aesthetic modernity. His aesthetics is characteristic of analytic philosophy, especially ‘categorical analysis’. It shifts from philosophical aesthetics in the Hungarian period, which is based on an ontological foundation, that is, materialist phenomenology, to social or sociological aesthetics in the Australian period concerning social modernity, institution, constitution, culture, and so on. This is a turn from a philosophical paradigm to a structural one as regards aesthetics, which indicates a break with Lukács’s late return in the early 1960s to Hegelian inspired Ontology of Social Being. Márkus is strictly and essentially an essayist in fragments, who distinguishes himself from the other members of the Budapest School in this way. Ironically, this genre is once again influenced by the young Lukács’s aesthetics. (shrink)

Georg Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukács's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl. (...) The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukács's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism. (shrink)

This article attempts two things. First, it aims to reassess the literary criticism that Georg Lukács produced in the 1930s while he was living in the Soviet Union in light of his earlier, and much-esteemed, The theory of the novel. Second, in order to carry out this reassessment, it examines the place of Hegelian aesthetics in Lukács’s theorization of realism in the 1930s criticism, in relation both to contemporary Soviet writings on the subject and to his own earlier, (...) ostensibly Hegelian work. I argue that, at least in terms of the place of art in the historical dialectic, the later work is more consistent with Hegelian philosophy than The theory of the novel. (shrink)

From the point of view of reflected postmodernity, Ágnes Heller constructs her own discourse of aesthetics on the basis of György Lukács’s contribution. She locates aesthetics in her social philosophy, philosophy of history, and ethics, transforming aesthetics from a ‘Marxist Renaissance’ to a ‘post-Marxist’ position, and points out that the paradoxes of modern culture can be avoided by a personality that is autonomous and moral in action. The notion of the beautiful character in everyday life is (...) a symbol of the ideal type of society and of the good life in contrast to the God-forsaken world of modern dilemmas and the domination of the sublime in postmodernism. It is the expression of freedom and democracy in the contemporary age. Heller’s neo-humanist aesthetics is in essence the presentation of her cultural politics as a Great Republic. (shrink)

György Lukács first published the original Hungarian language version of Soul and Form in 1910. It included eight of the ten essays later to be published in subsequent German, Italian, and English editions. This current centennial edition adds to the mix one additional Lukács essay, "On Poverty of Spirit", written at roughly the same time as the others and bearing a vital relationship to them. Finally, in this edition we have added to the Lukács material an important introductory essay by (...) Judith Butler, as well as a concluding essay, by Katie Terezakis, which draws out connections between the Lukácsian concept of form and its elaboration and critique in Lukács’s own work and in works of critical theory and philosophy up to the present. (shrink)

Georg Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukács's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.The (...) Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukács's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism. (shrink)

Introduction -- The symbolic form of art -- Kant's theory of the mathematical sublime and the boundlessness of the symbolic form of art -- The classical sublimity of Judaism -- The classical form of art -- The original epic -- The ideal -- The transition to the revealed religion and the romantic form of art -- The revealed religion -- Representational thought and the romantic form of art -- Traces of left-hegelianism in Hegel's lectures on aesthetics -- The end (...) of mythology -- The significance of Kierkegaard's interpretation of Don Giovanni in relation to Hegel's theory of the end of art -- The end of art -- The opera as a modern art form -- Hegel and Lukács's on the possibility of a modern epic -- The problem of a modern epic -- The modern epic and history -- Civil society as the background to the modern epic -- Myth and society : a common theme in the thought of Hegel and Sorel -- Sorel's myth of the general strike -- Myth and modern ethical life. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno died in 1969 and his last major work, Ästhetische Theorie, was published a year later. Only recently, however, have his aesthetic writings begun to receive sustained attention in the English-speaking world. This collection of essays is an important contribution to the discussion of Adorno's aesthetics in Anglo-American scholarship.The essays are organized around the twin themes of semblance and subjectivity. Whereas the concept of semblance, or illusion, points to Adorno's links with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the concept (...) of subjectivity recalls his lifelong struggle with a philosophy of consciousness stemming from Kant, Hegel, and Lukács. Adorno's elaboration of the two concepts takes many dialectical twists. Art, despite the taint of illusion that it has carried since Plato's Republic, turns out in Adorno's account of modernism to have a sophisticated capacity to critique illusion, including its own. Adorno's aesthetics emphasizes the connection between aesthetic theory and many other aspects of social theory. The paradoxical genius of Aesthetic Theory is that it turns traditional concepts into a theoretical cutting edge. (shrink)

This article examines the turn to the aesthetic dimension in early 20th century critical theory, particularly in the work of Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno. It focuses on the concept of play, which garnered particular attention as a possible form of aesthetic resistance to the reification of reason in modern society. The article traces the concept of play from the work of Lukács, who engaged with Schiller’s notion of the play-drive but ultimately viewed it to be an inadequate form of aesthetic (...) resistance, to the work of Benjamin, who optimistically embraced the revolutionary possibility of play. In contrast, the article argues that Adorno’s work tacitly advances a critical concept of dark play that offers a third perspective between Lukács’s pessimism and Benjamin’s optimism, thus avoiding both the retreat into an apolitical aesthetic dimension and the uncritical embrace of play’s revolutionary potential. (shrink)

"The actuality of the revolution: this is the core fo Lenin's thought and his decisive link with Marx."This essay on Lenin, which appeared in 1924, was intended to head off the massive criticism leveled at Lukacs History and Class Consciousness by Communist Party leadership. It was a period in which Lukacs was decisively influenced by Lenin and by Rosa Luxemburg, and his intellectual development proceeded concretely toward a political interpretation of history and of literature.In a postscript Lukacs remains essentially unchanged (...) in his view of Lenin as a practitioner whose theoretical superiority lay in his ability to assess the sociohistorical uniqueness of any given situation that required action. Looking back, Lukacs regards the book as a document of the mid-twenties--of how a number of Marxists of the period saw Lenin's personality and mission and his place in world events. Ideas in the book were determined by the concepts of the period, its prejudices, illusions, and extravagances. Nevertheless, the book established certain spiritual verities in perceiving Lenin as the active-practical sage who had a skillfull tactical grasp of realpolitik which was neither empirical nor dogmatic but the culmination of a theoretical attitude. "His life was one of permanent action, of continuous struggle in a world in which he was profoundly convinced that there was no situation without a solution, for himself or his opponents. The leitmotiv of his life was accordingly: always be armed ready for action--for correct action." Lukacs further notes that an essential dimension of Lenin's activism was unceasingly self-education and constant openness to the lessons of experience.Lukacs also emphasizes a number of points in the book that remain methodologically valid, including criticisms of Lenin's behavior which were implicit and accurate critiques of Stalin's later development and the increasing bureaucratization and mechanization of the party. (shrink)

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface. It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx's thought. This circumstance led Lukács, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in (...) the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel's intellectual development are examined: "Hegel's early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegel's views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and The Phenomenology of Mind." Lukács completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work. (shrink)

An introduction to Georg Lukacs's work as a whole and in particular to his later philosophical writings.

This article introduces the doctrine of the passions in the Hobbesian work, showing its debt with tradition, especially the scholastic Aristotelian one, even if, at the same time, it offers some breach features with this tradition, which are also analysed. In addition, the fundamentals of imagination manifest themselves in the appetitive process, in Hobbes's doctrine as well as in the scholastic Aristotelian tradition, showing their similarities and differences.

_At the End of an Age _is_ _a deeply informed and rewarding reflection on the nature of historical and scientific knowledge. Of extraordinary philosophical, religious, and historical scope, it is the product of a great historian’s lifetime of thought on the subject of his discipline and the human condition. While running counter to most of the accepted ideas and doctrines of our time, it offers a compelling framework for understanding history, science, and man’s capacity for self-knowledge. In this work, John (...) Lukacs describes how we in the Western world have now been living through the ending of an entire historical age that began in Western Europe about five hundred years ago. Unlike people during the ending of the Middle Ages or the Roman empire, we can know where we are. But how and what is it that we know? In John Lukacs’s view, there is no science apart from scientists, and all of “Science,” including our view of the universe, is a human creation, imagined and defined by fallible human beings in a historical continuum. This radical and reactionary assertion—in its way a _summa _of_ _the author’s thinking, expressed here and there in many of his previous twenty-odd books—leads to his fundamental assertion that, contrary to all existing cosmological doctrines and theories, it is this earth which is the very center of the universe—the only universe we know and can know. (shrink)

In the corollaries to Book I, Chapter 5 of De causa Dei, Thomas Bradwardine assumes the existence of an actual, infinite, God-filled extramundane void. Thomas Buckingham, Bradwardine’s former student, develops in the unedited Question 23 of his Quaestiones theologicae a rejection of the void’s existence precisely in opposition to the theory of his master. His argumentation is not only remarkable in its own; it also allows us to reassess essential concepts from Bradwardine’s De causa Dei, such as divine power, causality (...) and ubiquity. This paper first presents the Aristotelian notion of the void in rendering it in the context of the philosophy of nature at fourteenth-century Oxford; it is then dedicated to the analysis of the chapter in question from De causa Dei along with Buckingham’s answer. It is accompanied by a critical edition of Question 23 from Buckingham’s Quaestiones theologicae, »Utrum sit necesse ponere Deum esse extra mundum in situ seu vacuo imaginario infinito«. (shrink)

In his commentary on Lombardʼs Sentences, question 1, Robert Halifax OFM presents a remarkably original and inventive optical argument. It compares two pairs of luminous and opaque bodies with two shadow cones until the luminous bodies reach the zenith. In placing two moving human beings into the shadow cones whose moral evolution parallels the size of the shadows, Halifax creates an unprecedented shadow theater equipped with mathematics and theorems of motion from Thomas Bradwardineʼs Treatise on Proportions. This paper is a (...) first attempt at analyzing this imaginary experiment and the mathematics of the infinite it implies. It also shows that optics had new aims through its connexion with the theorems of motion of the Oxford Calculators. (shrink)

The essence of religious alienation may be identified by the use of Marx's method as we study the relationship of human beings to inimical natural and social forces dominant over them and give primary attention to the internal structure of socioeconomic alienation. In this connection it is necessary to take into consideration that the category alienation does not reveal its historical quality directly. Therefore, Marx and Engels did not confine their analysis to identifying the major features of alienation, but sought (...) to uncover the specifics of particular historically concrete forms of alienation. But the category alienation is a wholly meaningful abstraction, for it expresses a characteristic feature of the "prehistory" of humanity: realities created by human beings present themselves as dominant inimical, spontaneous forces not subordinate to the action of human beings. The Marxist analysis of the economic basis of alienation is the key to understanding all alienation. (shrink)

Generally, the topic of Hobbes's ethics that has received little attention is the "good"1, probably because the critical viewpoint has almost always been from politics and social philosophy; their focus is the justification of rules, obligation, the relationship between natural law and civil law and so on. This paper intends to consider different approaches to the theme of "good" given in the complete works of Hobbes, and not just the politically focused works, to explain the apparent contradictions.

Originally published in the 1930s, these essays on realism, expressionism, and modernism in literature present Lukacs's side of the controversy among Marxist writers and critics now known as the Lukacs-Brecht debate. The book also includes an exchange of letters between Lukács, writing in exile in the Soviet Union, and the German Communist novelist, Anna Seghers, in which they discuss realism, the European literary heritage, and the situation of the artist in capitalist culture.

In what is likely to be the final word from one of the most accomplished historians of our time, History and the Human Condition presents John Lukacs's profound reflections on the very nature of history, the role of the historian, the limits of knowledge, and more. Guiding us on a quest for knowledge, Lukacs ranges far and wide over the past two centuries. The pursuit takes us from Alexis de Tocqueville to the atomic bomb, from the American frontier to the (...) Cold War, from Hitler to Heisenberg. As an added bonus, this book features a complete bibliography of Lukacs's writings.Readers of History and the Human Condition will cherish this fascinating work by the man the Washington Times calls "one of the more incisive historians of the twentieth century. (shrink)

헤겔의 ‘미학 강의’에서 ‘소설’에 관련된 내용들을 루카치의 『소설의 이론』과 비교 검토하면 다음과 같은 결과가 도출된다. 첫째, 헤겔은 16세기부터 헤겔 당대까지 다양한 작품들을 ‘소설’이라고 부르고 있고, 소설의 규정과 범위는 ‘호토판 미학’ 이전으로 거슬러 올라갈수록 더욱더 불투명해진다. 이 점에서 헤겔은 처음부터 ‘소설’이라는 용어를 확정된 개념으로 사용하지 않았다는 것을 알 수 있다. 둘째, 헤겔의 ‘미학 강의’에서 ‘근대의 시민적 서사시’라는 핵심규정을 면밀히 검토해 보면, 소설은 독립적인 문학 장르도 아니며 ‘근대의 전형적인 예술 장르’로 규정되기도 힘들다. 이 점은 루카치가 애초에 헤겔적인 틀로 소설에 관한 ‘유형론’을 창출하려는 (...) 의도로 『소설의 이론』을 집필한 것과는 대비된다. 셋째, 헤겔은 ‘미학 강의’에서 그의 당대를 지시하는 맥락에서 ‘근대’라는 용어를 사용하면서 ‘근대 소설’의 특징을 강조한다. 루카치는 헤겔이 ‘현실’은 문제가 없고 ‘예술’만이 문제적이라고 보았다고 주장하지만, 이러한 루카치의 비판은 근대적 현실에 대한 헤겔의 비판적 논의 뿐만 아니라 예술과 철학의 새로운 관계 정립 면에서 볼 때 적어도 부분적으로 수정되어야 한다. (shrink)

We propose that Bloom's focus on cognitive factors involved in word learning still lacks a broader perspective. We emphasize the crucial relevance of working memory in learning elements of language. Specifically, we demonstrate through our data that in impaired populations knowledge of some linguistic elements can be dissociated according to the subcomponent of working memory (visual or verbal) involved in a task. Further, although Bloom's concentration on theory of mind as a precondition for word learning is certainly correct, theory of (...) mind being a necessary condition does not make it a sufficient one. On the basis of our studies we point out the importance of a theory of mind related goal preference in acquiring spatial language. In general, we claim that more specific cognitive preferences and constraints should be outlined in detail for the preconditions of acquiring linguistic elements. (shrink)

Originally published in the 1930s, these essays on realism, expressionism, and modernism in literature present Lukacs's side of the controversy among Marxist writers and critics now known as the Lukacs-Brecht debate. The book also includes an exchange of letters between Lukács, writing in exile in the Soviet Union, and the German Communist novelist, Anna Seghers, in which they discuss realism, the European literary heritage, and the situation of the artist in capitalist culture.

Adorno was deeply influenced by ideas about the rationalization of mass society and effects of commodification on consciousness. The work of Max Weber and Georg Lukács were dual influences that shaped much of Adorno's own work. He develops his critique of the “totally administered society” as a confluence of Weber's rationalization thesis as well as Lukács' theory of reification of consciousness due to the penetration of the commodity form into everyday life. But Adorno moves beyond these ideas by arguing that (...) the spread of exchange‐value and quantification, carried forth via the commodity form, collapses the modern individual and its consciousness into the prevailing forms of dominant rationality. I then show how his later projects of Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory seek to protect the subject from these trends and then reflect on how Adorno's ideas can be brought together with Lukács' later ideas about social ontology in order to glimpse a broader concept of Critical Theory. (shrink)

This article introduces the doctrine of the passions in the Hobbesian work, showing its debt with tradition, especially the scholastic Aristotelian one, even if, at the same time, it offers some breach features with this tradition, which are also analysed. In addition, the fundamentals of imagination manifest themselves in the appetitive process, in Hobbes's doctrine as well as in the scholastic Aristotelian tradition, showing their similarities and differences.

Zur Ästhetik Schillers.--Hegels Ästhetik.--Einführung in die Ästhetik Tschernyschewskijs.--Einführung in die ästhetischen Schriften von Marx und Engels.--Karl Marx und Friedrich Theodor Vischer.--Nietzsche als Vorläufer der faschistischen Ästhetik.--Franz Mehring (1846-1919)--Literatur und Kunst als Überbau.