The article ‘Aesthetic culture’ was written in 1908. Although it is in the same period as Soul and Form, in essence, the ideas expressed in this article go beyond the pure philosophy of life and the theory of form, which is different from the idealistic tendency of Lukács in this period. Moreover, ‘Aesthetic culture’ and History and Class Consciousness have ontological and epistemological consistency in subject–object relation and class consciousness. This was the first Marxist reflection of Lukács, and also a (...) reliable sign that he was to join the Hungarian Communist Party 10 years later and turned to Marxism. By criticizing the paradox of aesthetic culture itself, Lukács tried to construct a culture as a whole as a category, and tried to solve the deep contradiction between the freedom of consciousness and the passive form of the subject in modern society. This kind of culture as a whole would be based on the class consciousness of the proletariat itself and take life as the main category, so as to provide the proletariat with practical theoretical conception to expand their space for living in bourgeois culture. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman was one of the most influential sociologists in the English-speaking world. His work is translated into many languages. Chinese studies of Bauman started later than in the English-speaking world but have their own characteristics. In China, the interest is in sociology, culture, Marxism and aesthetics. This article surveys the current situation of Chinese Bauman studies and establishes the state of Chinese translations and studies of Bauman, and examines Chinese reception and interpretation of Bauman’s thought, especially theories of modernity (...) and postmodernity. Its purpose is to display the state of Chinese Bauman studies on the one hand, and to take Bauman’s thought as a lesson in the construction of Chinese sociology on the other, leaving open the question of what studies of modernity might have to learn from Chinese experience and theory. (shrink)