A Defence of History and Class Consciousness

Lukács’s polemic tells of a dogmatic, corrupt, ultimately murderous period in the transition from Stalinism … it tells also of the passion, so vividly Judaic and Central European, for the life and clash of ideas. – George Steiner * Times Literary Supplement *We almost hear Lenin himself murmuring, it happens that for eighty years no Marxist has ever properly understood History and Class Consciousness! Splendidly translated here by Esther Leslie and contextualized by an introduction by John Rees and a conclusion by Slavoj Zizek (both of them stimulating and suggestive). – Fredric Jameson * Radical Philosophy *

Georg Lukács (1885-1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary’s Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.