Lukács, György

(1885–1971)

Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Lukács was briefly a minister in the Hungarian government in 1919 and again in 1956, although he spent years in exile in Russia. Lukács saw in Marxism the way to overcome the duality of subject and object inherent in western thought: the experience of the working class can become both the subject and the object of history, thereby achieving the necessary harmony and totality (the thought here depends on a Hegelian framework). At this point, too, the blinkers of capitalist ideology, and in particular commodity fetishism, would be transcended. Lukács wrote extensively on literary theory as well as the interpretation of Marx. His works include Die Seele und die Formen (1911, trs. as The Soul and its Forms 1971) and Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (1923, trs. as History and Class Consciousness, 1971).