György Lukács
Based on Wikipedia: György Lukács
The Philosopher Who Survived Everything
In May 1919, György Lukács ordered the execution of eight of his own soldiers. He was a philosopher—a man who had spent years in Heidelberg salons discussing Dostoevsky and the nature of the soul. Now he was a military commissar in a revolutionary army, making life-and-death decisions in the chaos of Hungary's brief Soviet Republic.
This was the same man who would later become the most important Marxist intellectual of the twentieth century. The same man who would be arrested by Stalin's secret police, survive the Great Terror, be deported after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, narrowly avoid execution, and then publicly abandon his positions and engage in self-criticism—only to spend his final years quietly criticizing the very system he had helped build.
Lukács lived through everything the twentieth century could throw at a European intellectual: two world wars, the collapse of empires, the rise and fall of fascism, Stalinist purges, and failed revolutions. He survived it all. The question that haunted his legacy was simple: at what cost?
A Baron Becomes a Communist
György Lukács was born in 1885 in Budapest to a wealthy Jewish banking family. His father was knighted by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and received a baronial title, making young György technically a baron. The family converted to Lutheranism in 1907—a common move for assimilated Jewish families seeking fuller acceptance in imperial society.
Nothing about his early life suggested revolutionary politics. He received two doctorates, one in economic and political sciences, another in philosophy. He moved through the most refined intellectual circles of Central Europe: Budapest, Berlin, Florence, Heidelberg. In his twenties, he was writing thousand-page treatises on modern drama and producing avant-garde theater—plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hauptmann.
In Heidelberg, he befriended Max Weber, the sociologist who would define modern thinking about bureaucracy and capitalism. He studied with Georg Simmel, the philosopher who explored how money transforms human relationships. He absorbed neo-Kantianism, read Hegel and Kierkegaard, developed sophisticated ideas about aesthetics and the novel.
His early works—Soul and Form and The Theory of the Novel—established him as a brilliant literary critic. They were modernist, introspective, concerned with the problem of how individuals find meaning in a disenchanted world.
Then the First World War ended, and everything changed.
The Conversion
What makes someone abandon one worldview for another? In late 1918, Lukács published an essay called "Bolshevism as a Moral Problem," in which he rejected Bolshevism on ethical grounds. Within days—perhaps literally within days—he had reversed himself completely and joined the Communist Party of Hungary.
The timing matters. The Russian Revolution had happened the year before. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing. Hungary was in chaos. Lukács had been rejected for a teaching position in Heidelberg and had decided to pursue politics instead. Béla Kun, the leader of Hungarian communism, apparently persuaded him.
But intellectual conversions are rarely explained by circumstances alone. Something in Marxism answered questions that idealist philosophy could not. Lukács had spent years thinking about alienation—how modern life separates people from meaning, from each other, from their own humanity. Marx offered a diagnosis: capitalism was the cause. And more importantly, Marx offered a solution: revolution would restore wholeness.
For a philosopher searching for meaning in a world that seemed to have lost it, this was intoxicating.
Revolution and Terror
In March 1919, Hungary became a Soviet Republic. It would last only 133 days.
Lukács was lecturing to a packed hall on "Old Culture and New Culture" when the revolution was proclaimed. He became People's Commissar for Education and Culture—essentially the minister responsible for all intellectual and cultural life. He was thirty-four years old.
What followed was what Lukács himself called "red terror." In the communist newspaper, he wrote that state power must be used "for the destruction of the oppressing classes. A moment we have to use." As a commissar with the Red Army, he ordered those executions in Poroszló.
How do we understand this? The philosopher of the soul, the aesthetician who had written sensitively about form and meaning, ordering soldiers shot? One interpretation is that Lukács had concluded that revolutionary violence was historically necessary—that the end justified the means. Another is that revolutions consume their intellectuals, demanding actions that their theories never prepared them for.
When the Soviet Republic fell in August 1919, Lukács was ordered to stay behind and reorganize the communist movement underground. It proved impossible. After his comrade Ottó Korvin was captured, Lukács fled to Vienna, hidden by a photographer named Olga Máté. He was arrested but saved from extradition by a group of writers including Thomas Mann, who would later base the character Naphta in The Magic Mountain on Lukács—an intellectual terrorist, brilliant and dangerous.
Western Marxism is Born
Exile in Vienna proved intellectually productive. In 1923, Lukács published what became his most influential work: History and Class Consciousness.
This book changed everything. It created what would come to be called "Western Marxism"—a tradition that departed from the rigid orthodoxy of Soviet ideology. While Moscow was developing Marxism into a mechanical doctrine about economic laws and historical inevitability, Lukács was asking different questions. How does capitalism shape consciousness itself? How do workers come to understand their situation? What is the relationship between theory and practice?
His key concept was "reification"—a German word meaning "thing-making." Under capitalism, Lukács argued, human relationships become things. Your labor becomes a commodity you sell. Your interactions with others become transactions. Even your own abilities and personality become objects to be marketed. The whole world takes on a phantom objectivity, as if the social arrangements created by humans were natural laws beyond human control.
This was a profound philosophical move. Marx had analyzed capitalism economically—how surplus value was extracted, how capital accumulated. Lukács analyzed capitalism psychologically and culturally—how it warps human experience at the deepest level.
The book also provided philosophical grounding for Leninist politics. Lenin had been a practical revolutionary, brilliant at tactics and organization but not a systematic philosopher. Lukács gave Leninism a philosophical framework—an account of why a disciplined vanguard party was necessary, why the working class needed intellectual leadership to achieve true consciousness of its situation.
The Communist International was not pleased. At its Fifth Congress in 1924, Grigory Zinoviev attacked the book. It was too independent, too philosophical, too Western. Lukács ensured there would be no reprinting during his lifetime. The book became rare, hard to find, almost legendary—until the social movements of the 1960s rediscovered it.
Surviving Stalin
In 1930, Lukács was summoned to Moscow. He and his wife went in March. Soon after arriving, he was "prevented" from leaving.
What followed were years of precarious survival during the most dangerous period of Soviet history. Lukács was assigned to work "in the basement" at the Marx-Engels Institute, cataloging manuscripts. He gained access to previously unpublished works by the young Marx—writings that revealed a more humanistic, philosophically rich Marx than the official Soviet version allowed.
The Great Terror of 1936-1938 killed hundreds of thousands, including most of the original Bolshevik leaders and countless intellectuals. Lukács survived. How? Historians still debate this. He kept his head down. He wrote on literary criticism rather than politics. He may have been protected by his reputation. He may simply have been lucky.
On June 29, 1941—eight days after Germany invaded the Soviet Union—Lukács was arrested by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. He was released less than two months later, on August 26. No explanation was given for either the arrest or the release. He was evacuated to Tashkent with other German-speaking intellectuals, where he waited out the war.
The question that divides historians: did Lukács accept Stalinism? Did he believe in it, accommodate to it, or secretly oppose it while outwardly conforming? His later books—The Young Hegel and The Destruction of Reason—have been read as covert criticisms of Stalinism, positioning it as a form of irrationalism that betrayed true Marxism. But such readings require squinting. Whatever Lukács really believed, he said what he needed to say to survive.
Back in Hungary
In 1945, Lukács returned to a Hungary occupied by Soviet forces and being transformed into a communist state. He became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and took part in establishing the new government.
What followed was ugly. Lukács played what has been called an "administrative" role in removing non-communist intellectuals from academic life. Philosophers, writers, and scholars lost their positions. Between 1946 and 1953, many were imprisoned or forced into menial labor.
Lukács's defenders argue that his personal position was always that socialist culture should triumph through quality, through competition, not through bureaucratic suppression. And indeed, in 1948-49, he himself became the target of a purge—the "Lukács purge"—when the hardliner Mátyás Rákosi consolidated power. Lukács was apparently too tolerant, too independent, too genuinely intellectual for the party apparatus.
But the distinction between what Lukács believed and what he did matters less than it might seem. He participated in a system that destroyed people. Whether he did so reluctantly or enthusiastically, the destroyed remained destroyed.
1956
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was one of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War. For a few extraordinary weeks, it seemed that a communist country might actually throw off Soviet domination and create something new—"socialism with a human face," as later reformers would call it.
Lukács, now seventy-one years old, became a minister in the revolutionary government of Imre Nagy. His daughter led a short-lived party of communist revolutionary youth. Lukács attended debates of the anti-party Petőfi Society while remaining part of the party apparatus—trying to straddle the impossible line between reform and loyalty.
His position was that the Communist Party needed to retreat into a coalition government and slowly rebuild its credibility with the Hungarian people. It could win social leadership only by persuasion, not force. This was remarkably naive. It was also, given Lukács's history, remarkably hopeful—as if after everything, he still believed that reason could prevail, that a more humane socialism was possible.
Soviet tanks crushed the revolution on November 4, 1956. Lukács was deported to Romania with the rest of Nagy's government. Nagy was executed. Lukács was not—but it was close. He returned to Budapest in 1957, publicly abandoned his positions, and engaged in self-criticism.
He would never be trusted by the party apparatus again. His followers were indicted for political crimes throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Many fled to the West.
The Last Years
Lukács spent his final years writing. He produced an enormous Aesthetics and worked on an Ontology of Social Being. Following the uprisings in France and Czechoslovakia in 1968, he became more publicly critical of the Soviet Union and the Hungarian Communist Party—though always within limits.
In an interview shortly before his death in 1971, he finally said clearly what he may have believed for decades:
Without a genuine general theory of society and its movement, one does not get away from Stalinism. Stalin was a great tactician... But Stalin, unfortunately, was not a Marxist... The essence of Stalinism lies in placing tactics before strategy, practice above theory... The bureaucracy generated by Stalinism is a tremendous evil. Society is suffocated by it. Everything becomes unreal, nominalistic. People see no design, no strategic aim, and do not move...
He concluded: "We must learn to connect the great decisions of popular political power with personal needs, those of individuals."
It was a remarkable statement from a man who had spent most of his life serving a system that did exactly the opposite—that subordinated individuals to grand historical designs, that justified bureaucratic terror in the name of theory. Whether this final clarity represented a genuine change of heart or simply what Lukács had always believed but could never say, we cannot know.
The Problem of Lukács
What are we to make of György Lukács?
As a philosopher, his importance is undeniable. The concept of reification shaped generations of critical theory. His literary criticism—particularly his defense of realism and his analysis of the novel as a form—influenced how we think about literature and society. Western Marxism, the tradition he founded, produced thinkers from the Frankfurt School to Antonio Gramsci to countless contemporary theorists.
But Lukács also ordered executions. He collaborated with Stalinist purges. He helped remove independent intellectuals from Hungarian academic life. He repeatedly chose survival and continued influence over resistance or silence.
Some see him as a tragic figure—a brilliant mind trapped by history, doing what he could in impossible circumstances. Others see him as a cautionary tale about what happens when intellectuals convince themselves that they serve History with a capital H, that present crimes are justified by future liberation.
Perhaps the most honest assessment is the simplest: Lukács was a philosopher who believed that ideas have consequences, who committed himself fully to his ideas, and who then had to live with the consequences—including consequences he never intended and could not control. He built a philosophy of human liberation and then watched it become a justification for human oppression.
He survived. Whether that was triumph or tragedy depends on what you think survival is worth.
The Concept of Reification
Because Lukács's most enduring intellectual contribution deserves fuller explanation: what exactly is reification, and why does it matter?
The word comes from the Latin "res," meaning "thing." To reify is to make something into a thing—specifically, to treat something that is actually a human relationship or process as if it were an independent object with its own laws.
Consider money. Money is a social relationship—an agreement among people that these pieces of paper or numbers in computers represent value. But we experience money as a thing with power over us. The stock market "demands" austerity. The economy "requires" layoffs. We speak as if these human creations were forces of nature.
Or consider your job. The labor market treats your capacity to work as a commodity—something you sell to whoever will buy it. You learn to think of yourself this way: your skills are your product, your personality is your brand, your time is money. The human activity of working becomes a thing separate from you, something you possess and sell.
Lukács argued that this thing-making extends through all of modern life under capitalism. Relationships become transactions. Quality becomes quantity. Process becomes product. The world appears to us as a collection of objects governed by objective laws, when in fact it is a web of relationships created by human beings and therefore changeable by human beings.
This matters because it explains why oppression is so hard to resist. It's not just that powerful people benefit from the current system. It's that the system itself appears natural, inevitable, thing-like. Workers don't rebel not mainly because they're afraid of punishment, but because they can't imagine an alternative—because the way things are seems like the only way things could be.
The role of revolutionary consciousness, in Lukács's view, was precisely to pierce this illusion—to see through reification to the human relationships underneath, and to recognize that what humans have made, humans can unmake and remake.
This insight has proven remarkably durable. It influenced the Frankfurt School's analysis of mass culture, feminist critiques of how gender becomes naturalized, postcolonial studies of how racial categories become taken for granted. Long after Lukács's specific political commitments became historical curiosities, his core philosophical insight continues to illuminate how power works.
A Final Note on Survival
Thomas Mann, who helped save Lukács from extradition in 1919 and later modeled a character on him, understood something important about intellectuals and politics. Naphta, his Lukács character in The Magic Mountain, is a Jesuit-turned-communist—a man of absolute convictions who believes that terror and discipline are necessary for human redemption. The novel subjects Naphta to withering irony, but also takes his ideas seriously.
Mann seemed to grasp that Lukács was not simply a hypocrite or opportunist. He was something more troubling: a genuine believer. He believed in the historical mission of the working class. He believed that capitalism was a system of reification that alienated humans from their own nature. He believed that revolution was the only way to restore human wholeness.
And because he believed, he was willing to do terrible things and to accommodate himself to terrible systems. The tragedy of Lukács is not that he betrayed his principles. It's that his principles led him where they led.
He died in Budapest in 1971, at eighty-six years old. He had outlived most of the systems and leaders he had served. He had seen his ideas become influential in ways he never expected, particularly among the student radicals of the 1960s who rediscovered History and Class Consciousness. He had also seen those ideas used to justify exactly the kind of bureaucratic terror he criticized in his final interview.
Everything becomes unreal, nominalistic, he said of Stalinism. People see no design, no strategic aim. Perhaps in the end, that was also a description of his own life—a philosopher who devoted himself to a design that turned unreal, a strategy that led nowhere he intended.
And yet the ideas remain. Reification is real. The problem of how capitalism shapes consciousness is real. The question of how to change a system that makes alternatives unthinkable is still the central question of radical politics. Lukács got many things wrong, and some of what he got wrong was catastrophic. But the questions he asked remain the right questions.