History and Class Consciousness: Studies in
Marxist Dialectics (German: Geschichte und
Klassenbewußtsein – Studien über marxistische
Dialektik) is a 1923 book by the Hungarian
philosopher György Lukács, in which the
author re-emphasizes Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel's influence on Karl Marx, analyses the
concept of class consciousness, and attempts
a philosophical justification of Bolshevism.
The book helped to create Western Marxism
and is the work for which Lukács is best
known. Some of Lukács's pronouncements in
History and Class Consciousness have become
famous. Nevertheless, it was condemned in
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and Lukács
later repudiated its ideas, and came to believe
that in it he had confused Hegel's concept
of alienation with that of Marx. It has been
suggested that the concept of reification
as employed in Martin Heidegger's Being and
Time (1927) shows the strong influence of
History and Class Consciousness, though such
a relationship remains disputed.
== Summary ==
Lukács attempts a philosophical justification
of Bolshevism, stressing the distinction between
actual class consciousness and "ascribed"
class consciousness, the attitudes the proletariat
would have if they were aware of all of the
facts. Marx's idea of class consciousness
is seen as a thought which directly intervenes
into social being. Claiming to return to Marx's
methodology, Lukács re-emphasizes Hegel's
influence on Marx, emphasizes dialectics over
materialism, makes concepts such as alienation
and reification central to his theory, and
argues for the primacy of the concept of totality.
Lukács depicts Marx as an eschatological
thinker. He develops a version of Hegelian
Marxism that contrasted with the emerging
Soviet interpretations of Marxism based on
the work of Georgi Plekhanov and the dialectics
of nature inspired by Friedrich Engels.In
the essay "What is Orthodox Marxism?", Lukács
argues that methodology is what distinguishes
Marxism: even if all its substantive propositions
were rejected, it would remain valid because
of its distinctive method. According to Lukács,
"Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply
the uncritical acceptance of the results of
Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’
in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of
a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy
refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific
conviction that dialectical materialism is
the road to truth and that its methods can
be developed, expanded and deepened only along
the lines laid down by its founders."Lukács
maintains that it is through Marx's use of
the dialectic that capitalist society can
be seen as essentially reified and the proletariat
viewed as the true subject of history and
the only possible salvation of humanity. All
truth, including Marx's materialist conception
of history itself, is to be seen in relation
to the proletariat's historical mission. Truth,
no longer given, must instead be understood
in terms of the relative moments in the process
of the unfolding of the real union of theory
and praxis: the totality of social relations.
This union must be grasped through proletarian
consciousness and directed party action in
which subject and object are one.History and
Class Consciousness was republished in 1967
with a new preface in which Lukács described
the circumstances that allowed him to read
Marx's newly deciphered Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 in 1930, two years before
their publication. After reading them, Lukács
concluded that in History and Class Consciousness
he had made a basic mistake, that of confusing
Hegel's and Marx's respective concepts of
alienation. To Hegel, alienation is the objectivity
of nature, but for Marx, it refers not to
natural objects but to what happens to the
products of labor when social relationships
make them commodities or capital.
== Reception and influence ==
Extremely influential, History and Class Consciousness
is the work for which Lukács is best known.
Lukács' pronouncements in "What is Orthodox
Marxism?" have become famous. History and
Class Consciousness helped to create Western
Marxism in Europe and America, and influenced
Karl Mannheim's work on the sociology of knowledge,
but led to Lukács being condemned in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union. In response to
the Communist attack on his work, Lukács
wrote an essay on Vladimir Lenin's views (Lenin:
A Study in the Unity of His Thought). In his
later career, Lukács repudiated the ideas
of History and Class Consciousness, in particular
the belief in the proletariat as a "subject-object
of history" (1960 Postface to the French translation).
As late as 1925-1926, he still defended these
ideas, in an unfinished manuscript, which
he called Tailism and the Dialectic. It was
not published until 1996 in Hungarian and
English in 2000 under the title A Defence
of History and Class Consciousness.
The political scientist David McLellan writes
that the publication of Marx's key earlier
writings vindicated Lukács' interpretation
of Marx. The philosopher Lucio Colletti believes
that although the publication of those writings
disproved some of the assumptions of History
and Class Consciousness, the problem of the
nature of alienation remained valid. Lukács'
work was a crucial text for the French Situationist
Guy Debord, although Debord wrote in The Society
of the Spectacle (1967) that Lukács, by arguing
that the Bolshevik party provided a mediation
between theory and practice that enabled proletarians
to determine events within their organization
instead of being spectators of them, was describing
the opposite of how it functioned in reality.
Jürgen Habermas's initial understanding of
Marx came through Lukács's work, while Tom
Rockmore has described it as "brilliant."Some
writers have compared Lukács to Heidegger,
though the existence of any relationship between
the two has been disputed. The Marxist philosopher
Lucien Goldmann argues in his posthumously
published Lukacs and Heidegger: Towards a
New Philosophy (1973) that the concept of
reification as employed in Heidegger's Being
and Time (1927) showed the strong influence
of History and Class Consciousness (1923),
although Heidegger never mentions Lukács
in his writing and Laurence Paul Hemming,
writing in Heidegger and Marx (2013), finds
the suggestion that Lukács influenced Heidegger
to be highly unlikely at best. The critic
George Steiner writes that Lukács, as the
author of History and Class Consciousness,
shares with Heidegger "a commitment to the
concrete, historically existential quality
of human acts of perception and intellection."The
evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin,
the neurobiologist Steven Rose, and the psychologist
Leon Kamin draw on Lukács's ideas in Not
in Our Genes (1984). The critic Frederick
Crews writes that in History and Class Consciousness,
Lukács "made a fatefully ingenious attempt
to abolish, through metaphysical prestidigitation,
the newly apparent chasm between Marx's historical
laws and the triumph of Bolshevism." The economists
M. C. Howard and J. E. King praise the sophistication
of Lukács' Hegelian understanding of how
to specify the interests of the proletariat.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes the
Lukács of History and Class Consciousness
as, "the philosopher of Lenin's historical
moment". Žižek believes that Lukács' achievement
is to bring together the topic of commodity
fetishism and reification with the topic of
the Party and revolutionary strategy.
== See also ==
Cultural hegemony
False consciousness
György Lukács bibliography
== References ==
=== Footnotes ===
=== Bibliography ===
Books
== External links ==
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
Georg Lukács, preface to the 1967 edition
of History and Class Consciousness
