ABSTRACT
In a 1967 account of his own intellectual development, Georg Lukacs wrote that it was not until the 1930s that 'an independent and integral Marxist aesthetic' was expounded. The Holy Family, of course, is a polemical political pamphlet, not principally a work of aesthetics. The German Ideology marks a decisive shirt from the critique of philosophy to a preliminary statement of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' theory of historical materialism in which 'life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life' and 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas'. Like Marx and Engels, Georgi Plekhanov was a political refugee for much of his life, and his knowledge of artistic trends was similarly encyclopedic. The discussion of the concept of beauty in Plekhanov's Art and Social Life includes a similar point, that the idea of beauty prevailing in society at any particular time is the product of both 'biological' and historical conditions.
