ABSTRACT
George Lukacs was a revolutionary socialist for, at most, a decade. He became a marxist through his experience of the First World War and the revolutions that followed it. This was a time when Bolshevik theory and practice were little known and even less understood outside Russia. The almost universally accepted form of marxism was that of the Second International. Lukacs’s reading of, at first, Hegel, Marx, and Luxemburg, and, later, of Lenin, allowed him to reconstruct a version of marxism remarkably close to that of its founders. And he tailored that interpretation so that it met the needs of an era of imperialist war, monopoly capitalism, mass reformism, revolution, and counterrevolution. His History and Class Consciousness and Lenin remain remarkable achievements. But in two respects, they also carry the mark of their conditions of birth.
