ABSTRACT
The antihistoricist climate of postmodern thought makes a reassessment of Georg Lukacs refreshing. Despite his incurable nostalgia for the highbrow achievements of classical bourgeois culture, Lukacs remains the most provocative and profound Marxist thinker of this century. His major texts display the richness of the dialectical tradition, a tradition which emerged in figural biblical interpretation, was definitively articulated by Hegel and deepened by Kierkegaard and Karl Marx. This chapter examines Lukacs as neither a literary critic nor a political strategist, but primarily as a dialectical philosopher, and focuses on his later ontological writings, especially parts of his Toward the Ontology of Social Existence. His classic work History and Class Consciousness was a thoroughly political work focused on proletarian revolutionary activity against capitalist reification. Lukacs’s attempt to ground the scientificity of Marxist dialectics led him to adopt a form of epistemological foundationalism and philosophical realism.
