ABSTRACT
The section on ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’ in History and Class Consciousness was Lukács’ first attempt to discuss the history of philosophy from a Marxist standpoint. The Young Hegel might be thought to interest the student of Hegel rather than the student of Lukács. Lukács follows Engels, and orthodox Soviet Marxism, in extending dialectics to the natural sciences. The philosophy of dialectical materialism, he says, sums up the principles and laws of the special sciences. In The Young Hegel Lukács had been concerned with bourgeois philosophy at what he regarded as its highest point; The Destruction of Reason deals with bourgeois thought in decline. Before expounding Nietzsche’s thought, Lukács makes some interesting observations about his philosophical style. Although life-philosophy is the stage of irrationalist philosophy that immediately preceded, and indeed was contemporary with, the rise of Nazism, Lukács does not assert that Nazism drew exclusively on this source.
