ABSTRACT
In January, 1968, Lucien Goldman organized a conference on aesthetic theory in Royaumont, France. Adorno was one of the keynote speakers; I delivered a lecture on Lukacs’ The Specificity of the Aesthetic, which then was still not well known. A young man took the rostrum and spoke with anger and irritation: Lukacs, Goldmann, and Adorno are all the same. They are members of the Holy Family. In a sense, the young man in Royaumont was right. Lukacs, Adorno, and Goldmann did indeed belong to the Holy Family, and one could also add Bloch to the list. After his turn to Marxism and the collapse of the philosophy of History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs eventually repackaged his ideas in the shabby garmments of an official Diamat. He began speaking a language that concealed rather than revealed the message he meant to convey.
