ABSTRACT
According to his book Lukdcs and Heidegger, published posthumously, Lucien Goldmann completed his lectures in the historical year of 1968 with the following programmatic words: “It is necessary to know in the name of what and from where we are speaking today, if we believe that valid works and actions exist only to the extent that they are placed within a universe created by men and are attached to specific groups.” There has always been an implicit contradiction between Goldmann’s acceptance of Lukacs’ concept of collective consciousness and his application of the same notion to concrete analyses. Goldmann often criticized Lukacs’ identification of philosophy and social sciences. In the realm of science, he argues, the individual can arrive at “a kind of knowledge which goes beyond the real consciousness of all social classes actually existing at the time in which he is living”.
