ABSTRACT
one of the most prominent figures in the Hungarian Revolution was George Lukács, Minister of Education in Nagy’s second, short-lived government. But Lukács is more than a Hungarian politician. Thomas Mann called him “the most important literary critic of today”, and though Mann was no doubt influenced by the attention which Lukács had paid to his own work, I myself, who disagree profoundly with some of Lukács’s doctrines, would not dissent from this opinion. His importance as a critic was first made clear to me by the late Karl Mannheim, who had known him well in Hungary, and who again did not agree with the Marxist basis of Lukács’s criticism. What one was made to realize after the reading of a single essay by this critic (and to envy), was the formidable superiority of any polemicist who combines dogma with sensibility. It is the same kind of formidability that one finds in certain Catholic writers (such as Jacques Mari tain), and it makes one realize, rather ruefully, that sensibility is not enough: our humanist or libertarian criticism must have an equally strong foundation in faith.
