The Lukacs Reader (Blackwell Readers Series)

One of the greatest Marxist theorists of his generation, Georg Lukacs was a prolific writer of remarkably catholic, if moralistic, tastes. In The Lukacs Reader , his biographer Arpad Kadarkay represents the great range and variety of Lukacs's output. The reader includes, in original translations, and with introductory essays, Lukacs on: Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Ford, Strindberg, Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, Gaughin, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Also collected are: the autobiographical essay 'On the Poverty of Spirit', material from Lukacs's diary, and such key articles as: 'Aesthetic Culture', 'The Ideology of Modernism', 'Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem', and 'Class Consciousness'. What emerges is a figure very much at the centre of European thought whose value to modern culture and philosophy differs markedly from that which received opinion generally admits.

One of the greatest Marxist theorists of his generation, author of among other classics History of the Development of Modern Drama (1911), History and Class Consciousness (1923) and The Historical Novel (1937), Georg Lukacs was a prolific writer of remarkably catholic, if moralistic, tastes. In the The Lukacs Reader, his biographer Arpad Kadarkay represents the great range and variety of Lukacs's output, collecting work from four fields of activity: autobiography, drama and tragedy, art and literature, philosophy and politics -- material for the most part not previously published in English.

Library Journal

Georg Lukacs was a Marxist-humanistand a bourgeois romantic who once added "von" to his name. The romantic never died, and the Marxist was always unorthodox. That helps to explain why he is rivaled now only by Ernst Bloch as a Marxist worthy to be saved from the rubble of the political hopes of his fellow believers. This collection of essays emphasizes the romantic. It includes an early essay in which Lukacs compares the strangest of his own love affairs with Kierkegaard's, as well as essays on Strindberg, Ibsen, Wilde, and Shaw. There is an essay on Nietzsche that starts sympathetically and ends nastily with a portrait of Nietzsche as determined to destroy socialism and a serious but destructive essay on Heidegger. Two essays examine Marxist topics. One asks bluntly if good can be achieved through tyranny. The answer is "no." The second explores class consciousness and urges the proletariat to critical self-reflection. The balance could be better, but this book does bring together work still worth reading and conveys the curious concatenations of Lukacs's mind. General readers with a taste for ideas will find almost all of it readable.Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa, Ontario

The editor is the author of Georg Lukacs: Life, Thought and Politics (Blackwell Publishers, 1991) and is a Professor in the Department of Politics and Government at the University of Puget Sound.