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History and Class Consciousness was the most important of Georg Lukács’s early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923. The subject of high praise and passionate criticism, it had a major impact on all the Marxist debates that followed, introducing key new concepts such as ‘totality’, ‘reification’ and ‘imputed class consciousness’. This centenary edition, with a new preface by Michael Löwy, comprises a series of essays exploring, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of historic Marxism, and the substantiation and consciousness of the proletariat. This classic book has influenced many key philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Adorno, Debord, Heidegger, Lefebvre, Merleau-Ponty and Žižek, and it can lay claim to being one of the cornerstones of contemporary thought.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Translator’s Note
Preface to the centenary edition (2023)
Preface to the new edition (1967)
Preface
What is Orthodox Marxism?
The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg
Class Consciousness
Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat
I The Phenomenon of Reifi The Phenomenon of Reification
II The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought
III The Standpoint of the Proletariat
The Changing Function of Historical Materialism
Legality and Illegality
Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s "Critique of the Russian Revolution"
Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation
Notes to the English Edition
Index
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Georg Lukács (1885–1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
