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György Lukács (/ˈluːkɑːtʃ/; Hungarian: [ˌɟørɟ ˈlukaːtʃ]; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxistideological orthodoxy of the USSR. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx’s theory of class consciousness. He was also the philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin’s pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution (Leninism).
As a literary critic Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).[2]
Lukács has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though assessing his legacy can be difficult as Lukács seemed to both support Stalinism as the embodiment of Marxist thought, and yet also champion a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism.[3]
Georg Lukács was born Löwinger György Bernát, in Budapest, Hungary, to the investment banker József Löwinger (later Szegedi Lukács József; 1855–1928) and his wife Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél; 1860–1917), who were a wealthy Jewish family. He had a brother and sister. József Löwinger was knighted by the empire and received a baronial title, making Georg Lukács a baron as well, through inheritance.[4] As an Austro-Hungarian subject, the full names of Georg Lukács were the German Baron “Georg Bernhard Lukács von Szegedin”, and the Hungarian “Szegedi Lukács György Bernát”; as a writer, he published under the names “Georg Lukács” and “György Lukács”. Georg Lukács studied at the Royal Hungarian University of Budapest and the University of Berlin, and received his doctorate in 1906 from the Royal Hungarian University of Kolozsvár.[5]
Protest the closing of the Lukács Archives.
