Reification in the 21st Century

Lukacs’ Dialectic – the First Hundred Years

2008 is a centenary of sorts for the great Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs (1886-1971). A centenary because a hundred years ago, in Budapest, Lukacs produced his first work, a prize-winning study of German drama. In 1922, following his leading participation in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukacs published his most influential work, a collection essays entitled History and Class Consciousness. Lukacs’ ‘problematic’ of a reified ‘false’ consciousness – which can only be grasped in relation to its non-reified liberatory alternative – deeply impacted on the philosophers of the 20th Century: especially Adorno, Sartre, Marcuse, Merleau-Ponty, Debord, Edward Said – and maybe even Heidegger. Lukacs continues to engage thinkers in various fields, even if most of them see his socialist “solution” as “class-bound” and therefore historically invalidated by the collapse of the Stalinist system he subsequently embraced and eventually hoped to see reformed democratically.