DANIEL BELL
549
amalgamates Lenin and Rosa [Luxemburg]: Lenin did have the belief
that 'noch einege Jahre
Kri~g
und Revolution
anstatt
ietzt Friede und
keine Revolution.' Rosa most definitely did not. The reference to Spar–
takism in this regard and
in this
very
moment
-
the historical moment of
her butchery - is not altogether pleasant. (b) Lukacs has
never
repre–
sented an ethics of love which turned into a simple (Machiavellian)
ethics of the 'final' violence. But it is true that Lukacs made it under–
standable for Weber in many ways that the personal ethics of the
Grand Inquisitor and the collective ethics of the Russian revolutionary
have many important features in common and that in the contrast be–
tween the (impotent) love ethics ofJesus of the parable and materialist–
ic Gewaltethik of the Inquisitor the basic moral antinomy of the period
is expressed.
So there it was. Weber, in his own anguish at seeing the young
men who had stirred his life in his old age turn to revolution, had
sought to deter them, or at least to answer them before History. In
an immediate sense his effort was futile. But is there some charity in
all this? Toller had withdrawn to an absolute pacifism and suicide.
Lukacs had gone through the vale of tears to the bitter end, a cosmic
rationalist driven by a Faustian romanticism to the devil's pact
which bound him to the end of his days."
that in our sense would be called socialist; a bourgeois economy will re–
emerge, merely stripped of the feudal elements and the dynastic vestiges . For
this very modest result, they are willing to face 'some more years of war.' . . .
With Bolshevism and Sparticism , and, in general, with any kind of revolu–
tionary socialism, it is precisely the same thing.
It
is of course utterly ridicu–
lous if the power politicians of the old regime are morally denounced for their
use of the same means, however justified the rejection of their
aims
may be.
"The nadir of this was Lukacs's degrading "confession" in Moscow in 1934 to the
philosophical section of the Communist Academy, when he repudiated the book
which had made his reputation,
History and Class Consciousness.
As he said at that
time:
. . . I began as a student of Simmel and Max Weber (I was then under the in–
fluence of the German philosophical tendencies, the
Geisteswissenschajten)
and
developed, philosophically speaking, from subjective idealism to objectivism,
from Kant to Hegel. . . . I entered the Communist Party of Hungary in 1918
with a world outlook that was distinctly syndicalist and idealist. . . . The book
I published in 1923 ... was a philosophical summation of these tendencies.
