Laurent Stern
LUKAcs
AT
103
What is alive today of Lukacs's thought? Although he is
an historical figure for contemporaries, when one of my more gifted
students asked whether he should read Lukacs, I told him that the
role Lukacs played for my generation now belongs to others. In our
Golden Age of Philosophy a new lease on life has been provided for
Marx studies in analytical philosophy and contemporary social
science. A short list of these studies would include G.
A.
Cohen's
Marx's Theory of History
(1978); Alan Wood's
Karl Marx (1981);
Richard Miller's
Analyzing Marx
and R. P. Wolffs
Understanding Marx
(both 1984); J. Elster's
Making Sense of Marx
(1985); and the an–
thology edited by John Roemer,
Analytical Marxism
(1986). In these
books Lukacs's name is rarely mentioned, but it appears con–
spicuously in the bibliographies of writers for whom German philos–
ophy before 1830 remains the last Golden Age.
Writers in the tradition of speculative German philosophy
disregard work in analytical Marxism. The best and most detailed
recent account of Western Marxism, Martin Jay's
Marxism and
Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas (1984),
does not discuss any of the authors on my short list. Writers on
Marx and Marxism in the analytical and the speculative traditions
also reject the work done in the opposing tradition in other areas of
philosophy. The speculative tradition in Marx studies inaugurated
by Lukacs may be disregarded, understood as a call for action, or
relegated to the role of a cautionary tale.
Students in Western Europe in the late forties and early fifties
were drawn to Lukacs. We were in search of a respectable intellec–
tual tradition that admitted a radical criticism of society. Here was a
left-winger, who knew as much about classical philosophy and litera–
ture as any of our conservative professors. We were willing to forgive
his obvious failings: he was as blind to the political consequences of
his views as he was deaf to the art and literature of his own time.
History and Class Consciousness,
a collection of essays written between
1918 and 1923, supported a totalitarian vision of Marxism even
before Stalinism came to power. His writings after 1923 revealed in–
sensitivity not only to the work of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Musil, and
