LAURENT STERN
323
Beckett, but also to painting from Manet to Picasso and beyond. But
all this could be disregarded.
When our teachers pointed to the totalitarian streak in Lukacs,
we talked about him as a victim of Communism's
apparatchiks
since at
least the early twenties. When they spoke about the late Lukacs's in–
sensitivity, we talked about the early Lukacs's aesthetic sensitivity.
But we were not quite honest. We wanted a tradition, and for the
sake of that tradition we were willing to disregard his obvious fail–
ings. There is always a price to be paid for holding on to a philosoph–
ical position or a given tradition. When the price exacted is too high,
we reconsider our position. For me the price became too high when I
realized that Lukacs's views carry conviction only within the idiom
of a bygone age.
Lukacs's discussions of alienation and reification were most im–
portant to us. The two concepts were conflated in
History and Class
Consciousness;
he became aware of the confusion much later. In our
hands, their explanatory power was stretched beyond recognition.
They served not only to understand our own situation as students
transplanted from Central to Western Europe, but also to under–
stand the failure of revolutionary movements in advanced indus–
trialized countries. Although the structure of our master argument
was simple, we did not notice that the understanding we claimed
was vacuous. Our master argument warranted: (1) the stipulation of
a fundamental distinction between what we think a given group
needs and what that group actually wants; (2) the identification of a
group's needs by a critic - henceforth called a critical theorist - on
the grounds of reflection on the situation of that group within soci–
ety; (3) the claim that the group pursues its wants rather than its
needs because it is alienated.
The shallowness of this argument becomes clear only if the
steps are made explicit. Its debt to the idiom of German idealism
before 1830 is manifest. Its context antedates the advent of modern
social sciences or even Hegel's or Marx's major discoveries. Its debt
to the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller has been insufficiently ap–
preciated. Walter Benjamin thought that Communists politicized
aesthetics and Fascists aestheticized politics. The second half of this
claim makes sense only if restricted to the first years of Italian
Fascism, but the first half contains a deep insight.
According to Kant, aesthetic judgments are uttered with a
universal voice: in saying that a given object is beautiful I enter the
