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about what others needed, our judgment about them would change.
The intellectual heroes who once deserved our admiration would be
perceived as petty tyrants .
History and Class Consciousness
was written when Eastern Euro–
pean intellectuals began to acquire power to enforce their views
about what they believed to be the real needs of others: they claimed
to be acting on behalf of what they called "the masses of workers and
peasants ." They began building what was later described as pres–
ently existing socialism in Eastern Europe . Some became petty
disciplinarians, others became dangerous tyrants. Lukacs was criti–
cal of their methods , but not of their ultimate goals.
Few Western European or North American readers of Lukacs
shared his political views or his judgments about contemporary art
and literature after the late 1920s . Some of these readers responded
by trying to differentiate between an early or "good" and a late or
"bad" Lukacs. These efforts are pointless. The good and the bad, the
insightful and the shallow are evenly distributed throughout his
work. Others rejected his guidance in politics and literature, but
they continued reading him even after his most misguided book of
1953 , The Destruction of Reason.
What did they expect to find in read–
ing him?
Few of his Judgments about art and literature are comments on
individual works or what Kant would have called singular aesthetic
judgments.
If
these judgments were collected for an anthology from
the more than forty books he wrote, the resulting volume would be
quite small. Early or late, he did not have a good eye for great art
and literature or a good ear for music. Second-rate literary talents
served his purposes as well as great poets . When other critics praised
Rilke and Trakl, he celebrated Paul Ernst and Rudolf Kassner.
Against this background , his later rejection of great twentieth-cen–
tury literature should not be surprising.
His readers would not have taken him seriously as a literary
critic, aesthetician or social theorist. They understood that he
searched primarily for the normative and formative principles that
provide the groundwork for creativity in literature and philosophy.
There are works of art , how are they possible? There are philosophi–
cal doctrines, why are they necessary? What values inform art works
or philosophical doctrines? His views deserve a hearing primarily for
the questions he raised about the formative principles that are at the
foundation of literary art works. Singular aesthetic judgments do not
