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Georg Lukcs: Life, Thought, and Politics (review)

Eva L. Corredor

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 16, Number 2, October 1992, pp.

382-383 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/phl.1992.0073

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382Philosophy and Literature

Georg Lukcs: Life, Thought, and Politics, by Arpad Ka-darkay; 538 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Black-

well, 1991, $29.95.

The monumental work of the Hungarian philosopher Gyrgy Lukcs hasfinally received a worthy complement in Arpad Kadarkay's illuminating bi-ography ofLukcs's life, thought, and politics. Based on twenty years ofintensiveresearch, Kadarkay's grande oeuvre benefited from repeated personal contactswith Lukcs, ready access to his archives in Budapest, and the generous supportofa whole array ofdistinguished scholars and institutions all over the world.

It reveals the contents of a huge mass of previously unknown documents,especially from Lukcs's family life and student years, his activities during the1919 proletarian republic in Hungary, his exiles in Vienna and Russia wherethe Stalinist purge claimed nearly eighty percent ofhis fellow Hungarians, andfinally the 1956 Hungarian uprising which virtually brought Lukcs's politicalactivities to a definitive halt. The study illuminates the personal drama oftheman, the Jew, the intellectual, who throughout his life tried to adhere to hisown obsessive moral imperative: "I go to prove my soul" (p. 171). It is also asincere and courageous portrait ofa troubled and not always admirable human

being whose embittered life had an undeniable impact on "what purports tobe a coolly objective work" (p. 35).

In fact, this book provides lots ofammunition to ignite all kinds ofcriticalfires. Lukcs emerges from it as a highly troubled human being who lovesneither mother nor father, is sickly, arrogant, and egocentric, "without good-ness" (p. 151), cannot love, but also feels homeless, alienated, lonely, and suffersfrom temptations ofsuicide. His brilliant friends Bla Balzs, Karl Mannheim,Arnold Hauser, Ernst Bloch, Bla Bartk, and Zoltn Kodly, with whom hecreates the esoteric Sunday Circle, "looked to Lukcs as the new Socrates" (p.

177) and referred to him as the "aesthetic pope" and "saint Lukcs" (p. 178).They shared the young Lukcs's elitist intellectual tastes but also his "demons"(p. 124): loneliness and alienation. Kadarkay speaks in great detail ofLukcs'sJewish origins, the "Lukcs Circle's Jewish face" and Lukcs's "homeless Jewishmind" (180), his messianism and genuine interest in Hasidism encouraged byBuber(p. 1 16). Lukcs is also the "Robespierre ofRed Budapest" (p. 214) whoduring his rule ofterrorordered ratherarbitrarily the execution ofeight soldiersand who stated that "terrorand bloodshed are a moral duty" (p. 222), and thatthe revolution ultimately "failed because it shed too little bourgeois blood" (p.

246). Lukcs's "dialectics of evil" (p. 314), "his adulterous soul" (p. 328), arealluded to in references to his recantations and his "idolatry ofStalin" which,according to Isaac Deutscher, was "genuine" (p. 312) but, according to Kadar-kay's painstaking research, neverappeared in Lukcs's unpublished works (p.321).

Philosophically, Lukcs's portrait appears from this biographical puzzle as a

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Talmudian, idealist, neo-Kantian, Machiavellian, and Nietzschean metaphysi-cian "who could both arbitrarily leap from doubt into beliefand find relieffrom the torment ofdoubt by affirming the absurdity ofthe human condition"(p. 103). His early neo-Kantian essays in The Soul and Form (191 1) are seen ashis "unwitting intellectual autobiography" unmatched by his laterMarxist writ-ings (p. 91), with the exception ofHistory and Chss Consciousness (1923) and TheYoung Hegel, written during Lukcs's Russian exile, which receive due recog-nition. "Reading Marx offers little insight into Lukcs" (p. 340), observes Ka-darkay, only to state repeatedly elsewhere that Lukcs nevertheless "surpassesall Marxist thinkers" (p. 27).

There are many more merits than flaws in this magisterial work. The skillfuland honest handling ofan enormous amount of information make the biog-rapher's occasional peremptory statements, his unconditional admiration ofLukcs, and even his negative treatment ofwomen less significant. The desireto link Lukcs's work to his turbulent existence and troubled personality mayhave diminished some of the aura ofobjectivity surrounding his theories. Atthe same time, by uncovering the personal and historical contingencies ofLukcs's work, Kadarkay has contributed in an unprecedented way to ourunderstanding ofa significant body ofwork that testifies to some of the mostrepresentative intellectual and human turmoil of the twentieth century.

United States NavalAcademyEva L. Corredor

Is Literary History Possible?, by David Perkins; ? & 192pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992,

$25.95.

Is Literary History Possible? is puzzling. In significant respects it is exacdy whatone would expect from David Perkins, a sensitive critic who has written excellentstudies of Romantic literature and modern poetry. This book is informed,

judicious, precise in its judgments and formulations, elegany arranged, andlucidly composed. Yet Perkins's specific commentaries on writers and texts, andhis analyses of the theoretical problems in literary history, are often sketchy,

glancing, allusive, and fail to cohere in a satisfying general argument. For allits learning and careful thought, it is unclearwhetherIs Literary History Possible?has any consequences.

Perkins's first chaptersurveys "the present state ofthe discussion," noting inparticular the revival of, and return to, literary history in the aftermath oftheNew Criticism and its poststructuralist, especially deconstructionist, successors.