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It has become a standard practice, almost a narrative habit, when writing about Lukács to displace his efforts in History and Class Consciousness by placing them into a comfortable history, above all that history which leads through his early work to the critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin et al., which terminates, ironically, in the neo-Kantian locutions of Habermas. There is also that other history which traces the trajectory leading from History and Class Consciousness to Lukács' Lenin, and from there to Lenin, to Stalin and thence to the wax fruits of dialectical theory in Soviet practice. Consigning Lukács his place in this way certainly eases the burden of reading him, but must do less than justice to his text. Of course, there is a "history" which allows these histories to be written; but we should be uneasy about a telling of the past that allows Lukács to be indicted for his deviation from the truth of Marxist science, for his incipient humanism, and held responsible for the reduction of class praxis to Party dictatorship. Nor can we avoid the complacent irony of a history that commences with Lukács' insistent, penetrating critique of Kantianism in all its forms and culminates in what is but the most recent avatar of Kantian, transcendental philosophy.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-2897-8_11

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