GEORG [György] LUKÁCS (1885-1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic who has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era.  His major contributions include the formulation of a Marxist system of aesthetics that opposed political control of artists and defended humanism and an elaboration of the theory of alienation within industrial society.

He one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the ideological orthodoxy of the USSR.  In his magnum opus, HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS (1923), Lukács developed a unique Marxist philosophy of history and laid the basis for his critical literary tenets by linking the development of form in art with the history of the class struggle.  Turning his back on the claims of Marxism to be a strictly scientific analysis of social and economic change, Lukács recast it as a philosophical worldview.  Strikingly, he held that, even if all of Marx’s predictions were false, Marxism still would retain its validity as a perspective on life and culture.  He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into a formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.  In his late work THE ONTOLOGY OF SOCIAL BEING (1978-80), published in 3 volumes, Lukács undertook a systematic treatment of dialectical philosophy in its materialist form.

Lukács was also an influential literary critic for his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre.  His important work in literary criticism began early in his career, with THE THEORY OF THE NOVEL (1916/20), a seminal work in literary theory and the theory of genre.  THE HISTORICAL NOVEL (1937) is probably Lukács's most influential work of literary history.  In it he traced the development of the genre of realist fiction and a new historical consciousness, exemplified by writers like Scott, Balzac and Tolstoy, who depicted contemporary social life not as a static drama of fixed, universal types, but rather as a moment of history, constantly changing, open to the potential of revolutionary transformation.  For this reason he saw these authors as progressive and their work as potentially radical, despite their own personal conservative politics.  This preference for the great bourgeois realist novelists of the 19th century was denounced by proponents of the prevailing official doctrine of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union.  But he had his blind spots too: Lukács steadfastly opposed the formal innovations of modernist writers like Kafka, Joyce and Beckett, preferring the traditional aesthetic of realism.  He also authored important studies of Goethe, Hegel, Lenin, Thomas Mann, and others.

In compiling this torrent, I'd be remiss not to express my gratitude to Ross Wolf for his important work and scans, which I have occasionally taken the liberty of modifying.


The following books are in PDF format unless otherwise noted:

* Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 1980).  With Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.

* Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (Verso, 2000).  Translated by Esther Leslie.

* Culture of People’s Democracy, The: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition, 1945-1948 (Brill, 2013).  Translated by Tyrus Miller.

* Destruction of Reason, The (Humanities, 1981).  Translated by Peter Palmer

* Essays on Realism (MIT, 1981).  Translated by David Fernbach.

* Essays on Thomas Mann (Merlin, 1964).  Translated by Stanley Mitchell.

* German Realists in the Nineteenth Century (MIT, 1993).  Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast.

* Goethe and His Age (Merlin, 1968).  Translated by Robert Anchor.

* Historical Novel, The (Beacon, 1963).  Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell.

* History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (MIT, 1971).  Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

* Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (Verso, 2009).  Translated by Nicholas Jacobs.

* Lukacs Reader, The (Blackwell, 1995).  Edited by Arpad Kadarkay.

* Meaning of Contemporary Realism, The (Merlin, 1963).  Translated by John and Necke Mander.

* Ontology of Social Being, Vol. 1: Hegel's False and His Genuine Ontology (Merlin, 1978).  Translated by David Fernbach.

* Ontology of Social Being, Vol. 2: Marx's Basic Ontological Principles (Merlin, 1978).  Translated by David Fernbach.

* Ontology of Social Being, Vol. 3: Labour (Merlin, 1980).  Translated by David Fernbach.

* Process of Democratization, The (SUNY, 1991).  Translated by Susanne Bernhardt and Norman Levine.

* Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (Verso, 1983).  Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

* Reviews and Articles (Merlin, 1983).  Translated by Peter Palmer.

* Selected Correspondence, 1902-1920 (Columbia, 1986).  Translated by Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tar.

* Solzhenitsyn (MIT, 1971).  Translated by William David Graf.

* Soul and Form (MIT, 1974).  Translated by Anna Bostock. -- PDF + ePUB

* Studies in European Realism (Grosset & Dunlap, 1964).  Translated by Edith Bone.

* Tactics and Ethics, 1919-1929 (Verso, 2014).  Translated by Michael McColgan. -- PDF + ePUB

* Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (MIT, 1971).  Translated by Anna Bostock.

* Writer and Critic & Other Essays (Grosset & Dunlap, 1971).  Translated by Arthur D. Kahn.

* Young Hegel, The: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics (Merlin, 1975).  Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

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