Marxism, Romanticism, and the Case of Georg Lukács: Notes on Some Recent Sources and

Situations
Author(s): Paul Breines
Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Fall, 1977), pp. 473-489
Published by: Boston University
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 PAUL BREINES

Marxism,
Romanticism, and the Case of
Georg Lukacs: Notes on Some
Recent Sources and Situations

Marxism,
withwhich locates
an eye to polarizations
their abolition, and tensions
is not exempt in At
from them. society
crucial
points Marxism is divided against itself?a sign of both vitality and insuper
able dilemmas. It is, for example, a critique of ideology (religion, liberalism,
political economy) from the standpoint of universal human needs, and an
ideology serving the provincial needs of socialist parties and states. Marxian
theory and movements also pose a critique of a society dominated by eco
nomic forces, and are themselves economistic, dominated by economic defi
nitions of human experience. Moreover, as one commentator has noted,
Marxism has two souls, one democratic, the other authoritarian, its history
amounting to an internal battle between them. The list can be extended and
each polarization warrants attention, but one is of special interest here: Marx
ism as a sustained (and unequal) antagonism between Romantic and En
lightenment-Utilitarian moments. This particular tension, always in the back
ground of Marxism's history, is today emerging as a focal point of debate
whose outcome may be less ephemeral than the sound of the terms.
The discussion begins with notes on Marx's and late nineteenth-century
Marxism's relations to Romanticism, and concludes with remarks on the
present situation. In between, the center of attention will be Georg Lukacs,
whose career was a stage on which Marxism's entanglement with Romanti
cism unfolded with protracted intensity. Throughout, the guiding idea is
this: Marxism had vital roots in what is often called the Romantic revolt
against modernity. But in the course of its development, anxious to keep
abreast of the capitalist times and its scientific spirit, Marxism forsook those
Numerous of the themes I try to develop here emerge from co-teaching and conversa
tions with Peter Weiler in the Boston College History Department. He forgives my
deviations.

SiR, 16 (Fall 1977)

473

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 474 PAUL BREINES

roots. It continues to do so, and continues to pay the price: the same price
society pays for becoming modern.
As to Marx, while he followed Hegel, a most Romantic critic of Romanti
cism, in his conviction regarding the central role of passion and desire in his
tory, his tolerance for Romanticism's more sentimental effusions and its cult
of the emotions was of course low; for the political Romanticism that blos
somed in Germany even lower. Although he studied briefly with August
Schlegel at the Bonn University, wrote Romantic verse as a young man, and
briefly considered poetry his calling, Marx was never a Romantic. Nor is
this the issue. If it is a question of Marx's having declared or implied affiliation
with the Romantic movement, the answer is clearly negative. If, however, it
is a question of the extent to which the Romantic response to industrial cap
italist society's emergence assumed a significant position within his own
thinking, then the picture becomes more complex.
Not for most Marxists who, when they have taken up the matter at all,
have done so on the assumption that there is either Marxism or Romanticism.
There is ample negative evidence in the "classics" for this attitude since nei
ther Marx nor Engels offers much in the way of positive remarks on Roman
ticism. Moreover, their criticism of ideas and social movements linked to
Romanticism?Utopian socialism, "feudal socialism," artisan struggles against
incipient industrial capitalism?fast emerged as one of the decisive points of
self-validation within Marxist circles. In brief, Marxism proclaimed its su
periority to other forms of socialism on the basis of its own forward-looking
standpoint, its purported ties to the onward march of history, condemning
to what Leon Trotsky would later call the historical dust-bin all romanti
cally tinged socialisms which criticized capitalism by way of models of work
and social relations drawn from the pre-capitalist past.1 The initial state
ments of this position are The German Ideology and the "Communist Mani
festo"; the fullest is Engels' "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," published
in the early 1880's as a pamphlet which promptly became the basic text of
popularized Marxism.
A succinct statement of this traditional view appears in the recent and out
standing book on Georg Lukacs' political evolution by Michael Lowy, whose
study in other respects contributes much to placing the issue of Marxism and
Romanticism on a new plane.2 There are, Lowy stresses, numerous simi
larities between Marx's emergent thought and the social outlook of Roman
ticism. His critique of alienated labor is anticipated, for example, in Adam
1. At mid-century the Marxists pressed this point in a context that was dominated not
by them but by Romantic socialisms?Owenism, Saint-Simonianism, Proudhonism,
Bakuninism, and so forth.
2. Michael Lowy, Pour une sociologie des intellectuels revolutionnaires: Vevolution poli
tique de Lukacs, igog-ig2g (Paris: P.U.F., 1976). The sooner this fine work is translated
into English, the better. It is cited hereafter as Lowy, Pour une sociologie.

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 THE CASE OF GEORG LUKACS 475
Muller's analysis of the emptiness of work divorced from viable community
bonds. Similarly, Thomas Carlyle's abhorrence of the Mechanical and the
Cash Nexus parallels Marx's own lacerating commentaries on estrangement
and money. Nonetheless, Lowy indicates, Marx's theory had nothing so
cially or ideologically to do with "anti-capitalist romanticism": Marxism
"found its roots in a completely different section of the petite-bourgeoisie?
Jacobin, illuministe, democratic-revolutionary, anti-feudal, and francophile,
whose great literary representative was Heinrich Heine, that relentless op
ponent of Romanticism."3
This is a strong but one-sided case to which there have been challenges.
Ernst Fischer, the late Austrian Marxist and author of The Necessity of Art,
for example, has argued that Marx's theory emanated from a source he
shared in common with the Romantics: "the dream of the whole man."
Although he carried it in new directions, Marx, according to Fischer, built
upon the "romantic revolt against a world which turned everything into a
commodity and degraded man to the status of an object. . . . [The] poets
and philosophers of the iron age complained that man had become a frag
ment of his own self, had been overpowered by his own works, had fallen
away from himself"?a complaint which in Marx's hands became a theory
of proletarian revolution.4 A similar view presented from a different stand
point appears in M. H. Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism, where Marx's con
cepts of revolution and communism are delineated as extensions of the Ro
mantic vision of a final redemption of humanity following its "circuitous
journey" through a life of alienation.5 Or as Alvin Gouldner has recently
put it, "there were important components of Romanticism in [Marx's] thought
and ... if Marxism is to be understood as a whole, then these components
must be firmly grasped."6
Summarily presented, these too are trenchant but partial insights. With no
pretense to exhausting the matter here, its central element is that Marx?
vigorously between 1840 and 1850, more weakly thereafter?achieved a fu
sion of Romantic and Enlightenment-Utilitarian currents of social criticism.7
3. Lowy, Pour une sociologie, p. 23.
4. Ernst Fischer, The Essential Marx, trans. Anna Bostock (New York: Herder and
Herder, 1970), p. 15.
5. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Litera
ture (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 313-16.
6. Alvin W. Gouldner, For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today (New
York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 339. Gouldner's comment appears in the course of his wide
ranging essay "Romanticism and Classicism: Deep Structures in Social Science.*' Along
with the recent studies by Michael Lowy and Ferenc Feher, cited elsewhere in these
footnotes, it comprises the main sources on which the present essay is a gloss.
7. Gouldner, "Romanticism and Classicism," recognizes this although he conceives
it somewhat differently in connection with his examination of the interplay of Romantic
and classicist themes in sociology as a whole.

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 476 PAUL BREINES

Nowhere is this more sharply displayed than in the "Communist Manifesto,"

which has proven so enduringly compelling in large measure because it
formed into a single salvo the two dominant poles of response to modern
society?the scientific outlook and the "Romantic revolt" against it.8 In the
"Manifesto" and Marx's previous writings, the capitalist industrial revolu
tion and the entire world of objectified relations it creates are grasped as si
multaneously liberating and oppressive. With important exceptions (Di
derot, for example), the Enlightenment and its Utilitarian progeny had
stressed the former side of the picture; the Romantic current, the latter.
Marx stood alone in transforming both into a single critical vision.9

8. In this light, revision is needed in George Lichtheim's claim that the "Manifesto"
retains its power only in historical-social contexts similar to those in which it was orig
inally written, namely, when a traditional society is entering the throes of transition to
industrialism. See his Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Praeger,
1962), pp. 57-58, 65-66. Another and related issue needs to be taken up here: Gouldner's
suggestion ("Romanticism and Classicism," p. 338) that Marxism oscillates between a
classical political moment which stresses the importance of the maturation of objective
conditions for revolution, and a Romantic moment which stresses the importance of
"struggle, individual commitment, and effort." Marxism's long-range trend, Gouldner
argues, is toward "an increasingly Romantic politics," which began with the "Leninist
breakthrough" in Russia and continued through the "Romantic strategies of Mao and
Che Guevara." There is much to this idea, which is illuminated by Lichtheim's above
mentioned thesis, since there is obviously important sociological common ground be
tween Germany in the mid-1840's, Russia around 1917, China at the time of Mao's rise,
and Cuba in the period of its revolution. At the risk of nit-picking, however, some
qualifications are needed. First, while the stress on revolutionary will and combat is
bound up with the Romantic element in Marxism, this is not the whole story. For ex
ample, if Lenin's strategy is to be termed a form of Marxian political Romanticism inso
far as it is not contingent upon and even rejects the notion of objective maturation of
conditions for revolution, then two important aspects of Lenin's career need to be ex
plained: the fact that his entire explicit intellectual orientation was hostile to Romanticism
in virtually every respect; and the related fact that he was a Marxist modernizer par
excellence who saw economic development, not socialist community, as the top priority.
In both these latter respects, distinctions ought to be drawn between Lenin on one side,
and Mao-Tse Tung and Che Guevara on the other, since both in the general sense of
intellectual orientation and the particular sense of a critical attitude toward modernity,
they could be called Romantics whereas Lenin could not. The second lacuna in Gould
ner's provocative view is that, paradoxically, it does not reflect on the fact that the ex
amples it offers come from "third world" or transitional contexts, while it makes no
mention of the upsurge of forms of romanticized Marxism in the New Left movement
that emerged in the advanced, industrialized West during the 1960's. The upshot? First,
that "Romantic Marxism" has no monopoly on a strategic stress upon revolutionary
will; and second that "Romantic Marxism" does not require a belief in what Gouldner
calls "wilful coup d'itat."
9. Marx stood alone in the achievement, though not necessarily in the effort. Be
tween the 1820's and the 1860's, decades caught in the midst of major flux and transition
such that the clash of conflicting theories and efforts to integrate them were hardly un

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 THE CASE OF GEORG LUKACS 477
The achievement proved short-lived. As in European bourgeois culture
following 1850, when Romantic and Utopian impulses in social thought and
movements tended to give way to scientism, positivism, and what was
termed realism, so a parallel process unfolded within Marxism. In Marx's
writings from the mid-century onward, in Engels' increasingly important
contributions, and in the gradually expanding Marxist movement during
the latter decades of the century, the Enlightenment-Utilitarian root (faith
in mechanistically oriented scientific thought, industrial technology, and even
the Victorian work-ethic) blossomed, snuffing out its Romantic counter
part. A variant of bourgeois ideas of progress came to prevail among the
ideologues of the Marxist movement.
In this view, which traverses the writings of August Bebel, Karl Kautsky,
and Jules Guesde, for example, progress in science, technological advance,
and industrial development under capitalism were seen as leading society in
a linear fashion closer to socialism. More than this, the future hope of those
outside the direct capitalist relations of production?women, artisans, peas
ants?rested upon their being drawn into the ranks of the industrial prole
tariat. That this process entailed at its very center a calamitous shock?the
violent ripping apart not only of customary backwardness, but also cus
tomary social bonds and support networks?was shunted into the more dis
tant background of the Marxian perspective. Marx had grasped this calami
tous core of progress, having derived it from his Romantic progenitors and
contemporaries, and had made it part of his critique of capitalism. Yet, not
only did his own later nineteenth-century heirs tend to forget it, but Marx
himself also contributed to the process. While the story is complex, it is
nevertheless the case that Marx as well as Engels tended increasingly to mute,
as an unscientific residue, the element of moral revulsion and rebellion against
capitalism.10 In turn, the leading Marxists gave one-sided emphasis to their
theory's modernizing and productivist biases.11

common, other well-known careers provide evidence of attempts to bring Romantic

and Enlightenment currents together: for example, Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and
John Stuart Mill.
10. Moral outrage at capitalism continued to infuse Marxism even as it grew increas
ingly scientific in its pretentions. In fact, Marxism makes little sense without this ele
ment. At the same time?late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe?there
is ample evidence suggesting that, especially among what is called the "labor aristoc
racy" (skilled, regularly employed, better-paid workers), Marxism exerted its appeal
not so much through its denunciations of capitalism and its revolutionary will, as
through its anti-clericalism, rationalism, atheism, etc. To not insignificant sections of
the European proletariat and intellectual stratum, Marxism offered a modern, scientific,
secular world-view that was "culturally revolutionary" in relation to the Churches and
Christianity, but not necessarily in relation to capitalism. The late-nineteenth-century
repression of Romanticism within Marxism was certainly bound up with the increas

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 478 PAUL BREINES

If by the i88o's the Romantic dimension of Marx's early thought was on

its way out of Marxism, and to a lesser extent the dominant (materialist,
positivist, scientistic) currents of bourgeois thought, it did not vanish from
sight altogether. On the contrary, by roughly 1890 it underwent a potent
resurgence outside and against Marxism in the form of a new-Romantic cul
tural movement in academic and bohemian-aesthetic circles. Thanks to a
wide range of recent studies, the main contours and numerous particulars of
this development are well enough known, and we need note only the fol
lowing features: like its predecessor, Romanticism proper, neo-Romanti
cism centered around a cultural hostility to a (now heightened and deepened)
phase of modernity: the urbanization, "rationalization," and mechanization
of economic and social life; and the extensive intrusion of these forces into
intellectual life in the form of positivism, mechanistic materialism, and a
general tendency to reject the importance of subjectivity, will, and imagi
nation in human experience.12 That is, neo-Romanticism, for all its aristo

ingly non-revolutionary (or reformist) direction in which the prevailing currents of

Marxism were then moving. In this connection, during the early 1890^, first in Ger
many and then in the more-or-less Marxist Second International as a whole, the repre
sentatives of Romantic and moral revolt against capitalism, the anarchists, were expelled
from the organizations. This is not to say that all anarchist groupings at that time were
Romantic, but that many were and that Marxism's battle with anarchism in the turn of
the century period is at least a chapter in its movement away from its Romantic and
toward its Enlightenment-Utilitarian pole. Much material and very interesting analysis
of German anarchism in the early 1890's can be found in Dirk H. Muller, Idealismus und
Revolution: Zur Opposition der Jungen gegen den Sozialdemokratischen Parteivorstand, i8go
his 1894 (Berlin: Colloquium, 1975).
11. As indirect and obviously polemical evidence of this development, the remark by
Gustav Landauer, the German anarchist, in 1911 is apposite: the Father of Marxism,
Landauer proclaimed, is neither history, nor Hegel, nor Smith and Ricardo, nor the
socialist who preceded Marx. It is not the revolutionary-democratic conditions of the
period "and still less is it the will and desire for culture and beauty.... No, the Father of
Marxism is steam.... Placed before the living Jesus on the cross and a new machine . ..
a Marxist will find the crucified Christ-child completely useless and will run after the
machine." This perceptive exaggeration appears in Landauer's Aufruf zum Sozialismus,
3rd ed. (1911; rpt. Koln: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1925), pp. 47-48. The book, a critique
of Marxism and a major document of neo-Romantic socialism, has been republished in
Germany; an English translation is forthcoming from Telos Press.
12. See among other works those by H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The
Reorientation of European Social Thought, i8go-igjo (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958);
Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.
Press, 1967); Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement:
Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); Roy Pascal,
From Naturalism to Expressionism: German Literature and Society, i88o-igi8 (New York:
Basic Books, 1973); Martin Green, The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the
Tragic Modes of Love (New York: Basic Books, 1974); George L. Mosse, Germans and

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 THE CASE OF GEORG LUKACS 479
cratic, pessimistic, escapist, and irrationalist elements, ought to be seen as
"neo-Romantic anti-capitalism. "The latter term, initially proposed by Georg
Lukacs, has been suggestively elaborated in the book on Lukacs by Michael
Lowy and a recent essay by the Hungarian Marxist Ferenc Feher.13 Lowy,
for example, is on target when he depicts the neo-Romantic movement as a
resistance in the name of Culture (spiritual-aesthetic "use values") to its im
minent conquest by "exchange value." Finally, neo-Romantic anti-capital
ism was the chrysalis from which Georg Lukacs' Marxism sprung.
"One of Lukacs' great merits," Lowy writes, "is to have reformulated in
Marxist terms by way of the theory of reification, the intellectuals' confused
and romantic critique of the inexorable process of quantification generated
by the capitalist mode of production."14 Yet, as Lowy's own lucid portrayal
of the early phase of Lukacs' career shows, this particular insight requires re
formulation from the Romantic side: one of Lukacs' great merits, it should
be said, is to have criticized and reconstructed Marxism by way of the theory
of reification which he derived from the intellectuals' "confused and ro
mantic critique. . . ." The importance of the young Lukacs, in other words,
is to have sought to restore to Marxism its lost Romantic dimension.15 The
attempt rather than its fulfillment needs emphasis and not only because the
radically original Marxism Lukacs articulated in the early 1920's failed to in
fluence the dominant Marxist currents of the day. Beyond this?and it is
what makes his career as a whole so vital from an historical standpoint?by
the mid-i 920's Lukacs himself would begin to turn against the neo-Romantic
heart of his own Marxism, never succeeding fully in stilling it, but not for
want of effort. If the young Lukacs' neo-Romantic Marxism has haunted

Jews: The Right, the Left and the Search for a "Third Force" in Pre-Nazi Germany (New
York: Howard Fertig, 1970); and Andrew Arato, "The Neo-Idealist Defense of Sub
jectivity," Telos, 21 (1974), 108-61.
13. Lowy, Pour une sociologie, pp. 17-105; and Ferenc Feher, "The Last Phase of Ro
mantic Anti-Capitalism: Lukacs's Response to the War," New German Critique, 10
(1977), 139-54. This is part of a larger essay, "At the Crossroads of Romantic Anti
Capitalism," which has just been published in Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, Gyorgy
Markus, Sandor Radnoti, Die Seek und das Leben: Studien zumfruhen Lukacs (Frankfurt
am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1977). This important collection appeared after the present manu
script was completed.
14. Lowy, Pour une sociologie, p. 23.
15. Gouldner, For Sociology, p. 365, n., is correct in criticizing Gareth Stedman Jones's
"The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: An Evaluation," New Left Review, 70 (November
December 1971), pp. 27-66, which sees Lukacs* early Marxism as the "first irruption"
of Romanticism into Marxism. The first irruption came with Marx himself; Lukacs was
its major restorer. Jones's essay is of great interest in the present context. Sophisticated
but terribly wrong-headed, it attacks the young Lukacs' neo-Romantic Marxism from
an explicitly Enlightenment-Utilitarian-Marxist standpoint.

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 480 PAUL BREINES

twentieth-century Marxism as a whole, it haunted the mature Lukacs most

of all. A sketch of this story may help to illuminate aspects of the broader
Romanticism-Marxism relationship.
Prior to his conversion early in 1919 to Communism and Marxism, an
event which stunned both his Hungarian intimates and such of his German
admirers as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Thomas Mann, Lukacs' out
look was crisply summarized in his attitude toward World War I: "the mid
dle European powers will presumably defeat Russia, which can lead to the
fall of Tsarism. Fine. It's a likely prospect that the Western allies will triumph
over Germany; when this results in the collapse of the Hohenzollern and
Hapsburg houses, fine again. But then the question arises: who will save us
from Western civilization?"16 The problem of Western civilization's ad
vance, as Lukacs saw it in the years prior to and during the war, was that it
entailed the advance of Versachlichung (the transformation of life and culture
into things).17 In his Theory of the Novel (1916), which presents an aesthetic
philosophical analysis of the relations between literary forms and historical
cultural epochs, the young Lukacs constructs an exemplary display of the
neo-Romantic critique. Pointing to the organic wholeness (Geschlossenheit)
of classical Greek and medieval European cultures, he denounces the frag
mentation (Zerissenheit) of the bourgeois life and spirit. In the modern epoch
subjectivity and the world, the soul and action, spirit and nature, feeling and
reason, form and content are torn asunder; art is ripped from the totality of
social life, which is itself increasingly atomized. When there "no longer is
any totality of being (Seinstotalitat)," art, as in nineteenth-century Europe,
becomes increasingly intellectualized. Creativity becomes a project in re
flection on the problem of creativity and artistic forms themselves; the typ
ical hero in both fiction and drama is marked by passivity and inwardness.18
Several aspects of Lukacs' outlook call for comment. First, when he ana
lysed the crisis of culture in the bourgeois age, he did not do so only in

i6. Georg Lukacs, "Vorwort" (1962), Theorie des Romans, 3rd unrevised ed. (Neu
wied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1965), p. 5. The question of Lukacs' conversion to
Marxism and of relations between his thinking before and after it is expertly examined
in Gyorgy Markus, "The Soul and Life: The Young Lukacs and the Problem of Cul
ture," Telos, 32 (1977), 95-115.
17. The category of Versachlichung is most fully developed in Lukacs' pre-Marxian
work in his "Soziologie des modernen Dramas," Archivfiir Sozialwissenschaft und Sozial
politik, 38 (1914), 662-706, although it essentially underlies his whole outlook in the
pre-1918 period. Derived from the work of Ferdinand Tonnies, Georg Simmel, and
Max Weber, the term is the embryo of Lukacs' subsequent Marxian conception of
Verdinglichung (reification).
18. Lukacs, Theorie des Romans, pp. 22-33. An important sympathetically critical anal
ysis of Lukacs' early book is presented in Ferenc Feher, "Is the Novel Problematic? A
Contribution to the Theory of the Novel," Telos, 15 (1973), 47-74.

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 THE CASE OF GEORG LUKACS 481
terms of the dissolution of pre-bourgeois values; nor did he mean only a
crisis in art. Before he became a Marxist, Lukacs believed that the crisis of
bourgeois culture was a crisis of bourgeois society and "man"; and that a
resolution to the cultural crisis presupposed a social transformation.19 More
over, while he drew inspiration from the medieval and Greek images of
Gemeinschaft, his underlying orientation was not toward the past but the his
torical future. This suggests a second issue, one of the most intriguing and
vital in the whole picture of the young Lukacs: his invisible Utopia. From
his late teens onward?Lukacs was born in 1885?he was a socialist, if not
a typical one. His eschatological and religious conception of socialism re
mained in the background of his thinking, however, because he could not
see the European labor movement, including its Marxist sections, as the
bearer of real transformation, entangled as he believed it was in bourgeois
patterns of organization and thought.20 Yet Lukacs never renounced the ef
fort to locate and decipher the signs and spaces in the bourgeois world which
pointed to its transcendence and redemption.
Contrary to one recent argument, the pre-Marxist Lukacs did not share
the cultivated pessimism and stoicism of Max Weber and Georg Simmel,
from whom he otherwise derived much.21 Rather, in such works as The
Soul and the Forms (1910), "On the Poverty of the Spirit" (1912), as well as
the above-mentioned Theory of the Novel, he engaged in a relentless quest
for aesthetic and moral moments which glimpsed a new world. Nor did he
refrain from revealing how ephemeral and transitory the few prospects were,
since they all proved tainted by an incapacity to alter the epoch which made
them necessary. An example appears in the closing pages of Theory of the
Novel where, in a brief passage, Lukacs lauds Dostoyevsky as the writer who
has passed beyond the novel-form into a realm of creativity which is the
harbinger of new life. Just what Lukacs meant here is not entirely clear, al
though beneath the seemingly opaque vision lay his idea of community,
which was neither nationalistic-^olkisch nor passeiste, as were many parallel
ideas elaborated by others in the Romantic tradition. In Dostoyevsky he
glimpsed what he already had in sight: the image, yet confined to but a few
souls, of a world beyond estrangement. In his own work, as in Dostoyev

19-1 have tried to discuss this theme at more length in "Notes on Lukacs's The Old
Culture and the New Culture,' "ed. Bart Grahl and Paul Piccone, Towards a New Marx
ism (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973), pp. 3-19. It is treated by others, especially Markus,
"The Soul and Life"; and the important unpublished dissertation by James Schmidt,
"From Tragedy to Dialectics," Diss. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1974.
20. Lukacs' views of Marxism prior to 1919 are perceptively examined in Lowy,
Pour une sociologie, pp. 107-50.
21. This claim appears in G. Stedman Jones, "The Marxism of the Early Lukacs."

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 482 PAUL BREINES

sky's, this idea of community was never made positive. It remained mystical:
the unarticulated and inarticulable missing link that awaited forging.22
This silence is a sign of Lukacs' links to the Romantic refusal of reconcili
ation with the existing reality, even as it also signifies his rejection at that
time of Marxist resolutions to his dilemmas. Although by 1914-15 Lukacs
had begun to immerse himself in Hegel and had taken the initial steps to
ward adopting the philosopher's (and later Marx's) historical rationalism or
what is sometimes called "pan-logism," he had in no sense renounced his
hold on what the youthful Hegel had called the idea of how things ought to
be, and the tension between those ideas and the way things are. The moral
imperative or stress on the will to transform the world would assume a cen
tral place in Lukacs' Marxism of the early 1920's. Yet as the following pages
will try to show, by the mid-1920's Lukacs, as if on the model of Goethe,
Hegel (and Marx?), would allow himself to be educated by the recalcitrant
world, reconciling himself with it, rather than railing romantically against it.
That subsequent step, however, entailed adjustment to a Marxist not a
bourgeois reality, that is, to a victorious but increasingly bureaucratized Rus
sian Revolution, and a European Communist movement which, in the wake
of a series of resounding defeats between 1918 and 1923, was on its way to
becoming an appendage of the Soviet state. But before turning to Lukacs'
decisions in that context, something must be said regarding the broader re
lationship between neo-Romanticism and the political Left. Again, the work
of Feher and Lowy is important. In connection with the situation he terms
the "crossroads of Romantic anti-capitalism," Feher offers a sturiningly rich
analysis of the large exchange of letters between Lukacs and the German
writer Paul Ernst delineating the opposed routes taken by these kindred neo
Romantic spirits: Ernst moving from 1914 toward German nationalism, ca
pitulation to capitalism, and finally to fascism; with Lukacs moving in the
same period toward communist revolution.23
Lowy's commentary on neo-Romantic anti-capitalism in Germany prior
to and during World War I introduces the notion of the movement's "ideo
logical hermaphrodism." While the political Right, above all the Nazis,
cashed in on the neo-Romantic revolt during the 1920's and '3o's, this can
not be accounted for, Lowy implies, solely by reference to an alleged logic
built into the revolt itself, since the latter contained Leftist (Lukacs, Ernst
Bloch, Ernst Toller, Gustav Landauer) as well as Right-wing representatives,
not to mention those who carried neo-Romantic anti-capitalism across a se

22. For discussions of the young Lukacs* views on Dostoyevsky, see Feher, "The Last
Phase of Romantic Anti-Capitalism," pp. 140-44; and Lowy, Pour une sociologie, pp.
133-34- A major study of the issue is being prepared by Zoltan Feher of the Modern
Language Department at U.C.L.A.
23. Feher, "The Last Phase of Romantic Anti-Capitalism," passim.

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 THE CASE OF GEORG LUKACS 483
ries of political positions (for example, Thomas Mann and Robert Michels).24
The young Lukacs stands out in the general picture because of his effort
between 1919 and the mid-i920,s to develop a coherent theoretical integra
tion of neo-Romanticism and Marxism. This project's main contours were,
first, the theory of reification (Verdinglichung), the embryo of which he had
grasped in the pre-war period. In the essay "Reification and the Conscious
ness of the Proletariat,,, which he published in 1923 in History and Class Con
sciousness, Lukacs gave this theory its fuller, Marxist expression. In doing so,
not only did he manage to reconstruct Marx's critique of alienated labor
(without access to the now well-known "Economic and Philosophic Manu
scripts of 1844"), placing it at the center of Marxism as a whole, but beyond
this he also quietly introduced a major (and Romantic) reversal of the domi
nant currents of Marxism by extending the critique of reification to encom
pass science and the scientific outlook, which Lukacs saw as pillars of the
reified world.25
Second, Lukacs insisted that the essentially revolutionary element in Marx
ism was not the idea of the primacy of economics but rather the concept of
totality. Here he meant three closely connected things, which he believed
were basic to Hegel and Marx's critique of Hegel, but which ultimately
hinge on Lukacs' own neo-Romantic roots. His totality-concept, to begin

24. Lowy, Pour une sociologie, pp. 25-77. A number of recent works have argued
against the notion that, as regards its political logic, Romanticism can be reduced to
Nazism or related political formations. See, for example, Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Com
munity: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: U. of California Press,
1973); Friedrich Heer, Europe, Mother of Revolutions, trans. Charles Kessler and Jennetta
Adcock (New York: Praeger, 1972); and Bernard Susser, "Ideological Multivalence:
Martin Buber and the German Volkisch Tradition," Political Theory, 5 (1977), 75-96.
Cf. the brief but perceptive comments on not viewing Romanticism as univocally re
actionary in Gouldner, For Sociology, pp. 331-32. In connection with the Left-wing of
Romantic anti-capitalism, the name of Ernst Bloch requires mention. An intimate of
Lukacs during the pre-war years in the Heidelberg seminar around Max Weber, Bloch
developed his own fusion of neo-Romanticism and Marxism after the war in such as yet
untranslated works as Thomas Miinzer, Theologian of Revolution and Spirit of Utopia. For
an exquisite commentary on the initial Bloch-Lukacs relation, see Sandor Radnoti,
"Bloch and Lukacs: Two Radical Critics in a 'God Forsaken World,' " Telos, 25 (1975),
155-64. Bloch in the early 1920's, although fully supportive of Lukacs' History and Class
Consciousness against its orthodox Marxist detractors, nevertheless considered the direc
tion in which Lukacs was moving to be a betrayal of neo-Romantic anti-capitalism. For
Bloch's views, see the fascinating interview (1974) with him in the appendix to Lowy,
Pour une sociologie, pp. 292-300. An English translation appears in New German Critique,
9 (1976), 35-45.
25. This central aspect of the young Lukacs' Marxism throws his Enlightenment
Utilitarian Marxist critics into veritable tantrums. One such performance can be found
in Lucio Colletti, "From Bergson to Lukacs," in his Marxism and Hegel, trans. Law
rence Garner (London: New Left Books, 1973), pp. 157-98.

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 484 PAUL BREINES

with, comprised the methodological principle of the primacy of the universal

over the particular, the whole over its parts. Further, it included the notion
that totality is historical, and that its movement in historical time consists of
a coming-to-consciousness (Bewusstwerden) of the makers of history, namely
the proletariat. Finally, Lukacs believed that the concept of totality is linked
to a peculiar reality: that "totality of being" or Gemeinschaft which is present
in history only in the form of its dissolution in modern, bourgeois society, but
which?the goal of history?is to be re-created in the form of Communism.
The critique of reification and the concept of totality yield the third major
component of Lukacs' neo-Romantic Marxism, the notion of total revolu
tion. Communism in this perspective means not only a transformation of
one mode of production and set of property relations to another, but a liber
ation of humanity from domination by the economy, an overturning of an
entire everyday life-world and its replacement by a new one.26 In the con
text of the post-war revolutionary ferment, in whose vortex Lukacs was de
veloping these ideas, the idea of total revolution implied what has recently
been called "revolutionary impatience," the belief in the imminence of the
revolutionary cataclysm, and the insistence on gearing all action toward its
realization.27 Finally, this anticipation of imminent revolution yielded the
special "moral mission of the Communist party," as Lukacs entitled one of
his essays from the early 1920's.28 Echoing his fascination for Dostoyevsky,
Lukacs conceived the Communist party not as a cadre of technicians of revo
lution, but as an embryonic community of revolutionary combat, whose in
ternal relations foreshadowed the world to be made, and whose actions must
aim at unveiling the historical totality, thereby enabling the proletariat to
fulfill its own revolutionary mission.
Virtually all aspects of Lukacs' theorizing in the early 1920's ran afoul of
the emergent Marxist orthodoxy emanating from the young Soviet Union.29
Under the pressure of criticism brought against his work because of its al
legedly subjectivist and anti-scientific features, and under the even greater
pressure of what Lukacs in 1922 termed the slowing tempo of the revolution,
neo-Romantic Marxism found itself at a new crossroad. In essence it looked

26. The best statement of this in Lukacs' early Marxist writings is his 1920 essay "The
Old Culture and the New Culture," an English translation of which appears in Grahl
and Piccone, eds., Towards a New Marxism, pp. 21-30.
27. See the work of the East German Marxist Wolfgang Harich, Zur Kritik der revo
lutionaren Ungeduld (Basle: edition etcetera, 1971).
28. Georg Lukacs, "The Moral Mission of the Communist Party," in Tactics and
Ethics: Political Essays, 1919-1929, trans. Michael McColgan (New York: Harper, 1975).
pp. 64-70.
29. For analysis of the impact of Lukacs' Marxism in the early 1920's see Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, "Pravda," in his Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston,
DI.: Northwestern U. Press, 1973).

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 THE CASE OF GEORG LUKACS 485
something like this: with revolutionary hopes dashed and with the revolu
tionary movement appearing progressively crusty, the door to disillusion
ment and retreat into either aestheticism or counter-revolution stood open.
Lukacs had rejected these options long before he became a Communist, and
they exerted no pull on him in the early and mid-i920,s, even as they at
tracted others. A second path pointed toward upholding his initial neo
Romantic Marxist ideals with increasing vigor, which implied turning the
cutting-edge of those ideals more directly upon the realities of the Com
munist movement. This, in turn, would necessitate a break with the move
ment. The third road, which Lukacs chose, consisted of making certain ad
justments to the Communist movement and to history as a whole, which
had not gone according to hopes. This meant muting the initial ideals, slowly,
perhaps reluctantly, with much rear-guard activity, but nonetheless clearly
for all that.
In 1925-26 Lukacs marked the course he would follow and unveiled some
of the complexity of his choice. It is worth noting that in those approximate
years Lukacs was presented with an alternative model of the fate of critically
minded revolutionaries. The year 1926, for example, saw the expulsion from
the German Communist Party of Karl Korsch for philosophical and political
heresies not far from Lukacs' own. At that time, too, Stalin's assault on
Trotsky was well underway, and would be triumphantly completed in the
following year with Trotsky's exclusion from the Politburo of the Soviet
Party. In the figures of Korsch and Trotsky, Lukacs had an image of what
can be called the Novalis posture in Communism: political suicide in the
form of marginality and isolation, stemming from unyielding commitment
to principle. It was not an image Lukacs was willing to adopt.
He made this clear in 1926 in a discussion of the question "What can pro
letarian revolution offer to the development of art?" Five years earlier Lukacs
would likely have answered this question with one word, everything. In the
mid-1920's, however, his response was: "initially very little."30 "The im
mense transformation we are experiencing, the transformation being car
ried out by the revolutionary proletariat [in the Soviet Union]," he went
on, "finds expression in the immediate, sensual reality far less rapidly than a
superficial glance would have led one to expect. This explains the 'disillu
sionment' with the Russian Revolution on the part of many of those intel
lectuals who expected it to provide an immediate solution to their special
problems."31 This was the voice of neo-Romantic Marxism in retreat.
At roughly the same time (1924 and 1926 respectively), Lukacs produced
two lengthy essays on Ferdinand Lassalle and Moses Hess which centered on

30. Georg Lukacs, "L'Art pour l'art und proletarische Dichtung," Die Tat, 18 (1926),
220-23.
31. Lukacs, "L'Art pour l'art," pp. 222-23.

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 486 PAUL BREINES

the problem he termed "idealist dialectics," but which indirectly encom

passed a critique of Romanticism in the sense of Lassalle's and Hess's ro
mantic refusals to comprehend history's materialist logos and their resulting
inabilities to adapt themselves to it.32 As with Korsch and Trotsky, so with
Lassalle and Hess in the previous century, Lukacs seemed to find models of
almost-revolutionaries whose theoretical errors caused them to be left in the
lurch by history.
Yet even as Lukacs was turning decisively against the neo-Romantic di
mensions of his own recent past, he was capable of giving it exemplary ex
pression, as in his 1926 essay criticizing what he considered the economic de
terminism of Nikolai Bukharin's presentation of Marxian theory, which was
then emerging as the virtual catechism of Soviet Marxism.33 Lukacs argued
that Bukharin, and by implication Soviet thinking collectively?an impli
cation he was careful not to explicate?was falling into the same "vulgar
Marxist" errors of the late nineteenth-century thinkers by reducing the his
torical dialectic of praxis (the inter-relation of "consciousness" and "being")
to the ratio of technology and matter. In the course of his critique he man
aged to keep alive, if in the background, his earlier vision of total revolution.
From 1926 until his death in 1971 at the age of eighty-six, Lukacs' career
and oeuvre as a Marxist cannot be reduced to a single theme.34 It is neverthe
less permissible to say that his battle, or, better, his pre-occupation with neo
Romantic anti-capitalism traverses the story. By the early 193o's, when he
began a lengthy period of residence in Moscow, Lukacs characterized the
phase of his work through the mid-1920's as his apprenticeship in Marxism.35
As it happened, however, the spell of neo-Romantic anti-capitalism was not
easily laid to rest; in Lukacs' case, the apprentice turned out to be the real
sorcerer. This is apparent, first of all, in Lukacs' abiding interest in the phe
nomenon of intellectual-philosophical apprenticeship, specifically that of
Hegel and Marx.36
32. "The New Edition of Lassalle's Letters" and "Moses Hess and the Problems of
Idealist Dialectics" appear on pp. 147-48 and 181-82 of Tactics and Ethics.
33. The review of Bukharin's Historical Materialism (1922) appears in Tactics and
Ethics, pp. 134-35.
34. For a brief, reliable sketch of Lukacs' career see the editor's introduction to Georg
Lukacs: The Man, His Work, and His Ideas, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (Fakenham, London,
and Reading: Weldenfield and Nicolson, 1970), pp. 1-33. George Lichtheim's small
study, Lukacs (London: Fontana, 1970), ought to have been better.
35. Georg Lukacs, "Mein Weg zur Marx" (1933), in Peter Ludz, ed., Georg Lukacs,
Schriften zur Ideologie (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1967), pp. 323-29.
36. Georg Lukacs, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Eco
nomics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: 1975). The original German edition of the
book appeared in 1948, although the manuscript was completed a decade earlier; and
Der junge Marx: Seine philosophische Entwicklung von 1840-1844 (Pfullingen, West Ger
many: Neske, 1965). Lukacs' small study of the young Marx awaits translation into
English.

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 THE CASE OF GEORG LUKACS 487
On a different level, Lukacs was forced to consider Romantic and neo
Romantic anti-capitalism again because of what, by the mid-1930's, he con
sidered the fact that it had laid the intellectual ground for Nazism. This re
evaluation appeared in numerous of his literary essays throughout the i93o's
and '4o's, but was given full theoretical expression in the book The Destruc
tion of Reason (1954), where Lukacs took to task as proto-fascists nearly all
the Romantic and neo-Romantic thinkers who had exerted a significant im
pact on his own early thought: Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietz
sche (who curiously never attracted Lukacs' attention previously), Dilthey,
Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tonnies, Georges Sorel and Henri Bergson, Max
Weber, and others. That the standard of judgment he employed in de
veloping this case was the same arid rationalism that had given birth to the
"irrationalism" in German thought he had come to deplore, evidently es
caped him.37 In the early and late 1960's, in the form of introductions to
republications of some of his earlier neo-Romantic anti-capitalist and neo
Romantic Marxist works, Lukacs provided somewhat more differentiated
criticism, including admission that the neo-Romantic current had, after all,
contributed positively to his own development beyond it.38
If Lukacs' own half-century-long reckoning with the Marxism-Romanti
cism relation closed on notes that were not entirely free of ambiguity, it is
significant that his present-day heirs have drawn much inspiration from the
neo-Romantic moment with which his journey began. Conversely, they
have not been drawn to the "classicist" Marxism to which he subsequently
aspired. So, for example, Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, and several other of
Lukacs' younger associates grouped in what is known as the "Budapest
School" of social theory have not only decisively contributed to retriev
ing and reconstructing the young Lukacs, but have sought to develop fur
ther in their own analyses of contemporary capitalist and socialist societies
many of the themes he had proposed.39 Similarly, Lucien Goldmann, Mi
37- Georg Lukacs, Die Zerstorung der Vernunft (Berlin-East: Aufbau, 1955). A major
chapter in the mature Lukacs' sustained effort to exorcise his earlier heresies appeared in
his critique of expressionism as proto-fascist. Elaborated in numerous essays during the
early and mid-1930's, his views were put together in the 1934 work Grosse und Verfall
des Expressionismus, which has been reprinted in his Essays iiber Realismus (Neuwied and
Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971). For an excellent, concise criticism of Lukacs' position in the
1930's, see Lowy, Pour une sociologie, pp. 58-59.
38. See, for example, his "Preface to the New Edition (1967)," in History and Class
Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1970), pp. ix-xlvii.
39. In addition to the essays cited in these notes, see Andras Hegedus, Agnes Heller,
Maria Markus, and Mihaly Vajda, The Humanization of Socialism: Writings of the Budapest
School (New York: St. Martins, 1977). See also Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, Gyorgy
Markus, and Mihaly Vajda, "Notes on Lukacs's Ontology," Telos, 29 (1976), 160-81.
Michael Lowy provides an excellent introduction to the work of the "Budapest School"
in his review of a recent collection of some of their essays, Individuum und Praxis: Posi

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 488 PAUL BREINES

chael Lowy, Alberto Asor-Rosa, Joseph Gabel, Andrew Arato, and the asso
ciates of the American journal Telos?Lukacs' indirect students?have found
the germinal point for their own efforts in the neo-Romantic phase of his
career.40
With the dissolution of the Romantic revolutionary ruptures of the 1960's,
in whose aftermath an increasingly scientistic Marxism has once again blos
somed, talk of Marxism and Romanticism seems at best to have a quaint
ring to it. What it might entail at worst may be confidently left to others to
delineate. Yet there is reason to hope that the history of Marxism does not
consist of a broken pendulum which, but for occasional lurches toward its
Romantic side, lingers interminably at the Enlightenment-Utilitarian pole.
One small but promising sign in this connection is the potential meeting be
tween the young Lukacs' progeny and those from a quite distinct yet ulti
mately related English tradition of historiography represented in the writ
ings of E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and most recently Christopher
Hill.
If the Lukacsians can overcome their inveterate hostility to things Anglo
Saxon and if the English Romantically-tinged Marxist historians can tran
scend their scorn for the Continent, there are numerous interesting pos
sibilities. Here it may suffice to cite the fruitful lines of contact between the
story of central European neo-Romantic capitalism on the one side, and that
of the efforts by Thompson (especially in his biography of William Morris)
and Williams (especially in his Culture and Society and City and Country) to
disclose the radical content of the careers and social theories of numerous
English Romanticists. In this regard, the case of the historian Christopher
Hill is particularly exciting since the trajectory of his intellectual career seems
to have moved, contrary to the careers of Lukacs and William Morris, from
"orthodox," "classicist," Enlightenment-Utilitarian Marxism toward its neo
Romantic variant. His recent The World Turned Upside Down, a most sym
pathetic study of the radical religious sects in the English Civil War of the
seventeenth century, demonstrates that Marxists need not remain merely
that, while it has long since been clear that Romantics need not remain
simply Romantics.41
Georg Lukacs' career offers vivid if paradoxical evidence of this claim, as

tionen der "Budapester Schule" (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), in New German

Critique, 7 (1976), 153-56.
40. For comments on these and other of the young Lukdcs' present-day heirs, see my
"Introduction to Lukacs . . . ," in Grahl and Piccone, Towards a New Marxism.
41. Frank Hearn, "Toward a Critical Theory of Play," Telos, 30 (1976-77), 145-60,
is a first and extremely promising step toward bringing into a unified focus the current
of European Marxist theorizing stemming from the young Lukdcs, and the work of the
"neo-Romantic" Marxist historians in England.

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 THE CASE OF GEORG LUKACS 489
does the story of William Morris and numerous others with less-known
names. Some of them will doubtless find their historians; others might even
find themselves. Everything depends on whether they do or not. Mean
while, if, to use E. P. Thompson's phrase, the point is to move from Ro
manticism to Revolution, there must be a great deal of talk about Roman
ticism and Revolution. It will be unfashionable, but to that precise degree
it will be timely.

Boston College

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