Recovering Georg Lukacs's Philosophy of Praxis: A Hegelian Reading

Daniel Lopez

Georg Lukacs is remembered as the initiator of Western Marxism. By returning to the Hegelian roots of Marxism, Lukacs articulating a theory of reification and praxis which both extended Marxism and anticipated the rediscovery of many of the young Marx's ideas. Despite this, the totality of Lukacs's work from his Marxist period is regularly ignored, discarded, or criticised as contradictory. In large part, this stems from an over-hasty rejection of Lukacs's version of revolutionary politics. Of course, there has been a desire to cherry-pick certain of his concepts. But this has come at the expense of the coherence of his system as a whole. As Andrew Feenberg has said, most readers of Lukacs have been "deaf to the music of his dialectic".
This talk will outline what a recovery of Lukacs's "philosophy of praxis" would look like. Specifically, it will argue that an approach to Lukacs via Hegel can elucidate areas of his thought that have been passed over or misunderstood. Moreover, this approach allows us to fully appreciate the radical-democratic nature of Lukacs's approach to politics. Finally, while situated as an argument within Marxism, this talk will endeavour to make itself accessible to an audience outside this intellectual tradition.