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ABSTRACT
This article explores the young Georg Lukács (1885–1971) through the prism of his early intellectual identifications and obsessions with Kierkegaard, his model, Mann, his poet, Dostoyevsky, his prophet, and Weber, his mentor. Through his interactions with these figures, it attempts to reconstruct the mental universe of the pre-communist Lukács through two key motifs: the leap of faith and cultural despair. I argue that a striving, wilful, agonistic and totalising religiosity—which included a desire for personal and cultural salvation—was the determining factor in Lukács’s conversion to communism. In his writings on and responses to these figures, it was the spiritual and moral concern that was always uppermost. This thread runs throughout his life in different forms, from the pre-Marxist to the later Marxist Lukács.
Notes
1. Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 181.
2. Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 151: In an early review of a play by his friend Paul Ernst, Lukács writes that the characters move in a world “in which—to use Nietzsche’s expression—God is dead, in which man himself has become—in an exalted and moving sense—the measure of all things.” But this gives way for Lukács not to resignation or secular celebration but to messianic intimations of a new metaphysics: “But what if there is, after all, a god? If only one god had died and another, a younger, different god, one that stands in a different relationship to us, is in the process of coming into existence? What if the darkness of our aimless time signifies nothing other than the darkness between the dusk of one god and the dawn of another?”
3. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 60.
4. Lukács, Soul and Form, 209. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.
5. Gluck, Georg Lukács, 136.
6. Steiner, “Making a Homeland for the Mind,” 62.
7. Steiner, George Language and Silence, 303.
8. Lichtheim, Lukács, 87.
9. Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 63.
10. Steiner, Language and Silence, 303.
11. Lukács, “Dostoevsky,” in Dostoyevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, 162.
12. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 253.
13. Lukács, Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 10.
14. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 307.
15. Lukács, Record of a Life, 181.
16. Quoted in Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 326.
17. Lukács, Record of a Life, 166.
18. Quoted in Kadarkay, “Captive Mind,” 5.
19. Kadarkay, “Captive Mind,” 2.
20. Quoted in Kadarkay, “Captive Mind,” 3.
21. Lukács, Record of a Life, 166.
22. Quoted in Kadarkay, “Captive Mind,” 9.
23. Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 202.
24. Ibid., 326.
25. Lukács, “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem,” 8.
26. Markus, “Life and the Soul,” 3–4.
27. Ibid., 2.
28. Feher, “Lukács in Weimar,” 78.
29. Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 251.
30. Feher, “Lukács in Weimar,” 91.
31. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 135.
32. Lowy, “Lukács and Stalinism,” 34.
33. Lowy, Georg Lukács, 190.
34. Lukács, Soul and Form, 31.
35. Jay, Marxism and Totality, 89.
36. Markus, “Life and the Soul,” 2.
37. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 152, 11.
38. Quoted in Marcus, Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann, 144.
39. Kadarkay, “Georg Lukács’s Road,” 243.
40. Ibid., 206.
41. Lowy, Georg Lukács, 95.
42. Tar, “Note on Weber and Lukács,” 132.
43. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 11–20.
44. Marcus, Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann, 47.
45. Quoted in ibid., 22.
46. Hesse, Steppenwolf, 63.
47. Mann, Tonio Kroger, 147, 159.
48. Ibid., 185.
49. Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 40.
50. Kadarkay, ed., The Lukács Reader, 84.
51. Marcus, Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann, 15.
52. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 424.
53. Lukács, Record of a Life, 37.
54. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 152, 11.
55. Quoted in Kadarkay, “Georg Lukács’s Road,” 250.
56. Lowy, Georg Lukács, 113.
57. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 172.
58. Quoted in Tar and Marcus, “The Weber-Lukács Encounter,” 114.
59. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 29.
60. Ibid., 105.
61. Jay, Marxism and Totality, 89.
62. Lukács, “Dostoevsky,” 162.
63. Dostoyvesky, The Possessed, 305.
64. Lukács, “Stavrogin’s Confession,” in Reviews and Articles, 48.
65. Lukács, “Dostoevsky,” 151.
66. Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 133.
67. Lukács, “Dostoevsky,” 154–56, 158.
68. Lukács, “Stavrogin’s Confession,” 48.
69. Ibid.
70. Kadarkay, “Georg Lukács’s Road,” 249.
71. Lukács, “Stavrogin’s Confession,” 48.
72. Tar and Marcus, “The Weber–Lukács Encounter,” 113.
73. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 181.
74. Quoted in Lowy, Georg Lukács, 33.
75. Mitzman, The Iron Cage, 271.
76. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 466.
77. Mitzman, The Iron Cage, 196.
78. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 466.
79. Ibid., 124.
80. Weber, From Max Weber, 119.
81. Ibid., 89.
82. Tar and Marcus, “The Weber–Lukács Encounter,” 127.
83. Congdon, The Young Lukács, 104.
84. Tar, “Note on Weber and Lukács,” 131–39.
85. Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 80.
86. Kadarkay, “Georg Lukács’s Road,” 249.
87. Weber, From Max Weber, 89.
88. Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 251.
89. Lowy, Georg Lukács, 138.
90. Congdon, The Young Lukács, 170.
91. Quoted in Congdon, The Young Lukács, 143.
92. Kadarkay, “Georg Lukács’s Road,” 245.
93. Marcus, Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann, 161.
94. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 404.
95. Ibid., 443.
96. Radkau, Max Weber, 508.
97. Marcus, Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann, 169.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
John Dickson
John Dickson, is currently an honorary associate in the department of sociology at La Trobe University. Dickson contributed a chapter to The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff entitled “Philip Rieff and the Impossible Culture” (2018). His essay “Towards a Definition of Culture” was included in Metaphysical Sociology: On the Work of John Carroll (2019).