Lukács in the 1920s and the 2020s: The practice and praxis of intellectual history

The vigorous return to the work of Georg Lukács over the past few years has not met with universal enthusiasm, particularly from those who thought they had slain the Hungarian dragon in battles of three or four decades ago. Writing in 2018, one of the surviving veterans of those conflicts, Martin Jay, complained that ‘Lukács's magnum opus History and Class Consciousness is, alas, unbearable to read a century after the revolution’, such that ‘returning to the book now is such a painful experience’ (Jay, 2018: 195, 198). Given the vagaries of Lukács’s reputation over the past century, Jay’s anguish is not especially surprising: perhaps not since Machiavelli has a theorist been so influential while at the same time being roundly condemned by almost everyone citing him. Attacked by orthodox Bolshevism in the 1920s for his bourgeois philosophy, rejected by liberals for his compliance with Stalinism from the 1930s, arrested and sent for ‘reeducation’ in the 1950s by the Soviets for his participation in the reformist Nagy government, dismissed as a ‘humanist’ by French structuralists and their heirs, and criticized for allegedly treating the proletariat as a mythologized super-subject of history by Habermas and his protégées in the 1970s and 1980s, Lukács has found few defenders; perhaps the greatest indignity was that even those who readily acknowledged his influence – the likes of Adorno, for whom his account of reification was of decisive significance – would distance themselves from him.

Every decade has found new ways to express their rejection of Lukács – yet, as Jay recognizes, we find ourselves once again turning back to his thought. A number of recent and forthcoming monographs by Andrew Feenberg, Konstantinos Kavoulakos, Richard Westerman, Daniel Lopez, and Matthew Smetona, essay collections edited by Michael Thompson, Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, and Gregory Zucker, as well as a large conference in Budapest in response to the authoritarian Orbán government’s closure of the Lukács archive all testify to this resurgence of interest in his thought. ¹ Of course, this is not motivated by a pure and disinterested concern for intellectual-historical accuracy: sympathetic readers are turning to Lukács’s work of the 1920s and beyond because they see it as in some way relevant to the dawning 2020s. History and Class Consciousness, a book that Lukács himself described as a collection of essays largely written in response to quite specific problems emerging at definite junctures in the revolutionary struggles of his time, seems surprisingly able to speak to a very different social reality a century on. Ironically, it is the theory of many of those who sought to confine Lukács to the past that now itself seems quite out-of-date: Habermasian dreams of a world governed by reasoned discourse might have seemed plausible in the 1990s, but in a political situation dominated by authoritarian populists who rail against experts and scientists as out-of-touch elites, and whose supporters seem entirely unconcerned when their leaders are caught out in a lie, the discourse-ethical utopia seems for the time being entirely irrelevant – a mere scrap of paper promising peace in our time. Instead, it is Lukács’s preoccupation with the emergence of mass popular movements, and with the ways such movements can go astray and take on irrational forms, that seems closest to the concerns of our situation. At the risk of causing further pain to Martin Jay, then, it seems that there is still value in turning back to Lukács.

Yet the recent reappraisal of Lukács raises theoretical and methodological questions of its own. Many of the critics who had earlier rejected his thought did so because they read him as offering, in essence, a materialist version of German Idealism or Romanticism. ² The problem Lukács set out to solve, they argued, was one of locating a subject capable of seizing control of the depersonalized structures of society; he appeared to resolve the problem by describing the proletariat as the identical subject-object of a single historical totality, capable of controlling the world by virtue of the fact that its labour created social structures. Some (such as Stedman Jones) have interpreted this as a kind of neo-Romanticism. In contrast, the more sympathetic interpretations of recent years have situated Lukács within a quite different set of debates and discourses – particularly those of Neo-Kantianism in the Southwest German School. For Feenberg, Kavoulakos, and Westerman, Lukács’s theory may have been Marxist in its content, but its language and its conceptual framework were decisively shaped by the likes of Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask, or even the early phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Thus, the central essays of History and Class Consciousness are less about Idealist subjectivity than about logical forms of objectivity, or Gegenständlichkeitsformen – a distinctively Neo-Kantian concept that appears repeatedly in Lukács’s masterpiece. Rather than seek to defend or shore up supposedly-Lukácsian claims of an identical subject-object in the proletariat, then, these interpretations have instead denied that his account is chiefly concerned with subjectivity in the first place; they have done so by treating Lukács as a historical figure whose work must be interpreted as a statement within debates of his time.

It is not my intention to repeat the central arguments for that interpretation here. The weight of evidence for this Neo-Kantian interpretation seems overwhelming, particularly given that critics of Lukács have simply avoided dealing with it: Jay’s recent lamentation, for example, does not consider these arguments at all, instead pivoting to criticism of Žižek and Badiou (Jay, 2018). ³ Rather, my concern is with the implications of such an interpretation. Let us grant that History and Class Consciousness ought to be read as in many respects shaped by Neo-Kantian debates, and does not, therefore, rely on a mythologized account of subjectivity. What does this then imply for Lukács’s importance today? To put the problem differently: by understanding Lukács as a theorist situated firmly in his time, do we risk reducing him to antiquarian curiosity, of no possible value to contemporary debates? Indeed, one of Lukács’s critics has made this kind of argument in a different context: no longer an adherent of Althusser, Gareth Stedman Jones has sought in his recent book to interpret Marx by situating him firmly within the nineteenth century – with the intention of showing that the theory of Capital could not apply to 21st-century conditions. In the case of Lukács, the problem is perhaps made more acute by the very sources to which many of the more sympathetic reappraisals of his work point – German Neo-Kantianism. This particular perspective has long been dismissed as a mere academic curio: for Hannah Arendt, it drowned philosophy in a ‘sea of boredom’, while the Kant biographer Manfred Kuehn claims that ‘one of the reasons why the Neo-Kantians’ popularity has diminished is that their problems are no longer our problems’. ⁴ By arguing that Lukács’s thought can in some respects been seen as Neo-Kantian, do we risk confining it to the museum, entirely without use for our present circumstances?

I do not think that this must be the case. On the contrary, a properly intellectual-historical approach can help renew a theoretical paradigm such as that of Lukács by drawing out implied claims and assumptions that might hitherto have been hidden – thus pointing to latent and hidden possibilities in our own theoretical toolboxes. Instead of explaining away Lukács’s account as a mere product of its circumstances, I suggest that the historical approach extends and expands our own philosophical understanding. In this way, the practice of intellectual history can be revealed as a form of praxis: we do not simply seek to know and describe the theories and thinkers we study, but instead reconstruct them as interlocutors in contemporary debates.

To explain this, I shall begin with some general comments on methodology in intellectual history, with specific reference to the distinction between earlier, more critical readings of Lukács, and more sympathetic recent approaches. Arguing that it is essential to situate Lukács within the debates of his time, I shall then examine the most important such discourse for understanding his work – that of German Neo-Kantianism. This will allow me then to show Lukács’s own Neo-Kantianism, and the ways in which Neo-Kantian problems set the terms of his investigation in History and Class Consciousness. I shall then argue that a proper understanding of Lukács’s Neo-Kantianism reveals the project of History and Class Consciousness to be quite other than is normally assumed: rather than offering a theory of society, it is a metatheory, one that examines the presuppositions and modes of thought of dominant ways to understand social being. Finally, I shall conclude with some comments on the implications for our own practice as intellectual historians – suggesting that the proper historical understanding of thinkers of the past, grasping them in all their alterity rather than assimilating them to the present, plays an essential role in de-reifying our own world-views.

Behind the sympathetic reappraisal of Lukács stands a close attention to the philosophical context from which he emerged – in particular, that of Neo-Kantianism in the Southwest German School. By and large, this was absent in different ways from earlier, more critical readings. Those who saw Lukács’s case as centred on the proletarian macrosubject, such as Arato and Breines or Postone, tended to treat History and Class Consciousness at surface value: the ‘Reification’ essay spoke directly about German Idealism’s problems with the subject, so must itself be attempting to solve the same problem by different means. ⁵ Little attention was paid to the importance of Lukács’s Neo-Kantianism in his own reading of Idealism. Conversely, where critics did indeed try to contextualize Lukács (such as Stedman Jones’s Althusserian polemic), they offered a one-sided version of this context focusing on his pre-Marxist literary works, tinged as they were with neo-Romanticism, and largely ignored his specifically philosophical works in the years leading up to 1918 (Stedman Jones, 1977). Given that the central essays of History and Class Consciousness – above all, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ and the ‘Reification’ essay – are explicitly concerned with philosophical rather than literary problems, it makes much more sense to link them back to Lukács’s earlier philosophical work in Heidelberg than his tortured literary criticism. Of course, there were often good reasons for such an omission: Lukács’s most explicitly Neo-Kantian works – particularly his abandoned Heidelberg aesthetics – were thought forgotten until after Lukács’s death (and remain untranslated). The near-total ignorance of Neo-Kantianism among Anglophone critics also helps explain why such influences were not spotted in these circles at least – although in the case of Habermas, whose moral philosophy depends on the Neo-Kantian distinction of validity and value, the reasons for this omission are not so clear.

But what this has led to is the treatment of Lukács in an unhistorical manner, as someone whose utterances have the same meaning throughout time, both in terms of the definition of the words used, and as speech acts within a particular debate. It is assumed that we can treat History and Class Consciousness as if Lukács were talking to us, about circumstances that we share with him – or circumstances that existed objectively in his time, and to which we have in principle the same kind of epistemic access as he. Thus, his statements on the subject of social structures and institutions, and on theories about them, may be understood as offering a similar kind of theory to that of, say, Habermas – they are seen as truth-claims about an externally-existing reality, and can be evaluated as such. Similarly, his exploration of classical German philosophy – and his account of the position of the subject that emerges from it – is interpreted as an explanation of texts whose meaning is fixed, and that are understood in roughly the same way today as they were in Lukács’s time (or, if anything, more accurately today than then). In both cases, Lukács’s critics adopt a fairly crude epistemological realism tied to a Whiggish narrative of progress: there are social structures, philosophical texts, or fundamental ontological conditions out there; humans have gradually acquired more and more information about them, with the result that the knowledge we have today is necessarily superior to that of earlier times. As Lukács was (they imply) making statements about this same reality as us, we can rebut his arguments in the same way as we would those of our contemporaries – for we and he are involved in the same debate about the same external world.

In contrast, the sympathetic readings of Lukács by the likes of Feenberg, Kavoulakos, and myself that have lately come to predominance have treated his work as making a fundamentally different kind of statement shaped by the very specific discourse of Southwest German Neo-Kantianism. Consciously or unconsciously, we have adopted intellectual-historical methods similar to those of the Cambridge School. This approach, associated with the likes of Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, or John Dunn, offers a sort of middle way between on the one hand treating ideas as mere reflections of underlying social, political, and economic forces and hence unimportant as factors in understanding history, and on the other hand assuming that philosophical texts contain ideas of eternal, unchangeable wisdom. Rather, the Cambridge School approach recognizes the historical variability of grand concepts such as ‘freedom’ – but asserts at the same time that the meaning of such concepts cannot be fully explained by reduction to material forces. ⁶ In particular, they have interpreted philosophical texts by situating them within particular debates and discourses: the meaning of the terms deployed by, say, Hobbes can be explained by understanding the broader English constitutional debates of the time; Hobbes’s own work must be seen as a speech act responding to his interlocutors within that debate, aimed at them in terms they would understand, rather than as something written in a vacuum that provides a final and definitive statement on politics as such.

Reading a theorist as an interlocutor within a specific discourse implies that they are not part of our discourse – either that of the intellectual historian or that of contemporary theorists. In some respects, this has only lately become possible with regard to Lukács. For the critics of the 1960s and 1970s, Lukács was still part of the strategic debates of their era – quite literally alive for much of that time. Seeing him as an interlocutor, they necessarily interpreted his theory as statements directed at them, to which they must respond – rather than as arguments in a quite different idiom, and part of thoroughly separate debates. Indeed, their own critiques must themselves be situated in the discourses of their time – as part of the foment of the New Left, and the emergence of the Habermasian move to the center in response to the cracks appearing in the welfare states of the post-industrial West. This is perhaps most obvious, paradoxically, in the one critique that did seek to situate Lukács within a historical discourse: for Gareth Stedman Jones, History and Class Consciousness was an expression of the neo-Romantic Lebensphilosopie of Dilthey et al., and so ‘represents the first major irruption of the romantic anti-scientific tradition of bourgeois thought into Marxist theory’ (Stedman Jones, 1977: 37). Stedman Jones’s purpose, however, was clearly the advancement of the Althusserian structuralist version of Marxism to which he then adhered; by interpreting Lukács in this way, it was possible to confine him to the world of pre-war Central Europe, making of him a figure of no relevance to the Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s. Michael Löwy’s more positive interpretation offers sufficient rebuttal to Stedman Jones’s critique: while recognizing Lukács’s early Romanticism, he presents History and Class Consciousness as a self-overcoming of that problematic, rather than merely its expression (Löwy, 1979). In doing so, he recognizes Lukács as an active thinker – that is, as someone whose thought changed and developed in response to circumstances. Löwy thereby more fully historicizes Lukács than even Stedman Jones, by recognizing him as an individual offering definite intentional speech acts that grapple creatively with the limits that a discourse imposes on any attempt to manifest a thought, rather than merely the blank representative of a fixed Weltanschauung.

Löwy exemplifies a more general trend among Lukács’s defenders: they typically understand the Hungarian as a thinker developing across and relating to a range of discourses and circumstances, rather than defined by one or two essential elements. Indeed, we may even speak of a neo-Goldmannian school of Lukács interpretation, named for Lucien Goldmann’s somewhat esoteric argument that Heidegger’s Being and Time was a response to History and Class Consciousness. ⁷ Whatever the merits of that claim, Goldmann’s argument showed the importance of relating Lukács to his philosophical contemporaries; indeed, Löwy was a student of Goldmann’s. Moreover, while Heidegger may not have been responding directly to Lukács, the parallels Goldmann identified may be better explained by their common roots in Neo-Kantianism: both studied with leading Neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert, and both were close to Emil Lask, the leading figure in the school’s final generation. ⁸ It is this Neo-Kantianism that has been the focus of the recent sympathetic readings of Lukács by Andrew Feenberg (who, like Löwy, himself studied with Goldmann), Konstantinos Kavoulakos, and myself (Feenberg, 2014; Westerman, 2018). What all three of us point to is the degree to which Neo-Kantian language permeates the most important essays of History and Class Consciousness – particularly the ‘Reification’ piece. I do not intend to rehearse the evidence here, but these investigations show decisively that History and Class Consciousness simply cannot be read as a straightforwardly subjective Idealist book: even Lukács’s reading of the likes of Fichte and Hegel was shaped by Neo-Kantianism in ways that take him far from any such belief in a creative subject. ⁹

To understand Lukács, it is necessary to situate his thought in such Neo-Kantian debates – and in particular in relation to their turn to logical form as a way to escape both the reductionism of the positivistic naturalism most strikingly exemplified by psychologism on the one hand, and the irrationalistic relativism of Diltheyan Lebensphilosophie on the other.

Neo-Kantianism emerged in some ways as a response to the rising tide of scientific reductionism in philosophy – above all, in the form of psychologism. This latter term designates a broad approach exemplified by the likes of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) or Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), explaining mental activity in terms of biological processes in the brain. As Martin Kusch explains, this often entailed naturalizing Kant’s transcendental categories by arguing that they were products of the material brain’s learning processes, for example (Kusch, 1995). Even logic could be explained psychologistically by examining the mental states associated with the belief that a statement was ‘true’. This represented a major challenge to philosophy: the conditions of truth themselves seemed to depend on mere biology. A fortiori, other philosophical fields – ethics, aesthetics, and so on – were equally reducible to contingent matters of brain chemistry. Free will too was revealed as an illusion produced by entirely predictable, naturalistic processes.

More broadly, of course, this perspective diminished the value of culture as a whole: the pinnacles of art, literature, and creativity which human vanity was pleased to believe were created freely were, in fact, no more than by-products of biology. One response to such natural-scientific reductionism was offered by Wilhelm Dilthey. For Dilthey, the methods of the natural sciences were simply inappropriate for discussing philosophy, art, culture, or history: the humanities, he suggested, could not be described in such deterministic fashion. Dilthey’s own solution was to turn to the notion of Weltanschauungen, world-views, as the explanatory factor in understanding history: a nexus of cultural values shaped human action non-deterministically, adding a factor that could not be reduced to biology. Human activity must be understood interpretatively on this model, attempting to understand the cultural background and outlook that make behaviour intelligible without claiming to explain it categorically. Such world-views were historically and culturally variable: what made sense within one might seem absurd within another.

Yet Dilthey’s solution came with its own problems. As Frederick Beiser explains, for Neo-Kantians such as Wilhelm Windelband, this was unsatisfactory because it made philosophy too a mere relative world-view (Beister, 2011). Windelband was a historian of philosophy, seeking to make sense of the development of the discipline as a rational progression towards ever-clearer thought; Dilthey’s approach reduced this history to no more than a chance succession of different Weltanschauungen. To avoid this, therefore, the Neo-Kantians made recourse to the notion of validity developed by Hermann Lotze (1817–81). ¹⁰ Like Kant, Lotze sought to explain the necessary preconditions of knowledge, as distinct from mere perception. Gillian Rose (one of very few to have recognized Lotze’s importance) cites Kant’s own example: any beast can perceive that when the sun shines, the stone is warm – but knowledge requires us to link these perceptions properly, in a judgement like ‘the sun warms the stone’, stating a causal relation between the two perceptions. To avoid the risks of psychologism inherent in Kant’s dependence on a subjective act of judgment, Lotze cut away the subject, instead outlining the transcendental conditions of truth as such. For him, truth must be a property of propositions, not single concepts – it lay in the proper relation of ideas and objects within such statements. The transcendentally-necessary laws governing the relation of such ideas were the laws of validity: a proposition can be said to be valid, or to ‘hold’, if its parts are in logically-correct relations to one another. These laws were a priori: they could be derived solely from concepts, and were not learnt as one matured; indeed, they held as true even if no-one in fact knew them.

Validity therefore represented a realm that could not be explained by naturalistic processes, nor reduced to irrationalistic relativism. The Neo-Kantians of the Southwest German School seized on it as a solid foundation for their thought in a range of areas in the human sciences. Central to their arguments was the recognition they shared with Dilthey that distinct disciplines had their own conditions of validity. What made true knowledge in the natural sciences was not the same in the humanities; it would be misleading and false to explain historical events as if determined by the same iron laws as those of physics. Indeed, this had an even more profound implication: not only does each discipline or sphere deal with different objects, each deals with different kinds of objects. They may assume an atomistic or a holistic starting-point, they may describe a world operating according to absolute laws or one that allows for the intervention of subjects, and so on. Thus, each discipline can be said to have its own form of objectivity, or Gegenständlichkeitsform, dealing with particular kinds of objects according to definite conditions of validity that specify how they may interact and what kind of true statements may be made about them. A Gegenständlichkeitsform, then, is the specific way in which stuff comes to coherent form within a definite field of discourse. A mountain peak, for example, is described and understood very differently by the scientist studying its ecology, the artist who seeks to paint it, and the industrialist who seeks to extract its mineral wealth; the value of coal, perhaps central to the last of these three, has no place within aesthetic or ecological discourses – it simply cannot be disclosed within these forms of objectivity, and any attempt to make it so is invalid. The distribution of the notion of validity across a range of spheres of objectivity thus allowed the South-West Neo-Kantians to assert the independence of the human sciences from the naturalistic, while at the same time retaining the claim to truth and rigour of philosophy, rather than lapsing into irrationalism.

Lukács’s work must be set against this context: the turn to valid forms of objectivity as a way between deterministic naturalism and irrationalistic relativism is absolutely central to the project of the ‘Reification’ essay in History and Class Consciousness. Recognizing this refutes Stedman Jones’s claim that it was Diltheyan Lebensphilosophie that was his guiding light: as a Neo-Kantian, Lukács was fully cognisant of the weaknesses of such an approach. His own immersion in Neo-Kantianism is perhaps clearest in a series of drafts of a philosophy of art and aesthetics, written between 1912 and 1918 but left forgotten in a Heidelberg bank until their rediscovery after his death. ¹¹ Here, Lukács himself developed a philosophical aesthetics in which he investigated art in terms of what it mean for an artwork to be an autonomous sphere of meaning in explicitly Neo-Kantian terms. The meaning of the work could not be explained from the perspective of the creator, for whom its parts would always retain the meaning they had as personal experiences; only by taking up a standpoint entirely within the work, entirely cut off from one’s own personal experience, was it possible for its immanent meaning to be disclosed (cf. Westerman, 2018: 59–73). In a sense, Lukács explored the conditions of validity of works of art.

Crucially, these Heidelberg aesthetics were by far Lukács’s most serious, sustained, systematic philosophical work before the core essays of History and Class Consciousness. As such, it makes most sense to investigate possible connections between this aesthetics and his philosophical Marxism. Yet very few of his critics pay even the briefest attention to the Heidelberg manuscripts, preferring instead to connect History and Class Consciousness with his literary criticism of the 1910s – a series of essays very different in language, genre, philosophical toolbox, and approach. ¹² In consequence, they entirely overlook the degree to which the core essays of HCC – the three written or entirely rewritten for the book, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, and ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization’ – are permeated with Neo-Kantianism.

To understand Georg Lukács in the 1920s, then, requires us to recognize both the discursive position from which he spoke, as someone immersed in and committed to the questions of Neo-Kantianism, and the discourse into which he offered his speech acts – that of revolutionary Marxism. History and Class Consciousness reframes the problems of the latter in the terms of the former, translating Marxian social theory into a problem of forms of objectivity; at the same time, it seeks to answer the former by way of the latter, resolving the logical and ontological lacunae left by Neo-Kantianism’s apriorism by treating them as questions of social ontology, ones to do with the ways in which objects exist within society. Where Neo-Kantianism tried to avoid both naturalistic determinism and irrationalist spontaneism in theory, Lukács aimed to steer between the same Scylla and Charybdis in social relations.

Ignoring Lukács’s Neo-Kantianism leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the argument he is offering. He is not offering a theory about society as much as a metatheory, or a critique of the forms of our discourses and practices towards society, and our theories about it. This is clear in the very first essay of History and Class Consciousness, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’. Here, Lukács offers a critical comparison of Marxian thought with ‘bourgeois’ theories. The central difference, he claims, is not which facts, nor how many of them, each can identify; rather, they are distinguished by the kind of facts each generates, and with the facticity of those facts. In his words, ‘the facts will only first become facts within a methodological treatment – which varies according to the goal of knowledge’. ¹³ The mistake of bourgeois thought is to treat the human sciences as directly analogous to the natural sciences, wherein facticity is vested in data ‘reduced to their purely quantitative essence, as expressed in numbers and numerical relations’. ¹⁴ In other words, the problem is not so much what is said as how it is said: Lukács’s statement is a perfectly standard Neo-Kantian claim about the form of objectivity offered by certain theories, with the addition of a Marxian claim about the class origin of such thought. The problem with such a perspective is that it entails reification, or the reduction of the subject to a ‘castrated, blasé knowledge’ of a world of shadows (Lask, 1923–4). These words are not those of Lukács, but of his close friend the Neo-Kantian Emil Lask (1875–1915), who identified the same dangers in the natural-scientific outlook as his Hungarian colleague. Where Lukács differs from Lask is in his connection of this to a definite social structure: as he puts it, facticity and facts of this kind ‘are – precisely in the structure of their objectivity – products of a determinate historical epoch: of capitalism’. ¹⁵ (The distinctly Neo-Kantian phrasing of ‘Struktur ihrer Gegenständlichkeit’ stands out here.) The problem, therefore, is not that bourgeois theory is wrong, nor that it is incomplete; it is that it presents reality in a particular way that precludes intervention: ‘facts’ are ‘facts’, presented as incontrovertible, definite, and unalterable. Lukács’s diagnosis of bourgeois thought is unequivocally a Neo-Kantian metatheoretical critique.

Exactly the same problem can be seen beyond theory itself, in the very structure of social reality. Here Lukács fulfils Neo-Kantianism’s ontological aspirations by identifying the manifestation of the categories of being within society. His friend Lask had sought to demonstrate that logical categories were the necessary conditions of an object’s existence, and not merely of our thought about it. As he put it with the laconic clarity characteristic of German philosophy at the time, he aimed at the ‘overcoming of this independence of Being vis-à-vis the sphere of logic, in the destruction of the age-old sundering of object and truth-content, in the recognition of the transcendental logicity or “thinkable” quality of Being’. ¹⁶ It was left to Lukács to accomplish this by recognizing different social practices and institutions as manifestations of the categories of social being. Institutions, collective practices, and social relations could all be understood as forms of objectivity: they form an object in certain ways. When a mass of brute material is brought into those relations, it acquires a meaning determined by its position therein; when subjects or objects relate to one another socially, they do so on terms defined by the total system of relations. This can be seen most clearly in what Lukács portrays as the elementary form of objectivity under capitalism – that which he refers to repeatedly as the commodity structure in the ‘Reification’ essay. Here he picks up Marx’s account of commodity fetishism – at that time, a relatively neglected section of Capital. As Marx explained, every commodity must have, first, a use value – something about it that another person needs, a reason for them to purchase it. But when we seek to exchange it for other commodities, we need to identify a property common to all the objects exchanged so that we can judge what quantities are to be exchanged. Their use values are entirely incommensurable: we have no way to say whether a bottle of wine is more valuable than a laptop because their uses are so different; when I lack a computer to write my articles, no quantity of wine will make up for that missing machine (though it may help me feel less anguished about the problem). In Marx (as in Adam Smith), this common property is the sum of labour expended in producing them – and it is this that determines their relative Value. As these objects come into social relations, therefore, they are treated as quantities of Value; it is this property that determines how they interact with other commodities, rather than any of its material qualities. Lukács repeatedly describes the commodity with that Neo-Kantian term Gegenständlichkeitsform or form of objectivity: it is a way in which things come to objective social form or exist socially. Moreover, within this form of objectivity, only certain kinds of relations are valid: the exchange of commodities based on, say, their sacred character, their beauty, or one’s regard for their vendor would all seem like irrational, invalid intrusions into the order of social relations. It is this exclusion of everything that is not reducible to abstract quantities that produces reification: any particularist, subjective entry into social relations is ruled out by the form of the commodity itself. By analysing social relations as Gegenständlichkeitsformen, then, Lukács is able to overcome the Neo-Kantian problem of the relation between categories and existence. Social reality is practical: the form of these practices is the way in which objects participate in society. The relation between thing and form is methectic, not mimetic.

It is because they have overlooked this source of Lukács’s thought that his critics have mistaken or misrepresented several aspects of his thought. I shall highlight just two: first, the relevance of the labour theory of value; second, the relation of reification to alienation. In the first place, then, Lukács’s focus on the commodity as a formal structure of social relations means his account is not limited to a classical labour theory of value. In Lukács’s account, what is important is that the Value of the commodity in exchange be determined by sloughing off all other properties and determination so as to be quantitatively comparable to all other commodities. It is of negligible importance to specify the property by which it is measured; what is important is simply that it be expressed in abstract, quantitative form. Thus, Lukács rightly insists that marginal utility theory expresses the same kind of reification as the labour theory of value of Smith et al., to which most Marxists of the time adhered: in both cases, social relations offer the same abstract form of objectivity, and the same terms of validity in joining entities in social relations. ¹⁷ Critics such as Postone and Habermas are therefore wrong to condemn Lukács for supposedly grounding revolutionary subjectivity on an inflated notion of the proletariat as labouring creator of social relations; what is important for Lukács is the form of objectivity offered by such relations, not their origin.

Second, and by extension, the Neo-Kantian roots of Lukács’s thought changes our understanding of the relation between reification and alienation, and the role of the subject therein. Marx’s classic account of alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts describes it as the result of labouring activity within a certain set of social relations: the worker sells or alienates their labour to the employer, resulting in four further kinds of alienation – alienation from the product of one’s labour, from the labouring process, from one’s species-being, and from other humans. But here alienation is, in a sense, produced by the labouring subject (albeit one constrained by historical circumstances); the worker reproduces the conditions of their own oppression. Lukács did not know this text until several years after History and Class Consciousness was published; he reported later that reading it made him see the errors of his own work, in particular his underestimation of labour. ¹⁸ Despite this, critics such as Arato and Breines have attacked him for relying on an all-powerful labouring subject to resolve reification: all the proletariat needed to do was recognize itself as the creator of social relations in order to take control of them once again. ¹⁹ Yet once we understand the Neo-Kantian origins of Lukács’s theoretical framework, we see that his explanation is the exact reverse. ‘Alienation’ in History and Class Consciousness is not the work of the subject; rather, it is the Gegenständlichkeitsform of capitalist society that excludes and externalizes subjects by permitting them into social relations in only the most attenuated, abstract form. The structure produces particularity and subjectivity on its borders by excluding them from the system of relations that it governs: it is objectivity that alienates the subject.

Moreover, because they miss the way Lukács questions the natural-scientific theoretical stance, many of his critics fall into precisely the errors he identifies. This applies to vulgar Marxists of the Second International, for whom Marx offered primarily a better and more accurate theory of society than that of classical economics: in seeking to identify supposedly objective laws about society, they theoretically excluded themselves from any ability to intervene in order to alter them. But it applies just as much to the Althusserians or Habermasians of the 1970s and 1980s who criticized Lukács because his theory (they claimed) was a less adequate description of society than theirs: in making these arguments, they were, from Lukács’s perspective, trapped within a form of objectivity that treats society as an external object to be analysed in this way.

The importance of History and Class Consciousness therefore rests on the way Lukács reaches beyond both revolutionary Bolshevism and Neo-Kantianism by translating the former into the terms of the latter. In asking Neo-Kantian questions of Marxism, Lukács uncovered aspects of Marx’s critique of capitalism that were perhaps latent within it, but that were far from the forefront. It took the notion of forms of objectivity for the explosive potential of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism to be revealed: the term ‘reification’ almost never appears in Marx’s own writings, but Lukács’s analysis brings out the crucial importance of this notion in explaining the stability of capitalism. It helped to explain why exploited sections of society so rarely rose up against their oppressors, without resorting to claims that they had been tricked or fooled by myths more or less deliberately aimed at bewildering them. Rather, the completeness and internal validity of the commodity as a form of objectivity had the effect of naturalizing it – that is, of making it seem real, or the only possible form of social reality.

But at the same time as he resolved Marxian problems with Neo-Kantian means, Lukács was able to move beyond Neo-Kantianism by Marxian paths. In turning to the notion of validity to overcome psychologism, the Southwest German Neo-Kantians had found a refuge for philosophy from materialist determination – but at the price of being unable to explain how such validity could affect reality. Ethical maxims might be valid, but this did not explain how they might shape our actual will or deeds. The problem reached its pinnacle in Lask’s attempt to ontologize the categories of validity – but, Lukács argued, even Lask was unable to account for the existence of particular objects determined by his categories. ²⁰ Lukács’s explicit critique of German Idealism in the second section of the ‘Reification’ essay is in fact an implicit critique of this problem of Neo-Kantianism: it is the relation between thought and being that is at stake, not the location of a creating subject as his critics have charged. Here, it is Marxism that provides the solution: by locating validity within the meaning of actual social practices, Lukács immediately connects philosophy with being, while at the same time avoiding idealistically reducing reality to a projection of the subject. The categories shape social being through practice; overcoming the problems of these categories is possible – but only through radical transformation of the social structures and institutions that govern such practices. Marxism as a philosophy of praxis thus offers a way past the problems of Neo-Kantianism.

To understand Lukács in the 1920s, then, it is necessary to attend to the interaction between his Marxist material and the Neo-Kantian formal structure of his truth-claims. It is not only that the terms Lukács uses have a specific meaning that has been overlooked by his earlier critics – although that is undoubtedly the case with concepts such as Gegenständlichkeitsform. Rather, the basic validity conditions of his argument (in the Neo-Kantian sense) are determined by this peculiar synthesis. In his metacritique of theory understood on a correspondence theory of truth, Lukács attempts to theorize his way out of theory from the inside, and to show on its own terms why social reality can never be described either through a theoretical picture or through the accumulation of an ever-larger pile of ‘facts’ about it. It is for this reason that Lukács insists ‘every ‘theoretical’ tendency or difference of opinion must immediately develop organizationally’. ²¹ His entire argument tends towards this claim: the validity conditions of a particular social theory must be shown to be ontological categories through their realization in practices; political organization offers the opportunity to actualize theory. Lukács’s argument cannot be defeated on abstractly-theoretical grounds; the conditions of validity on which he operates means that only praxis – meaningful, coherent, structured activity – could adequately refute it. Any engagement with past theory has to take seriously the Eleventh Thesis: rather than treating theories simply as reflections of an objective world, or as crudely determined by underlying conditions, they must be understood as discursive social forms, and one way of acting within the world as a whole. Of course, from a perspective that views social reality as something objective and independent of any meaning-structure it may have, any claims Lukács makes must be incomprehensible, taken out of the context of his quite distinct theory. But Lukács’s project is fundamentally different: he is not even trying to offer such a pseudoscientific theory of an objectively-functioning world, but, rather, to explain dialectically the constitution of a reality through subjective practices governed by specific Gegenständlichkeitsformen.

But even those who do not wish to follow Lukács all the way to social transformation must pay attention to the nature of his argument, and ought not to treat it as the relic of a revolutionary moment whose time has gone. There are important questions for our practice of intellectual history that arise from thinking about History and Class Consciousness in terms of its creative melding of Neo-Kantianism and Marxism. By seeing Lukács as a creative participant in particular philosophical discourses and treating his theory as a speech act within that debate, we can avoid the risk of reifying his thought. His critics have treated his theory on purely epistemic terms, as a set of statements that can be evaluated as to their truth-content about a reality outside of them. Such statements would be, by definition, fixed in meaning and in their relation to the object which they describe but do not touch. In contrast, seeing Lukács within the context of Neo-Kantianism means treating him as part of a world of discourse, one with its own forms of objectivity and standards of truth and validity. As a participant in this discourse, Lukács was not simply an observer external to the object he described, but rather a co-creator of the standards by which a range of data come to cohere as particular kinds of objects. His innovation was to bring this perspective to bear on Marxian thought, thus transforming the terms of that debate and opening up new aspects within it. The theorist is at the same time contributing to the construction of the forms of objectivity of their discourse, defining and maintaining the standards of truth and validity of the objects they describe as well as making statements about those objects. In this way, social theory is revealed as a particular kind of practice – not, of course, capable of altering the material world on its own, but playing an active role in shaping the terms on which it is possible for subjects and objects to come into social relations.

In response to the charge that rigorous intellectual history has the unfortunate side-effect of reducing past theories to pieces of only antiquarian interest, Quentin Skinner has vigorously argued that we can instead plunder them for unjustly-forgotten ideas that may be deployed anew today. ²² Skinner’s approach, like that of most of his Cambridge School colleagues, is primarily concerned with uncovering forgotten semantic elements of historical theories – the particular inflection of this or that term within a certain debate, for example. Lukács’s concern with the validity of forms of objectivity is instead directed at the syntax of such theories, the way in which they distinguish and relate objects of analysis, and the relation between the theorist and their object: he asks what it means for statements to be true within a specific debate. At the broadest level, it is trivially and obviously the case that an aesthetically-valid claim or act will not (necessarily) be valid or true in political, ethical, or epistemic terms; understanding the syntax of these debates is necessary in order to evaluate any individual statement within them. It would be idiotic to evaluate a work of Abstract Expressionism by the terms of the High Renaissance; it is just as stupid to condemn Lukács’s theory for being expressed in the terms of Neo-Kantianism rather than those of the 1970s.

Recognizing this need not mean that we simply switch our theorizing from one form of objectivity to another. Indeed, it is not quite so easy to adopt the syntax of another debate as it is to take on its semantic components in the way Skinner suggests: the latter deals with elements that are in principle isolable; the former is concerned with the underlying structure of the debate as a whole, and cannot be altered piecemeal. But recognizing this, turning our attention to forms of objectivity as fundamental structures of a given perspective on reality as a whole, could have a potential de-reifying effect that could go far beyond that of identifying individual ‘facts’ that contradict dominant ideas of society. What a form of objectivity does is organize a reality as a whole: it makes sense of the world. When one form of objectivity is governed by coherent standards of validity, it comes to seem inevitable, and any other seems unimaginable: reification ensues. This is particularly the case for the world-view Lukács criticizes in the ‘Reification’ essay, which sees society only in terms of the interactions of depersonalized objects operating without the intervention of human subjects – a world whose objective laws can be described, but not altered. Many of Lukács’s critics have shared this perspective, attacking him for failing to understand correctly how such an objective world functions. If instead we try to get within the discourse that shaped Lukács’s theory – if we try to inhabit the world within which his claims can be said to ‘make sense’ – we may realise that our own world-view is neither so natural nor so obvious as we might assume. There are other ways in which the world as a whole can make sense, ones whose logic can be described. We must not try to assimilate past texts to our own ways of seeing, because in doing so, we render them familiar and harmless. The intellectual historian must strive to preserve the radical otherness of the past, presenting the strangeness of its world in all its unfamiliarity – but at the same time must show that this world too makes sense, is coherent, and has a meaning. Moreover, presenting such worlds methectically, as the collective creation of speech actors both constrained by the terms of their discourse but also capable of innovating and reconfiguring them with every speech act, shows them as living worlds – and reminds us that the ideas we inherit are not timeless truths, but endlessly fluid. Through this, the unthinking acceptance of our own world-view may, perhaps, be undermined – and in this way, the intellectual historian may contribute to the denaturalization and de-reification of contemporary perspectives.

To conclude: far from reducing Lukács to a museum piece, a more methodologically-rigorous intellectual-historical approach can in fact restore the potency of his thought for contemporary debates. At the most basic level, it is no surprise that his critics in the 1960s and 1970s found his theory lacking. This was not only because circumstances had changed – rather, they simply misunderstood what he was trying to say, because they decontextualized his thought, failing to link his interpretations of classical German philosophy to the Neo-Kantianism that coloured his work. But more fundamentally, these critics also misunderstood the kind of theory Lukács sought to produce. For them, the form of objectivity appropriate to social theory follows the natural-scientific model: it describes processes and interactions between objects that take place without the need for subjective intervention. The goal of Lukács’s analysis of reification is to bring precisely this assumption into question – to show that this is only one possible form of objectivity, and one possible subjective stance corresponding to it. His metacritique of the forms of bourgeois thought and society is aimed instead to reveal the underlying relation of subject and object in the constitution of social forms – as Kavoulakos has explained, praxis, not contemplation, is his primary theme. It is in making us question whether our approach to the world is indeed the only real and natural one, in tearing through the seeming completeness of a reified actuality, that Lukács has much to teach us today.