A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic
Slavoj Zizek, Georg Lukács, John Rees, Esther Leslie
List price £14.99
Product Details
- Format:
- Paperback / softback
- ISBN:
- 9781859843703
- Published:
- 17 Aug 2002
- Publisher:
- Verso Books
- Dimensions:
- 190 pages - 191 x 135 x 15mm
- Availability:
- Available
Categories:
In the mid 1920s Lukács wrote a sustained and passionate response to Stalin's onslaught on his earlier seminal work History and Class Consciousness. Unpublished at the time, Lukács himself thought that the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukács's oeuvre.
This work is commonly held to be the foundational text for Western Marxism. As Stalinism took over in Russia, Lukacs was subjected to attacks for "deviation". In the 1920s he wrote a response to this, which remained unpublished at the time. The manuscript was later found in Moscow and published.
Georg Lukács (1885-1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.