Background
He was born into a middle-class family, his father, a bank director, being ennobled in 1899, when he converted to Christianity.
He was born into a middle-class family, his father, a bank director, being ennobled in 1899, when he converted to Christianity.
As a teenager he began to write poems and plays but destroyed the latter when he was eighteen. From 1902 he studied law and political science at Budapest University, obtaining an LL.D. at Kolozsvar (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania).
In 1904 he was a founder of the Thalia Society, an avantgarde theater for which he translated several plays, including Ibsen's Wild Duck, and also participated in the group’s management. In 1906 he began studying in Berlin, and in 1909 received a Ph.D. for his dissertation.
The Form of Drama, an enlarged edition of which. History of the Development of Modern Drama, was published in 1911.
Following a series of personal tragedies, he moved to Heidelberg, where he came under the influence of Max Weber and his circle. His interests at this time centered on problems of the philosophy of history and ethics, about which he wrote in the introduction to his Die Theorie des Romans “Theory of the Novel,” (1914). Lukács did not share his German philosopher colleagues’ enthusiasm for World War I and published his objections in an article, “German Intellectuals and the War.” From 1917, he frequently returned to Budapest and formed the Sunday Circle, in which he met his friends to debate problems of philosophy, history, and religion. Members of the circle founded the Free School of Liberal Arts, where Lukács taught ethics.
His rejection of the prevalent social order brought him to Marxism. When, as a consequence of the victorious revolution of 1918, the hitherto theoretical philosophical-ethical questions became practical, he joined the Communist party and edited its organ. The Red Newspaper. In the proletarian dictatorship of Bela Kun, he was deputy commissar for education and from June 1919 commissar for education and culture. After Kun’s fall, he remained in Budapest with the task of organizing the illegal Communist party, but eventually had to flee to Vienna. In 1920-1921. he was a member of the Hungarian Communist party's provisional central committee and wrote numerous articles on theoretical problems of communism for Kommunismus,the organ of the Communist International.
For the next few years, his attention was directed to the history of Marxist ideology and of the workers’ movement in essays on Moses Hess and Ferdinand Lassalle.
Returning to Moscow in 1933, his articles were regularly published in the new Soviet journal. Literary Criticism. Together with M. Lifshitz, he set out to collect and interpret the comments of Marx and Engels on aesthetics with a view to reconstructing Marxist aesthetics as an integral part of Marxist philosophy. From 1935 to 1939 he was a member of the Philosophical Institute of the Soviet Acadamy of Sciences, working on his monograph.
Having survived the Stalin purges and World War II, he returned to Hungary in 1945. Until 1949, he was professor of aesthetics and philosophy of culture at Budapest University, from 1948 a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; and in 1949 —1958 a member of its presidium. From 1946, he was one of the editors of the social-science journal. Forum, and a member of the editorial board of Social Review. In his articles and lectures on the cultural policy of the Hungarian Communist party, he presented the Marxist viewpoint, while in contemporary ideological discussions he held that the progressive democratic traditions of Hungarian literature should become the norm. As a critic of bourgeois philosophy, he violently attacked the existentialists.
What is now known as the Lukács controversy erupted in 1949 over his theory of democracy, which clearly opposed the prevalent cult of the personality. His views were deemed right-wing deviation. In the end, he published yet another self-criticism, “Conclusions of a Literary Debate,” in Sociul Review. He was also castigated for failing to study Soviet literature and socialist realism. As a result, he published an essay on Soviet writers. During the ensuing years, he was engaged in theoretical research on reactionary irrationalism (The Forced Abdication of Reason. 1954).
On 4 November he lied to the Yugoslav embassy, from which he was taken to Romania. There he wrote the first part of his Marxist aesthetics, in which he opposed political control of artists. He was allowed to return to Budapest in April 1957 but stopped participating in public life. He continued his research and writing, finishing the manuscript of the elaboration of Marxist ethics shortly before his death.