Lukacs: Praxis and the Absolute

Georg Lukacs’s philosophy of praxis, penned between 1918 and 1928, remains a revolutionary and apocryphal presence within Marxism. His History and Class Consciousness has inspired a century of rapture and reprobation, perhaps, as Gillian Rose suggested, because of its ‘invitation to hermeneutic anarchy’.

In Lukacs: Praxis and the Absolute, Daniel Andres Lopez radicalises Lukacs’s famous return to Hegel by reassembling his 1920s philosophy as a conceptual-historical totality. This speculative reading defends Lukacs while proposing an unprecedented, immanent critique. While Lukacs’s concept of praxis approaches the shape of Hegel’s Absolute, it tragically fails to bear its weight. However, as Lopez argues, Lukacs’s failure was productive: it raises crucial political, methodological and philosophical questions for Marxism, offering to redeem a lost century.