Hungarian philosopher and literary critic whose 1923 essay collection History and Class Consciousness is, by universal acclamation, the single book that inaugurated what Anderson would later name Western Marxism; whose 1919 appointment as Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic made him one of the very few twentieth-century philosophers to hold real revolutionary office; and whose subsequent half-century of accommodation, disavowal, and self-criticism inside international communism makes his life, more than anyone else's, the drama the Western Marxist tradition kept trying to either escape from or repeat. He was born in Budapest in 1885 to György Löwinger, a self-made Jewish banker recently ennobled and baptized, which gave Lukács the "von" he spent most of his adult life discarding.
His pre-Marxist work — Soul and Form (1910) and The Theory of the Novel (1916), both written in elegant literary-philosophical German under the influence of Simmel, Max Weber, and the Neo-Kantians — reads the novel as the epic form of an age that has lost its "transcendental home." The young Lukács was a spiritual-aristocratic critic of bourgeois modernity in a specifically Mitteleuropean mode, and the Hungarian historian Ferenc Fehér called him, not unfairly, the last Romantic. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic under Béla Kun in 1919 — in which Lukács served as political commissar and, notoriously, on one occasion as battlefield commander — converted him into a revolutionary communist practically overnight. He fled to Vienna when the Republic collapsed after 133 days.
History and Class Consciousness, written in exile between 1919 and 1922, did two things that made it the central Marxist philosophical text of the century. First, it took Marx's account of commodity fetishism in Capital — the way in which relations between people take on the phantom objectivity of relations between things — and generalized it into a systematic theory of reification (Verdinglichung), in which the whole of consciousness under capitalism is shaped by the commodity form: fragmented, specialized, emptied of the living totality it presupposes. Second, he placed totality at the center of Marxist method — the claim that only the standpoint of the proletariat, the class whose self-understanding is simultaneously an understanding of the whole, can see the social world as the dynamic, dialectical totality it is. True class consciousness was not, for Lukács, what workers happened to be thinking; it was what they would think if they fully grasped their structural position. The book was attacked from the Comintern almost immediately — at the Fifth World Congress (1924) Zinoviev condemned it as idealist — and Lukács, in a move that became characteristic, accepted the condemnation and disavowed the book, repeating the gesture across the rest of his life with successive works ("Blum Theses," 1929; a 1967 self-criticism of HCC itself) in a pattern his admirers have read as tragic and his critics as abject.
His Stalin-era career was literary. Based mostly in Moscow from 1930 to 1945, he wrote the work on which his professional reputation rests — The Historical Novel (1937), Studies in European Realism, Goethe and His Age, and the late The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1956) — a systematic defence of nineteenth-century bourgeois realism (Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy) as the artistic form most capable of grasping historical totality, and a corresponding attack on modernism (Joyce, Kafka, Beckett) as the aesthetic expression of late-capitalist decadence and fragmentation. The resulting Expressionism Debate of the 1930s pitted him against Brecht, Bloch, and a younger generation who saw in modernist formal innovation precisely the resources Lukács dismissed; Benjamin and Adorno were closer to Brecht's side, though both read Lukács seriously. After 1945 he returned to Hungary, served briefly as Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy's 1956 revolutionary government, was deported to Romania after the Soviet invasion, eventually returned, and spent his last years writing The Ontology of Social Being, an enormous unfinished attempt to ground Marxism in a general theory of labor.
Lukács is unavoidable. Every serious strain of twentieth-century Marxism — the Frankfurt School, Gramsci (who read HCC in prison), Sartre's turn to Marxism in the 1950s, Goldmann's genetic structuralism, the English-language Western Marxism of Perry Anderson and Fredric Jameson — runs through him. He is also the tradition's most honest test case: a great philosopher whose life demonstrated, across fifty years, how hard it was for a Marxist intellectual in the twentieth century to be either inside or outside the real communist movements without betraying something.