Editorial Note, Nov-Dec, 2017

The life of Georg Lukács (1885–1971), the outstanding Marxist theorist, intersected so closely with the major revolutionary events of his time that it almost constitutes a history of the twentieth-century European proletarian revolutionary movement. Joining the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918, Lukács became the Commissar for Culture in the short-lived postwar revolutionary government of the Soviet Republic set up in Hungary, and fought in the Civil War that ultimately led to its defeat in August 1919. His History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923, was an astonishingly original work in Marxist philosophy which foregrounded the concept of reification. He was later to say self-critically that the book had expressed the ‘messianic sectarianism’ of that period; but it had also expressed, one might add, the ‘messianic utopianism’ underlying the revolutionary upsurge that came in the wake of the October Revolution.