Editorial Note, Jan-Feb, 2018

The current number of Social Scientist is the second and final one discussing the work and life of György Lukács, the Marxist philosopher and literary theorist. Perhaps no other person’s life straddles so comprehensively the vast expanse of twentieth-century socialist theory as that of Lukács. A witness to the Bolshevik Revolution who embraced communism in its wake, he lived to become an iconic figure of sorts for the New Left in the late 1960s – without, however, ever having ceased to be a communist. A Minister of Culture in the 1918 Hungarian Soviet Republic, he lived to become once again a Minister of Culture in the Imre Nagy government that was overthrown by Soviet intervention in 1956, leading to his arrest, incarceration and interrogation. A Marxist revolutionary who lived through the Stalin period, critical yet compromising, resisting yet paying obeisance, he survived that period to dream of a renaissance of Marxism.