Georg Lukács on Stalinism and Democracy: Before and After Prague, 1968.
Georg Lukács on Stalinism and Democracy: Before and After Prague, 1968.

Summary/Abstract: Georg Lukács spent the greater part of his life at odds with the party. Real deviations from the prevailing doctrine or disputes over tactical matters created some of the problems, for instance at times when Lukács knew exactly what the party expected from its intellectuals and risked testing those expectations anyway. Then again he often fell out of step either because he overlooked the subordinate relationship between interests of state and doctrine altogether or simply missed the internal political dynamics of an outwardly theoretical debate. But the party itself caused many of the difficulties with Lukács by frequently shifting its tactics and then flailing those intellectuals picked to serve as scapegoats for the failures of the earlier orthodoxy (or the ones who simply hedged too long before furnishing the expected doctrinal corollaries for the next). Still other disputes between Lukács and the party fit more into the category of confrontations caused when his rivals dredged up Lukács’ checkered past as a means of enhancing their own stature at the expense of his. [...]

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