A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. Tailism and the Dialectic

Georg Lukács was dubbed "the philosopher of the October Revolution" and his masterpiece History and Class Consciousness (1923) is commonly held to be the foundational text for the tradition known as "Western Marxism" which includes the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. However, as the liberating energies of the Russian Revolution were sapped by Stalinism, Lukács was subjected to ferocious attack for "deviations" from the "party line." In the mid-1920s, Lukács wrote a sustained and passionate response to this onslaught. Unpublished at the time, Lukács himself thought the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now, for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukács's oeuvre.

"Lukács's polemic tells of a dogmatic, corrupt, ultimately murderous period in the transition from Stalinism . it tells also of the passion, so vividly Judaic and Central European, for the life and clash of ideas.Æ - George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement

"We almost hear Lenin himself murmuring, it happens that for eighty years no Marxist has ever properly understood History and Class Consciousness! Splendidly translated here by Esther Leslie and contextualized by an introduction by John Rees and a conclusion by Slavoj Zizek (both of them stimulating and suggestive)." - Fredric Jameson in Radical Philosophy

Georg Lukács was born in Hungary in 1885 and died there in 1971. A leading communist militant and a foremost Marxist philosopher, he was also, in 1919 and 1956, a government minister. His other books include History and Class Consciousness, The Historical Novel, Political Writings, Record of a Life, and Lenin.