This post is a summary of a chapter of a book published at http://www.palgrave.com/resources/sample-chapters/9781137372819_sample.pdf. The second summary is from the book, "The Theory of the Novel," published at https://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/georg-lukacs-the-theory-of-the-novel.pdf . The third summary was published at http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27375-georg-lukcs-reconsidered-critical-essays-in-politics-philosophy-and-ae
Gyorgy Lukacs (1885-1971) was without doubt one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. His views on philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism exerted an immeasurable influence on intellectuals in Europe. Thanks to the impact of his 1923 book "History and Class Consciousness," with its philosophycal content and political message, Lukacs became known as one of the founders of Western Marxism and its principal representative. In all fields of culture, politics and indeed, in everyday life, we are witnessing the advance of irrational beliefs and the agressive attacks of forces hostile to reason and democracy. We face a situation in which the values of rationality need to be strengthened, just as Lukacs in his day considered the defence of such values to be one of his major tasks. Lukacs argues that the lack of transparency and "objective irrationality" of the social whole collide with the rationality of the systems of production and social organization and with the rationality of the now indispensable scientific research. Without a doubt Lukacs' work in the literary field is dominated by criticism. The most obvious sign of a continuity connecting the various periods of lukacs' work is his literary taste, which remained unchanged throughout his life. He always directed his attention to the canonized authors of world literature, in aprticular to the great realists of the 19th century, in whom he saw the protagonists of "art's struggle for freedom" and the interrelated actors of an ideal progression of historical development.
The method of "The Theory of the Novel" depends to a larger extent on whether the chief protagonist's soul is 'too narrow' or 'too broad' in relation to reality. This highly abstract criterion is useful, at most, for illuminating certain aspects of "Dom Quixote", which is chosen to represent the first type. "The Theory of the Novel," was the first book belonging to the 'intellectual sciences school in which the findings of Hegelian philosophy were concretely applied to aesthetic problem. We have already recognised the dangers that arise from abstract nature of the novel; the risk of overlapping into lyricism or drama, the risk of narrowing reality so that the work becomes an idyll, the risk of sinking to the level of mere entertainment literature. The irony of the novel is the self-correction of the world's fragility: inadequate relations can transform themselves into a fanciful yet well-ordered round of misunderstandings and cross-purposes, within which everything is seen as many-sided, within which things appear as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete autonomous life, as flowering and as decaying, as the infliction of suffering and as suffering itself. The outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. The fluctuation between a conceptual system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which can never attain completeness because completeness is immanently utopian, can be objectivised only in that organic quality which is the aim of biography. The novel comprises the essence of its totality, and thereby raises an individual of one who must create an entire world through his experience and who must maintain that world in equilibrium, the epic individual owed his significance to the grace accorded to him, not to his pure individuality. The objective structure of the novel shows a heterogeneous totality, regulated only by regulative ideas, whose meaning is prescribed but not given. That is why the unity of the personality and the world, a unity which is dimly sensed through memory, yet which once was part of our lived experience. A natural consequence of the paradoxical nature of this art is the fact that the really great novels have a tendency to overlap into the epic. The events in Dom Quixote are almost timeless, a motley series of isolated adventures complete in themselves, and while the ending completes the work as a whole as to its principle and problems, it does so only for the whole and not for the concrete totality of the parts. It was Cervantes the intuitive visionary of the historical-philosophical moment, his vision came into being at the watershed of two historical epochs; it recognised and understood them, and raised the most confused problematic into the radiant sphere of a transcendence which achieved its full flowering as form. The relationship between the objective and subjective worlds is therefore maintained in adequate balance: the hero is rightly conscious of the superiority of the opposing outside world, yet despite this innermost modesty he can triumph in the end because his lesser strength is guided to victory by the highest power in the world; the forces of the imaginary and the real correspond with one another; the victories and defeats are not contradictory to either the actual or the ideal world order. When this instinctive sense of distance, is lacking, the relationship between the subjective and the objective worlds becomes paradoxical, because the active soul, the soul that matters from the point of view of the epic, is narrowed, the world likewise becomes narrower for that soul than it is in reality. But since this reduction of the world and every action which follows from it and which is aimed only at the reduced, all that opposes the soul must come from, sources which are heterogeneous from it. Thus action and opposition have neither scope nor quality, neither reality nor orientation in common. The narrowing of the soul of which we speak is brought about by demonic obsession by an existing idea which it posit as the only. The greater closeness of 19th century literature to certain organic natural conditions, made it possible for that literature to be creatively polemical. Tolstoy, who was an essentially novelist of disillusionment, created a form of novel which overlaps to the maximum extent into the epic. The paradoxical nature of Tolstoy's historical situation, proves better than anything else how much the novel is the necessary epic form of our time.
Lukacs's work and intellectual legacy, always complex and provocative, have in fact never wanted for attention, but in the past few years new impetus for re-engaging with his book has come from litearary studies, where his theory of literary realism and his implacable opposition to literary modernism in all forms resonate with neo-realist aesthetics, and from social and political theory, where Axel Honneth's recent re-appropriation of the central concept of reification, and how well the concept might survive transplantation into theoretical climates far different than lukacs own.The anthology's third section,"Perspectives on Critical Theory," continues this contrastive work: refers to criticisms of the shortcomings of discourse-theoretical revision of the projects of critical theory in order to suggest that Lukacsian thought, offers help in addressing the charges of formalism.The revised version emphasizes an open history as the site of "a nonmechanistic emergence of a qualitatively new form of consciousness and a corresponding social practice as the concrete embodiment of effective human freedom," An updated Lukacsian world history is left with nothing but the classical idea of Enlightenment, the idea of enlightening people about their real conditions of existence and the application of this knowledge to the field of politics and the social practice of citizens. If today it strike us as outrageous it is because, despite the 'democratic' spirit of our age, we have, to a great extent, lost faith in the power of deliberate agency.
