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History and Class Consciousness By Georg Lukacs MIT, 356 pp., $8.95 Georg Lukacs, now in his 86th year, is generally recognized as the most original Marxist thinker of our time (except in Russia, where that distinction is traditionally conferred on the current General Secretary, and in China, which has only one Thought for every day). Like many other eminent philosophers, Lukacs is also a politician—an unsuccessful one. It is impossible to understand his tortuous path as a philosopher without knowing something of his, to put it mildly, rather unusual political career. In 1919, during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukacs was Deputy People’s Commissar for Education. When the military front began to crumble Lukacs, together with other leading Communists, was sent to stiffen the resistance of the Red Army, and this gentle philosopher became the only Hungarian political commissar to order the decimation of a unit that had retreated without orders.

Lukacs’ next political appointment came 37 years later: He was promoted to Minister of Education in the short-lived government of Imre Nagy. Then the Russian tanks arrived, and the political activities of Georg Lukacs came to an abrupt halt. But in between these two high-points. he had had a number of interesting experiences. One came just before the Soviet-German war, when Lukacs, jailed in the Lubianka, had his liberty won in a game of cards by the Russo-Hungarian economist Eugen Varga, a regular bridge partner of the late Mr. Beria (I have this story from Lukacs himself). A tough training, but then being a Marxist philosopher is a tough profession—in a Marxist country, that is, not in the “repressive tolerance” of the West.

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Tibor Szamuely

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History and Class Consciousness By Georg Lukacs MIT, 356 pp., $8.95 Georg Lukacs, now in his 86th year, is generally recognized as the most original Marxist thinker of our time (except in Russia, where that distinction is traditionally conferred on the current General Secretary, and in China, which has only one Thought for every day). Like many other eminent philosophers, Lukacs is also a politician—an unsuccessful one. It is impossible to understand his tortuous path as a philosopher without knowing something of his, to put it mildly, rather unusual political career. In 1919, during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukacs was Deputy People’s Commissar for Education. When the military front began to crumble Lukacs, together with other leading Communists, was sent to stiffen the resistance of the Red Army, and this gentle philosopher became the only Hungarian political commissar to order the decimation of a unit that had retreated without orders.

Lukacs’ next political appointment came 37 years later: He was promoted to Minister of Education in the short-lived government of Imre Nagy. Then the Russian tanks arrived, and the political activities of Georg Lukacs came to an abrupt halt. But in between these two high-points. he had had a number of interesting experiences. One came just before the Soviet-German war, when Lukacs, jailed in the Lubianka, had his liberty won in a game of cards by the Russo-Hungarian economist Eugen Varga, a regular bridge partner of the late Mr. Beria (I have this story from Lukacs himself). A tough training, but then being a Marxist philosopher is a tough profession—in a Marxist country, that is, not in the “repressive tolerance” of the West.