This is the first time one of the most important of Lukács' early
theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923, has been made
available in English. The book consists of a series of essays treating,
among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of
legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing
function of Historic Marxism, class consciousness, and the
substantiation and consciousness of the Proletariat.
Writing in 1968, on the occasion of the appearance of his collected
works, Lukács evaluated the influence of this book as follows:
For the historical effect of History and Class Consciousness and also
for the actuality of the present time one problem is of decisive
importance: alienation, which is here treated for the first time since
Marx as the central question of a revolutionary critique of capitalism,
and whose historical as well as methodological origins are deeply rooted
in Hegelian dialectic. It goes without saying that the problem was
omnipresent. A few years after History and Class Consciousness was
published, it was moved into the focus of philosophical discussion by
Heidegger in his Being and Time, a place which it maintains to this
day largely as a result of the position occupied by Sartre and his
followers. The philologic question raised by L. Goldmann, who considered
Heidegger's work partly as a polemic reply to my (admittedly unnamed)
work, need not be discussed here. It suffices today to say that the
problem was in the air, particularly if we analyze its background in
detail in order to clarify its effect, the mixture of Marxist and
Existentialist thought processes, which prevailed especially in France
immediately after the Second World War. In this connection priorities,
influences, and so on are not particularly significant. What is
important is that the alienation of man was recognized and appreciated
as the central problem of the time in which we live, by bourgeois as
well as proletarian, by politically rightist and leftist thinkers. Thus,
History and Class Consciousness exerted a profound effect in the
circles of the youthful intelligentsia.
