LukÁcs, Georg(1885–1971)
Georg (György) Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, was professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of culture at the University of Budapest from 1945 to 1956. Lukács was born in Budapest into a rich and eminent family (before he became a communist he wrote under the family name "von Lukács"). He took a doctorate in philosophy in Budapest (1906) and then studied under Georg Simmel at Berlin and under Max Weber at Heidelberg. Since Lukács was recognized as one of Europe's leading literary critics when he joined the Communist Party of Hungary in December 1918, he was offered the post of people's commissar for culture and education in the communist regime of Béla Kun (March–August 1919). After the fall of Kun, Lukács took refuge in Vienna, where he edited the review Kommunismus and carried on a struggle with Kun (exiled in Moscow) for control of the Hungarian underground movement. Publication in Berlin in 1923 of Lukács's collection of essays, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, decided the issue in favor of Kun—for the book was denounced as "deviationist." Lukács was ousted from the central committee of the Communist Party and from the editorship of Kommunismus after publishing his "self-criticism." He took refuge in Russia when Adolf Hitler came to power and, after a further and more thorough act of self-criticism, worked in the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Science from 1933 to 1944.
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