Praxical Sociology and the Algebra of Revolution

Abstract

The idea of praxis was explored in the 1960s, contemporaneously with the publication of an English translation of History and Class Consciousness—the early writings of Hungarian Marxist Georgy Lukacs. Reminding us that Marx titled Capital Volume One ‘The Process of Production’, his dynamic, processional and revolutionary brand of Marxism inspired many would-be radicals by its contrast with the official Marxism of the Eastern Bloc (and Western European communist parties). Like Elias, his notion of social figurations going through long-term processes of change as the motor of history represented a dynamic breakthrough from the rigidities of previously held versions of necessary stages of historical development. When Lukacs wrote in the 1920s he was countering the determinism represented by the Second International Marxism of Kautsky and Plekhanov, the leading theoreticians of Western social democracy and Russian menshevism. By the 1960s and 1970s this ‘objectivist’ brand of Marxism was associated with Althusser and the structuralists. The political sense of liberation represented by the Paris uprising in May 1968 gelled with Lukacs’ revolutionary ‘subjectivism’, which affirmed that the working class could make history in the dynamic process of making social change. Like his contemporary Antonio Gramsci, Lukacs was centrally involved in a revolutionary uprising in 1919, in Turin and Budapest respectively. Both sought what Lukacs called ‘the algebra of revolution’;1 both wrestled with the ways in which the state and its rulers hegemonised, and the tactics of the resistance; and both wrote in a style that was both suggestive whilst being open to a range of interpretations. Ninety years on, this article explores the extent to which these two ‘Western Marxists’ agree, and still provide relevant insight, and how linked ideologies from contemporaries such as Mannheim and Elias2—and later, Wacquant—have further developed ‘praxical’ sociology. 1 J. Rees, The Algebra of Revolution (London: Routledge, 1998). 2 R. Kilminster, Praxis and Method (London: Routledge, 1979).