The History of History and Class Consciousness

Abstract

Tracing the development of Lukacs’s thought from the heady days of revolution in 1919 to the publication of History and Class Consciousness in 1923, Westerman argues Lukacs’s masterwork should not be seen as a single, relatively unified whole. The last-written essays of the book—‘What is Orthodox Marxism?,’ ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,’ and ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation’—are quite different from the earlier ones in their theoretical sophistication. Pointing to the references Lukacs makes, to changes in his use of the term ‘consciousness,’ and to Lukacs’s increasing tendency to use the term ‘totality’ to designate a self-enclosed whole, Westerman argues that these essays represent a theoretical return to his Heidelberg works. This justifies treating those works as a unified lens to interpret Lukacs’s Marxian social theory.