The Reification of Consciousness: Husserl's Phenomenology in Lukács's Identical Subject-Object

Abstract

Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness has suffered the peculiar indignity of being criticized by its admirers for the very theory they take from it. Like Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, also published in 1923, Lukacs’s book explored the proletariat’s stubborn refusal to rise in support of revolutionary regimes in Germany and Hungary; eschewing allegedly scientific analyses of the supposedly necessary collapse of capitalism, Korsch and Lukacs focused on what happened in consciousness, not behind it, to understand society. Korsch’s dialectical account of the relationship between philosophy and society and Lukacs’s attempt to ground the very structures of subjectivity of individuals in their society are now seen as the foundations of “Western” Marxism. Yet while many have adopted Lukacs’s account of the reification of consciousness, few have accepted his argument that this very problem produces a revolutionary subjectivity in those most affected by it. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is a case in point: though inspired by Lukacs in criticizing the total rationalization of society, epitomized by the “culture industry,” they reject his optimistic