Orthodox Heretic, Romantic Stalinist

This April Georg Lukács would be 90 years old. When he died, four years ago, he was eulogized for a number of conflicting reasons:

• To some, he was the guardian of orthodox Marxism and the only disciple who had ever dared to compose a complete “system,” including the volumes the master had not gotten around to write: a massive Ontology, an equally comprehensive Aesthetics, and the adumbration of an Ethics, which only his death prevented from growing to similar dimensions.

• But others remembered him as the iconoclast who, 50 years earlier, published a fiery book, History and Class Consciousness, which had proclaimed precisely the opposite: that Marx had never intended a system, that the very idea of a system is repugnant to the spirit of dialectics, and that to be an orthodox Marxist one need not subscribe to any particular proposition in Das Kapital as long as one follows the Method of revolutionary dialec...