Georg Lukács: Record of a Life, and: Georg Lukács and His Generation (review)

134 the minnesota review of mainstream philosophy. However, the group is definitely not socialist; in fact, for the most part it is fairly unpolitical except as regards gender. Long a source of puzzlement and regret to me, I think several factors combine to explain the absence of a comparable radical philosophy movement here: 1) philosophy in the United States has long been somewhat less narrow and homogeneous than in Britain, which makes "the enemy" more difficult to discern; 2) a couple of established journals in the U.S., for example Philosophical Forum, have been open to radical ideas; 3) there is a much smaller socialist tradition in this country for critics to draw on. Hence, feminists here make some of the same criticism of philosophical orthodoxy , but in their own terms, that have been made by socialist philosophers in England. Add a crude economic factor: in the U.S. jobs have been more difficult to get and even more difficult to keep than in England. Many radical (and non-radical) philosophers have been forced to get out of the field. Those who hung on could ill afford to publish in journals outside the mainstream. The only positive sign has been a recent resurgence of interest in Marxist scholarship. We're fortunate, therefore, that Radical Philosophy exists, though I wish its distribution in the United States were better than it is. This collection is an excellent way to sample its stimulating ideas. NANCY HOLMSTROM Georg Lukdcs: Record ofa Life edited by Istvan Eorsi. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1983. 204 pp. $7.95 (paper). Georg Lukdcs and His Generation by Mary Gluck. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. 265 pp. $25.00 (cloth). In 1913 Ernst Bloch declared, after hearing a talk by the young Georg Luka'cs, "The world spirit has just passed through this room." Bloch has recognized something that becomes increasingly apparent as the twentidh century moves toward its close: for good or ill, Lukacs is its representative Marxist intellectual. The project of these two books is similar: to trace the development of Lukacs from his bourgeois origins in pre-war Budapest to his later position as exemplary Marxist philosopher of the modern period. Gluck's book covers the years 1900 to 1918. Eorsi's volume includes a series of interviews that Luka'cs gave between 1969 and his death in 1971, as well as Luka'cs' own notes written in 1970-71, toward an autobiography , the Gelebtes Denken. Along with Michael Ltfwy's Georg Lukdcs: From Romanticism to Bolshevism, these two volumes are the closest we have yet come to a full-scale intellectual biography of Lukacs. In Eorsi's view, the Gelebtes Denken reflects the "unity" of Luka'cs' life and personality . Whether Eorsi is right is a judgment that readers will want to make for themselves. Certainly Lukacs desired such a unity, if only retrospectively, but his infamous ideological turnarounds and self-critidsm, what Eorsi calls his "adjustments," complicate not only the task of his biographers, but also Lukacs' own attempts to make summary statements about his Ufe. For Luka'cs, the move to communism which he locates in 1917-18, was "the greatest turning-point in my life." The suddenness of this turn away from bourgeois idealist values to a Marxist world view is the most striking single element in Luka'cs' intellectual development . Gluck argues that it was not a Saul-into-Paul conversion, however, because it was preceded by what she calls a "dramatic reorientation" in Lukacs' standpoint that took place "sometime between 1909 and 191 1." Perhaps the most interesting and puzzling aspect of reading these two texts comparatively is these parallactic views of one man's life, his own and that of Gluck, his would-be biographer. To begin with Lukacs' own view: the movement, as he sees it, was from an earlier, "revolutionary culturaUst" position, to the overt politics of his work as assistant Minister of Culture in Bela Kun's short-lived Hungarian Soviet RepubUc. Acknowledging that "people tend to stylize their past," Luka'cs proceeds to describe a rational trajectory in his own career, from early readings in Uterature (always from an "ethical" point of view) to...