Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence

Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence PDF Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441121080
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
The end of the Soviet period, the vast expansion in the power and influence of capital, and recent developments in social and aesthetic theory, have made the work of Hungarian Marxist philosopher and social critic Georg Lukács more vital than ever. The very innovations in literary method that, during the 80s and 90s, marginalized him in the West have now made possible new readings of Lukács, less in thrall to the positions taken by Lukács himself on political and aesthetic matters. What these developments amount to, this book argues, is an opportunity to liberate Lukács's thought from its formal and historical limitations, a possibility that was always inherent in Lukács's own thinking about the paradoxes of form. This collection brings together recent work on Lukács from the fields of Philosophy, Social and Political Thought, Literary and Cultural Studies. Against the odds, Lukács's thought has survived: as a critique of late capitalism, as a guide to the contradictions of modernity, and as a model for a temperament that refuses all accommodation with the way things are.

Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence

Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence PDF Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441121080
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
The end of the Soviet period, the vast expansion in the power and influence of capital, and recent developments in social and aesthetic theory, have made the work of Hungarian Marxist philosopher and social critic Georg Lukács more vital than ever. The very innovations in literary method that, during the 80s and 90s, marginalized him in the West have now made possible new readings of Lukács, less in thrall to the positions taken by Lukács himself on political and aesthetic matters. What these developments amount to, this book argues, is an opportunity to liberate Lukács's thought from its formal and historical limitations, a possibility that was always inherent in Lukács's own thinking about the paradoxes of form. This collection brings together recent work on Lukács from the fields of Philosophy, Social and Political Thought, Literary and Cultural Studies. Against the odds, Lukács's thought has survived: as a critique of late capitalism, as a guide to the contradictions of modernity, and as a model for a temperament that refuses all accommodation with the way things are.

Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence

Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence PDF Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441187286
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
The end of the Soviet period, the vast expansion in the power and influence of capital, and recent developments in social and aesthetic theory, have made the work of Hungarian Marxist philosopher and social critic Georg Lukács more vital than ever. The very innovations in literary method that, during the 80s and 90s, marginalized him in the West have now made possible new readings of Lukács, less in thrall to the positions taken by Lukács himself on political and aesthetic matters. What these developments amount to, this book argues, is an opportunity to liberate Lukács's thought from its formal and historical limitations, a possibility that was always inherent in Lukács's own thinking about the paradoxes of form. This collection brings together recent work on Lukács from the fields of Philosophy, Social and Political Thought, Literary and Cultural Studies. Against the odds, Lukács's thought has survived: as a critique of late capitalism, as a guide to the contradictions of modernity, and as a model for a temperament that refuses all accommodation with the way things are.

Georg Lukacs Reconsidered

Georg Lukacs Reconsidered PDF Author: Michael Thompson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441108769
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
An international team of contributors explore contemporary insights into the work of Georg Lukacs in political theory, aesthetics, ethics and social and cultural theory.

Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis

Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis PDF Author: Konstantinos Kavoulakos
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474267424
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Georg Lukács' early Marxist philosophy of the 1920s laid the foundations of Critical Theory. However the evaluation of Lukács' philosophical contribution has been largely determined by one-sided readings of eminent theorists like Adorno, Habermas, Honneth or even Lukács himself. This book offers a new reconstruction of Lukács' early Marxist work, capable of restoring its dialectical complexity by highlighting its roots in his neo-Kantian, 'pre-Marxist' period. In his pre-Marxist work Lukács sought to articulate a critique of formalism from the standpoint of a dubious mystical ethics of revolutionary praxis. Consequently, Lukács discovered a more coherent and realistic answer to his philosophical dilemmas in Marxism. At the same time, he retained his neo-Kantian reservations about idealist dialectics. In his reading of historical materialism he combined non-idealist, non-systematic historical dialectics with an emphasis on conscious, collective, transformative praxis. Reformulated in this way Lukács' classical argument plays a central role within a radical Critical Theory.

Georg Lukacs Reconsidered

Georg Lukacs Reconsidered PDF Author: Michael J. Thompson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 144119763X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
Georg Lukács stands as a towering figure in the areas of critical theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, ethical theory and the philosophy of Marxism and German Idealism. Yet, despite his influence throughout the twentieth century, his contributions to the humanities and theoretical social sciences are marked by neglect. What has been lost is a crucial thinker in the tradition of critical theory, but also, by extension, a crucial set of ideas that can be used to shed new light on the major problems of contemporary society. This book reconsiders Lukács' intellectual contributions in the light of recent intellectual developments in political theory, aesthetics, ethical theory, and social and cultural theory. An international team of contributors contend that Lukács' ideas and theoretical contributions have much to offer the theoretical paucity of the present. Ultimately the book reintegrates Lukács as a central thinker, not only in the tradition of critical theory, but also as a major theorist and critic of modernity, of capitalism, and of new trends in political theory, cultural criticism and legal theory.

Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute

Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute PDF Author: Daniel Andrés López
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004417680
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 632

Get Book Here

Book Description
Georg Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, penned between 1918 and 1928, remains a revolutionary and apocryphal presence within Marxism. His History and Class Consciousness has inspired a century of rapture and reprobation, perhaps, as Gillian Rose suggested, because of its ‘invitation to hermeneutic anarchy’. In Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, Daniel Andrés López radicalises Lukács’s famous return to Hegel by reassembling his 1920s philosophy as a conceptual-historical totality. This speculative reading defends Lukács while proposing an unprecedented, immanent critique. While Lukács’s concept of praxis approaches the shape of Hegel’s Absolute, it tragically fails to bear its weight. However, as López argues, Lukács’s failure was productive: it raises crucial political, methodological and philosophical questions for Marxism, offering to redeem a lost century.

Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism

Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism PDF Author: Richard Westerman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331993287X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a radical new interpretation of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, showing for the first time how the philosophical framework for his analysis of society was laid in the drafts of a philosophy of art that he planned but never completed before he converted to Marxism. Reading Lukács’s work through the so-called “Heidelberg Aesthetics” reveals for the first time a range of unsuspected influences on his thought, such as Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, and Alois Riegl; it also offers a theory of subjectivity within social relations that avoids many of the problems of earlier readings of his text. At a time when Lukács’s reputation is once more on the rise, this bold new reading helps revitalize his thought in ways that help it speak to contemporary concerns.

Recovering the Later Georg Lukács

Recovering the Later Georg Lukács PDF Author: Matthew J. Smetona
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262545373
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book Here

Book Description
New resources for the critique of capitalism in culture from the late writings of Georg Lukács, one of the first authors in the tradition of Western Marxism. The Hungarian literary critic, philosopher, and Marxist social theorist Georg Lukács is best known for his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, in which he offered an influential critique of reification from the standpoint of a dialectical conception of totality. While Lukács’s early works have been central to the study of Marxist thought, his later works have often been dismissed as political accommodations to Stalinism. In this new study, Matthew Smetona argues for a revisionist interpretation of Lukács’s later writings on topics as diverse as aesthetics, politics, and ontology. Smetona demonstrates that these writings reveal a methodological unity that follows directly from History and Class Consciousness, in which realism, in both literary and extraliterary senses, becomes the basis for the critique of reification. As Lukács had demonstrated, reification is that process by which the social relations between persons seem to take on the character of a thing. Rooted in Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, the critique of reification proved, in Lukács’s hands, to be a flexible tool capable of clarifying all manner of obfuscations that arise within the social relations that capitalism produces. To recover the later work of Lukács is to open up new horizons for Marxist cultural criticism.

Axel Honneth and the Critical Theory of Recognition

Axel Honneth and the Critical Theory of Recognition PDF Author: Volker Schmitz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319919806
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
The critical theory of the Frankfurt School has undergone numerous and at times fundamental changes over the last ninety years. Since the late 1960s, it has been characterized primarily by Jürgen Habermas’s “communicative turn” and a focus on normative foundations. Today, that “second generation” exists side-by-side with a “third generation” represented most prominently by Axel Honneth’s turn toward recognition, ethical life, and the normative reconstruction of social institutions. This volume brings together critical voices on the state and direction of Frankfurt School theory today by examining Honneth’s theory in light of both current challenges and the intellectual and political ambitions that have shaped the tradition from its beginning. United in their strong commitment to critical scholarship, the authors collected here approach Honneth’s work from different backgrounds, employ a wide variety of methodologies, and write in different genres, ranging from the sober scholarly analysis to programmatic and political appeals. The collective aim of these reflections is not to reject Honneth’s theory but to build upon his work and incorporate his themes of recognition and social freedom into a new project of critical theory that can prove adequate to the political and social crises of our time.

The Age of Silver

The Age of Silver PDF Author: Ning Ma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190606568
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Age of Silver considers how commerce fueled the emergence of the novel around the globe, examining the evolution of epochal works of national literature from Don Quixote in 1605 to Robinson Crusoe in 1719.