Abstract
The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács is known for his reintroduction of Hegelian thought to Marxist philosophy—but I argue that his account of the subjectivity of the proletariat owes just as much to the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. Despite strong differences in their outlook, their accounts of subjectivity have strong structural similarities. For both, a division of the self against itself produces suffering that leads in turn to a growing consciousness of the roots of the problem; in the end, the self is restored through a relation to itself grounded in the absolute, and thereby becomes capable of freedom. Lukács’s theory of subjectivity is, thus, predicated on changing the orientation of the proletariat towards itself—in ways that are deeply indebted to the peculiar theology of Kierkegaard.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank in particular Raymond Geuss, George Pattison, Martin Ruehl, Nicholas Walker, and the staff of the Lukács Archive in Budapest for their help and advice at various points in this project. I am also grateful to the trustees of the Robert Owen Bishop Fund at Christ’s College, Cambridge, who supported the initial stages of research from which this piece emerged. Needless to say, any remaining errors or misrepresentations are entirely my own.
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Westerman, R. The irrational act: traces of Kierkegaard in Lukács’s revolutionary subject. Stud East Eur Thought 67, 229–247 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-015-9240-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-015-9240-7