1885-1971. Hungarian philosopher, one of the
founders of `Western' or `Hegelian' Marxism,
a philosophy opposed to the Marxism of the
official communist movement. In History and
Class Consciousness 1923, he argued that the
proletariat was the `identical
subject-object' of history. Under capitalism,
social relations were `reified' (turned into
objective things), but the proletariat could
grasp the social totality. Lukacs himself
repudiated the book and spent much of the
rest of his life as an orthodox communist. He
also made contributions to Marxist aesthetics
and literary theory. He believed, as a
cultural relativist, that the most important
art was that which reflected the historical
movement of the time: for the 20th century,
socialist realism.