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Thinkers

Gyorgy Lukacs

Marxist · Europe · 1885 to 1971

Hungarian thinker who argued that under capitalism human relations harden into things, a process he called reification.

What it is

György Lukács (1885 to 1971) was a Hungarian philosopher and literary critic, born in Budapest. He is counted among the founders of Western Marxism, an approach that departed from the Marxism officially taught in the Soviet Union. His writing on the novel and on how capitalism shapes the mind became a reference point for critical theory.

He began as a literary and aesthetic theorist and was influenced by Georg Simmel. In 1918, to the surprise of his friends, he became a communist. He served in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 as the people's commissar for education and culture, and was active in politics again in 1956. He went on writing about literature and philosophy until his death in 1971.

The main ideas

  • Reification. Under capitalism, he argued, relations between people come to look like relations between things. Work, goods and prices appear as natural facts beyond anyone's control, and people lose sight of the human activity behind them.
  • Class consciousness. He understood Marxism as a self-conscious transformation of society by those who live in it, not merely a forecast of history.
  • A standpoint for knowing. He argued that the position of the working class gives it an advantage in understanding society as a whole. This became an early model for what is now called standpoint theory.
  • Form and life. In his early essays, he saw modern culture as split between objective cultural forms and the richness of genuine life, and asked how art might bridge the gap.
  • The novel. In The Theory of the Novel he studied the novel as the form of a world that has lost its sense of wholeness.
  • Realism. He developed a theory of literary realism and of the novel as a literary form, which made him very influential as a critic.

What it looks like in practice

Think of how a price on a shelf seems like a fact of nature, as if it simply belonged to the item, though it comes from many people's labour and decisions. Lukács would ask whose activity has been hidden behind the price and what it would mean to see it again. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Soul and Form (1910) is a collection of essays on literature and life.
  • The Theory of the Novel (1916) studies the novel as a response to the modern world.
  • History and Class Consciousness (1923) lays out reification and class consciousness and is his best-known work.
  • His last years produced two massive works, one on aesthetics and one on ontology.

Questions and criticism

  • Shifting positions. Even today's readers find it hard to follow the shifts in his thinking between 1918 and 1923.
  • Political choices. His commitment to communism and to office in the Hungarian Soviet Republic surprised his friends and remains a matter of dispute.
  • An early peak. His later work did not capture the public imagination the way his early writings did.

Close neighbours

Karl Marx's analysis of the commodity is the starting point of his theory of reification. Georg Simmel influenced his early writing, and the pages on Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas show how critical theory carried his ideas on.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • G. W. F. Hegel · He built his account of history and totality on Hegel.
  • Karl Marx · His best-known book reads Marx through the idea that social relations harden into things.

Reacted against by

  • Theodor Adorno · Adorno criticised his later turn to realism in art and his view of modern culture.

Other Marxist thinkers

Sources we used

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