A Defence of History and Class Consciousness
Tailism and the Dialectic
Georg Lukács author Esther Leslie translator John Rees editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Verso Books
Published:17th Aug '02
£14.99
Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.
A crucial, fascinating and intense lost text
This work is commonly held to be the foundational text for Western Marxism. As Stalinism took over in Russia, Lukacs was subjected to attacks for "deviation". In the 1920s he wrote a response to this, which remained unpublished at the time. The manuscript was later found in Moscow and published.In the mid 1920s Lukács wrote a sustained and passionate response to Stalin's onslaught on his earlier seminal work History and Class Consciousness. Unpublished at the time, Lukács himself thought that the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukács's oeuvre.
Lukács's polemic tells of a dogmatic, corrupt, ultimately murderous period in the transition from Stalinism ... it tells also of the passion, so vividly Judaic and Central European, for the life and clash of ideas. -- George Steiner * Times Literary Supplement *
We almost hear Lenin himself murmuring, it happens that for eighty years no Marxist has ever properly understood History and Class Consciousness! Splendidly translated here by Esther Leslie and contextualized by an introduction by John Rees and a conclusion by Slavoj Zizek (both of them stimulating and suggestive). -- Fredric Jameson * Radical Philosophy *
ISBN: 9781859843703
Dimensions: 191mm x 135mm x 15mm
Weight: 214g
190 pages