Lukács’ Marxism remained indelibly shaped by his earlier Hegelian idealism.
Evidence
Luká cs, who is often treated as the perpetrator of a too-simple concept of ideologies—as “world-views”—sometimes also appears as its victim. He fell under the spell of Geisteswissenschaft as a gifted intellectual in the heady climate of the Heidelberg School, as he has himself acknowledged. To escape the lingering strains of positivism he tried to go “further back”—to Hegel himself, in The Young Hegel . In order to escape from Hegel he turned to Marx—but the path from one to the other was ineradicable: the absent-presence of Hegel lay across the route Luká cs took to Marx, like the sky-trail of a vanished aircraft. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 341
Categorization
- DEFINE: The metaphor of the ‘absent-presence of Hegel’ clarifies what Hall means by an intellectual tradition leaving a route-conditioning trace on a later thinker.
- XREF: connects to: Lukács’s route to Marx passed through an inescapable Hegelian frame; Adorno reframed Lukács’s class-centered Hegelian Marxism into speculative self-recognition; Narration problems drove Lukács to Marxism, not the reverse — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 372
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Lukács’s route to Marx passed through an inescapable Hegelian frame; Adorno reframed Lukács’s class-centered Hegelian Marxism into speculative self-recognition; Narration problems drove Lukács to Marxism, not the reverse — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 372