Lukács fused Weber’s rationalization and Marx’s fetishism with idealist class struggle

Evidence

For Lukács, the decisive element was not a process of radical change directed by knowledge and motivated by indignation. It was a kind of knowledge which was, as knowledge, practical, and an act of achieving consciousness which was in itself an action. The combination of Weber’s theory of rationalization and Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism with an idealistic class-struggle philosophy of history made the essay on `Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ the most effective in the whole book. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 322

Categorization

• XREF: The Weber-Marx synthesis here prefigures the ‘negative dialectics’ and ‘instrumental reason’ frameworks of Adorno and Horkheimer in later critical theory. — connects to: Lukács fused Weber’s rationalization with Marx’s fetishism to make practical knowledge revolutionary.; Lukács’s radical negation of bourgeois culture attracted Max Weber’s interest. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 309; Lukács saw rationalization as reification caused by commodity fetishism — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 379 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Lukács saw rationalization as reification caused by commodity fetishism #expands (0.95) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 379