Lukács saw the Greek polis as the last society where culture was truly possible.

Evidence

The starting-point for the study was a comparison between the Greek city state, the historical social formation in which culture had achieved everyday reality, and bourgeois society, in which anarchic production and competition had alienated labour, had made the bonds of society more abstract and complex and had made individuals more isolated, so that culture in the true sense of the word was no longer possible. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 307

Categorization

• XREF: This is the classical Marxist-Lukácsian narrative of alienation versus the Greek polis that recurs across critical theory — connects to the Frankfurt School’s later nostalgia for lost totality and to work on reification.