Lukacs’s Leninist loyalty and anti-modernist taste limited his critical flexibility

Evidence

Lukacs, the man who repudiated his own History and Class Consciousness because of criticisms by the Party hierarchy, never truly freed himself from the Leninist straitjacket. This was apparent in a number of ways. One of the better known is his practically unrelieved hostility to artistic modernism of all kinds.; To such writers as Proust, Joyce, and Kafka, Lukacs turned a deaf ear, because of their alleged formalism and subjectivity. Much of twentiethcentury art Lukacs associated with the alleged irrationalism in the writings of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. Along with this attitude went a rather conservative preference for the masterpieces of bourgeois culture and a less than critical deference for the products of socialist realism. This latter aspect of his work was perhaps due to an overly optimistic appreciation of the reconciliation of contradictions already achieved in socialist countries.’ Still another manifestation of his adherence to Leninist standards appeared in his relative indifference to the effects on art of technological innovation; class conflict remained the sole motor of history underlying his criticism. For all the insights contained in the vast corpus of his critical works, Lukacs’s compromise with political authority and his almost temperamental insensitivity to modernist art prevented his achieving the kind of critical flexibility that Western para-Marxists, such as those connected with Frankfurt School, were able to attain. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 537

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Party fear prevented Lukács from reading materialist motifs into Hegel’s logic itself — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 136; Anti-Communist bias distorted English reception of Lukács and Sartre; Lukács’s work is misread as party-line symptoms instead of internal logic — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 339 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Party fear prevented Lukács from reading materialist motifs into Hegel’s logic itself #exemplifies (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 136