Party fear prevented Lukács from reading materialist motifs into Hegel’s logic itself
Evidence
Lukács sees himself faced with double necessity of both having to appropriate the ‘great thinker’ Hegel directly for economic materialism and, becauseMarxrefutedhim,havingtorefutehimagain.Thus,goodandbad marks are given to him alternately. However, out of fear of the mandarins [i.e., the party functionaries], Lukács doesn’t dare to search for the materialist motifs in Hegelian logic and metaphysics themselves, but rather clings to that which is more or less excerpted from classical national economy and is overjoyed when the application of the dialectical method in the subject area of economy occasionally yields results which are reminiscent of Marx and Engels. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 136
Categorization
- XREF: This is the crux of Adorno’s critique of orthodox Marxist Hegelianism—relevant to the volume’s ‘political economy’ revisionist argument. — connects to: Lukacs’s Leninist loyalty and anti-modernist taste limited his critical flexibility — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 537; Trotsky’s fixation on Leninism prevented him from decoding Stalinism’s class basis; Lukacs did not actually maintain a dualism between natural and human history.