Andrew Arato - The young Lukács

Arato-Breines and Lwy on LukcsThe Young Lukcs and the Origins of Western Marxism by Andrew Arato; Paul Breines;Georg Lukcs: From Romanticism to Bolshevism by Michael LwyReview by: Ferenc FehrNew German Critique, No. 23 (Spring - Summer, 1981), pp. 131-139Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487944 .Accessed: 09/12/2012 08:54

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REVIEW ESSAYS

Arato-Breines and Lowy on Lukdcs

by Ferenc Feh6r

Andrew Arato and Paul Breines. The Young Lukdcs and the Origins of Western Marxism. New York: Seabury Press, 1980. 256 pages.

Michael L6wy. Georg Lukdcs: From Romanticism to Bolshevism. London: New Left Books, 1979. 219 pages.

Shortly before his death, Lukacs, with a cynicism typical of when he spoke of himself, remarked to me: "In my long life I have had many unpleasant experiences, but at least I am going to be relieved of one burden: reading the miscellaneous nonsense that will be written about me." This has turned out to be an accurate forecast of the general quality of works about Lukacs. With darkness setting in, Minerva's owlets are irresistably drawn to his work and person, though with the unfortunate result that these have been buried in even greater obscurity. Within this context the books by Arato and Breines and by L6wy' (along with Laura Boella's II Giovane Lukdcs2) are welcome shafts of light. These works portray Lukaics from unusual angles, with unexpected foreshortenings, surprising local color - sometimes harsh, sometimes tender - but always illuminating. In spite of their differences, the books by Lowy and Arato- Breines have many features in common. Among other things, both books mark the end of a period in which only biased studies of Lukacs were written, either to prove his innocence beyond all reasonable doubt (mostly by his personal disciples) or to unmask the devil's ally (e.g., Steiner or Lichtheim).3 Both aims are understandable. Those trying to salvage a thinker of great cultural significance by presenting the image of a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche fought against a situation best described by Sinko. In Moscow during the 1930s, Fogarasi is reported to have remarked cynically to Sinko: "Lukacs? There is no philosopher of this name. He is only allowed to compile literary histories." At the other extreme, it was typical of Lukacs to create lifelong enmity with other intellectuals. One can

1. For an earlier review by Jeffrey Herf of the original French edition of L6wy's book, see Telos, 37 (Fall 1978), 226-35.

2. For an extensive review of this book by Eleni Mahaira-Odoni, see Telos, 41 (Fall 1979), 214-19.

3. See George Steiner, "Georg Lukacs and his Devil's Pact," Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York, 1977), pp. 325-39; George Lichtheim, Lukdcs (New York, 1970).

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readily understand how this came about by skimming through de Beau- voir's few but venomous remarks about him in her autobiography and by remembering Lukaics' commissar-like performance in the existentialism debate, or by rereading Deutscher's slanderous review of Lukaics4 and comparing it with the latter's frequent and equally slanderous statements about Trotsky and Trotskyism.s The two books reviewed here go beyond this distasteful impasse.

Both books tell unconventional stories, departing from the usual bio- graphical narrative and organized around coherent and original theses. In L6wy's case, it is that the valuable part of Lukacs' enormous oeuvre is his work during the radical period: between the pre-World War I romantic, anti-capitalist Kulturkritik and culminating in History and Class Conscious- ness and his conversion to Bolshevism. When he later accepted Stalin's "socialism in one country" and turned against Trotsky's Bolshevik opposition, he ceased to be radical and interesting up to his last shift in old age. The Arato-Breines thesis is roughly as follows: What Merleau-Ponty had called "Western Marxism" had been an important cultural and theoretical reality for forty years. Until the dramatic and short-lived rise of the New Left in the mid-1960s, however, it lacked any concrete agents. Regardless of whether there will be a future resurgence, no acceptable cultural history of the Left can be written without ascribing Western Marxism and History and Class Consciousness a central role in it. Arato and Breines do not suggest a harmonious relation between the New Left and this book. The story is far more complex. Unlike L6wy, they do not claim that genuine Leninism and History and Class Consciousness coincide. Where L6wy sees concordance and hopes of reunion, Arato and Breines reveal discord and irreconcilable hostility. But both sets of authors abandon the puerile classification of a "pre-Marxist" and a "Marxist" Lukacs, and find History and Class Consciousness to be his magnum opus, the only legitimate heir to Marx's philosophical genius. Each book also has specific merits as far as accuracy is concerned. In L6wy it is the extensive description of Lukacs' Hungarian background. Only a Hungarian can fully appreciate the absence of spelling mistakes in names, or more significantly, the complete understanding of the subtleties of complex situations. In Arato and Breines

4. Issac Deutscher, "Georg Lukacs and 'Critical Realism,'" Marxism in Our Time (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 283-94.

5. For obvious reasons, it would be useless to discuss in detail Lukacs' official Soviet critics. I will only relate a story which I heard from Lukfcs himself who, despite false self- criticisms made under duress, was a man of scrupulous personal integrity. One or two months before Rudas' criticism of History and Class Consciousness appeared in Pravda, Lukacs received a letter from him with warm congratulations on his masterpiece, but predicting difficulties "since these imbeciles in official posts will not understand your work." Luk~cs also reported how, when somewhat earlier, during a drastic reshuffle of the Hungarian Central Committee, he suggested Rudas' name for purely tactical considerations, Bela Kuin dismissed it out of hand: "Rudas is of no consequence. I pay him and he writes what I want."


Arato-Breines and Lowy on Lukdcs 133

it is the account of the "posterity" of History and Class Consciousness that is impressive.

Without at this point going into an extensive discussion of L6wy's thesis of oppositional Bolshevism (with which I strongly disagree),6 it should be pointed out that it is precisely this position, containing more messianic elements than he would be ready to admit, which helps him to understand the profundity of the young Lukics' romantic revolt against capitalism - but it is only at the cost of reducing romanticism to a romantically inspired political revolt. As with all messianic rebels, the struggle is not about "betterment" - that pedestrian-opportunistic category. The real choice is between all or nothing. This is why, even before dealing with Lukacs, he analyzes T6nnies, emphasizes the distinction between culture and civilization current in German academic circles, and restores to Marxism that romantic dimension denounced not only by social democrats but also by the later Lukics.7 This favorable view of the romantic dimension, and his sympathetic account of the longing for a meaningful life in a mechanized and lifeless money-centered civilization, allows Lowy to provide an interpretation of "genuine" Leninist Bolshevism as a movement seeking to abolish alienation, and to account for why Lukics became a communist. It solves the puzzle of Lukacs' overnight conversion from an academic German idealist into the People's Commissar in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. All of this has to be understood in terms of Lowy's earlier important work on Che Guevara and on Marx's theory of revolution.8 Romantic idealism carries a critical and emancipatory message against Soviet Marxism. This is a radical position which, even if built on illusions, puts forth human emancipation as its major premise and allows for constant reinterpretation. For this reason it is irreconcilable with Althus- ser's "scientific" dogmatism.

Let me single out two purely theoretical highlights - one implicit, the other explicit - of L6wy's approach to Lukacs as a radical. L6wy's account puts to rest George Steiner's lengthy condemnation of Lukics' "organic incapacity" to understand Dostoevsky, or his "dry rationalism"

6. I simply leave for L6wy's further consideration, both moral and political, whether it is proper to describe, as he does, as "curbing democracy" the work of a regime in which the total of those executed must be at least around 500,000 (Jacques Baynac, La Terreur sous Lenine) and probably more; in which Lenin's and Trotsky's mass murderers (Dzerzhinsky, Lacis, Peters and their apparatus) introduced a system of taking hostages and executing them regularly, of establishing concentration camps, of repressing starving workers' strikes by killing hundreds, of annihilating opposition socialist parties, first politically and increasingly physically, of eliminating masses of people for the "crime" of belonging to a particular social group.

7. For an extensive discussion of the later Lukics' classicism, see my "Lukics in Weimar," Telos, 39 (Spring 1979), 113-36.

8. Michael L6wy, La Thdorie de la Revolution chez le jeune Marx (Paris, 1970); Michael Lowy, La pensfe de Che Guevara (Paris, 1970).


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unable to perceive the healthy seeds latent in such a mystical attitude.' From materials discovered posthumously, Lowy knows that The Theory of the Novel was the only completed chapter of a book on Dostoevsky imbued with radical mysticism. He also provides a brilliant analysis of the famous Naphta-problem: Was Lukacs really Thomas Mann's model for Naphta in The Magic Mountain? Those who saw Naphta's demagogy as proto- Bolshevik have answered in the affirmative, while those who have accepted Lukics' interpretation of Naphta as a proto-fascist have answered negatively. '0 Mann himself gave misleading and ambivalent clues to this query. L6wy's solution can only be understood in relation to his rehabilita- tion of the romantic dimension. He knows that the romantic quest for community, the romantic longing for the organic, for a living civilization as against a "dead" or "mechanical" one is Janus-faced: It can lead to emancipatory collectivism or to a community of blood, myth and race. The early Lukics was indeed a romantic rebel. Thus, he could have been a model for Naphta, either as a proto-Bolshevik or a proto-fascist. The only catch here is that Lowy does not seem to realize that this is also an indirect confirmation of Sorel's admiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. Without the norm of Enlightenment - which includes that respect for dissenting opinions so marked in Luxemburg and so totally lacking in Lenin - there is no way of forecasting whether the romantic rebellion will follow Lukaics' or Heidegger's political path. Without this norm it can only result in destructive consequences, however different they may be.

One of L6wy's most attractive features is his sensitivity to the radical utopianism inherent in every project rejecting reconciliation with the given. When analyzing (p. 172) Lukaics' comparison of Lessing's Nathan the Wise and Goethe's Tasso - the play Lukacs at the time regarded as the acme of lamentable accommodation - his sympathies are with Lukacs favoring Lessing against Goethe. The roots of this sensitivity lie in Lowy's hidden messianic quality. In an interesting polemic against Goldmann (p. 109), L6wy states that it was not the crisis of fin de siecle capitalism but its absence that drove Lukacs, "the revolutionary without a revolution," to despair and made him vulnerable to the mystic Russian idea. Similarly, the delayed crises today in the various systems of domination make L6wy ready for a radical utopia.

My objections to L6wy's book are all related to his Bolshevism. The first objection concerns his treatment of the problem of morality in Lukacs' early writings. Even here, L6wy is one of the few to devote enough space to these problems - which, surprisingly, are neglected in Arato and Breines' book. Lukaics' account moves on two levels. On the one hand, he sees that there is a gap between Marxism as scientific sociology and the

9. Steiner, "Devil's Pact," p. 336 passim. 10. The last chapter of this dispute was the polemic between Yvon Bourdet and Nicolas

Tertulian in the early 1970s.



utopia it seeks to bring about, i.e., a non-alienated future. Here, morality is the mediating principle between the two and the necessary foundation for a new type of politics. Although it points to a serious contradiction in Marx, this solution is inadequate. As Agnes Heller has pointed out, political activity must imply moral maxims, but it cannot be based on morality. On the other hand, Lukacs also advocates a "Dostoevskyan" ethic: the ethic of a revolutionary minority practicing terror in the name of the proletariat. Lowy does not clearly distinguish between the two levels or see the fertility of the first as contraposed to the total falsity of the second. Furthermore, he accepts as inevitable the tragic pose of the terrorist who claims that he "has to kill" - a pose exposed on its first presentation in Ivan Karamazov's parable of the Grand Inquisitor, where Alyosha's embarrassed smile reveals the empty histrionics of Ivan's efforts to appear "suffering" and become "paradigmatic." This acceptance of Ivan's and the Grand Inquisitor's ethic rests on three unacceptable tacit premises: the identification of violence with terror, the belief in the possibility of being able to bring about socialism with a Jacobin dictatorship, and the moral approval of the individual terrorist's decision concerning other people's lives - the great individual's prerogative to be free to sacrifice others because he sacrifices himself. L6wy seems uneasy when dealing with these moral issues. As a moral individual, he feels that they are central to the preservation of radicalism's original mission and therefore considers Luk'cs' preoccupation with moral problems in the midst of revolutionary turbulence both admirable and bizarre at the same time. But there is nothing bizarre for people considering practicing terror to at least try to think about the moral implications of their actions, nor is it admirable that, having thought it over, they still practice it.

The second problem concerns L6wy's handling of the problem of reconciliation with reality. This key concept of Hegel's post-Waterloo period is generally unacceptable, for the simple reason that it assumes everything that exists to be reasonable. But this should not lead to distorting Hegel, who was very clear about his intentions. According to him, alienation can be abolished only in philosophy. So one should reconcile oneself to a reality that guarantees everyone's freedom. But, if the general application of the principle is abandoned while still dealing with practical exigencies, as L6wy does, what criteria other than Hegel's will be possible as a precondition for action? Of course, if Hegel's criterion is sufficient, the dilemma evaporates. Here L6wy is at a loss because, although he has a firm standard of comparison, he is reluctant to admit it. This standard is the way in which Lenin acted in any given situation. But, even while he employs it, LAwy is too sophisticated to admit to the sin of hero worship. This is only part of his difficulty. More problems are generated by the fact that his hero, Lenin, was one of the worst pragmatists and Machiavellians who derided anyone who tried to contrast a revolutionary Ought to Is, and immediately disposed of such living obstacles by any


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means available. Since this too is inadmissable, L6wy introduces the Trotskyist mythology of "ultra-leftism," "ultra-rightism" and the like, invented by Lev Davidovich himself, to preserve Lenin as the standard of correct action.

The book's conclusion raises one final question. L6wy considers Lukaics' last years (from the mid-1960s to his death in 1971) as a period of re-radicalization, under the impact of the Vietnam war, the French May, the Prague Spring, etc. He describes this process in terms of a rejection of reconciliation with reality and a return to the "correct" radicalism of the 1920s. While there was a shift, it cannot be described in these terms: there are no political similarities between Lukacs' views during the 1919-1922 period and those of the late 1960s. Of course, there is an ultimate philosophical similarity: the conception of socialism as a dis-alienated society. But in terms of practical politics, despite his frequent references to Lenin, Lukacs' half-hearted and intrinsically contradictory efforts pointed towards "democratization" - a euphemism for partial political pluralism rather than a revival of Lenin's Jacobin politics. His conception was not equivalent to Arato and Breines' "Western Marxism" either. It was rather a groping in the dark toward a politics that was to be called Eurocommun- ism and which was coming into being around the time of his death.

As with good novels, Arato and Breines' book should be read backwards. They close with an analysis of History and Class Consciousness, an analysis which is unmatched in a literature that includes contributions by people such as Bloch, Marcuse, Sombart and Kautsky. They not only summarize the major themes, but develop them so as to insert the book into this century's major philosophical debates. Thus, the analysis of reification takes on new dimensions. The general problem of alienated rationality in capitalism, the universalized factory model, the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft rendering labor abstract by tearing it from its roots in the rural community, the development of the subject- object debate from the stage of a given subject to that of a self-creating subject and then on to the present stage of the collective subject, the complexity of immediacy and mediation - all these themes are not merely restated but greatly elaborated by Arato and Breines.

But they did not mean to write a textbook. Rather, theirs is an effort at self-understanding typical of a generation which in the 1960s thought it was living through a new type of revolution. For this reason, the chapter on the "Theory of the Revolution" is crucial. There is also an original analysis of Lukacs' vacillation between Luxemburg and Lenin. Lukacs rejected all deterministic theories and saw Luxemburg's conception of the inevitable catastrophe as such, while misguidedly attributing to Lenin the merit of having broken through the deterministic framework of Marxism with his theory of imperialism. But he admired Luxemburg's focus on proletarian mass action, which he saw as a forerunner to his own theory of constitutive class consciousness, as an absolute precondition of the "realm of freedom."



Thus, Arato and Breines show how, as the revolutionary tide begins to ebb, the elitist conception of Leninism builds on the ruins of a defeated Luxemburgism. In this respect, their disagreement with Lowy is unmis- takable.

All this is much more than mere history. It is part of the authors' struggle with present problems and the possibilities for a radical trans- formation of advanced capitalism. Let me briefly single out three of these problems. The first is "proletarian self-determination." Even if the authors are aware that Lukacs created myths in order to remain a Leninist in good conscience, his project has lost none of its contemporary validity. Thus they link History and Class Consciousness to the autogestionnaire socialism of today. The second major problem is that of class itself. In spite of the structuralist vogue of class theory, there is a growing skepticism in regard to the sociological validity of this concept. On the other hand, there is an obvious danger for any radicalism to dispense with the notion of a collective subject in general - without which radical action would become meaningless. When Arato and Breines re-analyze the implications of class consciousness as something constituting a new reality and as prefiguring a new rationality, they point to some important aspects of potential collective subjects of radical change. One is the collectivity as a way of life, not simply as an economic unit, but opposed to the predominant lifestyle centered around possession. The second is the new collective subject as the agent of a new, substantive type of rationality: the rationality of a Kommunikationsgemeinschaft realized in permanent domination-free discussion. The third conclusion is an indirect defense of at least one version of Marxism against the often proclaimed charge of "productionism." As they put it: Lukacs "could, nevertheless, not bring himself to acknowledge the Leninist model of the militarized factory as the paradigm of socialist transition. There were in fact three models of the transition that Lukacs now (1922) rejected: (1) the myth of proletarian self-determination as the content of the primacy of the political (Lukacs' position in 1919; in part Lenin's in 1917; and indeed fairly close to that of Luxemburg herself); (2) the primacy of economic development, yielding the spontaneous political revolution of the proletariat and the emergence of a new mode of production from the womb of the old.. . and (3) the primacy of the political dimension in the form of the authoritarian-military organization of society as a factory" (p. 154).

When we read their account backwards, i.e., starting from the analysis of History and Class Consciousness as the book's climax, its whole complexity unfolds; and the development of Weber's disciple and friend into a messianic communist becomes, if not obvious, at least decipherable. Among other things, the book provides the first good analysis in English of Luk~ics' Dramahistory - a unique masterpiece in which the authors find the impact of both Marx and Simmel. They trace back to Dramahistory and to The Soul and Form the contrast between Is and Ought and the subject's


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predicament, its authenticity and its opposition to objectifications. So Lukacs, as a critic of alienation, was predisposed to Bolshevism. Arato and Breines discover that the dichotomy Lukacs finds in Marx, i.e., the rupture between a radical utopia and the "scientific" sociology of class struggle, is already present in the young Lukacs' early works. For instance, Drama- history operates with a rigidly Marxist theory of the decline of the bourgeoisie. This is the key to understanding the author's account of the transformations of dramatic form. While Lukacs' book ends in skepticism, his mystic rhapsodies calling for the "new barbarians to come to destroy the cathedrals of lies" were explicitly revolutionary. Ironically, for his mystical revolutionary eruptions, Lukacs has been punished with an en- counter with his heroes, who indeed turned out to be barbarians.

One major problem with the book is related to Western Marxism. Strangely enough, Arato and Breines fail to provide an account of this key notion which, despite Merleau-Ponty's efforts, is far from self-evident. One is prompted to ask the further question: what is Eastern Marxism? It cannot be Stalin's or Brezhnev's, for that would be a farce. Even Lenin cannot be seen as the source. As Knei-Paz has shown," it was the achievement of the young Trotsky, following Parvus' steps, to shift the focus of Marxist theory from a "bourgeoisified" West to a still turbulent East. Not until the development of the theory of the "weakest link of imperialism" did Lenin follow him in this heresy, and even then not entirely and overtly. This shift, which resulted in the injection into revolutionary theory of an overwhelming Jacobin element, was brought about by someone who was consciously anti-Jacobin and who predicted inevitable doom if the Jacobins seized power.12 Eastern Marxism came about as an ideology of permanent political revolution in the East as well as in all underdeveloped areas, and resulted in a change of elite, while occasion- ally, but not necessarily, it precipitated a violent modernization of back- ward areas.

Despite the fact that Jacobinism itself is a Western device, the Eastern, Jacobin type of Marxism might have a political constituency in the West, but can never become a dominant force there. The main formula of Jacobinism, i.e., the denunciation of the absence of civil liberties in autocracies, or of the existence of only pseudo-liberties in conservative- liberal states, only works where there has not yet been full-fledged political emancipation. One of the most stunning refutations of Marx's social theory is that in a period whose "opportunism" he and Engels so vehemently

11. Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford, 1978). 12. Trotsky always regarded himself as the author of this shift, but in spite of his vanity and

domineering manner (and basic honesty), he recognized Lenin as the forger of the instrument necessary to realize the project. It is because of this profound connection, I believe, and not from self-serving motives, that he always defended his alliance with Lenin from his own Jacobin-Bolshevik period onwards.



criticized, the working class showed very little interest in what the founding father called "human emancipation," but fought for political emancipation. Once achieved, political emancipation and Bolshevik Jacobinism are incompatible. This is why Eastern Marxism never even came close to carrying out a revolution in the West.

This does not mean that the question of human emancipation or dis- alienation is meaningless or obsolete. On the contrary, its hidden vitality is shown by the emergence of Western Marxism - a heretic movement which Perry Anderson has derisively but correctly described as philosophy.13 Western Marxism is indeed a philosophical project of the dis- alienation of society, of a total social revolution. Yet revolution is not reduced to a mere cultural movement. Western Marxism does not deny the relevance of political struggle, and it is even ready to accept the very violence imposed on it by its conservative enemies. But by definition it excludes terror and the idea of a dictatorship, however impermanent, as a means to a preliminary stage of socialism. Western Marxism is aware of the fact that it is a practical expression of the objective tendency of industrial society toward a non-Jacobin, non-Bolshevik transcendence of capitalism. Thus, the advocates of Western Marxism are pluralistic agents of socialism as radicalized democracy. As a philosophical project, Western Marxism remains a refutation of the Rousseauean vision according to which people can be forced to be free. To someone who has lived close to Lukics, it is comforting to be reassured by Arato and Breines that, despite a forty-year detour, Lukaics remains the major architect of this project.

13. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1976).


Article Contentsp. 131p. 132p. 133p. 134p. 135p. 136p. 137p. 138p. 139

Issue Table of ContentsNew German Critique, No. 23 (Spring - Summer, 1981), pp. 1-177Front Matter [pp. 1-140]"Shall I Garnish a Metaphor with an Almond Blossom?" [pp. 3-11]Enlightenment against Fundamentalism: The Example of Lessing [pp. 13-26]The Woman at the Keyhole: Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism [pp. 27-43]"I'd Rather Be Dead than Think the Way Kunert Does": Interview with Wolf Biermann and Gnter Kunert[pp. 45-55]Introduction to Stefan Schtz[pp. 57-58]Theater, Manufacturing, and the Ship of Women: Interview with Stefan Schtz[pp. 59-72]Love between Women and Love between Men: Interview with Charlotte Wolff [pp. 73-81]Lesbians in the GDR: Two Women [pp. 83-96]Introduction to Small-Town Story [pp. 97-99]Small-Town Story [pp. 100-113]Georg Lukcs and Gelebtes Denken: The Right to the Last Word[pp. 115-129]Review EssaysArato-Breines and Lwy on Lukcs[pp. 131-139]Recent Literature on Critical Theory [pp. 141-170]Transformations: Heine's Poetry in English [pp. 171-177]

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