Jameson Frederic. The Case For George Lukács

Salmagundi. — 1970. — No. 13 (Summer). — p. 3-35.For Western readers the idea of George Lukács has often seemed more interesting than the reality. It is as though, in some world of Platonic forms and methodological archetypes, a place were waiting for the Marxist literary critic which (after Plekhanov) only Lukács has seriously tried to fill. Yet in the long run even his more sym- pathetic Western critics turn away from him in varying degrees of disillusionment: they came prepared to contemplate the abstract idea, but in practice they find themselves asked to sacrifice too much. They pay lip-service to Lukács as a figure, but the texts themselves were not what they had had in mind at all.1 Such discomfort is hardly surprising, for it marks the approach of Western relativism to its own conceptual limits: we conceive of our culture, indeed, as a vast imaginary museum in which all life forms and all intellectual positions are equally welcome side by side, pro- viding they are accessible to contemplation alone. Thus, alongside the Christian mystics and the 19th century anarchists, the surrealists and the Renaissance humanists, there would be room for a Marxism that was but one philosophical system among others.