History and Class Consciousness is a collection of eight essays by the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, published in Berlin in 1923, and it is the founding text of the whole tradition later called Western Marxism. It is famous above all for one long essay on reification, and most summaries of the book are summaries of that essay alone. That fame is lopsided. The collection opens with a claim about method so sweeping that it redefined what loyalty to Marx could mean, builds its argument on a category, totality, that it ranks above economics itself, and closes its career with something almost no other classic of political theory possesses: a long preface, written by its own author for a later edition, that takes the book’s central philosophical construction apart piece by piece and declares it a mistake. A reader who knows only the reification essay knows the middle of the book. A reader who misses the later preface has read, in a strict sense, only half of it, because the demolition is part of the text that the world actually inherited.

This guide reads the whole collection. It begins with the circumstances in which the essays were written, since they were composed between 1919 and 1922 in the middle of a revolution, a counter-revolution and an exile, and their urgency is unintelligible without that setting. It then sets out the essay map, the findable instrument at the centre of the guide, which lists every essay with the year it was written, a statement of its argument, an assessment of its difficulty, and separate grades for students, teachers and researchers. The sections after the map take the arguments in the order a reader meets them: the method claim of the opening essay, the category of totality, the reification essay in its three parts, the account of class consciousness and imputation, and the doctrine that casts the proletariat as history’s identical subject and object. Later sections deal with the book’s debts to Hegel and to Weber, with its condemnation by the Communist International, with the author’s long road of self-criticism that ended in the preface of the later edition, and with the strongest objection ever pressed against the book, which the guide states at full strength before answering it. The governing claim throughout, the one this guide names and keeps returning to, is the method claim: the thesis that orthodoxy in Marxism refers exclusively to method, and that everything this tradition was later praised and blamed for follows from that single opening move.

A revolutionary’s essays, gathered in exile

The eight essays were not written as a book. They were written as interventions, most of them for journals and party publications, by a man whose life had been turned upside down in the space of a few months. Lukacs came to Marxism late and suddenly. Born in Budapest in 1885, the son of a wealthy banker, he had spent his youth as an essayist and philosopher of culture in the orbit of German sociology, writing on the drama, on the novel, and on the forms of modern inner life. He moved in the Budapest circle around the journal Nyugat and in the Heidelberg circle of Max Weber, and his pre-war work, including The Theory of the Novel, written during the first winter of the First World War, belongs to the history of literary theory as much as to philosophy. In December 1918, weeks after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, he joined the Hungarian Communist Party. The conversion was abrupt enough that he later compared it, in a phrase he borrowed from Kierkegaard, to a leap. Within months he was a minister of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, serving as the deputy head of its education and culture commissariat during that government’s short life in 1919, and after its fall he worked underground in Budapest before escaping to Vienna.

Vienna in the early nineteen twenties was the capital of a defeated revolution’s exile. The Hungarian Soviet Republic had lasted a few months; the German revolution had been contained and its leaders murdered; the Bavarian soviet had been crushed; and the great insurrectionary wave that was supposed to carry the Russian Revolution westward was visibly receding. The essays of History and Class Consciousness were written inside that recession, and they are best understood as an attempt to think, at the highest philosophical level, about why a revolution that seemed objectively possible had not generalised, and what in Marxist theory itself might have contributed to the failure. The opening essay dates from 1919, the essay on class consciousness from 1920, the pieces on Rosa Luxemburg from 1921 and 1922, and the two most important studies, the reification essay and the essay on organisation, were written specially for the collection in 1922. The volume appeared in Berlin in 1923 under the title Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, with the subtitle Studies in Marxist Dialectics, published by the Malik Verlag, the publishing house associated with the German Communist Party’s cultural wing.

Why did the essays appear in the middle of a defeated revolution?

The essays were weapons in a live argument about failure. Their author had served a revolutionary government that fell within months, and he wrote from Viennese exile to explain why the western working class had not followed the Russian example, locating part of the answer inside Marxist theory itself rather than in betrayal or accident alone.

That explanation determined the book’s character. Where the official Marxism of the period explained defeat by circumstances, by the immaturity of conditions or the treachery of leaders, Lukacs looked for the obstacle inside consciousness and inside the theory that claimed to describe consciousness. His essays therefore move constantly between politics and philosophy: a question about trade union tactics becomes a question about the structure of thought in a commodity society, and a question about the legacy of Hegel becomes a question about whether a revolutionary party can know the society it hopes to transform. This is why the collection has always struck readers as simultaneously a party intervention and a work of academic philosophy, and why both kinds of reader have sometimes found it exasperating. It was written to be both.

The book’s appearance also needs to be set against the state of Marxist theory at the time. The Marxism of the Second International, the loose federation of socialist parties destroyed by the First World War, had settled into a doctrine of historical necessity: capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, and the task of the movement was to organise, to educate and to wait for the ripening of conditions. Its theoretical authorities read Marx through the natural sciences, and its most influential popularisers treated dialectics as a set of general laws of nature and history that guaranteed the outcome in advance. Against that background the essays of 1923 were a scandal of a particular kind. They reintroduced Hegel, whom the older doctrine had treated as a youthful indiscretion of Marx’s, to the very centre of Marxist method. They replaced the image of a history unfolding by iron laws with a drama of consciousness, in which the decisive variable was whether the working class could come to see the society that produced it as a whole and as its own product. And they did all this in the name of orthodoxy, which is the audacity of the opening essay and the subject of a later section of this guide.

One further circumstance belongs in any honest account of the book’s composition, because the author himself insisted on it in old age. When the essays were written, the philosophical writings of the young Marx were almost entirely unknown. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in which Marx developed his account of alienated labour, were not published until 1932, and the full text of The German Ideology likewise appeared only in that decade. Lukacs reconstructed a Hegelian Marx from Capital, from the published polemics and from his own formidable knowledge of Hegel, without access to the early manuscripts in which Marx’s debt to Hegel is most visible. When he finally read the 1844 manuscripts in Moscow in 1930, the experience shook his confidence in his own book, and the aftershock runs through the preface he wrote nearly four decades later. The collection the world received in 1923 was therefore, among other things, an act of divination: it recovered, by philosophical inference, positions that its author could not yet document from Marx’s texts, and the recovery was accurate enough that the book is still credited with anticipating the Marx who became public property in the nineteen thirties.

The essay map: eight essays at a glance

The essay map is the instrument this guide exists to provide. It lists the eight essays in the order in which they appear in the collection, with the year each was written, a compressed statement of its argument, an honest assessment of its difficulty, and a verdict for three kinds of reader: the student meeting the book under examination pressure, the teacher choosing what to set, and the researcher working on the tradition the book founded. The verdicts use three grades, read closely, skim, and skip, and they are this guide’s considered judgement rather than a report of anyone else’s. Two facts should be grasped before the map is used. First, the collection is uneven by design: it gathers occasional pieces written for different journals alongside two long studies composed for the volume itself, and no reader is well served by marching through it from the first page to the last. Second, the map’s verdicts assume the later preface is read with the book, since the author attached it to the standard later edition; a reading that omits it is graded down in the final row’s spirit even though the preface is not itself one of the eight.

Essay	Written	What it argues	Difficulty	Student	Teacher	Researcher
What is Orthodox Marxism?	1919	Orthodoxy resides in method alone, not in any thesis; a Marxism that survives refutation of its results	Moderate	Read closely	Read closely	Read closely
The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg	1921	Luxemburg grasped totality instinctively; her errors on accumulation and spontaneity corrected from within her own method	Hard	Skim	Skim	Read closely
Class Consciousness	1920	A class’s consciousness is imputed from its position, not polled from its members; degrees of possible awareness graded	Hard	Read closely	Read closely	Read closely
Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat	1922	The commodity form stamps the structure of consciousness itself; bourgeois thought stalls in antinomies the proletarian standpoint can pass	Very hard	Read closely, first part	Read closely	Read closely
The Changing Function of Historical Materialism	1919	Historical materialism was once the ideology of a rising class and changes function when wielded by the class it describes	Moderate	Skim	Read closely	Skim
Legality and Illegality	1920	Legality is a tactic to be judged by the movement’s aims, never a fetish and never a romance of conspiracy	Moderate	Skip at first	Skim	Skim
Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s Critique of the Russian Revolution	1922	Luxemburg’s criticisms of Bolshevik practice honoured in method and answered in detail on land, nation and party	Hard	Skip at first	Skim	Read closely
Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation	1922	Organisation as the hinge joining theory to practice; the party as bearer of imputed consciousness	Very hard	Skim	Read closely	Read closely

Reading the map vertically teaches the collection’s shape faster than any summary. The two wholly new studies, the reification essay and the organisation essay, stand at positions four and eight, and they carry the philosophical and the political weight respectively. The opening essay supplies the charter under which everything else operates. The essay on class consciousness supplies the epistemology, the account of how a class can be said to know anything. The two Luxemburg pieces and the short essays on historical materialism and legality are occasional in the honourable sense: they apply the method to questions thrown up by the movement’s debates, and their interest for most readers is in watching the method work rather than in their conclusions, several of which were overtaken by events within a few years. A collection organised this way rewards a reader who treats it as an architect treats a building with one great hall: visit the hall, learn the plan of the whole from the charter documents, and let the smaller rooms wait for a second visit.

Why does the map give verdicts for three kinds of reader?

Because the collection serves three different purposes and a single verdict would betray two of them. A student needs the essays that examinations reward and that later theory presupposes. A teacher needs settable extracts with clean edges. A researcher needs the occasional pieces too, since the tradition’s later arguments were often replies to them.

The map also embodies a claim about how this book should be read in an age of summaries. The reification essay has been so thoroughly extracted, anthologised and paraphrased that a reader can absorb its reputation without ever meeting its argument, and the argument is stranger and stronger than its reputation. Conversely, the opening essay is short, quotable and constantly mentioned, yet it is often treated as a ceremonial preface rather than as the load-bearing wall it is. The map corrects both distortions at once: it sends every kind of reader to the opening essay first, it grades the reification essay as very hard and worth the difficulty, and it releases the time-poor reader from any obligation to the pieces on legality and on Luxemburg’s critique until the core has been mastered. What the map refuses to do is grade the later preface as optional. Wherever the preface is discussed in this guide it is treated as part of the book, because the author bound it to the book, and because a guide that sent readers to the essays without the author’s own commentary on them would be repeating the exact failure it exists to correct.

The method claim: orthodoxy without doctrines

The first essay in the collection is also the shortest of the major pieces, and it is the one on which everything else depends. Its title is a question, What is Orthodox Marxism?, and its answer is the most quoted and least absorbed passage in the book. Lukacs begins by refusing the terms his readers would have expected. An orthodox Marxist, he argues, is not someone who accepts a list of conclusions. It is not someone who treats the writings of Marx as a sacred text to be defended line by line, nor someone who has mastered a set of results, economic laws, predictions about collapse, doctrines about the state, and undertakes never to revise them. Suppose, he says, in the essay’s famous thought experiment, that new research were to refute every single thesis Marx ever advanced, one after another, without remainder. A Marxist of the doctrinal kind would be finished. The orthodox Marxist, as this essay defines the term, would accept the refutations, all of them, and remain exactly what he was, because his allegiance was never to the theses. It was to the way of getting at them. In the essay’s own formulation, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.

The method in question is the dialectical method, and the essay is precise about what that method involves. It is not a ritual of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, a formula the essay never uses and the tradition later pasted onto it. It is a discipline of approach: the refusal to accept any social fact as a finished, self-contained thing; the insistence that every apparently solid institution, category and statistic is a moment in a historical process and must be understood through its relations to the whole that produced it; and the conviction that knowledge of society and transformation of society are not two separate activities but a single one, since a society understood in its process is a society already being changed by the understanding. Marx, on this account, did to political economy what Hegel had done to philosophy: he dissolved its fixed categories into processes and relations. The economist’s capital, rent, wages and price are not things but frozen moments of a living whole, and the dialectical method is the technique for thawing them.

What does orthodox Marxism refers exclusively to method mean?

Lukacs argues that being an orthodox Marxist means adhering to the dialectical method rather than to any particular conclusion, so that orthodoxy would survive even if every individual thesis Marx advanced were refuted. The claim opens the book and defines the tradition it founded.

Why did the claim matter so much? Because of what it licensed and what it forbade. It forbade the two dominant styles of Marxism in 1919 at a stroke. Against the doctrinal style of the old social democracy, with its catechism of laws and its confidence that history would deliver socialism as a train delivers passengers, it said that no result, however well attested, could be the essence of the theory, and that a Marxism of guaranteed outcomes was a contradiction in terms. Against the emerging doctrinal style of the new communist parties, which was already hardening into a requirement to affirm the correctness of a leadership’s current line as the test of loyalty, it said something more dangerous still: that loyalty attaches to a method, and a method is precisely the instrument by which any particular claim, including a leadership’s, is to be examined. A definition of orthodoxy that makes refuted theses survivable also makes authorised theses questionable, and the essay’s subsequent career, beloved by dissident Marxists and suspected by every orthodoxy with police powers, was inscribed in that double edge from the start.

What happens to a refuted thesis under the method claim?

Under the claim, a refuted thesis is simply discarded, and the theory walks away unharmed, because the theory was never the pile of its results. The method that generated the thesis is turned on the new evidence, a better account is produced, and continuity is preserved at the level of approach rather than at the level of conclusions.

The method claim is what this guide calls the book’s namable claim, and it deserves its name because it is the founding move of the tradition the collection created. A Marxism defined by its method can travel. It can leave the terrain of nineteenth century political economy, where its founder’s conclusions were tied to the capitalism he observed, and set up on new terrain: on culture, on everyday life, on the structure of consciousness itself, without feeling that it has stopped being Marxism. The Frankfurt School’s migration into aesthetics and psychology, the French existentialists’ migration into biography and the novel, the Italian readings of the factory and the school: all of these journeys were made under the passport the opening essay issued. Equally, the claim explains what the tradition was blamed for. A Marxism that can survive the refutation of its theses can also decline to notice their refutation, and every critic who has charged Western Marxism with building a sealed system, immune to evidence and interested mainly in its own refinement, is charging it with abusing the charter of 1919. The strongest objection section of this guide takes that charge at full length. For now the point to hold is simpler: the method claim is not a modest methodological remark tucked into a preface. It is the collection’s constitution, and the essays that follow are its legislation.

There is a subtlety in the essay that summaries almost always flatten, and recovering it is part of reading the book rather than its reputation. Lukacs does not say that results do not matter, or that Marx’s conclusions were disposable scaffolding. He says that the results are the method’s findings at a moment in history, valid exactly as long as the process they describe keeps the shape they captured, and that the findings of a dialectical inquiry carry their own expiry conditions inside them. The falling rate of profit, the polarisation of classes, the concentration of capital: these are not articles of faith but reports on a moving object, and when the object moves, loyalty to the method requires the reports to be rewritten. What looks from outside like a licence for evasion is, from inside, a demand for a particular kind of honesty, the refusal to embalm. Whether the tradition lived up to that demand is a fair question, and the objection section will press it. But the essay itself is stricter than its reputation: it does not protect conclusions from evidence, it demotes them before evidence, which is a different and more interesting act.

The essay also contains, in germ, the collection’s quarrel with the Marxism of the Second International over the role of consciousness. If orthodoxy is method, and the method is dialectical, then the split between a world that develops by itself and a consciousness that merely registers the development is itself an undialectical split, a piece of the very contemplative stance the book would later anatomise in the reification essay. The knower stands inside the process known. That single move, made almost in passing in an essay of a few thousand words, is the hinge on which the entire collection turns: it is why a book about method becomes a book about class consciousness, and why the title joins history to consciousness with a simple and. Neither term is the backdrop of the other. History is what consciousness does when it grasps itself as a product of the process it inhabits, and the essays that follow the first are the working out of that equation at the levels of economics, of philosophy and of party organisation.

Totality: the category that outranks economics

If the method claim is the collection’s constitution, totality is its first principle of interpretation. The second great thesis of the book, developed in the opening essay and assumed everywhere afterwards, is that the decisive difference between Marxist thought and the thought it opposes is not economic. Bourgeois science also studies economics; it has economists of genius; it accumulates facts about production and exchange with great industry. What it cannot do, on Lukacs’s account, is see the economy as a whole in motion, because its method isolates. It takes the social world apart into specialised provinces, economics here, law there, psychology in a third place, and studies each province with categories treated as eternal. Marxism’s distinctiveness lies in the opposite gesture: the primacy of the whole over the parts, the insistence that the meaning of any fact is given by its place in the total process of society’s reproduction and transformation. In a fragment of the opening essay that the tradition has quoted ever since, the distinguishing mark is not the primacy of economic motives but the point of view of totality.

Totality, in this usage, does not mean completeness. It is not a demand that the analyst know everything, or that an account mention every factor before it may begin. It is a standpoint, a decision about where explanation starts: with the whole and its movement, from which the parts derive their character, rather than with the parts, from which the whole can never be reassembled because the relations that constitute it were destroyed in the taking apart. A wage, contemplated in isolation, is a sum of money and a statistic. Placed in the totality, it is a relation between classes, a quantity determined by the whole state of the labour market, the reserve of unemployed, the history of organisation and defeat, and the legal and customary frame that surrounds the bargain. The sum of money has not changed. Its meaning has been transformed, and the transformation is what the category performs. Lukacs’s word for the operation that connects part and whole is mediation: nothing in social life is immediate, everything arrives through layers of relations, and the method’s work is to trace the mediations rather than to worship the isolated fact in its apparent self-evidence.

What does the standpoint of the whole change in practice?

It changes the order of explanation. Analysis begins from the movement of the whole society and assigns each fact its meaning from its place in that movement, instead of accumulating facts and hoping a whole will emerge from the pile. Categories stop being eternal labels and become reports on relations that are themselves historical and changeable.

The category does heavy political work in the essays, and it is worth seeing the work plainly. The reformism of the old social democracy rested, in Lukacs’s analysis, on a fragmented view: wages could be raised here, hours shortened there, a ministry won in a third place, and each gain was real, yet the whole that distributed the gains and set their limits remained untouched and unexamined. A movement that sees only parts will mistake the management of capitalism for its supersession. The standpoint of totality is therefore not an academic refinement but the theoretical form of the difference between reform and revolution: only a class whose interest lies in grasping the whole, because its emancipation requires the whole to be remade, will spontaneously generate the standpoint. That class, in the argument of the collection, is the proletariat, and the bridge between the category of totality and the theory of class consciousness is exactly here. The whole can be known, but not from everywhere. It can be known from the position of the class that experiences the whole as its own unfreedom, a claim the class consciousness essay and the reification essay develop in detail.

Totality also disciplines the book’s treatment of economics itself, in a way that surprises readers who arrive expecting economic determinism. The economy is the foundation of the whole in the sense that the reproduction of material life sets the frame within which everything else moves, and Lukacs never retreats from that materialism. But a foundation known only in isolation, as a mechanism of quantities, is precisely not known as a totality: the base and superstructure language of the older doctrine, with its picture of an economic machine downstairs and a cultural pageant upstairs, is for this book a piece of the fragmented thinking it opposes. Economic relations are themselves relations between people, saturated with law, custom, violence and belief, and the totality is the name for the refusal to peel those layers apart and call the residue the real. Readers who know the later quarrels of the tradition will recognise how much is prefigured here: the insistence that ideology is not decoration on a material base but a medium in which material life is lived runs from this category straight through Gramsci’s hegemony to the Frankfurt School’s studies of culture, and the line of descent begins with the primacy of the whole.

A word of caution belongs in this section, because the category has been misread in a direction the text does not support. Totality is sometimes taken to license a style of theorising in which the whole is invoked as a trump: any inconvenient fact is dissolved into the totality, any partial science is dismissed as fragmentary, and the theorist who claims the standpoint of the whole claims thereby a knowledge no specialist finding can disturb. Lukacs’s own usage is more austere. The totality is not an object anyone possesses; it is a direction of inquiry, an asymptote of understanding that organises research and forbids the naturalisation of fragments. The moment the whole is treated as a possession rather than a task, the category has been converted into its opposite, a certificate exempting its holder from the labour of mediation. The author’s later self-criticism, which found in the book a tendency to erect constructions above reality, catches an early form of exactly this danger, and the section of this guide devoted to the preface returns to it.

The reification essay: the book’s centre of gravity

The longest essay in the collection, occupying roughly a third of its pages, is the study of reification written for the volume in 1922, and it is the piece on which the book’s fame rests. Its concept is treated in its own article in this series, the companion guide to Lukacs and reification, and the present guide does not duplicate that treatment. What belongs here is the essay’s architecture, because the architecture is the argument. The essay falls into three parts, and each part performs a distinct operation. The first describes a phenomenon: the way the commodity form, when it becomes the universal form of social life, stamps the structure of objects and of consciousness alike, so that human relations take on the character of things and human activity confronts its makers as an alien, law governed machinery. The second part turns to philosophy and argues that the great systems of classical German thought are the intellectual register of that same structure, stalling at antinomies they cannot cross. The third part asks where a standpoint exists from which the structure can be seen whole, and answers with the proletariat, whose position in production forces upon it the experience that the machinery is made of human relations after all.

The first part’s description ranges far beyond the factory, and its range is the point. Rationalisation, the calculability of every process, the splitting of work into specialised fragments timed and measured, appears in the modern office, in the bureaucracy, in the law court and in the newspaper as surely as on the assembly line. The worker at the machine, the clerk in the office, the journalist assembling copy from agency fragments: each confronts a rationally ordered system whose laws can be predicted and used but whose whole is not theirs, and each adopts toward that system the stance the essay calls contemplation, a passive spectatorship before a world that moves by itself. Reification names the process by which this stance becomes second nature, so that socially produced relations present themselves as natural facts, as unchangeable as the weather and for the same apparent reason: they are simply there. The essay’s most durable insight is that this is not a mistake that propaganda plants in passive minds. It is the truthful registration of a real structure, and it can be dispelled only when the structure itself is grasped as produced, which is a practical as much as a theoretical act.

How is the reification essay built, and where should a reader start inside it?

The essay is built as an ascent in three movements: a description of reified consciousness in work and administration, a demonstration that classical philosophy founders on the same structure, and an account of the proletarian standpoint as the place where the structure becomes visible. A first reader should master the opening movement and the start of the third, then return.

The second part, on the antinomies of bourgeois thought, is the most demanding stretch of the entire book and the one that decides whether a reader finds the collection exhilarating or merely difficult. Lukacs argues that the oppositions which great bourgeois philosophy could not resolve, freedom against necessity, form against content, subject against object, the rational system against the irrational residue of given fact, are not eternal puzzles of reason. They are the conceptual shape of a society organised by the commodity form, reflected in thought with great fidelity and therefore insoluble on the terrain where they arise. Kant’s thing in itself, the unknowable remainder that limits his system, is for this essay the philosophical signature of a world whose social essence confronts its inhabitants as alien nature. The reading is audacious and has been contested by Kant scholars ever since, but its function in the book is clear: it converts the history of philosophy into evidence for a social theory, and it prepares the third part’s claim that the exit from the antinomies is not a better argument but a different standpoint, occupied by a class whose practical activity dissolves the rigid split between subject and object because that class is itself the commodity at the centre of the system.

That third part is where the essay’s wager becomes explicit. The worker sells labour power and is therefore, in his own person, a commodity among commodities, an object of the process. Yet the commodity that is a human being can become conscious of itself as a commodity, and in that act the objective structure does something it does nowhere else: the object knows itself as object, and knowledge of the self as produced becomes, in the same gesture, knowledge of the producing whole. The proletariat’s self knowledge is thus not one opinion among others about society. It is the point at which the reified world acquires a crack of light, because the knower and the known coincide. Readers will recognise this as the doorway to the identical subject and object doctrine, the book’s boldest construction and the one its author later dismantled. Within the essay, though, the movement should be felt as the author intended it: not as a leap of faith but as the completion of an ascent, from the timed gestures of the assembly line to the fate of reason in Kant, arriving at a single class positioned by the logic of the system itself to see the system whole.

The essay’s afterlife has been out of all proportion to its length, and a guide should register the main lines of it without pretending to settle them. The analysis of rationalisation entered sociology and never left; readers of Weber will notice that Lukacs fused Weber’s account of rationalisation with Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, a fusion neither source contains alone, and the alloy proved stronger than either metal. The Frankfurt School took the essay as a founding document and built the critique of instrumental reason upon it. The concept escaped Marxism altogether and now circulates in ordinary intellectual speech, usually thinned to a synonym for objectification in the loose sense, a fate the section on the later preface will complicate, since the author himself came to think that his younger self had run together two things that needed separating. For the purposes of reading the collection, the essential discipline is the one the essay map imposed: read the first part closely, survive the second with the help of the antinomies’ plain statement, and give the third part the attention owed to the hinge of the whole book.

Class consciousness: what a class can be said to think

The essay on class consciousness, written in 1920, supplies the collection with its epistemology, and it is the piece through which the book entered the working vocabulary of social science. Its problem is simple to state and treacherous to solve. Marxism speaks constantly of what a class thinks, wants and does, yet any actual class is millions of people whose recorded opinions are contradictory, shifting and often at odds with the theory’s expectations. Polls of workers in 1920, as in any year, would not have returned the revolutionary consciousness the theory anticipated. Lukacs’s solution is to distinguish, with legalistic care, three things that ordinary speech confuses: the empirical consciousness of a class, the opinions its members happen to hold at a moment; the psychology of classes, a descriptive science of those opinions; and class consciousness proper, which is neither. Class consciousness in the strict sense is the awareness that can be imputed to a class from its position in the process of production: the thoughts and feelings its members would have if they grasped their situation and its place in the whole completely. The German term of art is imputed consciousness, and the companion article on class consciousness in the Marxist tradition treats the concept’s wider career.

Imputation is a stronger and stranger operation than it first appears. It does not describe what workers think, and it does not prescribe what they ought to think in the manner of a moralist. It reconstructs, from the objective position, the maximum awareness that position makes possible, the ceiling of understanding available to a class situated as this one is. Between the ceiling and the empirical floor lies the whole drama of politics: organisation, education, defeat, deception and experience move actual consciousness toward or away from what its position permits. The theory thereby gains something priceless, a standard independent of opinion surveys by which the consciousness of a moment can be assessed, and it incurs a corresponding danger, which critics have never stopped naming: whoever performs the imputation claims to know a class’s mind better than the class does, and the claim can be used to license substitution, the party speaking for the class, the theorist overruling the worker. Lukacs knew the danger and built against it as well as he could, insisting that imputed consciousness is not an invention of the theorist but a real possibility inscribed in the class’s situation, and that organisation is legitimate only as the mediation through which the class approaches its own possible awareness. Whether the safeguard suffices is one of the standing questions the book leaves open, and the organisation essay, graded in the map for teachers and researchers, is where he tried to answer it.

How can a class be credited with thoughts its members have not voiced?

By imputation from position rather than by counting heads. The essay argues that a class’s situation in production defines the fullest understanding available to it, and that this possible awareness, not the fluctuating average of opinions, is what the theory means by class consciousness. Actual opinion is then measured against the standard the position sets.

The essay refines the doctrine with a historical grading that summaries often omit. Not every class can stand in the same relation to its own imputed consciousness. The bourgeoisie, on this account, is structurally prevented from reaching the ceiling its position defines, because a bourgeois awareness that became fully clear about the whole would have to recognise the historical transience of bourgeois society itself, and the class’s interest forbids the recognition. Its consciousness is therefore false in a precise, non insulting sense: not stupid, not insincere, but barred by position from completing its own logic, condemned to stop the analysis at the point where analysis would dissolve the analyst’s world. The proletariat’s position is the mirror image. Its interest requires the abolition of class society as such, its own class rule being a transitional absurdity it must intend to end, so nothing in its situation forbids the completed view. This asymmetry is the moral engine of the whole collection. It is also, read coldly, an enormous claim about the distribution of possible knowledge among classes, and the reader should register both its elegance and its exposure: a theory that assigns epistemic privilege by position must explain every historical case in which the privileged class declined the privilege, and the essays were written in the midst of exactly such a case, the non revolution of the western working class after the war.

One distinction more, because examiners and critics alike trip on it. Imputed consciousness is not the consciousness of the average worker raised to a higher power, and it is not the consciousness of the best workers, the militants, multiplied. It is a theoretical construction anchored in the production process, closer in spirit to the economist’s model of a rational agent than to any portrait of actual minds, and Lukacs is explicit that it must be derived from the typical position of the class in the whole, not induced from interviews. The construction can therefore be wrong in an honourable way: the derivation can be challenged, the account of the position can be corrected, the ceiling recalculated. What it cannot be is refuted by the mere fact that workers, asked, say something else, since saying something else is what the gap between empirical and imputed consciousness already describes. This invulnerability is the concept’s analytical strength and, as the objection section will argue in the parallel case of method, its standing temptation.

The identical subject and object

At the summit of the collection’s argument stands the claim for which it is most celebrated and most reproached: that the proletariat is the identical subject and object of history. The phrase needs careful unpacking, because its grammar is philosophical and its content is the whole theory in miniature. In the knowing relation as bourgeois thought conceives it, subject and object face each other as strangers: the knowing mind on one side, the known world on the other, and the scandal of philosophy is the bridge between them, which no system manages to build without cheating. History intensifies the scandal, since the society to be known is not a landscape but the accumulated product of human action, and the knower is inside the product. Every class before the proletariat, on Lukacs’s account, experiences history as something that happens to it or through it, but never as its own deed become transparent. The bourgeoisie makes history as no class before it, remaking the world in a few generations, yet must experience its own creation as a second nature governed by laws, because to know the economy as its own product would be to know it as changeable at the root, and its rule depends on not knowing that. The proletariat occupies the unique position where the split can close. As the object of the process, the commodity labour power, it experiences the reified world in its own person. As the subject that becomes conscious of that experience, it knows the world as human product in the act of knowing itself. Subject and object coincide, and history becomes, for the first time, knowable from within by the being whose activity history is.

What would it mean for one class to be both maker and knower of history?

It would mean that the split between the society that acts and the society that is known has closed at one point. The class that is treated as an object of the economic process, bought and sold as labour power, becomes in its self consciousness the subject that recognises the process as human work, and so can know the whole as no external observer can.

The construction’s grandeur should be felt before its weakness is examined, because the grandeur explains the book’s hold on its century. If the claim holds, then Marxism possesses what no other doctrine of the period could offer: a solution, inside history itself, to the problem of how history can be known. The theorist does not descend upon the class with a science manufactured elsewhere; the class’s own ascent to consciousness is the science coming into existence, and the party, the theory and the class are moments of a single process rather than an external apparatus and its raw material. The claim also explains the book’s peculiar emotional register, its certainty under conditions of defeat. The revolution had failed, the class had not risen, the empires of capital stood; yet if the structure of the argument is sound, these are facts about the distance between empirical and imputed consciousness, not about the destination, and the theorist can contemplate defeat with a composure that looks, to unsympathetic eyes, like the serenity of a man whose system absorbs every blow. Both the power and the danger of the construction live in that composure.

Its weakness, as the author himself would eventually state with unmatched authority, is that the identity is asserted at the level of philosophy rather than demonstrated at the level of history. Between the proletariat as it empirically is, divided, tired, often nationalist, often indifferent, and the proletariat as the identical subject and object, there yawns the entire distance the book’s other concepts, imputation, mediation, organisation, were invented to bridge. A bridge whose far end is guaranteed by the philosophy of history is not a bridge but a promissory note drawn on the future. The young author’s philosophical training supplied the confidence: Hegel had shown spirit coming to know itself in its otherness, and the essays transfer the pattern to the class, with the commodity form in the role of alienation and revolution in the role of the return to self. The transfer is breathtaking and, the older author concluded, illegitimate, because a class is not spirit, its self knowledge is not guaranteed by the logic of the concept, and dressing a political hope in the garments of the absolute produces not knowledge but a mythology of the proletariat, all the more effective for being philosophically upholstered. The preface section of this guide gives that verdict its full weight. Within the essays themselves, the reader should notice the moments where the text strains: the sliding between the class as empirical collectivity and the class as philosophical subject, the reliance on the party as the vessel in which the identity is made actual, the treatment of dissenting workers as bearers of a consciousness not yet theirs. The strain is visible in 1923 to a reader who knows where to look, and naming it is not hindsight. It is the point at which the book’s own method, relentlessly applied to the book, begins the work the author finished in his preface.

Mediation and practice: the book’s working tools

Two working concepts carry the collection’s daily labour, and a reader who masters them can follow any page of it. The first is mediation. Against every doctrine of immediacy, the given fact glowing with self evidence, the self evident interest, the transparent experience, Lukacs sets the claim that social reality reaches consciousness only through mediations, layers of form that shape what can appear at all. The wage appears as a fair price for a day’s work; the mediation is the whole labour market, the legal form of the contract between equals, the separation of the worker from the means of production accomplished centuries before the bargain was struck. To think dialectically is to refuse the appearance its self sufficiency and to reconstruct the chain of mediations until the fact stands in the whole that explains it. The second concept is practice, praxis in the vocabulary the tradition settled on. Knowledge of society is not a spectator’s achievement. The contemplative stance, which the reification essay diagnoses as the deformation of consciousness under the commodity form, can be broken only in activity that engages the object, since the object’s truth is its genesis and its possibilities, and those disclose themselves to the being who intervenes. Theory and practice are therefore not two departments with a courier between them. They are the systole and diastole of a single process, and the party, in the organisation essay, is conceived as their institutional mediation, the form in which a class’s theory and a class’s action continually correct each other.

Why does the book distrust unmediated facts?

Because in a society organised by the commodity form, facts arrive pre shaped by the forms they must pass through, and the most innocent looking datum, a wage, a vote, a circulation figure, already contains the whole structure in disguise. Accepting the fact as immediate means accepting the disguise as the reality, so the method treats every given as a problem in mediation.

These tools explain the book’s distinctive handling of its opponents. A bourgeois economist is not refuted by counter statistics; he is shown the mediations his categories suppress, the point at which his science must stop asking questions in order to remain coherent, and that stopping point is then read as the signature of his class position. A reformist trade union leader is not denounced as a traitor, or not primarily; he is shown inhabiting a mediation, the legal and customary frame of collective bargaining, so completely that the frame’s limits are invisible to him as limits. The polemical temperature of the essays is consequently lower than their reputation suggests. The dominant mood is diagnostic rather than denunciatory, and the diagnosis is structural: positions in the process generate horizons of the thinkable, and the theorist’s task is to map the horizons, not to distribute praise and blame to the thinkers inside them. This is one reason the book aged better than the party literature around it. Denunciations date with their targets. A map of the horizons of an epoch’s thought can be consulted long after the epoch, by readers who share none of the author’s commitments, and the steady migration of the book’s concepts into general social theory is the evidence that they have done so.

It is also worth naming what these tools cost, because the cost is the seed of the objection developed later in this guide. A method that reads every opposing position as the expression of a horizon has a ready answer to every refutation: the refuter’s horizon explains his refutation. Used with the austerity the essays mostly observe, the move is a powerful heuristic that has repeatedly disclosed real connections between social position and intellectual limit. Used lazily, it becomes a machine for never losing an argument, and the line between the two uses is a matter of the user’s honesty rather than of the tool’s design. Lukacs’s own career supplies both exhibits. The young author of the essays used the tool to illuminate. The older author, looking back, suspected that the identical subject and object construction had been precisely a horizon effect of his own position, the exiled revolutionary intellectual mistaking the logic of his hope for the logic of history, and said so in print. Few theorists have turned their own instrument on themselves with that completeness, and the gesture is part of why this book, uniquely among the classics of its movement, contains the tools of its own correction between its covers.

The book’s debts: Hegel above all, and Weber in the machinery

No account of the collection is complete without its intellectual debts, because the book’s scandal in 1923 was precisely the identity of its creditors. The dominant Marxism of the period acknowledged a debt to British political economy, to French socialism and, at a respectful distance, to German classical philosophy, with Hegel filed as a brilliant but superseded ancestor. Lukacs reversed the filing. The essays treat Hegel as the indispensable predecessor, the thinker who first grasped history as a process in which subject and object are moments of a single whole, and they treat Marx’s achievement as the materialist completion of Hegel’s logic rather than its simple inversion. The celebrated image of Marx turning Hegel right side up, from a famous preface of Marx’s own, is quietly set aside in favour of a stronger claim: that the dialectic of Capital, its movement through forms that negate and preserve themselves, is Hegel’s logic at work in economic material, and that a Marxism embarrassed by its Hegelian parentage has cut itself off from its own method. Whole passages of the reification essay’s second part are a negotiation with the Phenomenology of Spirit, whose master and servant dialectic and whose drama of consciousness educating itself through its own products stand behind the book’s theory of class consciousness at every point.

What did the essays take from Hegel, and what did they take from Weber?

From Hegel they took the logic: totality, mediation, the subject that knows itself in its object, and history as the medium in which forms dissolve and are preserved. From Weber they took the sociology of rationalisation, the account of calculability spreading through modern institutions, which the reification essay fused with the commodity form to produce its analysis of modern consciousness.

The Weberian debt is the quieter one and in some ways the more original. Lukacs had sat in Weber’s Heidelberg circle before the war and absorbed the great themes of the sociology of modernity: rationalisation as the fate of the West, the calculability that invades every institution, the bureaucracy as a machine for the predictable processing of cases, the disenchantment of the world. Weber regarded this fate with a stoic pessimism and drew no revolutionary conclusions from it. The reification essay performs an act of theoretical appropriation that still has the power to startle: it takes Weber’s description whole, and re-grounds it. What Weber attributed to rationality as such, the destiny of a disenchanted age, Lukacs derives from the commodity form, a specific and therefore abolishable social relation. The iron cage becomes a historical product, and what was made can be unmade. The fusion of Marx’s fetishism chapter with Weber’s rationalisation thesis is the book’s most consequential piece of intellectual engineering, more consequential in the long run than the identical subject and object, because it founded a research programme: the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason, and through it much of the twentieth century’s suspicion of bureaucratic and technical rationality, descends from this single act of re-grounding performed in Vienna by an exile in his thirties.

Around these two great debts orbit smaller ones that a researcher will want registered. From Rosa Luxemburg came the instinct for totality as a political category and the model of revolutionary spontaneity the essays both honour and correct. From Simmel, whose lectures the young Lukacs had attended in Berlin, came a sensitivity to the forms of sociation and to the tragedy of culture, the process by which human products acquire an objective life that crushes their producers, which is reification in an earlier, non Marxist dress. From the neo-Kantian air of Heidelberg came the problems of form and content, fact and value, that structure the antinomies discussion. And from Lenin, whose writings on organisation and on the soviets the essays cite with a reverence the later tradition sometimes forgot, came the political form in which the theory was to be embodied, though the essays’ Lenin is a philosopher’s Lenin, selected and arranged to underwrite a dialectics he never systematised himself. A book with this ancestry was never going to be a catechism. It is a confluence, and the essay map’s grades reflect it: the researcher is sent to the occasional pieces precisely because the confluence’s tributaries show most clearly there.

The occasional essays: Luxemburg, legality, and the uses of history

The five shorter pieces gathered around the two great studies are usually treated as ballast, and the essay map grades several of them as skimmable for students. That grading is a service to the time-poor, not a judgement of worthlessness, and this section exists to say what the occasional essays contain and why a serious reader returns to them. The two Luxemburg pieces form a pair across the collection. The essay on the Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg, written in 1921, is the most generous act of theoretical portraiture in the book: it credits Luxemburg with having grasped, before anyone, that the standpoint of totality is the soul of Marx’s method, and it reads her whole career, her economics, her theory of spontaneity, her mass strike doctrine, as the unfolding of that single grasp. Her errors, on the accumulation of capital and on the national question, are then corrected from within her own method, an immanent criticism that treats its subject as a classic rather than as a rival. The critical observations of 1922 face the other way: they examine Luxemburg’s posthumous critique of the Russian Revolution, her strictures on Bolshevik land policy, on the nationalities question and on the dangers of party substitution, and they answer her in detail, honouring the method while disputing the application. Together the two pieces are the finest sustained encounter between the book’s theory and an alternative revolutionary Marxism, conducted with a dead woman who could not reply, and conducted, to the author’s credit, as if she could.

The essay on legality and illegality, the shortest in the collection, is a small masterpiece of political hygiene. Written in 1920, when the Hungarian movement was being hunted and the temptation to romanticise conspiracy was at its height, it refuses both fetishes available to a revolutionary movement: the fetish of legality, which treats the existing legal order as a moral horizon and trims every aim to what the courts will tolerate, and the fetish of illegality, which treats transgression as a proof of seriousness and the underground as a home rather than a tool. Legality, the essay argues, is a relation of forces wearing a juridical mask; it is to be used, respected tactically or broken, strictly according to its service to the movement’s aims, and the moment either legality or its opposite becomes a principle in itself, the movement has exchanged politics for theatre. Read against the century that followed, in which movements of every stripe have agonised over the same choice, the essay’s coldness is its virtue.

The changing function of historical materialism, the earliest of the occasional pieces, makes a move whose ingenuity is easy to miss. Historical materialism, it argues, has itself a history, and its function changes with the class that wields it. In the hands of the rising bourgeoisie, a materialist reading of history was an ideology of emancipation, dissolving the pretensions of throne and altar. In the hands of the proletariat it becomes something else: a self knowledge of the class that intends to abolish the conditions materialism describes. The doctrine thereby turns its own instrument on itself, asking what social function its own categories perform, and anticipates by some years the sociology of knowledge that Mannheim, another Hungarian formed in the same Budapest world, would make famous. The organisation essay, finally, is no occasional piece at all in substance, though the map separates it from the reification study. It argues that organisation is the form of mediation between theory and practice, neither a technical afterthought nor a machine for command, and it constructs the party as the bearer of the class’s imputed consciousness, the institutional shape in which a class’s possible awareness becomes an acting force. Everything dangerous in the book’s posterity flows through this essay, since the bearer of another’s consciousness is a figure who invites abuse; and everything noble in it flows there too, since the essay’s party is conceived as a school of the class’s self clarity, continually answerable to the movement it organises. The strongest objection section returns to the danger. For the map’s purposes, the verdict stands: students skim it at their peril in examinations on the party question, and researchers neglect it at the price of misunderstanding the whole tradition’s organisational unconscious.

The condemnation: a political act with a theoretical charge

Within a year of publication the book was condemned by the movement it had been written to serve, and the condemnation is part of its meaning. A guide has to present the episode accurately, which means presenting it twice over: as the political act it was, performed by identifiable bodies for identifiable reasons of organisational discipline, and as a theoretical charge with a stated content, which deserves to be given in its own terms rather than waved away as the resentment of bureaucrats. The two presentations are not rivals. The condemnation was political in form and theoretical in content, and flattening it into either dimension alone falsifies the record.

The political sequence is quickly told. The essays had already made enemies in the Hungarian party’s exile politics, where Lukacs belonged to a faction whose standing in Moscow was precarious. The book appeared in 1923, the year Lenin’s illness removed him from the leadership of the Communist International and the struggle over his succession began to reorganise every party in Europe. In the Soviet philosophical journals the attack opened in 1924, led by Abram Deborin, the most powerful Marxist philosopher in Moscow, who charged the book with Hegelian idealism and with dissolving materialism into a philosophy of consciousness. Laszlo Rudas, a Hungarian rival, pressed a parallel critique. At the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, meeting in Moscow in the summer of 1924, Grigory Zinoviev, the International’s chairman, named Lukacs and Karl Korsch, whose Marxism and Philosophy had appeared in the same season as the collection and reached kindred conclusions, as representatives of a revisionist deviation: theoreticians, professors in spirit if not in post, who were revising Marxism away from materialism at the moment when the movement required doctrinal firmness. The congress’s authority converted a review article’s argument into a line. Across the communist parties, the book became a byword for a deviation with a name, and its author understood the signal. He published self-criticisms, withdrew from the theoretical front line in the movement’s internal life, and turned, in the years that followed, to literary scholarship and to the patient work of the Marx Engels Institute in Moscow, where he helped edit the early Marx manuscripts whose discovery would later arm his self-criticism of the book itself.

What exactly did the Fifth Congress charge the book with?

The charge, stated in the congress’s polemics and the journal campaign around it, was revisionism in philosophical form: that the book replaced materialism with a Hegelian philosophy of consciousness, made the proletariat’s awareness rather than material production the motor of history, and thereby dissolved the objectivity of Marxist science into the self development of a class subject.

Stating the charge accurately matters, because the charge was not stupid, and treating it as mere obscurantism is the first step toward misunderstanding the entire subsequent history of Marxism. The book really had re-centred Marxist theory on consciousness. It really had treated the dialectics of nature, the extension of dialectical law to the non human world that Engels had pioneered and that Soviet orthodoxy regarded as the keystone of its materialism, with a coolness bordering on dismissal, confining dialectics to the subject object relation in history and society. It really had made Hegel, a philosopher the emerging orthodoxy honoured as a precursor and distrusted as an idealist, into the living centre of the method. A movement constructing a state doctrine, in a country where philosophy was becoming a branch of administration, had reasons of state for finding all this intolerable, and it also had a philosophical case, which Deborin, a serious Plekhanovite scholar, argued seriously: that a dialectic confined to consciousness and history, cut loose from nature and from matter, ceases to be materialism in any sense the word had borne, and that the identical subject and object is Hegel’s absolute wearing a proletarian cap. Later sections of this guide record that the author himself came to accept a version of the second point. The congress’s conclusion does not follow from its premises with anything like the rigour its enforcers claimed, and its enforcement, by organisational anathema rather than by argument, corrupted the intellectual life it claimed to defend. But the episode cannot be understood if the condemned book is cast as innocent science martyred by power. It was a bid, by a leading communist intellectual, to redefine the doctrine of a movement that was ceasing to tolerate bids, and the collision was between two real things: a philosophy and a state.

There is a further political layer that honest treatment requires, because it complicates sympathy in both directions. The condemnation of the book was entangled with factional war inside the Hungarian party and inside the International, and some of its drivers cared about the author’s factional alignment more than about his epistemology. Equally, the defence of the book in later decades has often been conducted as if its author had been a liberal crushed by totalitarians, a portrait the record refuses: Lukacs was a convinced communist of the Leninist school who accepted the discipline of self-criticism as a legitimate instrument, defended much of the Soviet record in later life at costs to his reputation that liberals found inexplicable, and never repudiated the movement that had anathematised his masterpiece. He repudiated, precisely and repeatedly, the book’s philosophy. The distinction between the man and the doctrine, and between the doctrine and the anathema, is the whole lesson of the episode for a reader of the collection: the Comintern condemned the book as a political act, the author later condemned it as a philosophical error, and the two condemnations, though they share a target, share nothing else. A guide that merges them into a single story of persecution and vindication has replaced history with melodrama.

The immediate practical consequence deserves a paragraph of its own, because it shaped the text’s transmission. After 1924 the book became effectively unavailable in the communist world and suspect in the social democratic one, and its author was forbidden the role of its interpreter. It survived in German exile circles, in the libraries of the Frankfurt Institute, whose members had read it on appearance and never stopped arguing with it, and in the small international milieu of dissident communists for whom it proved that another Marxism was possible. Its condemnation thus performed an unintended service: it certified the book as the founding document of every Marxism that defined itself against the official doctrine, and when the official doctrine’s philosophical prestige collapsed in the decades after Stalin’s death, the condemned book was waiting, with its charter of method over doctrine ready drafted, to legitimate the reconstruction. The wheel had come full circle by the time the author, an old man in Budapest, sat down to write the preface that his younger self would have regarded as the final treason and his older self regarded as a debt of honesty.

Among its contemporaries: the dialectical moment and its other books

The collection did not appear alone, and placing it among the books of its season sharpens everything distinctive about it. Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, published in 1923 like the collection itself, argued from within the German party that Marxism had fallen into a crisis of contemplative materialism and that the recovery of its Hegelian dialectic was the condition of its renewal. The parallel is close enough that the two books were condemned in the same breath, and the authors knew and valued each other’s work. Yet the differences matter for a reader choosing where to begin. Korsch’s book is a history and a polemic, leaner and more directly aimed at the movement’s intellectuals; Lukacs’s is a system in embryo, heavier with philosophy and wider in ambition, indifferent to immediate party application at exactly the points where Korsch is most applied. Behind both stands the same recognition, reached independently in Budapest exile and in Berlin: that the Marxism which had failed in the West had failed in part as a theory of consciousness, that it had treated the minds of the class as a reflex of its situation, and that a doctrine unable to think the subject’s part in history would keep being surprised by history.

The wider intellectual season makes the same point from outside the movement. The early nineteen twenties in German speaking Europe were a moment of dialectical ferment across the arts and sciences: expressionism’s aftershock in literature, the crisis of historicism in the universities, the young Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope, written in the same war years, the theological dialectics that Barth had detonated into Protestant thought. Lukacs moved in this world and was formed by its pre Marxist half; his early essays on the novel and on form are documents of it. What distinguishes the collection is that it carried the period’s dialectical instinct into the one institution that officially disowned it, the communist movement, and gave that instinct a organisational address. Gramsci, working in Italy and soon in a fascist prison, would arrive at neighbouring conclusions by an independent road, through the factory councils of Turin and the long meditation of the Prison Notebooks on hegemony, and the convergence of the three exiles and prisoners, none of them reading the others in time, is the strongest evidence that the questions the collection posed were posed by the situation itself. The tradition this series calls Western Marxism, surveyed whole in this series’ complete guide to the western tradition, is the name posterity gave to their convergence.

The author’s verdict: self-criticism and the later preface

Every classic of political theory is accompanied by a commentary tradition. This one is accompanied by a commentary written by its author against itself, and no reading of the collection is complete until that commentary has been given its full weight. The road to it was long and began almost immediately. Through the nineteen twenties Lukacs published the ritual self-criticisms the movement required, and scholars still dispute how much of them was conviction and how much the price of remaining a communist intellectual in a movement that exiled or shot its dissenters; the question of coercion is genuinely open, and this guide follows the brief of the evidence, which is that the early recantations were made under discipline while the mature verdict was argued, at length and in freedom from any immediate demand, as philosophy. Privately, the young author defended his book. In 1925 and 1926 he composed a book length defence, a manuscript that answered Deborin point by point and restated the collection’s dialectics as a defence of Leninism; the manuscript, known by its Russian nickname as the Tailism essay, was never published in his lifetime, surfaced in an archive, and appeared in print only in the nineteen nineties, in English at the century’s end. Its existence matters to the story because it proves the recantations of the twenties were not the whole man: the public record said submission, the drawer said defiance, and the truth of the period lies in the doubleness.

The turn, when it came, came through scholarship rather than discipline. Posted to the Marx Engels Institute in Moscow at the end of the nineteen twenties, Lukacs worked on the edition of Marx’s early writings and in 1930 read the Paris manuscripts of 1844 in typescript, two years before their publication. The experience, by his own account in the later preface, was a shock that rearranged his understanding of his own book. Marx’s manuscripts drew a distinction the collection had missed: between objectification, the necessary and eternal process by which human beings externalise themselves in their products, which no society can abolish because it is coextensive with labour itself, and alienation, the specific deformation of that process under private property, in which the product confronts the producer as an alien power. The young Lukacs, following Hegel, had treated alienation and objectification as one, and had therefore built his system on the demand that objectification itself be overcome, which would mean, pursued consistently, the end of objective reality as such: the subject taking its world back into itself until nothing stood outside it. The identical subject and object, the summit of the essays, was the philosophical form of that demand. Reading the young Marx, the older Lukacs concluded that the summit was a mirage, and that the road to it had been, in his later phrase for the whole construction, an attempt to out-Hegel Hegel, to be more dialectical than the master by abolishing the object’s independence altogether.

Which single sentence of the later preface does the most damage?

The sentence in which the author rules that his proletariat, cast as the identical subject and object of the historical process, completes no materialism at all but attempts to out-Hegel Hegel, an edifice raised above every possible reality. In one clause the book’s central construction is reclassified from Marxist discovery to Hegelian relapse.

The preface in which these judgements were delivered was written in 1967, when the collected works edition gave its author, then in his eighties, the occasion to introduce the reissue of the collection to a new generation of readers who were discovering it in the student movements of that decade. It is a long, severe and remarkably unembarrassed document. It retells the intellectual biography of the book, its origins in the author’s apprenticeship, his road to Marx through Hegel and through the war. It keeps what the author still thought keepable: the book’s role in restoring the dialectic to Marxism, its analysis of reification as a genuine phenomenon of capitalist society, its insistence that consciousness is a historical force. And it dismantles, in order, the identical subject and object as an idealist construction; the conflation of alienation with objectification as the error that made the construction necessary; the book’s messianic utopianism, its expectation of a total transformation that would leave nothing of the old world standing; and its neglect of labour as the mediating activity between subject and object, the theme the author’s later ontology would take as its centre. The preface also performs an act of historical justice toward its subject that few authors manage: it explains why the errors were the errors of a serious book, products of a philosophical tradition taken at full strength and of a revolutionary moment that demanded total answers, rather than the blunders of a careless one.

How does the preface separate alienation from objectification?

It argues that objectification belongs to labour as such, since every act of making sets a human purpose into an object that then exists independently, while alienation names the narrower condition in which, under private property, the object and the process escape the producer’s control and rule him. The young book, following Hegel, had fused the two, and the fusion is withdrawn.

The scholarly afterlife of the preface has its own ironies, which a guide should record without resolving. Some of the book’s defenders have treated the preface as a hostage document, the price an old man paid for a quiet life in Kadar’s Hungary, and have read the essays through it as through a fog to be discounted. The evidence does not sustain the discount in any simple form. The preface’s arguments are philosophical arguments, continuous with positions the author had been developing in print since the nineteen thirties, in his work on the young Hegel and on the ontology of social being, and they were repeated in interviews given to western journals where no Hungarian censor stood between the author and the reader. Other critics have run to the opposite pole and treated the preface as the book’s execution, after which the essays survive only as documents. That pole fails too, since the preface itself refuses it, preserving the reification analysis and the methodological charter while withdrawing the metaphysical summit. The sound position, and the one this guide’s essay map encodes by binding the preface to the book, is that the collection now exists as a two storey text: a young man’s system below, an old man’s audit above, and the reader’s task is not to choose a storey but to inhabit the staircase. The parallel cases in this series, the prefaces with which Marx and Engels reissued the Manifesto and the second thoughts Lenin attached to his own pamphlets, belong to the same pattern of authors outliving their books in public, but none of them matches the completeness of this audit, in which the auditor and the author are one and the charge sheet is philosophical rather than circumstantial.

One question remains, and the preface’s honesty forces it: if the identical subject and object falls, what happens to the theory of class consciousness and to the reification essay that were built to support it? The preface’s implicit answer, which later scholarship has mostly accepted, is that the lower storeys stand on their own foundations better than their architect feared. The analysis of reification describes mechanisms, the deformation of consciousness by the commodity form, that can be verified or contested case by case without any guarantee from the philosophy of history. Imputed consciousness, shorn of the identity thesis, becomes a sober heuristic about the relation between position and possible awareness. What falls is the keystone that converted these analyses into a theodicy of the proletariat, the assurance that history has appointed its own knower and that the appointment cannot fail. The book that remains after the audit is smaller than the book of 1923 and larger than its official reputation in the decades of anathema: not a system with a guaranteed subject, but the richest single exploration ever written of how a society’s forms enter the minds of the people who reproduce them, together with its author’s demonstration, forty four years on, of how to criticise a beloved error without either worshipping or disowning it. The companion article on Marx and the concept of alienation follows the concept whose disentangling did the damage, and readers who want the young Marx side of the 1930 shock should go there next.

Five misreadings, corrected

The book has been read badly in a small number of recurrent ways, and a guide earns its keep by correcting them in one place. The first misreading reduces the collection to the reification essay, treating the other seven pieces as packaging. Its falsity should by now be visible from the essay map alone: the opening essay supplies the charter without which the reification analysis has no licence, the class consciousness essay supplies the epistemology without which the reification essay’s third part cannot move, and the organisation essay draws the political conclusion the whole structure was built to reach. A reader who knows only the famous essay owns a diagnosis without a method, a standard or a politics, which is rather like owning the middle third of a bridge. The second misreading treats the method claim as a ceremonial flourish, a young man’s rhetorical warm up before the serious business begins. The claim is the serious business. It is the premise that authorises the migration of Marxist analysis from the economy to consciousness, the premise on which the totality argument stands, and the premise whose costs the strongest objection section of this guide will weigh. Demote it to a flourish and the book becomes unintelligible, a heap of brilliant fragments; restore it to the centre and the fragments compose a system.

The third misreading concerns the author’s later repudiation and holds that it was purely political, a coerced performance to be discounted by anyone who values the essays. The account of the preface earlier in this guide has given the evidence its full complexity: discipline in the twenties, a secret defence in the drawer, and then, from the Moscow encounter with the young Marx onward, a philosophical reconsideration argued in print for four decades, in venues where no one was compelling the argument. A repudiation with that biography cannot be filed as coercion, and readers who file it so are usually protecting the book from its author, a protective instinct the author would have recognised as the contemplative stance applied to his own text: the classic frozen into an object, its history politely ignored. The fourth misreading takes totality to mean completeness, as if the category demanded an account of everything before anything could be explained, and dismisses it as a totalitarian fantasy of total knowledge. Totality in the essays is a standpoint, not an inventory: begin from the whole’s movement, assign each part its meaning from its place, and refuse to let fragments pose as self sufficient. So far from demanding omniscience, the category is a confession of finitude, a rule for finite knowers about where to stand. The fifth misreading shelves the book as literary or cultural theory, a classification encouraged by its author’s earlier fame as a critic and by the migration of its concepts into cultural studies. The essays were written as interventions in a revolutionary movement’s theory, by a serving commissar turned exile organiser, and their central questions concern the knowledge and organisation of a class, not the interpretation of texts. That a book so political could be received as belles lettres is itself a datum about the reification of classics, and about what happens to a fighting text when the fight is forgotten: it is preserved, honoured and defused, which the author of the legality essay would have recognised as the fate his movement’s enemies could never have imposed by force.

The strongest objection: a method that cannot lose

A guide that has presented the book’s charter sympathetically owes its readers the objection that has been pressed against that charter for a century, stated at full strength. The objection is this. A Marxism defined by method rather than by results is unfalsifiable by construction. If every refuted thesis can be shed while the theory walks away intact, if every failed prediction testifies only to the gap between empirical and imputed consciousness, if every opponent’s refutation can be filed as the expression of his class horizon, then no conceivable evidence could count against the theory, and a theory that no evidence can touch is not a theory but a faith with a philosophical vocabulary. On this charge, the opening essay of 1919 is not the founding charter of a research programme but the invention of an escape hatch, and the century of Western Marxism that followed, with its ever more refined analyses produced at ever greater distance from any working class that recognised itself in them, is the record of the escape hatch in use: a tradition that could survive anything because it had arranged, in advance, never to have to admit that anything had gone wrong. The objection gains force from the biography. The book’s own author, confronted with the non revolution of the western proletariat, did not conclude that his theory of that class was mistaken; he concluded that its consciousness had not yet reached its imputation. The identical subject and object, the guarantee that history had appointed its knower, stood behind the whole structure as the final insurer: the destination was certain, only the timetable was empirical. Strip the guarantee away, the objection concludes, and what remains is a method that explains every outcome by redescribing it, the philosophy of a church that has lost its god and kept its liturgy.

The answer begins by recovering what the method claim was formulated against, because the objection habitually reads it in a vacuum. The determinism of the Second International had made particular predictions into doctrine: the collapse of capitalism by its own weight, the automatic growth of socialist consciousness with the growth of the movement, the ripening of conditions as a natural process requiring only patience. Those predictions had failed, catastrophically, in 1914 and again in the postwar years, and the doctrinal style had responded exactly as the objection describes orthodoxies responding: by protecting the theses and redescribing the failures. Against that background, the method claim was not an escape hatch but a demolition order. It told a movement embalming its predictions that its loyalty was misplaced, that the predictions were expendable reports on a moving object, and that the only thing it was forbidden to abandon was the discipline of re-examining them. The claim’s direction of fire was inward, at Marxism’s own dogmatism, and the cost accounting must include the dogmatism it prevented as well as the evasions it permitted.

The concession the objection is owed should then be made without flinching, because the book’s own author made its substance in his preface. The identical subject and object did function as an insurer. It did guarantee the destination at the level of philosophy, and a guaranteed destination does corrupt inquiry exactly as the objection says, converting every defeat into a delay and every delay into a confirmation of the theory of consciousness that explains delays. Where the objection overshoots is in extending the verdict from the keystone to the whole building. The analyses of reification, of imputation, of mediation, do not stand or fall with the guarantee; they are tools for describing mechanisms, and mechanisms can be tested, refined and discarded piecemeal, as the tradition in fact discarded and refined them. The falsifiability the objection demands is available at the level where the book does most of its work, the level of the middle range analyses, and the tradition’s healthiest practitioners have always worked there. What the objection identifies, precisely, is the cost the tradition paid whenever it reached for the keystone: the moments when a Western Marxism of genuine analytical power consoled itself with the philosophy of history instead of revising its account of the class it claimed to serve. Those moments are real, they are numerous, and the objection deserves to be quoted against them forever. But a cost is not a refutation of the whole enterprise, and the reader who has followed the argument this far can hold the two judgements together, as the evidence requires: the charter of 1919 licensed both the tradition’s finest work and its characteristic evasion, and telling the difference, case by case, is not a problem the book solves for its readers. It is the work the book assigns them.

Can a method be refuted, and what follows if it cannot?

A method cannot be refuted the way a prediction can, and the book’s critics are right that this shelters it. But methods are not therefore beyond judgement: they are vindicated or condemned by the fertility of the work they organise over time. By that standard the method claim faces a mixed and arguable record, not an acquittal and not a dismissal.

A second pass: the essays in sequence

Guides to this collection usually end with the map, and readers are left to discover for themselves what a sequential reading actually feels like. This section walks the volume in order, noting at each essay the passage where the argument turns, the difficulty that ambushes first time readers, and the question to carry forward into the next piece. It assumes the map’s route has been followed once, and it is written for the second pass, which is where this book surrenders its real wealth.

The opening essay repays slow reading despite its brevity, and its turn comes early: the moment where orthodoxy is detached from results and attached to method, everything after it in the volume is reclassified as application. First time readers stumble on the essay’s assumption that its audience knows the doctrine being displaced, the catechism Marxism of the pre war parties; a reader who supplies that background from the composition section of this guide will find the polemic legible. Carry forward one question: if the method is the whole of orthodoxy, what does the method look like when it is working, rather than when it is being defined? The Luxemburg portrait answers first. Its turn is the attribution of the totality standpoint to a thinker who never named it, a reading of Luxemburg’s career as the instinctive practice of the method the opening essay theorised. The difficulty here is the economics, the accumulation controversy, which can be followed at the level of structure without mastering its machinery. Carry forward the question of how a method relates to the consciousness of those who practise it without possessing it as theory, because the next essay makes that relation its theme.

Class Consciousness is the volume’s most compressed performance and its turn is the introduction of imputation, after which the essay’s gradations, the bourgeoisie’s structural blindness, the proletariat’s open ceiling, the role of the party as the form of the possible becoming actual, unfold with the logic of a legal code. The ambush for modern readers is the essay’s serenity about the theorist’s authority to impute, and the honest way through is to mark every passage where the authority is claimed and to test it later against the organisation essay, where the claim receives its institutional form. Carry forward the discomfort; the book intends it to accumulate. Then the reification essay, the volume’s centre, which should be read in its three movements on separate days. The first movement’s turn is the extension of the analysis from the factory to the office, the court and the press, the moment reification stops being a doctrine about workers and becomes a doctrine about modern consciousness as such. The second movement’s turn is the diagnosis of the thing in itself as the scar left on philosophy by a reified world. The third movement’s turn is the self consciousness of the commodity, the hinge on which the entire collection swings toward its summit. The ambush is exhaustion: the prose is at its densest in the second movement, and the map’s advice to master the first movement and the third’s opening before returning is the difference between readers who finish the book and readers who cite it.

The changing function essay, encountered after the summit, feels like a descent, and its quiet turn is easy to miss: the recognition that historical materialism must apply its own analysis to itself, a reflexivity the rest of the volume presupposes without restating. Legality and Illegality passes quickly, and its turn is the refusal of both fetishes, which should be read with the movement’s later history in mind to feel its nerve. The critical observations on Luxemburg’s critique then present the volume’s most painful spectacle, the author defending Bolshevik practice against the movement’s most luminous martyr, in detail and without flinching; its turn is methodological, the insistence that Luxemburg’s own standpoint of totality condemns her conclusions, and a reader who has followed the Luxemburg portrait will feel the two essays lock together like the jaws of a trap the author built for himself and for her memory. The organisation essay closes the volume by performing the collection’s final mediation, between the theory now assembled and the practice it exists to serve. Its turn is the definition of organisation as the hinge between theory and practice, and its closing vision of the party as the class’s consciousness made durable is either the volume’s crown or its original sin, depending on the judgement the reader has been forming since the imputation essay. That the book ends there, on an organisational question rather than a philosophical one, is its author’s last lesson in what he thought theory was for.

How History and Class Consciousness travelled: influence, suppression, and return

The influence of a condemned book is a study in underground rivers. Suppressed in the world it was written for, History and Class Consciousness surfaced wherever Marxist thought renewed itself against an orthodoxy, and its itinerary can be traced through three great relays. The first relay was Frankfurt. The Institute for Social Research, founded in the year of the book’s publication, gathered scholars for whom the collection was a revelation of what Marxist philosophy could be: Max Horkheimer’s programme of critical theory, with its refusal to separate social research from philosophy, its suspicion of the given fact, and its interest in the psychic mediations of domination, is unthinkable without the essays’ example, and Adorno, who read the book as a young man and said it overwhelmed him, carried its categories into the analysis of culture and the authoritarian character. The second relay was Paris. Lucien Goldmann, a Romanian Jewish scholar formed in the same Central European world, built his genetic structuralism on the book’s concepts, made the reification essay the centre of a famous seminar, and transmitted Lukacs to the generation of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic, the book that named the western current of Marxism in passing even while quarrelling with it, is a sustained negotiation with the collection’s theory of consciousness and the party. The third relay was the long 1968 of the student movements, when the book, at last legally reissued with its author’s ambivalent preface and translated into the major languages, became a charter for every attempt to imagine a Marxism that was revolutionary without being Stalinist, and its concepts passed from the movement’s pamphlets into the universities the movement’s veterans entered.

The English speaking world received the book late and whole. Rodney Livingstone’s translation, published by the Merlin Press in 1971 with the author’s preface included, arrived when Anglo American social theory was hungry for exactly what it offered: a Marxism of consciousness, culture and form, to set against the structural functionalism of the postwar sociology departments and the economism of the older left. Its arrival can be dated in the citation patterns of a decade: reification entered the vocabulary of sociology, media studies and literary theory; the standpoint argument entered, by routes its author would not have predicted, the prehistory of standpoint epistemology in feminist theory, where the claim that social position conditions possible knowledge was rebuilt on new foundations; and the critique of contemplation entered the philosophy of social science as a standing warning against the naturalisation of social facts. Karel Kosik in Prague, whose Dialectics of the Concrete carried the book’s themes into a Czech idiom and paid for the Prague Spring with his livelihood, represents the relay the official map always omits: the book’s secret life inside the eastern bloc, where samizdat copies of a condemned Hungarian classic testified that the doctrine’s monopoly was contested from within its own tradition.

How did a condemned book reach the readers who made it canonical?

By the routes closed systems cannot seal. It travelled in the luggage of exiles to Frankfurt and Paris, was rebuilt by scholars like Goldmann into new research programmes, survived in the eastern bloc as samizdat, and returned in legal reissue and translation at the moment two generations were searching for a Marxism answerable to consciousness and culture.

Measured by consequences rather than by sales, the book’s deepest influence may be the one least often credited to it: it changed what counted as a Marxist question. Before 1923, the serious questions of Marxist theory were held to be economic and strategic, and questions about consciousness, culture and form were relegated to the Sunday supplements of the movement. After the collection, and through the relays described here, those questions stood at the centre of the tradition, and the entire subsequent history of Western Marxism, its glories in the analysis of culture and ideology and its notorious weakness in economics, is the unfolding of that reordering. Perry Anderson’s celebrated audit of the tradition, which found it marked by a structural divorce from mass political practice and a migration from economics toward philosophy and aesthetics, is in effect a description of the world the method claim made: a Marxism authorised to leave the economy for the superstructure could hardly complain when its critics noticed it had gone. The companion series guide to the method at stake in dialectical materialism sets out the doctrine against which the collection defined itself, and readers who want to feel the full force of the book’s novelty should hold the two accounts side by side.

A word, finally, about the book’s presence in the examination room and the seminar, since the guide’s persona layers will develop it. The collection is set, excerpted and examined across the humanities: the opening essay as a set text on the nature of theory, the reification essay’s first movement as the canonical statement of a concept, the preface as the standard exhibit in courses on authorship and revision. This institutional afterlife has a paradox at its heart that students should be told about plainly. The book is taught, overwhelmingly, by being excerpted, and the excerpting reproduces exactly the fragmentation its category of totality exists to forbid: the reification essay torn from the charter that licenses it and the audit that qualifies it, circulated as a free standing classic of cultural criticism. To read the whole book, with its preface, against its excerptors, is therefore not pedantry. It is the one gesture of fidelity the book’s own method demands, and it is the gesture this guide has been organised, from its essay map onward, to make possible.

Reading the book: route, difficulty, and editions

Everything in this guide converges on a practical question: how should a reader who has decided to read the collection actually proceed? The route the essay map encodes is worth restating as an itinerary, because the order in which the pieces are met changes what they mean. Begin with the later preface, read quickly and without taking sides, purely to learn what the author eventually thought was wrong; the foreknowledge costs the essays none of their force and protects the reader from mistaking the summit construction for the book’s settled doctrine. Then read the opening essay entire, since it is short and since every later page presupposes its charter. Then the reification essay’s first movement, its description of the phenomenon, which is the most immediately gripping sustained writing in the book. Then the essay on class consciousness, which supplies the epistemology the reification essay’s climax requires. Then the third movement of the reification essay, the standpoint argument, now legible as the working out of the imputation doctrine rather than as a rhetorical ascent. Then the preface again, slowly, as the book’s second author. The remaining pieces, the reification essay’s second movement included, belong to the second pass, and the organisation essay should be read last of all, when the reader is equipped to feel both its power and its danger. Readers who keep a study notebook will find that the collection rewards being argued with in writing; the VaultBook Marxism study notes companion exists for exactly this discipline, and an essay map copied into a notebook and annotated with verdicts of one’s own is the traditional instrument, in digital or paper form, for converting a first reading into a possession.

Is the book as hard as its reputation says?

It is hard in specific, uneven ways rather than uniformly. The political essays are lucid, the opening essay is compressed rather than obscure, and the real difficulty concentrates in the reification essay’s second movement, where the argument moves through Kant and German classical philosophy at a pace that assumes the reader has that philosophy by heart.

The difficulty deserves a fuller anatomy, because the book’s reputation for impenetrability deters readers who would manage most of it easily. Three distinct obstacles are usually confused. The first is philosophical preparation: the antinomies discussion presupposes Kant’s critical system and Hegel’s logic, and a reader without them will feel the ground give way in that essay’s second movement. The remedy is not a degree but a map: one clear account of the thing in itself, of the antinomies of pure reason, and of Hegel’s master and servant dialectic, consulted before the movement and kept open beside it. The second obstacle is the prose itself, which in the German is hypotactic and architectural, sentences built like vaults, and in translation retains a density that punishes skim reading while rewarding attention with unusual precision. The third obstacle is historical distance: the essays argue with opponents, the catechism Marxism of the old parties, the neo-Kantians, the syndicalists, who no longer introduce themselves, and the reader must reconstruct the debate from the answers. None of these obstacles is a reason to postpone the book. All three are reasons to read it in the order given here, at a pace of one movement at a sitting, with the preface’s warnings already in mind.

Which translation should an English reader trust, and why?

The English reader has effectively one complete text: Rodney Livingstone’s translation, first published by the Merlin Press and long available from the MIT Press and in later Verso printings, which includes the author’s preface to the later edition and is the version scholars cite. Its terminology is consistent, its renderings of the key terms are the standard ones, and its occasional stiffness mirrors a stiffness in the original.

The terminology matters enough to deserve a short register of its own. Livingstone renders Verdinglichung as reification, a Latinate coinage that has passed into the language; readers should know that the German word carries the sense of thingification, a making into a thing, and that its bluntness in German is part of its polemical force. Zugerechnetes Bewusstsein becomes imputed or ascribed class consciousness, and the legal flavour of the German verb, to reckon something to someone’s account, is worth holding in mind when the doctrine’s authority is questioned. The German title itself, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, yokes history and class consciousness with the plainest of conjunctions, and the English title preserves the yoke exactly. For readers with German, the text in the collected works is the scholarly standard; for readers without it, Livingstone is not a compromise but the genuine article, supervised in its day by a literary culture that included the author’s own circle, and the centenary reissues have wisely kept his text rather than commissioning a rival. What a reader should not do is rely on excerpted translations in anthologies for anything beyond sampling, since the excerptors’ choices silently decide the interpretive questions this guide has been at pains to open.

Time is the last practical question, and it deserves an honest answer. The collection in English runs to some four hundred pages including the prefaces, of which the essential route described here amounts to perhaps two hundred. A reader giving the book an hour a day will finish the essential route in three weeks and the whole volume, with the second pass this guide recommends, in two months. That is not a large price for the founding text of a tradition, and it compares favourably with the time the same reader will spend, across a lifetime of encountering its concepts at second hand, wondering what the original actually said. The book’s difficulty is real but front loaded; its rewards compound. Almost every reader who finishes it reports the same surprise: that a volume famous as a monument turns out to be an argument, conducted at white heat by a man in his thirties who believed the fate of civilisation turned on getting its distinctions right, and audited, at the end of a long life, by the same man grown old enough to say where the heat had outrun the light.

The book in a life: before and after the essays

The companion profile in this series treats the author’s career and the concept together, and the present section confines itself to what a reader of the collection needs: the shape of the life on either side of the book, since the book sits at its exact hinge. Before it stretches the apprenticeship: the Budapest aesthete, the Heidelberg pilgrim, the author of Soul and Form and of The Theory of the Novel, works of a conservative, even despairing, cultural criticism that diagnosed the modern world as an age of absolute sinfulness and found in the novel the epic of a world abandoned by meaning. The conversion of 1918 did not discard that formation; it conscripted it. The essays of the collection are legible as the work of the same sensibility armed with a new answer, the diagnosis of a fragmented, thing ridden world retained entire and the remedy transformed, from the artwork’s lonely form to the class that would remake the world that fragments it. Readers who approach the collection from the author’s literary fame should therefore expect recognition rather than surprise: the reification essay is The Theory of the Novel rewritten as revolutionary theory, and its author’s lifelong double career, as the century’s most formidable Marxist literary critic and as a party intellectual of iron discipline, is the biography of that single sensibility at work in two media.

After the book stretches the long second life in which the author simultaneously served, evaded and outlasted the movement that had condemned him. The Moscow years at the Marx Engels Institute made him, incidentally to his disgrace, one of the editors who gave the world the young Marx. The literary work of the nineteen thirties and forties, the great studies of the historical novel and of the German realist tradition, built the aesthetics for which the wider culture knows him, on foundations the collection had laid: the category of totality survives there, domesticated as the typical, the mediation of individual and epoch in the great realist text. The Hungarian revolution of 1956 drew the old man back into government as a minister in Imre Nagy’s cabinet, and its suppression drew him into deportation and then into the long, careful semi favour of the Kadar years, during which the preface to the collection was written. At the end he was at work on an ontology of social being intended as the systematic work the collection had only prophesied, with labour, the concept whose absence the preface had charged against his younger self, at its centre. He died in Budapest in 1971, the year the English translation of the collection appeared. The symmetry is the kind no novelist would dare: the book began its world career in the year its author ended, and the audit he had attached to it ensured that the career would be conducted, forever, in dialogue with its author’s own dissent.

The argument about the book: critics, defenders, and the standing questions

A century of argument about the collection has settled into a shape a reader can learn in advance, and this section maps the standing positions without enrolling in any of them. The most influential hostile audit came from Leszek Kolakowski, whose history of Marxism treated the book as the founding document of a gnosis: a doctrine in which a elect subject possesses the truth of history by position rather than by inquiry, and whose political issue, when wedded to a party that claims to incarnate the subject, is the licence of the enlightened over the unenlightened who must be ruled for their own imputed good. George Lichtheim, writing the first scholarly history of the western current, gave the book a cooler and in some ways more damaging treatment, as a brilliant Hegelian romance whose author mistook the categories of German philosophy for the mechanisms of a society he governed, briefly and disastrously, without understanding its economy. Against these stand the reconstructions: Andrew Arato and Paul Breines’s study of the young Lukacs, which recovered the book’s genesis in the revolutionary crisis and defended its analyses as responses to real defeats; Martin Jay’s history of the totality concept across the tradition, which treated the collection as the source of a river that watered even its critics’ fields; and the steady work of Hungarian scholarship, some of it by the author’s own students of the Budapest School, which has documented the text’s composition and the preface’s sincerity with archival patience.

Three standing questions organise the continuing dispute, and a reader who can state them owns the argument. The first is the question of imputation’s authority, already followed through this guide: whether a theory that locates a class’s true consciousness in a construction, rather than in the class’s voice, can avoid becoming a warrant for substitution, and whether the safeguards the essays build, the party as mediation, the identity of theory and practice, are safeguards or incantations. The second is the question of nature. The collection confines dialectics to the subject object relation and is pointedly cool toward the dialectics of nature associated with Engels; Soviet orthodoxy made that coolness a capital charge, and later philosophy of science has had to decide whether a Marxism that abandons laws of nature keeps its materialism or trades it for a philosophy of praxis, a decision on which the tradition split and has never rejoined. The third is the question of the economy’s disappearance. The book that re-founded Marxism contains no sustained economic analysis, no engagement with the theory of value, of crisis, of the falling rate of profit; its economics is presupposed in a paragraph and never again examined. Whether this is the method claim’s legitimate consequence, the economy being one region of the totality rather than its master key, or the original sin from which the tradition’s later economic illiteracy descends, is the question on which the book’s Marxist critics and its Marxist defenders divide most sharply, and it connects this collection to the economics cluster of this series, where the tradition’s other branch kept the founder’s economic questions at the centre and let the philosophy go. A balanced guide records that the argument remains open on all three questions, that the book’s enemies and its friends both read it still, and that a text which continues to organise the disagreements of people who share nothing else has earned, by the only test that finally applies to classics, its place.

The method at work: three examples

Abstract accounts of method persuade few readers, and the collection’s own practice is the best commentary on its charter. This section applies the book’s instruments, totality, mediation, imputation, the critique of contemplation, to three objects of the kind its first readers faced, in order to show the difference the method makes when it is working rather than being defined.

Take first a statistic of the kind every labour movement newspaper printed: the average industrial wage has risen by a tenth in a decade. The contemplative reading, shared by the statistician and the minister who quotes him, treats the figure as a fact with a meaning inscribed in it, prosperity or its opposite, according to taste. The method of the essays refuses the figure its innocence and sets about the mediations. Averages conceal distributions, and the whole of which this average is a moment includes the changing composition of the workforce, the entry of women and juveniles at lower rates, the migration of industry between regions, the length of the working year behind the weekly figure, the prices of the necessaries the wage commands, and the state of the reserve army whose pressure the average registers without naming. Restored to its totality, the risen average can be the statistical form of a deterioration, more hands working longer for a household income that buys less security, and the figure that seemed to refute the theory of immiseration becomes, mediated, an exhibit for a subtler version of it. Nothing in the exercise requires the conclusion in advance. It requires only the refusal to let the fact interpret itself, which is the whole of the method’s negative labour.

Take second a parliamentary event: a socialist party, grown large on a programme of transformation, votes the credits for a war its programme abhors, as the parties of the Second International did in the August of 1914, the catastrophe that stood behind everything Lukacs wrote. The moral reading, which the movement’s survivors favoured, speaks of betrayal, of leaders corrupted by office. The economic reading speaks of interests, of a labour aristocracy bribed by empire. The method of the essays adds the dimension both readings miss, the form of consciousness that made the vote feel necessary to the men who cast it. A party organised for decades inside the legal and customary mediations of a national state, its press, its funds, its deputies’ careers, its members’ patriotism absorbed with their mother tongue, had come to experience the nation as an unmediated fact and the international as an abstraction, precisely reversing the order of reality: the nation, a historical product, felt like nature, and the class, a real relation, felt like a slogan. The vote was cast by that inversion before it was cast by any hand. An analysis that stops at betrayal cannot explain why the betrayers were sincere, and sincerity, the essays insist, is a datum any adequate theory must save. Imputed consciousness completes the account: the parties acted beneath the ceiling of their class’s possible awareness, and the distance between the two, not the wickedness of individuals, is the measure of the disaster and the agenda of the reconstruction the book was written to serve.

Take third a work of art, since the author’s formation was literary and the tradition he founded made culture its province. A realist novel of the nineteenth century, Balzac’s for choice, presents a provincial aspirant devoured by Paris. The fragmented reading sorts the novel into the provinces of the specialised sciences: the sociologist extracts its evidence about post revolutionary France, the psychologist its portrait of ambition, the aesthete its style, and each extraction is correct and each misses the novel. The standpoint of totality reads the work as its author later taught a generation to read: as a mediation in which the whole of a society at a moment of its transformation becomes visible in the fate of individuals, the typical case in which private destiny and historical process are one story told at two scales. The aspirant’s corruption is not an illustration of a thesis about money; it is the form in which the rule of money over human relations becomes experienceable, and the novel knows things about its society that its author’s own political opinions, legitimist and Catholic, would have forbidden him to say. That a work can know more than its maker is the literary form of the book’s central doctrine, consciousness outrunning the empirical awareness of its bearer, and it is no accident that the theory of the novel and the theory of class consciousness issued from the same mind. The method, applied to art, yields the author’s mature aesthetics in embryo; applied to the wage and the vote, it yields his politics. One instrument, three provinces, and the unity is the point the opening essay staked everything on.

The essays and the founder’s texts: a reconstruction from fragments

A peculiarity of the collection that every reader should have explained, since it conditions the book’s authority, is the state of the Marxian corpus in 1923. The essays reconstruct a dialectical Marx from an archive with holes in its centre. Available to Lukacs were the published works: the first volume of Capital with its chapter on the fetishism of commodities, the polemics and histories, The Eighteenth Brumaire above all, the prefaces and the letters, and the second and third volumes of Capital in Engels’s editions. Unavailable were the texts in which the young Marx’s Hegelianism is most legible: the 1844 manuscripts, unpublished until 1932; the full German Ideology, likewise a text of the nineteen thirties; the Grundrisse, the vast draft of 1857 and 1858, which slept in an archive until its first publication on the eve of the Second World War. The Hegel who presides over the essays is therefore not Marx’s Hegel recovered from Marx’s notebooks. He is Lukacs’s Hegel, mastered in the Heidelberg years and recognised, by a feat of philosophical sympathy, at work beneath the surface of Capital. When the missing texts surfaced, the book’s central intuitions about alienation and the dialectic were found to have anticipated them to a degree that astonished even the author’s critics, and the episode remains the strongest exhibit for the method claim in its author’s own practice: a reader armed with the method had reconstructed, from the mature work’s logic, positions the immature work was later found to state outright. The same episode, read from the other side, armed the preface’s self-criticism, since the manuscripts also contained the distinction between alienation and objectification that the essays had missed. The archive giveth, and the archive taketh away, within a single decade of one man’s life.

The convergence with Lenin belongs in the same register of ironies. In the winter of 1914 and 1915, in Swiss exile, Lenin had filled notebooks with an intense private study of Hegel’s Logic, emerging with the conviction, recorded in an aphorism that became famous when the notebooks were published fifteen years later, that nobody had understood Marx’s Capital because nobody had studied Hegel’s Logic whole. The notebooks were unpublished in 1923 and unknown to Lukacs. The two men, the movement’s supreme organiser and its most philosophical heretic, arrived independently at the same diagnosis, that Marxism’s crisis was a crisis of its relation to Hegel, and drew from it opposite institutional conclusions: Lenin, a sharpened instrument for a party he led; Lukacs, a system for a movement that promptly anathematised it. The essays cite Lenin constantly and ventriloquise him freely, constructing from What Is to Be Done and the writings on the soviets a philosophical Lenin who underwrites the dialectics of consciousness. Historians have long noted the construction’s liberties, and the liberties are real. But the convergence of the notebooks suggests that the ventriloquism caught something genuine about its subject’s instincts, and the book’s Lenin, like its Marx, is best judged as the tradition has learned to judge the whole collection: as a reconstruction, answerable to the texts but not a substitute for them, whose deviations are data about the reconstructor’s moment rather than frauds upon the reader.

What the book leaves open: a balance sheet

A guide that has corrected misreadings, stated the strongest objection and audited the author’s audit should end its analytical work with a balance sheet, the assets and liabilities of the collection as they stand after a century. On the side of the assets, first and largest, stands the restoration of the subject to Marxist theory: after this book, no serious account of capitalism could treat consciousness as a decorative reflex of economic process, and the entire subsequent investigation of ideology, hegemony and culture descends from the restoration. Second, the analysis of reification as a form of consciousness generated by a social structure, neither error nor lie but a necessary appearance, remains the single most fertile idea the tradition produced, fertile far beyond the tradition’s borders. Third, the methodological charter itself, in its austere reading: the refusal to embalm conclusions, the demand for mediation, the standpoint of the whole as a discipline rather than a possession, constitutes a permanent resource for any social theory that wishes to remain historical. Fourth, the book’s own apparatus of self correction, culminating in the preface, models an intellectual virtue that neither its friends nor its enemies have consistently matched.

On the side of the liabilities, the entries correspond to the standing questions mapped earlier. The theory of imputation carries an authoritarian temptation in its structure, and the century’s record of parties claiming to embody a class’s true consciousness against the class’s expressed will is the temptation’s biography; the essays build safeguards, but safeguards in a theory are only as strong as the institutions that inherit it, and the institutions were not strong. The identical subject and object, even after the author’s withdrawal of it, left the tradition with a taste for guaranteed subjects, and the search for successor subjects, the nation, the colonised, the multitude, reproduces the construction’s shape long after its content was surrendered. The bracketing of nature and of economics, defensible as emphases in a single book, hardened in the tradition into incapacities, so that the current of Marxism most indebted to the collection is also the current least equipped to analyse a crisis of accumulation or a question of natural limits, and must borrow from the very orthodoxies it defined itself against. And the book’s difficulty, its demand for a reader formed in two canons at once, has confined its direct readership to the academy it never addressed, so that its influence has been exercised largely through intermediaries, with the distortions that intermediation, as its own theory of mediation would predict, reliably introduces.

The balance does not strike itself, and this guide does not pretend that it does. What can be said without partisanship is that the liabilities are visible chiefly because the book’s own instruments make them visible, that the assets include the tools with which the liabilities are audited, and that no other single volume in the tradition contains both its programme and its critique in so complete a form. That is the deepest reason the collection, rather than any of its more consistent rivals, became the tradition’s founding text: a tradition, like a reader, needs not a monument but an argument it can continue, and the argument between the essays of 1923 and the preface of 1967 is one that every subsequent Marxism has had to join, on one side or the other, whether it knew the source or not.

The commissar’s education: what the essays learned in government

The essays’ authority on questions of culture and consciousness was not acquired in a library alone. Between March and August of 1919 their author served the Hungarian Soviet Republic, first in the republic’s education and culture commissariat, as its deputy head, and for a period as political commissar with an army division at the front, and the experience is written into the collection’s deepest assumptions. The republic, encircled and starving, conducted an experiment in cultural revolution at breakneck speed: theatres and museums thrown open and reprogrammed, schools reorganised, a directorate of writers and artists administering the republic’s intellectual life, the whole apparatus of a people’s commissariat attempting to manufacture, by administration, the consciousness that the theory said history would supply. Its director of literary affairs was the young Lukacs himself, preaching in speeches of the period that the proletariat must appropriate the classical heritage rather than smash it, that Shakespeare and Goethe were the inheritance of the class that had been excluded from them. Anyone who has wondered where the essays acquired their serene confidence that consciousness is a material force, organisable and transformable by institutional means, will find the answer in those months: their author had run the ministry charged with doing exactly that, and had watched the experiment drown in the republic’s military collapse and the white terror that followed.

The failure taught the second lesson the essays carry, the one that separates them from every merely propagandistic theory of consciousness. The republic’s cultural administration could decree access, curricula and repertories; it could not decree the inner transformation it advertised, and its four months demonstrated the timescale problem that haunts the book’s theory ever after: consciousness changes at the speed of lived experience, not at the speed of decrees, and a revolution that outruns the consciousness of its own class builds on sand. The theory of imputation, with its careful distinction between the consciousness a class has and the consciousness its position makes possible, and its assignment to organisation of the long mediation between the two, is the theoretical deposit of that Hungarian summer. So is the book’s characteristic patience, its willingness to think in decades where the pamphleteers of the movement thought in weeks, and its corresponding coldness toward voluntarism, the belief that will can substitute for the missing mediations. The exile who wrote the essays had governed, and governed a revolution’s culture, at the age of thirty four; the fact is not a biographical ornament but a key to the text, and it is why the collection’s treatment of consciousness never sounds like the treatment of a man guessing from outside the machinery of power.

Spontaneity, organisation, and the argument with Luxemburg

No relationship in the collection is more instructive than its long argument with Rosa Luxemburg, conducted across two essays and shadowed by a third presence, the organisation essay, and a reader who follows it learns the book’s political geometry better than from any summary. Luxemburg, murdered in Berlin in January 1919, in the same weeks that Lukacs was entering the Hungarian government, represented for the young theorist the one figure of the pre war left who had grasped totality in practice: her mass strike doctrine had treated the economic and the political, the spontaneous and the organised, as moments of a single process, and her refusal of the catechism had kept her Marxism alive while the parties embalmed theirs. The portrait essay honours this without reservation. Yet the honour is paid in order to conduct a correction, and the correction defines the book’s position. Luxemburg, on Lukacs’s reading, trusted the process to generate its own consciousness with a spontaneity the Hungarian and German defeats had refuted; she had made the party the pupil of the movement where the new conditions required it also to be the movement’s memory and its theoretical organ. The organisation essay supplies the counterweight, constructing the party as the form in which the class’s imputed consciousness becomes durable, capable of surviving defeats, of holding the gains of spontaneous moments against the ebb, and of educating the class toward its own ceiling of awareness.

The argument’s third term is Luxemburg’s posthumous critique of the Russian Revolution, which the critical observations essay answers in detail, and the exchange deserves its reputation as the collection’s most painful and most honourable episode. Luxemburg, writing in prison in 1918, had warned the Bolsheviks that their land policy would create a new class of proprietors hostile to socialism, that their nationalities policy would arm the counter revolution, and above all that the suppression of democracy would strangle the public life without which no class learns to rule, since the working class requires, in her famous insistence, the experience of its own errors. Lukacs’s reply accepts her method, the standpoint of the whole, and disputes her applications: the land settlement as a tactical necessity of the revolution’s survival, the party’s dictatorship as the form of a class’s rule in a hostile world rather than its negation. Posterity has dealt unevenly with the exchange. Luxemburg’s warnings about democracy read, after the century that followed, like prophecy, and Lukacs’s answers read like the brief of a gifted advocate for a client whose later career destroyed the brief’s premises. Yet the exchange remains the finest model the tradition offers of Marxists arguing as if truth, and not factional advantage, were the stake, and the essay map’s grading, which sends researchers to both Luxemburg pieces while sparing students until the second pass, reflects that double judgement: indispensable to the tradition’s memory, unbearable to read without knowing how the story ends.

Class as relation: the essays’ sociology and its silences

Beneath the famous concepts lies a sociology that summaries rarely reach, and surfacing it completes the reader’s equipment. Class, in the essays, is never a stratum, a layer of the social cake defined by income or occupation and available to the census. It is a relation and a process: a position within the production of the whole, defined by what its occupants must do to live and by what their doing makes possible for them to know. This is why the empirical composition of a class at a moment, its mixture of skilled and unskilled, employed and unemployed, native and immigrant, matters less to the theory than the direction of its experience, the way its daily practice schools it in the reality or the appearance of the whole. The bourgeoisie of the essays is likewise a relation before it is a roster of owners: the capitalist appears as the personification of capital’s drive to accumulate, a character mask, in the phrase the essays borrow from Marx’s preface, and his consciousness is analysed as the awareness available to a functionary of that drive, acute within the firm’s horizon and blind beyond it, where blindness means not stupidity but the structural inability to see the function itself as historical.

The silences of this sociology are as instructive as its insights, and a balanced guide must name them. The peasantry, still the majority of Europe’s population when the essays were written and the decisive class of the Russian and Hungarian revolutions alike, figures in the collection only at the margins, as an object of other classes’ strategies rather than as a subject with its own imputed consciousness; the theory’s machinery, built for the two great classes of the capitalist relation, is never seriously set to work on the small producer, whose experience of the market is real but whose relation to the means of production defeats the categories of the factory. The new middle strata, the clerks, technicians and officials whose world the reification essay describes with such brilliance as a structure of consciousness, are likewise denied a class position of their own in the theory’s political arithmetic, appearing as a audience for the two principals rather than as a third. And the national question, which had torn the old International apart and would tear the century, is handled in the critical observations as a tactical problem of the revolution’s defence, never with the theoretical seriousness the essays lavish on consciousness. Later Marxism would spend decades repairing these silences, in the theory of hegemony above all, where Gramsci rebuilt the politics of alliance that the collection’s two class schema could not house. The repair work is a tribute to the framework’s generativity and a measure of its limits, and the reader who has grasped both is in possession of the book’s actual legacy: not a completed sociology but a method for producing one, demonstrated on the terrain its author knew and left incomplete exactly where his experience ran out.

Questions to test a reading

Teachers who set the collection, and students who revise from it, converge on a small set of questions that discriminate real reading from received summary, and a guide for the series would be incomplete without rehearsing them. The discriminating questions share a property: none can be answered from the reification essay alone, and each requires the charter, the audit, or the occasional pieces. A candidate asked to explain the method claim who reaches only for the five famous words has failed the first test; the creditable answer reconstructs the thought experiment of the refuted theses, names the two dogmatisms the claim was aimed against, and states the licence and the danger in a single breath. A candidate asked about totality who defines it as knowing everything has reproduced the misreading the text forbids; the creditable answer defines it as a standpoint, illustrates it with a mediated fact, and concedes the category’s abuse as a trump. A candidate asked about the condemnation who reaches for martyrdom has failed the neutrality the subject demands; the creditable answer separates the political act from the theoretical charge, gives Deborin’s case its force, and notes that the author later accepted a version of the charge from the opposite direction. A candidate asked about the preface who calls it coercion has stopped reading at the point where the story becomes interesting; the creditable answer follows the argument from the 1844 manuscripts, distinguishes alienation from objectification in the author’s own terms, and weighs what survives the audit. And a candidate asked the synthetic question, whether the book refutes itself, who answers with a flat yes or no has missed the collection’s final lesson: that a text can dismantle its own keystone and stand, that the standing is the interesting problem, and that the problem is the tradition in miniature.

For the researcher, the testing questions change register. They concern the text’s construction: how the 1923 volume was assembled from journal pieces and two new studies, how the later edition’s preface reframes the whole, how the secret defence manuscript complicates the public record of recantation, and how the translations have distributed the book’s emphases across languages. They concern its contexts: the Hungarian faction fights inside the condemnation, the Heidelberg formation inside the philosophy, the Lenin notebooks inside the convergence on Hegel. And they concern its effects: the relays through Frankfurt and Paris, the samizdat life in the east, the migration of its concepts into disciplines its author never entered. A researcher who can keep the three registers apart, text, context and effect, and can say which of the standing questions belongs to which, commands the secondary literature’s map; the confusion of the registers, blaming the text for its effects or excusing it by its context, is the characteristic failure the literature exhibits and the one this guide has tried, by its separation of the argument about the book into its own section, to avoid.

The exile’s workshop: Vienna, the journals, and the ultra-left winter

The collection was written at a desk in Vienna, and the city and the movement’s journal culture of those years left marks on the text that a reader benefits from seeing. Vienna after the empire’s collapse was the listening post of a defeated revolution: refugees from Budapest, Berlin and Munich crowded its cafes, the Austrian party vacillated between reform and insurrection, and the Hungarian emigration conducted its factional war in print with an intensity inversely proportional to its forces. Lukacs wrote for the journal Kommunismus, the Viennese organ of the Balkan communist federation, and it was in its pages that several of the essays first appeared, addressed to readers who were themselves organisers in flight. The journal’s circle debated the questions the essays theorise: the relation of party to class in countries where the party was illegal or minuscule, the meaning of the soviets outside Russia, the tactics of a movement whose moment had passed and whose members refused to know it. The essays’ characteristic elevation, their insistence on treating tactical questions as questions of consciousness and method, is the sound of a man thinking at that pitch because the room demanded it: when an emigration has nothing left but its ideas, it argues about ideas as if they were armies, and sometimes, as the collection’s posterity proved, the argument outlasts the armies.

The same winter produced the polemic that fixed the author’s reputation for ultra-leftism in the movement’s memory. Lenin’s pamphlet on left wing communism, written in 1920 against the infantile disorders of the western parties, took aim at currents to which the Hungarian emigration, Lukacs among its theorists, stood close: the refusal of parliamentary work, the suspicion of the trade unions as hopelessly corrupt, the impatience that mistook the vanguard’s clarity for the class’s readiness. The essays of the collection are, among other things, a sustained theoretical answer to that pamphlet’s challenge, though they never name it as their target: the theory of imputed consciousness is precisely an account of how a vanguard’s clarity and a class’s unreadiness can both be real, and of what organisation must do to mediate between them, and the legality essay’s refusal of both fetishes is the tactical form of the same mediation. Reading the collection without this background makes its central doctrine look like an abstraction imposed on politics. Reading it with the background restores the doctrine’s birthplace in the most concrete argument a revolutionary generation ever conducted with itself: how to act when the theory says the moment is ripe and the class, obstinately, has not arrived.

The missing nature: the book’s boundary

Every strong book has a boundary where its method stops, and the collection’s boundary is nature. The essays confine the dialectic to the realm where subject and object meet, in history and society, and they treat the extension of dialectics to the natural world, the doctrine associated with Engels’s later writings, with a reserve that shades into dismissal: nature, for the young Lukacs, is a social category in the sense that what counts as nature, and how it can be known, is mediated by the forms of society, while the dialectical movement of knower and known has no purchase on a realm where the knower’s activity does not constitute the object. The political charge this provoked has been recorded in the condemnation section. The philosophical question is harder and still open. If dialectics is the logic of the subject object relation, then a materialism that surrenders the dialectics of nature must find its account of nature’s independence elsewhere, in a realism the essays gesture toward but never build; and a critic is entitled to ask whether the book’s materialism, so powerful inside society, is at its boundary simply an idealism that has stopped walking. The author of the preface worried at the boundary himself, and his later ontology attempted the building the essays omitted, founding social being on labour’s metabolic exchange with a nature that exists whether or not any subject knows it.

The boundary matters beyond exegesis because the tradition inherited it. The western current of Marxism defined by the collection is, with few exceptions, a Marxism of society and culture that leaves nature to the natural sciences and borrows its ecology, when it reaches for one, from elsewhere; the eastern doctrine, for all its dogmatism, kept a philosophy of nature at its centre and thereby kept questions the west had to relearn late. Readers meeting the essays in a century when the metabolism between society and nature has become the master question of politics will feel the boundary as the book’s most dated feature, and the feeling should be registered honestly rather than argued away. It should also be registered that the book’s own method supplies the correction’s beginning: the insistence that nature as encountered is always socially mediated is, turned carefully, a foundation for analysing how a society’s form organises its interchange with the natural world, its agriculture, its energy, its waste, and the most promising ecological readings of Marx in the present generation build on exactly that insistence while discarding the boundary that originally housed it. A classic is not diminished by having a frontier. It is diminished only when its custodians pretend the frontier is a wall of the world rather than a property line of the text, and the collection’s custodians, beginning with its author, have mostly known the difference.

The text in print: a century of editions

The book’s publishing biography is its political biography in another binding, and a reader who knows it can date every phase of the text’s fortunes from its title pages. The first edition, Berlin 1923, from the Malik Verlag, presented the essays as studies in Marxist dialectics by a leading communist intellectual at the height of his movement standing. Within eighteen months the standing was gone, and the book entered its long clandestinity: unreprinted in the communist world, unobtainable in the author’s own country, surviving in the west in the libraries of institutes and exiles and in the famous private collections of the Frankfurt circle. A Dutch exile edition circulated among the German emigration during the years of fascism, and the book’s readers in those decades met it as a relic of the revolution’s heroic age, its author inaccessible behind the double wall of his recantations and his party’s discipline. The thaw came from Paris: the French translation of 1960, published by the Editions de Minuit in the translation associated with Kostas Axelos and Jacqueline Bois, introduced the collection to the generation that would make it a classic, and Sartre’s circle received it as the missing philosophy of the Marxism they were rebuilding. The German reissue followed in the collected works at the end of the nineteen sixties, carrying the new preface that changed the book forever by auditing it, and the English translation of 1971, Rodney Livingstone’s, completed the canonisation by delivering the text, preface included, to the anglophone universities at the moment of their greatest expansion. Every later edition, the paperback reprints, the centenary issues with their scholarly introductions, descends from that sequence, and the sequence explains the text the world reads: not the raw intervention of 1923, but the intervention together with its author’s audit, bound in one cover by the decision of the nineteen sixties editors, a decision no reader since has had reason to regret and every reader should know was a decision.

Reading alongside: the companion texts

A book like this is read best in company, and the guide closes its analytical work by naming the companions that repay a reader’s time, each for a stated reason. Marx’s chapter on the fetishism of commodities in the first volume of Capital is the collection’s seed crystal, and an hour with it before the reification essay multiplies the essay’s yield. The 1844 manuscripts, read after the collection rather than before, let the reader perform the author’s own 1930 experience in miniature, watching a distinction emerge that the essays needed and lacked. Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, the collection’s twin, reads as the same crisis argued by a lawyer rather than a philosopher, and the two books correct each other’s excesses. Gramsci’s prison writings on hegemony and the intellectuals, composed in ignorance of the collection, show its questions rebuilt for a longer defeat and a subtler politics, and the series guide to the tradition as a whole, the western marxism complete guide, places the three in their common frame. The author’s own Tailism manuscript, his secret defence, is the companion for readers of the condemnation, since it proves what the public record of the twenties concealed. And the preface to the second edition of the Manifesto, with the other authorial second thoughts gathered in this series pattern of self revision, makes a fitting coda: the tradition’s classics were written by men who lived long enough to argue with their young selves in print, and learning to read the argument, rather than either voice alone, is the skill the whole shelf exists to teach. Placement of the collection in a wider course of reading, from the founder’s texts to the tradition’s exam literature, is the business of the series marxism reading list, to which readers planning a season with these books are directed.

Immanent critique: the book’s gift to its enemies

One instrument in the collection deserves a section of its own, because it is the instrument by which the book has been most often and most profitably attacked, and because mastering it is the difference between a reader who has opinions about the essays and a reader who can work with them. The instrument is immanent critique: the practice of judging a position not by an external standard imported for the purpose, but by the position’s own claims, its own criteria, its own unrealised intentions. The Luxemburg portrait is the collection’s masterclass in the method. Lukacs does not refute Luxemburg’s economics from a Leninist catechism; he reconstructs her own standpoint of totality, grants it fully, and shows her conclusions failing the standard her standpoint sets. The antinomies discussion works identically on Kant: the critical philosophy is not scolded for ignoring society but shown, from inside its own architecture, generating the thing in itself as the scar of its limits. Even the condemnation’s history obeys the pattern in reverse: Deborin’s most damaging charge was immanent in form, measuring the essays against the materialism they claimed to defend, and the author’s preface completes the circle by performing the operation on the essays themselves, from inside their own demand that no text, not even this one, be exempt from history.

The method explains a quality of the book that readers feel before they can name it: its fairness, the sense that opponents are strengthened before they are answered. Immanent critique requires the strengthening, since a position refuted in its weak form has not been refuted at all, and the essays’ portraits of Luxemburg, of Kant, even of the reformist leaders, have the solidity of work done under that discipline. It also explains the book’s unusual usefulness to readers who reject its conclusions. A liberal philosopher, a sociologist of organisations, a historian of the labour movement: each can take the instrument from the book’s hands and apply it to the book, finding in the gap between its claims and its performance, between the party as mediation and the party as substitute, between consciousness as the class’s own and consciousness as imputed by its theorists, the materials of a criticism the text itself taught them to make. Doctrines that arm their critics age differently from doctrines that merely anathematise them. They are dismantled, often; but they are dismantled with their own tools, in arguments that keep their questions alive, and the collection’s century, a century of productive dismantling from the Frankfurt School to its author’s own preface, is the biography of an instrument that would not stay in its maker’s hands.

Why the book endures

The reasons for the collection’s survival can now be gathered, and they are not the reasons that usually keep a classic alive. It does not survive as a period piece, though its period is fascinating; the questions it poses about consciousness and social form have not dated with the empires whose collapse it mourned. It does not survive as a system, since its system’s keystone was removed by its author and the building stands anyway, a ruin more instructive than most intact edifices. It survives, first, because its central perception, that the forms of a society enter and organise the consciousness of the people who live it, and that this organisation is the proper object of a critical science, has been confirmed by a century of work done in its wake and in ignorance of it alike. It survives, second, because its charter question, what loyalty to a theory consists in when the theory’s findings change, is the permanent question of every intellectual tradition that wishes to remain both faithful and honest, and the opening essay states it more cleanly than anyone before or since. It survives, third, because it is accompanied by its audit, and the spectacle of a great mind arraigning its own masterpiece on philosophical grounds, in public, without self pity and without theatre, remains nearly unique in the literature of politics; readers return to the essays for their argument and stay for the drama of the two voices, the young commissar certain that history had appointed its knower, and the old scholar explaining, with courtesy and finality, wherein the certainty had deceived him. And it survives, finally, because the tradition it founded has never found a replacement for it. Western Marxism has produced richer histories, subtler aesthetics, more rigorous economics and more usable politics, but it has produced no second book in which the whole enterprise, its method, its object, its knower and its fate, is thought at once and at this intensity. Until it does, the collection of 1923, with its preface of 1967 bound behind it like a conscience, will remain what the essay map of this guide has treated it as: the first book of the tradition, and the one its readers are never finished with.

The prose itself: how the writing argues

A close reading guide owes its readers a word about the writing, because in this book the style is not decoration on the argument but one of its instruments. The essays are written in the high German philosophical manner their author had mastered before his conversion, a prose of long, subordinated sentences in which a claim is advanced, qualified, turned against itself and restated at a higher level within a single period, so that the sentence’s very movement performs the dialectic the sentence describes. Readers feel this as difficulty, and it is difficulty, but of a specific kind: not obscurity of vocabulary, since the terms are defined and used consistently, but density of relation, every clause answering to three others. The effect at its best is a sense of thought happening at full stretch, the prose thinking in public. At its worst, in the reification essay’s middle movement, the machinery can outrun the matter, and generations of readers have closed the book at exactly the point where the sentences stop reporting distinctions and start generating them. Livingstone’s translation preserves the architecture with remarkable fidelity, which is why the English text shares the original’s reputation: this is a book to be read the way its sentences are built, in whole movements, at a desk, with the thread held firmly, and readers who adapt their pace to its periods find the difficulty halve itself within fifty pages as the ear learns the music.

The prose also carries a rhetorical signature worth recognising, because it explains the book’s power over readers who resist its doctrine. Lukacs argues by ascent: a familiar phenomenon is described with sudden precision, the description is shown to imply a structure, the structure is shown to govern domains far from the starting point, and the reader, who agreed to a remark about factory timekeeping, finds himself committed to a philosophy of history before he has noticed the staircase. The ascent is the essay form itself, inherited from the author’s pre Marxist work as a literary essayist, in which a review of a single book or play would open, by the same unobtrusive steps, into a diagnosis of the age. What changed in 1919 was the destination: where the young aesthete’s ascents ended in a judgement of taste or a sigh over the modern soul, the commissar’s end in a class and a party. Recognising the staircase does not oblige the reader to climb it, and the critical literature’s best pages are written by readers who climbed knowingly, marking each step’s warrant. But no reader is well served by pretending the staircase is not there, and the commonest failure of the book’s summarists is to report the view from the top as if it were a list of opinions rather than the end of an ascent the reader was meant to perform.

Three scenes from the text

Close reading is best taught by example, and this section lingers on three scenes, an opening, a definition and a farewell, in which the whole book can be seen in miniature.

The opening scene is the first page of the first essay, where the young author, not yet thirty five and addressing a movement that measured loyalty in theses defended, calmly detaches orthodoxy from every thesis at once. What a close reader notices is the tone: there is no polemic heat, no naming of enemies, only the patient unfolding of a distinction, as if the most explosive redefinition in the movement’s theoretical life were a matter of tidying a definition. The restraint is the rhetoric. By presenting the method claim as a clarification rather than a challenge, the essay recruits the reader’s assent before the reader has priced the consequences, and by the time the consequences arrive, in the essays on history and consciousness, the charter has the force of something agreed long ago in a quiet room. Every teacher who sets the essay should warn students about that room: the arguments they will spend the term disputing were settled, or unsettled, in its first three pages.

The definition scene stands in the class consciousness essay, where imputed consciousness is introduced with the care of a lawyer drafting a statute, the empirical consciousness of the class, its psychology, and the consciousness appropriate to its position distinguished in sequence and fenced from one another. What a close reader notices here is the source of the book’s later troubles compressed into a virtue: the definition is so clean that the construction it names acquires the solidity of a thing, and the essay’s subsequent movement, in which the party is built as the construction’s bearer, follows with the inevitability of a proof. The scene rewards being read twice, once for the distinction’s genuine analytical power, which no subsequent sociology of knowledge has dispensed with, and once for the moment where a heuristic becomes an institution, since in that moment the whole subsequent history of the doctrine, its illuminations and its abuses, is contained as an acorn contains an oak.

The farewell scene is the close of the later preface, where the old author, having dismantled his book’s summit with a thoroughness no enemy matched, declines to conclude that the book should not be read. What a close reader notices is the absence of the two tones the scene invites, bitterness and nostalgia, and the presence of a third: the tone of a man filing a report. The preface’s final judgement is that the book was a product of a transitional period and bears its marks, that its errors were the errors of an apprenticeship served in a revolution, and that readers of a later transition may find in it, precisely because of those marks, a document of how such periods think. It is the most Lukacsian ending imaginable, the author treating his own masterpiece as a historical phenomenon to be mediated rather than a possession to be defended or a shame to be buried, and it completes the collection’s deepest claim by enacting it: the book about the historicity of all consciousness ends by historicising itself, and the reader who has followed the argument this far is watching the method perform its final office on the only subject its author had the right and the duty to judge without appeal.

The silent centre: the Russian Revolution inside the essays

No event is named more often in the collection’s margins, and none structures it more deeply, than the Russian Revolution, and a reader who makes the connection explicit will find several of the book’s doctrines falling into place. The essays were written in the revolution’s slipstream, by a man whose own revolution had been modelled on it and crushed, and their central theoretical problem is October translated into philosophy: how had a class dismissed by every orthodoxy as unready produced, in one country, the act that remade the century, and why had the classes of the advanced countries, schooled and organised beyond anything Russia possessed, failed to follow? Every answer the movement offered dissatisfied the young theorist. The answer of betrayal made the outcome a morality tale. The answer of ripeness made it a timetable and counselled waiting for conditions that had manifestly not waited in Petrograd. The essays’ answer is the theory of consciousness itself: that readiness is not a property a class carries like a cargo but a relation between its position and its awareness, that the Russian workers, possessing less organisation and more unmediated experience of the old order’s collapse, stood closer to their imputed consciousness than the organised west, whose very organisation had become a mediation screening it from the whole. October, on this reading, is the empirical proof of the class consciousness essay, and the western failure is its control experiment.

The revolution also stands behind the book’s organisational doctrine in a way its critics have not always credited. The soviets, workers’ councils arising outside and against the established organisations of the movement, figure in the essays’ background as the historical form in which a class’s consciousness made itself an institution without ceasing to be the class’s own, and the organisation essay’s theory of the party is best read as an attempt to think the party and the council together, the durable form and the living movement, rather than as the substitution of the one for the other that later practice made notorious. That the attempt failed in the author’s own movement, that the party devoured the councils in Russia and the doctrine in the parties, is the tragedy the condemnation section of this guide has already charted from the other side. But the essays’ pages preserve the moment when the synthesis seemed possible, and historians of the revolutionary years read them, among other reasons, as the most intelligent record of what the generation of October hoped its revolution meant before the meaning was confiscated.

The essays as a theory of crisis

The last analytical frame this guide offers is the one the book’s first readers would have supplied unbidden: the essays as a theory of the crisis through which their author and his audience were living. The years of composition were years in which every inherited form presented itself as simultaneously intact and hollow: empires had fallen and their successor states wore the old ministries like borrowed coats, currencies dissolved, parliaments legislated over societies that no longer believed their categories, and the labour movement’s great organisations commanded millions and could not say what the millions were for. The collection’s categories can each be read as an instrument built for that condition. Reification names the experience of a world whose forms persist after their human content has drained away, contemplated by populations who no longer expect their actions to register. Imputed consciousness names the gap between what an epoch’s classes do and what their situation would let them understand, the gap in which crises are decided. Totality names the discipline required when every partial indicator lies, when wages rise and security falls, when constitutions multiply and power evaporates, and only the movement of the whole tells the truth about the parts. Even the method claim reads, in this frame, as a crisis doctrine: a movement whose theses had all been framed for a world that ended in 1914 required, before any new thesis could be trusted, a ruling about what in its inheritance survived the world’s ending, and the ruling was that the method survived and the theses were negotiable.

This frame also explains the book’s strange double address, its simultaneous life as a party intervention and as a work for the ages. A theory of crisis written inside the crisis cannot know whether it is a memorandum for next season’s congress or a testament for readers a century away, and the essays hedge the uncertainty in the only way available to them, by pitching their claims at the level of method and category, where a memorandum and a testament are the same document. The wager succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. The crisis passed into the stabilisations and catastrophes of the following decades, the congresses were forgotten, and the testament remained, legible to readers whose crises the author never imagined and whose questions his categories still organise with unnerving ease. Whether that ease testifies to the categories’ truth or to the recurrence of the condition that produced them is a question this guide leaves, as the book leaves so much, to the reader’s own standpoint, with the observation that the two testimonies may be the same.

The philosophy of history inside the essays

Beneath the doctrines this guide has expounded runs a philosophy of history that gives the collection its emotional temperature, and surfacing it completes the exposition. The essays assume that history has a direction that can be known, not as a timetable of events but as a logic of forms: societies generate the standpoints from which they can be understood and surpassed, and the succession of standpoints is not random. The proletariat’s privilege, in this scheme, is eschatological in structure if not in content: it is the class whose self knowledge coincides with history’s self knowledge, the point where the process becomes transparent to itself, and its victory would close the prehistory of unknowing, the long era in which human beings were governed by the products of their own activity as by alien powers. Critics from the author’s contemporaries to Kolakowski have pressed the religious shape of this construction, a chosen class, a fall into reification, a redemption through self knowledge, and the author of the preface, who had read his Hegel too well not to see it, treated the construction’s Hegelianism as the confession that the shape was borrowed from the philosophy of spirit rather than discovered in the factories.

The charge deserves the same fairness the guide has practised throughout. A philosophy of history with a direction and a bearer is not thereby a religion, unless every theory that finds meaning in the whole is to be so classified, and the essays’ version is distinguished from its theological cousins by its insistence that the redemption is neither guaranteed by heaven nor inscribed in nature, but depends on the class achieving in practice the awareness its position affords, an achievement the essays’ own historical moment was busy refuting. The eschatological shape is real; so is the contingency the shape contains, and the tension between them, a guaranteed destination that can nevertheless be missed, is not a confusion the author overlooked but the exact form of the revolutionary generation’s experience, which had watched the appointed hour strike in one country and pass unstruck in others. The later author resolved the tension by surrendering the guarantee and retaining the direction as a tendency, relocating the philosophy of history into an ontology of labour and social being where tendencies are real without being fated. Readers who follow that relocation will find the old man’s vast final work less a repudiation of the essays than their translation into a chastened key, the same music with the eschatology turned down, and will understand why he could audit the young book so severely and still refuse, in the preface’s closing movement, to call the apprenticeship wasted.

Reflection and its discontents: the essays on knowledge

One further doctrine, never headlined in the essays, explains many of their quarrels and deserves extraction before this guide closes: their implicit theory of knowledge. The Marxism of the period was settling into a doctrine of reflection, according to which consciousness copies an external reality and truth is the copy’s fidelity, a picture with roots in the founder’s metaphors and in the materialism of the natural sciences. The essays never attack the picture frontally, which is why the quarrel it caused was so long delayed, but everything in their construction replaces it. Knowledge, for the collection, is not a copy but a relation, constituted in the interchange between a subject formed by its object and an object that exists for the subject only through the forms of that interchange. The thing in itself, the unknowable residue that the copy theory must postulate and can never inspect, dissolves in the essays’ handling into a practical problem: the object as it is apart from our activity is a limit concept, and what we can know, and need to know, is the object in its genesis and its possibilities, which our activity continually reveals. Hence the primacy of practice, hence the suspicion of contemplation, hence the otherwise puzzling claim that a class can know society better by changing it than any observer can by describing it.

The Soviet orthodoxy’s philosophers were not wrong to smell danger here. A theory of knowledge that makes the subject constitutive courts idealism at every step, and the distance between the essays’ position and the Berkeleyan conclusion that the world is our representation is a distance the text patrols with its insistence on the object’s resistance, on labour’s encounter with a nature that answers back, but never fortifies with the systematic care the point required. The preface’s turn to labour as the model of all objectification can be read as the late fortification of exactly this frontier: in labour, the subject’s purpose meets a material that is indifferent to it, and knowledge grows in the negotiation between purpose and resistance, neither copied from the object nor imposed upon it. Readers trained in later philosophy will recognise how much of the century’s epistemology is prefigured in the negotiation model, from the pragmatists’ inquiry to the philosophy of science’s discovery that observation is theory laden, and will register the familiar irony: the heretical essays of a condemned communist anticipated, from inside a doctrine of reflection they were accused of betraying, the very corrections that doctrine’s official custodians would spend fifty years refusing to hear.

Four cities: the geography of a book

The collection can be mapped as well as read, and its geography organises its meanings with unusual neatness. Budapest is the city of formation and of power: the aesthete’s Budapest of the pre war journals and Sunday circles, where the young Lukacs learned to treat art as the register of an age’s soul, and the commissar’s Budapest of 1919, where he learned what it costs to administer a revolution’s culture with the armies closing in. The essays carry both cities in solution: the diagnosis of a fragmented world comes from the first, the confidence that consciousness can be organised from the second, and the friction between the aesthete’s despair and the commissar’s faith is the book’s inner weather. Vienna is the city of composition: the exile’s desk, the factional journals, the long aftermath of defeat in which the pieces were written and the system assembled, its cold clarity the clarity of a man with nothing left to lose but his argument. Vienna also supplied the audience, an emigration of organisers and intellectuals for whom theory was the last form of action, and the essays’ pitch, theoretical to the highest degree yet addressed to practitioners, is the pitch of that room.

Berlin is the city of publication and of the parallel case: the Malik Verlag’s Berlin, capital of the strongest communist party outside Russia, where the book appeared as a German event and where Korsch’s twin volume argued the same crisis from the German party’s benches. Berlin gave the collection its first serious readers in the universities and its first institutional heir in the Frankfurt Institute, founded the year of publication a few hundred miles west. And Moscow is the city of judgement and of the archive: the congress that condemned the book, the institute that preserved its author and handed him the young Marx manuscripts that armed his self criticism, the capital where the doctrine the essays challenged hardened into a state philosophy and where, in consequence, the book’s fate and its author’s were decided by turns for fifty years. A reader who keeps the four cities distinct will never mistake the collection for a product of the study alone. It is a book written between a lost capital and a victorious one, by a man travelling the road between them in the wrong direction, and its theory of consciousness is, among other things, the report of that journey.

What counts as an argument in this book

A final piece of equipment, without which the essays will be misjudged by standards they never accepted: an account of what counts, inside this book, as proving something. The essays do not argue as an economist argues, by model and measurement, nor as a historian argues, by document and narrative, though documents and narratives appear in them. They argue in the manner their charter prescribes, by reconstruction. A position is rebuilt from its presuppositions until its inner logic stands visible; the logic is then confronted with the position’s own unexamined boundary, the point where it must stop or contradict itself; and the contradiction is exhibited as the signature of the social form that produced the position. Kant is not refuted by a truer system but shown generating the thing in itself where his premises run out. The reformist leader is not refuted by a better policy but shown inhabiting a mediation whose limits his practice cannot acknowledge. Even the book’s positive constructions follow the pattern in reverse: imputed consciousness is not evidenced by surveys but derived, from the structure of the class’s position, as the awareness that position makes possible, and its warrant is the derivation’s fidelity to the structure, not a head count of the convinced.

This manner of arguing has a strength and a weakness that the reader should hold simultaneously, because the century’s debate about the book is largely a debate about their exchange rate. The strength is depth of a kind no rival method in the social theory of the period could match: the essays can say why a false position is necessary, why intelligent people must think it, and where its necessity ends, which is the beginning of all durable criticism. The weakness is the absence of an external checkpoint. A reconstruction can be dazzling and wrong, its fidelity to a position’s inner logic certified only by the reconstructors’ sympathy, and the identical subject and object stands in the book’s own history as the awful example: a derivation so faithful to its Hegelian presuppositions that it derived a class’s soul. The author’s preface, once again, is the book’s own correction of its method’s weakness, since it submits the great derivation to an external check, the texts of Marx recovered from the archive, and finds it wanting. The essays thereby teach their readers, across the forty four years between their voices, the double lesson that is this guide’s last word on method: reconstruct boldly, for nothing less reaches the roots of a position, and check the reconstruction against whatever the world holds outside it, for nothing else keeps boldness honest.

Labour in the essays: the quiet foundation

For a book that re-founded a doctrine of the working class, the collection says surprisingly little about work itself, and the balance deserves a section because the omission and the presence are equally instructive. Labour enters the essays chiefly in one great scene, the first movement of the reification study, where the modern labour process is anatomised with a precision that later sociology of work would spend decades re-earning. The scene’s elements are worth enumerating in prose: the rational decomposition of the product into specialised operations, the worker’s reduction to a spectator of processes embodied in machinery and in the stopwatch’s calculus, the conversion of time from the medium of a life into a measurable substance to be filled and sold, the spread of the same pattern from the factory to the office, the bureau and the newsroom, until the stance of passive contemplation before a self moving system appears as the universal form of modern experience. This is the collection’s most concrete writing, and its ancestry is double: the analysis descends from the chapters of Capital on cooperation and machinery, and from the scientific management literature of the author’s own decade, whose apostles of rationalisation he read as unwitting witnesses for the prosecution.

Labour also enters as the silent premise of the whole theory of consciousness. The proletariat’s epistemic privilege is grounded, when the essays are pressed, in nothing mystical: in the fact that the worker’s own activity is the point where the social whole is daily produced, so that the knowledge available at that point is knowledge of production from inside, the producer’s potential knowledge of the product as his own. The identical subject and object, for all its Hegelian upholstery, is the philosophical inflation of this sober premise, and the preface’s complaint that the young book neglected labour as the mediator between subject and object is the complaint that the inflation displaced its own foundation: the mediating activity through which a subject actually makes and knows a world was present in the essays as a scene and as a premise, but never installed as the centre, where consciousness, the derivative magnitude, sat instead. The old author’s ontology would spend its thousands of pages repairing the inversion, founding social being on labour’s teleological positing, its setting of purposes into resistant material, and deriving consciousness from there. A reader who watches the repair being prepared inside the preface’s few pages watches the tradition’s most consequential act of self correction at the moment of its conception.

The balance for the reader is therefore double, and this guide states it as plainly as the text permits. As an analysis of the experienced structure of modern work, of how rationalised labour deforms the consciousness of everyone it touches and not only of those it employs, the reification essay’s first movement has never been surpassed inside the tradition and rarely outside it; the literature on alienated labour, on bureaucratic personality and on the attention economies of a later century is its footnote. As a theory of labour in the economic sense, of value, exploitation and accumulation, the collection is an absence, a frame without the picture its founder would have painted first, and the reader who needs the picture must go to the economics articles of this series, where the tradition’s other inheritance is kept. The two judgements together define the book’s strange completeness: it is the fullest account ever written of what capitalism does to the minds that reproduce it, written by a man who had administered a revolution and read Hegel entire, and it achieves that fullness partly by declining the terrain on which its doctrine was born. Whether the decline was the method claim’s finest liberty or its original evasion is the question with which this guide’s objection section charged the reader, and the labour question is where that question bites hardest.

The state in the essays: the reified form above society

One institution haunts the collection’s edges without ever receiving an essay of its own, and a thorough guide should draw it into the light before closing: the state. The essays inherit from their moment a double experience of the state that their theory never quite digests. On one side stands the bourgeois state as the reification essay’s logic predicts it: a machinery of formal law and calculable administration, in which the official, no less than the factory hand, performs specialised operations upon fragments of human cases and contemplates the whole as a self moving order whose justice consists in its predictability. The rule of law, in this analysis, is not denounced as a fraud; it is diagnosed as a form, the political shape of a society that experiences its own relations as things, and its blindnesses are the form’s blindnesses, incapable of seeing the class content that its categories process so impartially. On the other side stands the soviet, the council, glimpsed in the essays’ background as the counter form: an institution in which the separation between the administrators and the administered, between the state’s contemplators and society’s producers, begins to dissolve, because the council is the class organised as its own government rather than a machinery above it.

Between the diagnosis and the glimpse, the hard questions of state power, of violence, of the dictatorship the movement proclaimed and the democracy Luxemburg demanded, are handled by the collection at a level of generality that later history would punish. The critical observations defend the Bolsheviks’ emergency measures as the necessities of a besieged revolution, and the essays’ theory offers no independent standard by which an emergency measure could be judged to have outlived its emergency, no account of the forms by which a class’s rule over itself differs institutionally from a machinery’s rule over the class. The omission is the political form of the imputation problem that has followed this guide throughout: a theory that locates the class’s true will in a construction must entrust the construction’s custody to an institution, and the essays’ institutions, party and council in unresolved partnership, never receive the constitutional reflection their burden required. Later Marxism’s state theory, from Gramsci’s integral state to the debates of the nineteen seventies, can be read as the tradition’s long attempt to write the essay the collection omitted, with the collection’s own categories as its instruments and its silences as its syllabus. The reader who finishes the volume aware that its author governed a state for four months, and still left the state untheorised, has located the point where even this most self conscious of books was overtaken by its moment, and where its readers’ work, like the work it assigns them everywhere else, begins.

Revolution in the essays: the moment the gap closes

Every doctrine in the collection leans toward a single practical horizon, and naming it plainly is the right note on which to end the exposition. Revolution, in these essays, is not primarily an insurrection, a seizure of buildings and ministries, though the author had served one and never disowned it. It is the name for the process in which the distance between a class’s actual awareness and its imputed awareness is closed in action: the moment when the producers of the social whole come to know it as their product and, in the same movement, take responsibility for remaking it. So defined, revolution is less an event than a transformation of consciousness with institutional consequences, and its timescale is set by the mediations the essays anatomise, the slow education of a class by its own experience, punctuated by crises in which decades of learning are compressed into weeks. The definition explains the collection’s otherwise baffling mixture of urgency and patience, its author’s willingness to think in generations while his comrades thought in offensives, and its coldness toward putschism, the attempt to close the gap by decree from above, which the Hungarian summer had taught him to regard as the revolution’s caricature.

It also explains the book’s final difference from the doctrine that condemned it. For the emerging orthodoxy, revolution was a transfer of property and power whose theory was settled and whose agent was the party acting for the class. For the essays, the transfer is the least of it: a revolution that changes the owners while leaving the forms of consciousness untouched has changed the personnel of reification and nothing else, and the long labour of the councils, the schools, the press and the party as educator is not the decoration of the revolution but its substance. Posterity has dealt with the two definitions as it has dealt with everything in this book, finding the essays’ version at once too philosophical for the barricades and too political for the academy, and finding also, in every later attempt to think liberation as a change in human beings and not only in their rulers, that the essays had been there first. The reader who closes the collection on this definition has the whole argument in a sentence: history is the story of a class learning what it already, in position, is, and the book is that learning’s most complete record and most searching audit, written by the man who lived at the head of the class.

For students and exam candidates

Your task with this collection is narrower than the book, and this guide’s essay map was built for it: master the opening essay entire, the reification essay’s first movement, and the preface’s two great withdrawals, the identical subject and object and the fusion of alienation with objectification. For the concept itself, work from the companion article on Lukacs and the analysis of reification, and for the term your papers will actually use, the companion article on class consciousness and its imputation gives the examinable definition in its wider setting. Keep an essay map of your own, in the VaultBook Marxism study notes companion or on paper: one card per essay, its claim in a sentence, its place in the whole in a second sentence, and the objection it must survive in a third. In answers, state the method claim before you summarise any content, give the condemnation in both its dimensions, political act and theoretical charge, and never present the later repudiation as either martyrdom or confession; examiners reward the candidate who can hold the essays and the audit in one judgement.

For teachers and seminar leaders

The collection sets better in extracts than in whole, and the extract with the cleanest edges is the opening essay: short enough for a single seminar, complete enough to generate the term’s arguments about method, loyalty and evidence, and safe to set without the surrounding system. Pair it in the following week with the first movement of the reification essay and you have the tradition’s founding gesture entire, charter and application. The preface makes an unmatched teaching text on authorship and revision: set its central pages against the essays they audit and ask the seminar to rule on whether the auditor is right, a question on which able students divide exactly as the literature divides. For discussion, the condemnation rewards a structured exercise in which one side must state Deborin’s charge to Deborin’s own satisfaction before answering it; the discipline of the steelman is the discipline of the book itself. Warn students early about the second movement of the reification essay, and give them the Kant and Hegel map before they reach it.

For researchers, historians, and journalists

The collection’s scholarly frontier lies in its documents: the 1923 Malik text against the later collected works edition, the secret defence manuscript that complicates every account of the recantations, and the correspondence and journal polemics of the Vienna exile, much of it still unevenly edited. For editions, translations and the state of the texts, the series western marxism reading guide gives the full apparatus, and the later preface should be treated as the key secondary source on the book, cited alongside the essays rather than beneath them. Open problems worth a researcher’s season include the Hungarian factional archive behind the condemnation, the exact channels by which the book reached the Frankfurt Institute’s first generation, and the samizdat circulation in the eastern bloc, where the record is rich and largely unworked in English. Journalists writing on the book’s anniversaries should resist the two stock frames, the prophetic masterpiece and the totalitarian seed: the documentary record, a condemned book defended in secret and audited in public by its own author, is stranger and better than either.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is History and Class Consciousness about?

It gathers eight essays composed between 1919 and 1922 by Georg Lukacs and issued in Berlin in 1923. Their shared argument is that Marxist theory should be judged by its way of working rather than by a catalogue of conclusions, that society must be grasped as an interconnected whole, and that the working class occupies a singular vantage point from which that whole becomes visible. The longest piece examines how commodity relations reshape awareness itself. Later printings bind in a preface from the author’s old age that withdraws the volume’s most ambitious construction, so the work now reads as an argument between a revolutionary system and its own retrospective audit.

Q: What does orthodox Marxism refers exclusively to method mean?

It means that fidelity to Marx is located in a procedure, the dialectical manner of dissolving fixed facts into processes and relations, instead of in assent to any finding that procedure once produced. The opening essay presses the point with a thought experiment: grant, for argument’s sake, that investigation overturns every substantive thesis Marx defended, and the orthodox adherent, on this redefinition, concedes each one and loses nothing essential, because the allegiance was never owed to the findings. Loyalty migrates from results to the discipline that generates and revises them. That migration, modest in appearance, is the hinge on which the volume and the tradition descending from it both turn.

Q: Why is totality the central category?

Because the essays locate the difference between Marxism and its rivals in where enquiry begins. Rival approaches isolate a domain, economics, law, psychology, and perfect their knowledge of the fragment, whereas this book insists that any fragment receives its significance from its location within the moving ensemble of society. A wage, a statute or a statistic is therefore not denied reality; it is denied self sufficiency. Grasped as a moment of the whole, the same item discloses the relations that produced it and the limits built into it. Totality names that discipline of placement. It is a vantage point adopted before analysis starts, not a quantity of information gathered by the end of it.

Q: Which essay in the book matters most?

Two candidates divide informed judgement, and the answer depends on what a reader needs from the volume. The opening piece, on the meaning of orthodox Marxism, carries the founding redefinition of loyalty as method, and without it the rest of the collection loses its charter. The long central study of reification carries the fame, the influence and the descriptive power, reshaping how generations have thought about consciousness under commodity relations. Examination candidates should secure the opener first because it is short and because questions presuppose it. Readers arriving for the celebrated analysis will find that the opener, taken seriously, changes how the famous essay reads.

Q: What does Lukacs’s later preface to the book say?

Written when its author was in his eighties, for a collected edition, the preface applauds parts of the young man’s performance and dismantles the rest. It preserves the assault on doctrinal Marxism and the description of reified awareness as genuine insights. It withdraws the construction of the proletariat as history’s identical subject and object, classifying that construction as an idealist relapse, a bid to surpass Hegel on Hegel’s own ground. It also separates two notions the essays had merged: the externalising of human powers in objects, which belongs to labour in every society, and the estrangement of those powers under private property, which is historically specific. Reading the essays without this audit is reading an unfinished text.

Q: Why was the book condemned by the Comintern?

The condemnation joined an institutional decision to a stated philosophical objection. Institutionally, the volume appeared just as Lenin’s illness removed him and the International was being reorganised around doctrinal discipline; at its Fifth Congress in 1924, Zinoviev named its author, alongside Karl Korsch, as a voice of revisionism. Philosophically, critics such as Deborin objected that the essays demoted materialism beneath a philosophy of awareness, sidelined the dialectics of nature, and recast the proletariat as a metaphysical subject. Organisational anathema then did the rest: a disputed interpretation was converted into a deviation, and the author answered with public self criticism while privately drafting a defence that stayed unpublished for decades.

Q: Is History and Class Consciousness hard to read?

Its difficulty is concentrated rather than evenly spread, which makes it manageable with the right route. The political pieces are direct, the opening essay is dense with implication but brief, and the celebrated central study opens with a descriptive movement most readers find gripping. The genuine obstacle is that study’s middle movement, a passage through Kant and classical German philosophy conducted at speed and assuming familiarity. Readers who prepare the few philosophical landmarks involved, and who take the volume in the staged order this guide’s map proposes, generally report the reputation exaggerated. Readers who begin at the first page and push straight through often stall, which says more about sequence than about the prose.

Q: What influence did the book have?

Few theoretical works of its century travelled further from a smaller beginning. Suppressed across the communist world, it nonetheless formed the Frankfurt School’s founding generation, shaped the French reconstruction of Marxism through Goldmann and his readers, circulated in the eastern bloc as forbidden literature, and returned in translation during the student movements as a charter for a revolutionary theory independent of Moscow. Its vocabulary migrated into sociology, media research and literary studies, frequently detached from its source. Perhaps its deepest mark is disciplinary: after these essays, questions about awareness, ideology and cultural form stood near the centre of Marxist enquiry instead of at its margins, and the argument about that reordering has never really closed.

Q: Which parts of the book can you skip?

A first reading can safely defer four of the eight essays without losing the argument’s skeleton. The two pieces on Rosa Luxemburg reward specialists and second readings; the short essay on legality and illegality is a tactical jewel that a beginner can admire later; and the essay on historical materialism’s changing function is a subtle reflexive exercise best appreciated once the main positions are secure. The middle movement of the reification study can also be approached on a second pass. What cannot be skipped is the short opening essay, the descriptive first movement of the central study, the essay on class consciousness, and the author’s later preface, which together carry the charter, the phenomenon, the epistemology and the correction.

Q: Which edition and translation should you use?

English language readers should choose the complete translation by Rodney Livingstone, first issued by the Merlin Press and kept in print by university and trade publishers since, in preference to any anthology extract. It is the version scholarship cites, its renderings of the technical vocabulary are the accepted ones, and crucially it includes the author’s preface to the later German edition, without which the volume is incomplete. Printings differ in introductions and pagination rather than in the translated text, so any full Livingstone printing serves. Readers with German may go to the collected works text. What matters in every language is completeness: an edition lacking the retrospective preface withholds the author’s verdict on his own construction.

Q: How does the method claim change what orthodoxy means?

It relocates the test of belonging. Before this redefinition, orthodoxy functioned as assent: the faithful adherent was the one who upheld the authorised findings, and deviation was measured by distance from them. Afterwards, at least within the tradition these essays founded, the adherent is identified by a manner of enquiry, by whether social facts are dissolved into processes, traced through their mediations and placed within the whole. Findings become provisional reports, revisable without loss of standing, while the procedure itself becomes the non negotiable inheritance. The change had a double edge that the essays’ critics seized on: it freed Marxist research to migrate across every domain of culture, and it handed later generations a formula under which awkward evidence could be shed without the theory ever formally losing an argument.

Q: What should a reader separate between the wartime essays and the later collection?

Composition from packaging. Six of the eight pieces began life as separate interventions in journals and party debates between 1919 and 1922, aimed at immediate controversies of a collapsing revolutionary wave, and only two, the reification study and the organisation essay, were composed for the volume itself. Reading the gathered book as a treatise planned from the start mistakes its genre: the systematic impression comes from selection and arrangement performed in Viennese exile, plus the two new studies written to supply the system’s centre and conclusion. Keep the occasional origin of the shorter pieces in view and their unevenness becomes intelligible, while the architecture imposed on them in 1923 can be appreciated as an achievement in its own right.

Q: Why was the book condemned by the movement it defended?

Because its defence took the one form the movement’s new custodians could not license: a redefinition of the doctrine’s identity performed by an insider, from the doctrine’s own resources, at the moment the custodians were converting that doctrine into an instrument of rule. A heresy framed as orthodoxy’s true meaning threatens an emerging orthodoxy more than open opposition does, since it contests the custodians’ title to define the faith. The volume’s specific provocations sharpened the threat: Hegel restored to the centre, consciousness promoted over catechism, and a class subject answerable to philosophy rather than to instruction. The response was therefore disciplinary before it was philosophical, and the anomaly of a servant anathematised for the manner of his service is the episode’s enduring lesson.

Q: How does the essay map order a reading of the collection?

The map in this guide sequences the volume against its own pagination. It sends the reader first to the retrospective preface for orientation, then to the short opening essay where the charter is issued, then into the descriptive opening of the reification study, then to the essay on class consciousness for the epistemology, and only then to the standpoint argument that crowns the central study. Occasional pieces, the densest philosophical movement and the organisation essay are reserved for a second pass, and the preface is revisited at the end as the volume’s second author. Each entry in the map gives a verdict for students, teachers and researchers separately, because the three read for different purposes and a single ranking would mislead all of them.

Q: What separates imputed consciousness from the consciousness workers report?

The location from which each is derived. Reported consciousness is empirical: it is whatever workers, asked or observed at a given moment, actually think, with all its mixture of insight, habit, resentment and resignation. Imputed consciousness is a construction from position: the awareness that would correspond to a full grasp of where the class stands in production and in society, whether or not any worker articulates it. The theory uses the construction as a yardstick against which the reported variety acquires meaning, and assigns to organisation the work of narrowing the interval. Critics object that the yardstick can be wielded against the class it claims to describe, by anyone confident of having performed the imputation correctly, and the objection has never been answered to everyone’s satisfaction.