I read the discussion about the Marxist theories of Fascism by Matthew Sharpe and Matthew King with interest. In their essay, they made three references to my Science and Society article about Lukacs’s analysis of irrationalism, but without quoting anything I actually said. The follow-ing are some of my thoughts about Lukacs’s discussion of philosophy and literature concerning the ideology of irrationalism, which in Lukacs’s view, led to fascism. My comments are adapted from my Science and Society article, “The Politics of Epistemology."1
Lukacs vs. the Frankfurt School
I agree with Sharpe and King that the best known neo-Marxist analysis of the relationship between irrationalism and the rise of’ fascism is that of the Frankfurt School, particularly as expressed in the writings of Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. The Eclipse of Reason by Horkheimer (1974) and Dialectic of Enlightenment by Hor-kheimer and Adorno (1972) are the most representative texts of this point of view. Although Lukacs was familiar with the work of the
Frankfurt School, he did not develop a systematic critique of their point of view. It is safe to assert that he viewed the work of Horkheimer and Adorno as grounded in the irrationalist traditions of’ German philosophy.
The Destruction of Reason was published in 1952. Lukacs’s aim was to articulate the struggle between irrationalist and rationalist ten-dencies in philosophy and social theory in the context of the cold war. In his view, many intellectuals were still operating with an irra-tionalist epistemology. This was true for both cold war liberals and neo-Marxist social theorists. Consider the following remark addressed to the intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School:
A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” which I described in con-nection with my critique of Schopenhauer as a beautiful hotel, equipped with absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of’ the subtle com-forts offered. (Lukacs 1971: 22)
Here, Lukacs asserted, through an analogy, a connection between the Frankfurt School and the irrationalist epistemology and pessimism of the pre-fascist traditions in German philosophy. In Lukacs’s view the Frankfurt School and their followers in the postwar period operated with what he referred to as “left ethics and right epistemology” (Lukacs 1971: 21).
In other words, their commitment to human emancipation was grounded in a purely utopian conception of the role of theory. This pos-ition did not allow for the discussion of socialism in the real world. Their theory of domination was based on an essentialist myth of the identity between human and external nature. The connection Horkhei-mer and Adorno posit between the Enlightenment and the rise of fascism is dependent upon an abstract conception of the domination over nature as the principle of modern totalitarianism. This way of for-mulating the problem makes organized political struggle against capit-alism irrelevant to the project of human emancipation. It leads to an attitude of passive resignation, despair, or elitism.
The Critique of Philosophical Irrationalism
After 1930 Georg Lukacs withdrew from administrative party work and wrote on philosophy and literature. His primary aim was to articulate the progressive elements within bourgeois culture in opposition to the reactionary tendencies which had become dominant. During the period from the 1930s through the 1950s, he developed an analysis of bourgeois irrationalism, the most important texts being: The Destruction of Reason and The Young Hegel.
Consider the following passage from the 1954 preface to a new edition of The Young Hegel:
My account of the development of the young Hegel supplements in many respects the ideas I have attempted to formulate in my other studies of the history of German philosophy and literature. Above all the present work con-tains a positive vision to contrast with the “classical” age of irrationalism as presented in my work The Destruction of Reason. In that book I examined the irrationalist tradition established by Schelling and his successors. Here I shall be concerned with the critique and overcoming of irrationalism as seen from Hegel’s side. (Lukacs 1975: xi)
The polemical aim of The Young Hegel, written in 1938 but not pub-lished until 1948, was to free Hegel from prevailing irrationalist interpretations by pro-Nazi philosophers in Germany.
Lukacs’s analysis of irrationalism combines an analysis of the social function of ideas with an immanent critique. For Lukacs, this approach was necessary in order to prevent lapsing into either mechan-istic materialism or idealism. In his view, an analysis which is based solely on the social function of ideas risks the danger of mechanistic materialism, and one which is based solely on an immanent critique risks the danger of idealism. His conception of a dialectical analysis assumes the methodological necessity of the interaction between phil-osophy and historical development.
Lukacs traced the development of irrationalist tendencies within bourgeois philosophy. These were understood as arising from the sociohistorical conditions of’ class struggle:
the first important period of modern irrationalism has its origin in the struggle against the idealist dialectical-historical concept of progress. It constitutes the road from the feudal reaction against the French Revolution to bourgeois hos-tility to progress. (Lukacs 1981: 7)
Philosophically, class struggle was expressed, on the level of epistem-ology, in polemics against the idealist dialectic of Hegel in the period before 1848 and against historical materialism after 1848. In his view, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were the leading exponents of philosophical irrationalism in the 19th century.
For Lukacs, Schelling’s philosophy represented a romantic reaction against science and the bourgeois conception of democracy. This was evident in Schelling’s conception of intuition as the primary source of all knowledge and in his elitist notion of the inheritance of genius as an explanatory principle of philosophical development. In his later philosophy this tendency led directly to mysticism.
After the aborted revolutions of 1848 philosophical irrationalism was exemplified and popularized in the writings of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard irra-tionalism took the form of polemics against Hegelianism, the develop-ment of a pessimistic ontology of social isolation, and the denial of the very possibility of sociohistorical progress. In Nietzsche, whose philos-ophy Lukacs believed proved to be influential as a precursor of fascism, irrationalism took the form of an anti-democratic ontology and the sub-stitution of myth-making for historical analysis.
In the imperialist period between 1870 and World War I the leading philosophical tendency was that of vitalism. Lukacs considers Dilthey, Spengler and Scheler as the main representatives of this philo-sophical trend in Germany. By vitalism, Lukacs meant the substitution of a mythical conception of life for a concept of socio-historical exist-ence. This philosophy led, in his view, to the false opposition between culture and civilization as the primary contradiction.
Philosophical polemics against democracy and socialism often took a highly abstract form. They opposed the notion of human pro-gress and the possibility of’ knowledge. Lukacs furnished an outline of the basic irrationalist tendencies in modern philosophy from Schel-ling to Heidegger:
The disparagement of understanding and reason, an uncritical glorification of intuition, an aristocratic epistemology, the rejection of sociohistorical progress, the creating of myths and so on are motives we can find in virtually any irrationalist (Lukacs 1981: 10). Lukacs’s primary criticism of Heidegger was not for his famous speech in support of Hitler. It was instead against his ontology of the chaos of human existence expressed philosophically in Being and Time.
The political problem the analysis of irrationalism addressed was the rise of fascism. Lukacs’s argued that philosophical irrationalism provided the ideological grounds for fascism and that the despair implicit in irrationalism provided the social-psychological connection between the masses and the ideology of National Socialism. In his view, the racial theories of Chamberlain and Rosenberg were grounded in the irrationalist epistemology of vitalism.
Lukacs’s argument was that the epistemology of vitalism provided the irrationalist grounds for a racist theory of history. He argued that Rosenberg’s theory was a synthesis of earlier racist theories with the subjectivist epistemology of vitalism.
Lukacs’s analysis of irrationalism was written for Western intellec-tuals. Although he argued that the irrationalist tendencies in philos-ophy were a response to the sociohistorical conditions of class struggle, it was clear to Lukacs that they were not the only possible response. In other words, his argument was that it was still possible for intellectuals to avoid lapsing into irrationalist epistemology through a philosophical commitment to the notion of human progress and the subject-object dialectic.
In his studies of literature after 1930, Lukacs conceives ideology as the world-view underlying an author’s work. Although he rejected a mechan-istic conception of the substructure-superstructure relation, he nevertheless asserted a determinism in which ideology has its origin in conditions of life. In his view, nihilism, cynicism, despair and angst are spontaneous products of capitalist society. He suggested that bourgeois intellectuals have the responsibility to struggle against these tendencies of modern life and that they can do this by committing themselves to the practice of reason and the ideal of human progress (Lukacs 1963: 90–91). The problem with this position is that it fails to theorize the relationship between social determin-ism and the moral choice imputed to intellectuals.
This is the context in which Lukacs formulated the categories of’ naturalism, modernism, and critical realism. It is in terms of this pro-blematic that critical realism is said to be preferable to both naturalism and modernism. Naturalism is criticized by Lukacs even when it expresses overt sympathies for the oppressed, as in the writings of Emile Zola and Upton Sinclair. It is criticized because it divorces sub-jective experience from its social conditions and formulates a mechan-istic conception of social causation (Lukacs 1972a: 86–89). Literary naturalism is analogous to positivism in its inability to formulate a dia-lectical relationship between subjective experience and the external world (Lukacs 1963: 119).
In Lukacs’s view literary modernism also produces the separation between subjective experience and its social conditions. It makes a fetish of the self and denies the existence of the objective world. Mod-ernist writers (Joyce, Kafka and Beckett are typical examples) they sub-stitute a conception of the absolute self and deny both history and personal biography (Lukacs 1963: 21). In separating subjective experi-ence from the social world, they express a static conception of subjec-tivity, and the dissolution of personality is represented as an eternal human condition (Lukacs 1963: 26). The consequence of this world view is a conception of the world as fundamentally chaotic and unin-telligible, which leads to a sense of despair and hopelessness; the possi-bility of human progress is no longer conceivable.
Naturalism and modernism are rejected by Lukacs because they deny the interaction between experience and social reality. The former reifies objectivity and the latter reifies subjectivity. In both cases, the possibility of social development and progress through col-lective action is denied. Naturalism provides a mechanistic conception of the evolution of society, and modernism excludes the possibility of bettering the human condition altogether. Lukacs’s alternative is the subject-object dialectic which he believes receives expression in critical realism:
True great realism thus depicts man and society as complete entities, instead of showing merely one or the other of their aspects. Measured by this criterion, artistic trends determined by either exclusive intro-spection or exclusive extra-version equally impoverish and destroy reality. (Lukacs 1972a: 6)
What is central for Lukacs, to critical realism is its ability to depict social existence as a historical totality:
Perspective, in this concrete form, is central to our problem. For there is an inti-mate connection between a writer’s ability to create lasting human types (the real criterion of literary achievement) and his allegiance to an ideology which allows a belief in social development. Any attempt to substitute a static immo-bilism for the dynamic movement of history must reduce the significance, the universality of the typology in question. (Lukacs 1963: 57)
For Lukacs, perspective refers to a principle of selection, which enables an author to depict chaos as historically grounded. It is the presence of this perspective which makes Thomas Mann in Lukacs’s view superior to all of the modernist writers of the 20th century (Lukacs 1964).
Central to this discussion is the issue of the moral responsibility of intellectuals. Lukacs argues that intellectuals can make a choice between reason and irrationalism, between progress and decadence. They either allow themselves to be overwhelmed by chaos, cynicism and despair or they resist these tendencies in modern life by commit-ting themselves to reason. While modernist writers submit to the deca-dent forces which are propelled by monopoly capitalism, critical realists express through literature the will to resist and overcome both personal angst and social chaos. What is of fundamental impor-tance for Lukacs is the relationship between social crisis and an author’s moral and political commitments.
In a polemical review of The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Adorno 1977), Adorno suggested that Lukacs had abandoned his own reason in the analysis of modern philosophy contained in The Destruction of Reason. After praising the cultural criticism of the young Lukacs, Adorno proceeded to attack him for what he took to be the dogmatic rejection of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy and modernist literature. Against the view of Lukacs, Adorno continued to assert that the autonomy of modern art was the one remaining criti-cal moment within bourgeois culture. Lukacs had rejected both the conception of the autonomy of artistic production and the idea that there was anything critical in the perspective of writers like James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. Lukacs’ defense of Critical Realism against both Naturalism and Modernism depended on an appeal to a subject/object dialectic embodied in literary narrative.
Many who continue to write within the tradition of Critical Theory have accepted both Adorno’s philosophy of aesthetics and his attitude toward Lukacs’ alleged “Stalinism.” When Adorno read The Destruc-tion of Reason, he failed to place it within its proper historical context: the rise of Fascism and the early years of the Cold War. His criticism of Lukacs involved a reading which abstracted statements, arguments and conclusions from the immediacy of a complex and desperate pol-itical struggle. He read The Destruction of Reason as if it were a poorly written history of European philosophy rather than as an intervention with a specific project.
Lukacs’ defense of the Enlightenment followed the line of his aes-thetic and epistemological conception of realism. The critique of irra-tionalism, expressed in The Destruction of Reason and in his literary studies from the 1930s through the 1950s, can be understood as a defense of the possibility of knowledge and human progress. Lukacs’ writings provide more than a history of ideas; they place these ideas within a historical context. He discusses the decay of bourgeois intellec-tual and moral standards in terms of both epistemology and aesthetics and emphasizes the relationship between intellectual production and the reality of class struggle.
In The Destruction of Reason, Lukacs traced the development of bourgeois thought in three fields: philosophy, sociology and racial theory. If we include his literary studies, the story is told a fourth time. Lukacs’ analysis of irrationalism was written in the name of pro-gress and a common humanity.
I do not believe that Lukacs intended to suggest that sociohistorical progress is inevitable, nor did he wish to defend a positivist conception of science. His aim was to defend Marxism against bourgeois irration-alism and to assert the primacy of the subject-object dialectic in histori-cal analysis.
His philosophical writings were an attempt to clarify questions of epistemology. If we consider Lukacs’s philosophical analysis and his literary criticism of the 1930s, it is easy to see that the problem of knowledge was central. He rejected both mechanistic materialism and idealism. His solution was that the interaction between subject and object constitutes the process of historical development.
Lukacs rejected naturalism in favor of critical realism (Lukacs 1971: xxxvii). The former, he said, produced a photographic image of social reality, and the latter portrayed the dynamic process of historical development. He argued that literary modernism annihilated any image of external reality. A similar claim was leveled against most of modern philosophy. Lukacs’s faith in human progress and the future development of socialism was grounded in philosophical arguments concerning the nature of historical reality and the capacity for human understanding and action.
For Lukacs, the subject–object dialectic is a philosophical presup-position of the nature of social reality and a principle guiding social analysis, preventing tendencies toward either idealism or mechanistic materialism. His conceptions of progress, historical development, and the dialectic do not constitute a new philosophy. They are an important contribution to the clarification of the principles enunciated by Marx. For Lukacs, the theoretical problem connecting political and philo-sophical questions is the role intellectuals play during a period of gen-eralized crisis. This is a problem which was insufficiently dealt with by the Frankfurt School. Lukacs’s analysis may shed light on both the general characteristics of irrationalism and the political dangers associated with it.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1977. “Reconciliation under Duress,” Aesthetics and Poli-tics, Ernst Bloch et al. New York: Verso.
Horkheimer, Max. 1974 Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum Books. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. 1972 Dialectic of Enlightenment New York: Continuum Books.
Lukacs, Georg. 1963. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. London: Merlin Press.
Lukacs, Georg. 1964a. Essays on Thomas Mann. London: Merlin Press.
Lukacs, Georg. 1971. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lukacs, Georg. 1972a. Studies in European Realism. London: Merlin Press. Lukacs, Georg. 1972b. Political Writings. London: New Left Books.
Lukacs, Georg. 1975. The Young Hegel. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lukacs, Georg. 1981. The Destruction of Reason. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Huma-nities Press.
1. Science and Society, Vol. XLIX, No. 4, 1985. Matthew Sharpe and Matthew King, “Reclaiming the Differences: Three Neglected Marxian Theories of Fascism in Lukács, Marcuse, and Bloch,” Socialism and Democracy 36, no. 3 (September 2, 2022): 36–62, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2023.2201803.
