Idealism and the Annihilation of History: Georg Lukács’s Antinomies

• In Event: Critical Theory and Historicity: (Re)imagining an Emancipated Future

Abstract

In “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Georg Lukács appeals to Marxism to reinterpret Weber’s categories of modernity as the intellectual expression of a condition of social domination. For Weber, the process of rationalization that defines the modern world succeeds as a form of technical rationality at the cost of disenchanting it, evacuating it of value and leaving us morally adrift. Weber’s work captures a profound loss of historical meaning that results from rationalization. In reinterpreting this condition as a result of social domination in his “reification” essay, Lukács appeals to Marx to argue that the proletariat can overcome these impasses and realize a historical mission. Where the bourgeois encounter the world as a readymade thing available for rational-calculative contemplation, the proletariat’s laboring activity puts them in direct contact with their capacity to fashion and transform the world. Accounting for the social-material basis of rationalization thus shows, for Lukács, that it is a product of our collective agency and a problem we can collectively solve. Lukács intends for his materialist analysis to show how revolutionary praxis can overcome the impasses of modernity and recuperate a sense of meaning within history. In so doing, he links the materialist critique of rationalization’s ideological character to the recuperation of historical meaning through political action.
How are we to assess Lukács’s recuperation of historical meaning from the perspective of a present in which his emancipatory ambitions never materialized? In recent years, theorists have paid increasing attention to the critique of reification to gain new insights for the critique of capitalism, even as his account of praxis and the de-reified society remain variously mysterious or untenable. Reading Lukács against his sources in Weber and the Neo-Kantians, this paper provides an ‘against the grain’ interpretation of the reification essay to recuperate historical contingency, rather than teleology, as a generative condition for creative agency and social transformation. Reading Lukács against himself, this paper proposes an alternative linkage between the critique of reification and the recovery of social praxis.

Author

• William Levine, University of Chicago