The Development of Lukacs' Realism
ISBN-13: 9781570273971
Contributor(s): Silvia Federici
Subject: Philosophy
Publisher Imprint: Minor Compositions
Publication Date: 13-04-2027
Format: Paperback
Availability: Not yet published
£20.00
About the book
Written in 1980 and never published, The Development of Lukacs' Realism reveals a lesser known early chapter in the intellectual trajectory of Silvia Federici. Best known for her groundbreaking feminist analyses of capitalism, reproduction, and social struggle, Federici appears here as a young philosopher engaging deeply with the traditions of Marxism, German idealism, and aesthetic theory. Taking Gyorgy Lukacs as her central figure, Federici challenges the standard narrative that divides his work into sharply opposed phases: early idealism, revolutionary Marxism, and later aesthetic realism. Against this account, she argues for a striking continuity across Lukacs' career, tracing how his commitment to realism persists through shifting philosophical vocabularies and political commitments. What emerges is a rigorous and unsparing critique of Lukacs' realism as an unresolved attempt to reconcile absolute values, historical meaning, and the role of consciousness within modern capitalist society. Moving from early literary essays to History and Class Consciousness and the late aesthetic writings, Federici situates Lukacs within the broader crisis of bourgeois culture in the twentieth century: the fragmentation of life, the loss of totality, and the search for meaning in art, philosophy, and revolution. Her analysis foregrounds the metaphysical tensions that haunt Lukacs' thought - between subjectivity and objectivity, form and content, ethics and history - while raising broader questions about Marxist philosophy, aesthetics, and the legacy of Western Marxism itself. At once a study of Lukacs and a diagnosis of a wider intellectual tradition, The Development of Lukacs' Realism invites readers to reconsider the foundations of Marxist aesthetics and the unresolved contradictions that continue to shape critical theory today.