"The Specificity of the Aesthetic" by Georg Lukacs,1963

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A Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic whose work inaugurated the turn toward Hegelian Marxism in the West. With History and Class Consciousness ( 1923 ), Lukács challenged the scientific positivism and historical determinism prevalent in Marxist thought since Friedrich Engels and dominant in Communist Party doctrine of the period. Moreover, he reconstructed Karl Marx 's concept of alienation as the fundamental condition of humanity in capitalist society.
Alienation had played an important role in Marx's early work, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, but these writings remained unpublished and were all but unknown until the early 1930s. For Lukács, alienation highlighted the crucial role of working-class consciousness: in capitalist society, he argued, only the position of the working class offered a standpoint for critique radical enough to break through the reification and false consciousness of capitalist relations. Only the working class—or theorists adopting the standpoint of the working class—was capable of synthesizing theory and practice into the totality of praxis, which alone could achieve a true grasp of history and bring about revolutionary change. Against prevailing Marxist theory, Lukács argued that the contradictions of capitalism would not in and of themselves create the conditions necessary for revolution. In addition, he argued that the proletariat had only in certain cases achieved this necessary consciousness. His suggestion that revolutionary change depended on theory as well as practical experience opened the door to Leninist interpretations of the role of the Communist Party (see Leninism).

Lukács's views were apostasy to much of the Communist orthodoxy but found a very sympathetic ear in the work of Frankfurt school critical theorists and French existentialists. His literary criticism also left a complex and influential legacy: Early works such as Theory of the Novel ( 1916 ) provide a broad and decidedly un-Marxist account of the fundamentally alienated quality of modernity, which the novel tries to recuperate. His later work represents an attempt to theorize the relationship between narrative and historical processes; The Historical Novel (1937), in particular, is notable both for its veiled critique of Soviet realism and its attack on modernism.

Lukács spent much of the 1930s and 1940s in the Soviet Union, including a short period in prison. After the war, he returned to Hungary and served briefly as Minister of Culture under the Nagy government until the Soviet invasion of 1956 . Recurrently, he seems to have suppressed the nonorthodox side of his intellectual views in favor of remaining loyal to the Communist Party. This resulted in several public retractions and a number of internal tensions in his work.

Lukács's other major works include The Young Hegel ( 1948 ), The Meaning of Contemporary Realism ( 1963 ), and The Specificity of the Aesthetic ( 1963 ).