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A Defence of History and Class Consciousness:Tailism and the Dialectic
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A crucial, fascinating and intense lost text
In the mid 1920s Lukács wrote a sustained and passionate response to Stalin’s onslaught on his earlier seminal work History and Class Consciousness. Unpublished at the time, Lukács himself thought that the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukács’s oeuvre.
Reviews
Lukács’s polemic tells of a dogmatic, corrupt, ultimately murderous period in the transition from Stalinism ... it tells also of the passion, so vividly Judaic and Central European, for the life and clash of ideas.
We almost hear Lenin himself murmuring, it happens that for eighty years no Marxist has ever properly understood History and Class Consciousness! Splendidly translated here by Esther Leslie and contextualized by an introduction by John Rees and a conclusion by Slavoj Žižek (both of them stimulating and suggestive).