Henri Lefebvre and the Lukács Question

In 1955 Henri Lefebvre delivered an important lecture on Georg Lukács that was subsequently published in French over thirty years later as Henri Lefebvre, Lukács 1955. That volume also carried an interview between the historian and philosopher of science Patrick Tort and Henri Lefebvre, which revolved around the issues that were raised in the mid-twentieth century lecture. It also included a piece by Tort. As part of our research collaboration on Henri Lefebvre that led to the volume On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography, our attention was cast to this material, so we asked Federico Testa to translate the interview. The interview is now published open access in Historical Materialism as ‘The Lukács Question’ and carries with it our introduction as well as important editorial commentary on the issues it contains.

What was ‘the Lukács Question’? Sometimes referred to as a ‘debate’ or an ‘affair’, the Lukács question was a reference in the 1950s to the resurfacing of attacks on Lukács under the shadow of Stalinism, led by László Rudas (a communist ideologue) and Jószef Révai (a former communist ally and friend of Lukács). What provoked them was, first, a set of essays on Hungarian literature and art that culminated in Literature and Democracy [1947] where Lukács was reproached for making the argument that socialist realism had neither its Balzac nor its Leonardo da Vinci. Second, there was the latest “autocritique” that Lukács published in the journal Társadalmi Szemle [Social Review, 1949] where he defended his arguments against Rudas, especially. Famously, Lukács would say of Rudas:

Marxism-Leninism is indeed the Himalayas of world-views. But that does not make the little rabbit hopping on its summit larger than the elephant of the plains.

The ‘Lukács Question’ thus received international notoriety, including the attention of Eric Hobsbawm, and one view is that it has been a never-ending debate. Originally completed in 1923, Georg Lukács’s book History and Class Consciousness carries an important commentary on the topic in the 1967 Preface. Likewise, the shadow of Stalinism is deliberated upon in Georg Lukács, Record of a Life: An Autobiography (published in 1983). In the volume Literature and Democracy, previously mentioned, Lukács dialectically plays with the notions of ‘poetry’ and ‘party’ to deliver subtle anti-Stalinist criticisms. All these elements can be seen to combine in the build-up to the period preceding Lefebvre’s lecture. It is notable too, that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lefebvre’s own writing was restricted by the French Communist Party, with one book being blocked by its censors. In response, he turned to writing a series of books on French writers and aesthetics. They included studies of Diderot, Rabelais and Alfred de Musset, as well as a major two-volume study of Blaise Pascal.

The import of the translated interview is that it demonstrates Lefebvre’s awareness of the context of the criticism of Lukács and how he draws attention to the renewed attacks against him. The latter’s 1949 essay of ‘self-criticism’ – still untranslated into English – is referred to explicitly by Lefebvre in the interview. In his 1955 lecture, Lefebvre also mentions that he has a dossier containing Rudas’s ‘violent article’ on Lukács as well as notes from his own interviews with Rudas and Revai. The later interview with Tort also deals with a number of significant wider issues, namely Stalinism as a form of state ideology and the stakes of Lukács as a target, the role of consciousness as a criterion of truth and action linked to the Party, the need to defend the category of totality and to deepen dialectics, the fusion of power and knowledge, the domain of literary aesthetics and everyday life, and the necessity to question self-critically the notion of ‘proletarian science’ and its saturation by Stalinist dialectical materialism. Most crucially, Lefebvre works through issues in the interview linked to the social function of philosophy and how philosophers should have the right to err as part of their role in the process of knowledge construction. This is a theme that gets taken up subsequently by Louis Althusser in his introduction to Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko.

As the interview makes clear, Lukács was therefore a controversial figure at the time of Lefebvre’s lecture, and so speaking about his work was seen as a political act. After all, 1955 was two years after the death of Stalin and, as Lefebvre indicates, a few months before Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in early 1956, which denounced the crimes of that era. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and its suppression by the Soviet army was also just around the corner.

The publication of the interview therefore opens an important window onto this era and it is hoped that the publication rejuvenates interest in further works that are still not available in English by both Lefebvre and Lukács. We would like to draw attention to just two documents in this regard. First, Lefebvre’s long 1955 lecture itself on Lukács that remains untranslated into English. It carries much of relevance for those interested in totality and dialectics, not the least interesting engagements with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. Running with the influence of Lukács, Lefebvre refers to Sartre as:

Neither rabbit hoping at the summit, nor elephant in the plain, but perhaps an animal of respectable size on the slope!

Second, Lukács’s essay ‘Criticism and Self-Criticism’ from 1949, written in Hungarian, is important for his defence of his text Literature and Democracy whilst charging figures such as Rudas with taking statements from his work out of context and giving them meaning quite different from their original intention. ‘I baked cakes’, states Lukács in this essay, ‘from any variety of materials; they only picked out the “raisins” they liked’. As Lukács affirms here, casting a watchful eye on Moscow, its influence over literature and socialist realism, and its impact on the political landscape of Hungary was a gap in his critical activity that he would seek to rectify in the future.

The set image is licensed from Wikimedia Commons, Author: Globetrotter19

Author: Stuart Elden

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of books on territory, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Henri Lefebvre. Shakespearean Territories was published by University of Chicago Press in 2018; and Canguilhem by Polity in 2019. He published a four-volume intellectual history of Michel Foucault’s entire career with Polity (2016, 2017, 2021, 2023). He has edited several of Henri Lefebvre’s books in English, including, most recently On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography, with Adam David Morton (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). He is currently writing a history of Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France, and runs a blog at: www.progressivegeographies.com

Author: Adam David Morton

Adam David Morton is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is author of Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (2007); Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (2011), recipient of the 2012 Book Prize of the British International Studies Association (BISA) International Political Economy Group (IPEG); and co-author of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (2018) with Andreas Bieler. The volume Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography was published in 2022 with University of Minnesota Press, co-edited with Stuart Elden.