Portrait of the Young Lukács

Georg Lukács liked to say that Marxism is the Himalayas of thought. But, he warned, a hare atop the Himalayas ought not to imagine himself taller than an elephant in the valley below.

The most fertile Marxist mind of our times was surely that of Lukács, and it was a mind that matured beside many of the elephants that roamed Central European intellectual valleys in the early twentieth century. Its most brilliant product remains his 1923 classic History and Class Consciousness...