In 1949, a few years after his return to Budapest following a quarter of a century’s exile, Georg Lukacs found himself under vigorous attack by the press and the party hierarchs who accused him, among other things, of “revisionism” and “objectively” serving imperialism. That same year saw the publication of an article on “Goethe and the French Revolution” by his Rumanian-French disciple Lucien Goldmann, which argued a...