Tactics and Ethics: 1919-1929

by Georg Lukacs

Overview

Tactics and Ethics collects Georg Lukács’s articles from the most politically active time of his life, a period encompassing his stint as deputy commissar of education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Including his famed essay on parliamentarianism—which earned Lukács the respectful yet severe criticism of Lenin—this book is a treasure chest of valuable insights from one of history’s great political philosophers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781681497
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	01/14/2014
Series:	Radical Thinkers , #8
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Georg Lukács (1885–1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary’s Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Table of Contents

Introduction Rodney Livingstone vii

Tactics and Ethics

Tactics and Ethics 3

'Intellectual Workers' and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership 12

What is Orthodox Marxism? 19

Party and Class 28

Early Writings 1919-1922

Speech at the Young Workers' Congress 39

'Law and Order' and Violence 41

The Role of Morality in Communist Production 48

The Question of Parliamentarianism 53

The Moral Mission of the Communist Party 64

Opportunism and Putschism 71

The Crisis of Syndicalism in Italy 80

The Question of Educational Work 91

Spontaneity of the Masses, Activity of the Party 95

Organization and Revolutionary Initiative 106

The Politics of Illusion - Yet Again 117

Reviews 1924-1925

Bernstein's Triumph: Notes on the essays written in honour of Karl Kautsky's seventieth birthday 127

N. Bukharin: Historical Materialism 134

Karl August Wittfogel: The Science of Bourgeois Society 143

The New Edition of Lassalle's Letters 147

Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics 181

Blum Theses 1928-1929 227

Index of Names 255

Editorial Reviews

An invaluable contribution to an understanding of Lukács’s work in the English-speaking world.” —Tribune
 
“Adds a new dimension to what English readers know about Lukács as a philosopher and literary critic …  includes the great theoretical essays on Moses Hess and Lassalle.” —Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher