Danubian culture
Our Review of Books begins this week with two discussions of the politics of Georg Lukacs, who is fashionable in England for the same reasons as Noam Chomsky, whom I mentioned a fortnight ago. Lukacs is a formidable Hungarian Marxist whose in- trinsic merits, as a literary and philosophical critic, would not by themselves have marked him out from many of his contemporaries in Budapest and Vienna in the early years of the century. The reason why some of Lukdcs's works are now being translated in- to English for the first time, long after they were written, is that the radical left wishes to persuade the liberal left that it is possible to believe in the total transformation of society and consciousness without being the- oretically committed to the brutality of Stalinist practice.
The point made by Tibor Szamuely and Elie Kedourie is not only that all attempts at total transformation will probably produce Stalinist brutality but that total transforma- tion needs a form of party-dominated totali- tarianism which Lukacs justifies in theory.
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