History and Class Consciousness

History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (German: Geschichte und Klassenbewu tsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik) is a 1923 book by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, in which Lukács re-emphasizes Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s influence on Karl Marx, analyses the concept of class consciousness, and attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism. History and Class Consciousness, which helped to create Western Marxism, is the book for which Lukács is best known, and some of his pronouncements have become famous. Nevertheless, History and Class Consciousness was condemned in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and Lukács later repudiated its ideas, and came to believe that in it he had confused Hegel’s concept of alienation with that of Marx. It has been suggested that the concept of reification as employed in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) shows the strong influence of History and Class Consciousness, though such a relationship remains disputed. (wikipedia.org)