Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute

Product Description
In
Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, Daniel Andrés López reassembles Lukács's philosophy of praxis on a Hegelian basis, as a conceptual-historical totality, both defending him and proposing an unprecedented, immanent critique that raises problems for Marxian philosophy as a whole.
Review
"For a long time Lukács's detractors presented his early Marxist work as an idealist and subjectivist distortion of revolutionary Marxism. According to this critique, Lukács remained too much a Hegelian, willing to substitute the proletariat for the world spirit. Recent studies question this standard interpretation by pointing out neo-Kantian and phenomenological elements in Lukács's early philosophy that significantly deviate from Hegelianism. Instead, Daniel Lopez radically reverses the interpretative focus: What if the young Lukács was too less a Hegelian? Adopting a higher, Hegelian philosophical standpoint, Lopez's meticulous scholarly study offers a charitable reading of
History and Class Consciousness and, at the same time, criticizes its theoretical limitations. A much needed, substantial contribution to an emerging critical discussion on Lukács and Hegelian Marxism." - Konstantinos Kavoulakos,
University of Thessaloniki

"
Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, by Daniel Andrés López, is an outstanding piece of scholarship. His knowledge of Lukács' writings and of the vast secondary literature is simply impressive. As a philosophical reading of
History and Class Consciousness (HCC), López proposes a much deeper and more systematic interpretation than most, if not all, previous works on Georg Lukács. The result is a remarkably rich and dense body of philosophical reflection; the whole is a brilliant essay in high theory, but with a strong historical and political dimension. It is a polemical piece, and makes a powerful refutation of the innumerable commentators who have criticised HCC - including Lukács himself, in his (in)famous 1967 "self-criticism". At the same time, it is not an un-critical piece, since López aims at an immanent critique of Lukács on the basis of his own viewpoint. While I may not agree with all its conclusions,
Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute is a bold and original re-interpretation of Lukacs, which appears as a major contribution for rethinking the Marxist philosophy of praxis." - Michael Löwy,
Centre national de la recherché scientifique

"A fine study written with a Lukácsian attentiveness to the give-and-take of subjective and objective life - Daniel Lopez is touchingly sympathetic and incisively critical in equal parts." - Esther Leslie,
Birkbeck
About the Author
Daniel Andrés López, Ph.D. (2018), La Trobe University, is an Honorary Research Associate with the
Thesis Eleven Forum for Social and Political Theory. He is a regular contributor to the journal
Historical Materialism. His writing also appears regularly in
Jacobin Magazine.