Dialectics of Reification: The Origin and the Meaning of Lukács's Social Philosophy

In this work, I argue that Lukács’s early Marxist philosophy is characterized by a continuous struggle to mediate between theoretical and practical categories of thought. I argue that his dialectics should be considered neither as a traditional Marxist critique of Hegel nor a “neo-Idealist” recovery of Hegelian dialectics contra Marx, but rather a novel conception of dialectics informed by both approaches. Throughout, I refer to this methodological standpoint as a dialectical epistemology of the totality, referring to the how Lukács adopts a middle position between the dialectics of Hegel and Marx. Moreover, I claim that behind Lukács’s “identical subject–object” lies a historicist-praxialist conviction that practical forms of knowledge remain unintelligible as long as laws of nature, with their atemporal validity, immutability, and explanatory efficiency within the domain of natural sciences, are taken as a vantage point for interrogating innovative social agency. For Lukács, social phenomena, including their interrelation, development, and their relationship with the natural, should first be conceptualized on the ground of historically shaped categories of praxis-oriented philosophy. For Lukács, such categories are in turn not given as pre-constituted but rather emerge from a practically engaged desire to comprehend the social world holistically in pursuit of an emancipated society. In this sense, I believe that Lukács’s dialectical epistemology of the totality offers a valuable perspective, on the one hand, into the relationship between social norms, rules, and institutions, and, on the other hand, into social change.