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••• John Scott •••

generally orthodox position. Indeed, Lichtheim has remarked, only a little unfairly,
that his work on aesthetics and literary theory during the 1930s (Lukacs, 1937, and
various essays later published as Lukacs, 1946) ‘are the work of a man who had per-
formed a kind of painless lobotomy upon himself, removed part of his brain and
replaced it by slogans from the Moscow propagandists’ (Lichtheim, 1970: 83–4).
Lukács returned to Hungary in 1945, and the main works that he published after
his return were studies that he had been preparing through the 1930s and 1940s.
These were a study of Hegel (Lukács, 1948), and a massive history of German thought
since Schelling (Lukács, 1953), in which he criticized Heidegger, Jaspers, and the
German sociological tradition in the name of Lenin’s representational realism. He
also produced a study of modernism (Lukács, 1958), and, in the early 1960s, a two-
volume study of aesthetics. These works were attempts to rebuild the approach to
aesthetics that he had set out in his very earliest works, but from a more orthodox
Marxist basis. His final work, the outcome of his reflections on the implications for
Marxism of Marx’s early manuscripts and Lenin’s philosophical notebooks, was The
Ontology of Social Being, which was published only after his death (Lukács, 1971a). 7

Marxist Humanism at Frankfurt

The core ideas of Marxist humanism as a method of cultural analysis were set out in
Lukács’s key work. It was developed in its classic form, however, by a group of
German academic Marxists who took up Lukács’s ideas and enlarged them into a sys-
tematic social theory. These were the theorists of the Institute of Social Research at
the University of Frankfurt.
The Institute was formed in 1923 with an institutional existence quite separate
from the Department of Sociology (then headed by Franz Oppenheimer) and the
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other academic departments of the university. Formed with funding from Felix
Weil, the son of a wealthy merchant, its aim was to carry out and promote radical
social research. Weil, a committed Marxist who had helped to finance the publica-
tion of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, promoted the Institute in order to
further Marxist research on socialism and the labour movement. Karl Korsch, then at
Jena but soon to be enmeshed in the controversies surrounding his and Lukács’s
work, actively supported the Institute’s research. Under its first Director, Carl
Grüneberg, this interdisciplinary group of Marxist scholars had a distinctly Austro-
Marxist focus: Grüneberg had studied at Vienna under both Hilferding and Renner.
Its members and work in the early years included Henryck Grossman on the eco-
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nomics of monopoly and finance capital, Karl Wittfogel on Chinese society, Franz
Borkenau on feudal and bourgeois world-views, and Friedrich Pollock on the Soviet
planned economy. Members of the Institute of Social Research worked closely with
Ryazanov’s editing of the Marx archives in Moscow.
Grüneberg’s retirement in 1929 precipitated a shift in focus for the Institute, which
became both more philosophical and more concerned with cultural issues. The

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