Page 77 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 68

Contemporary Cultural Theory

Franco-Rumanian disciple, the sociologist of literature, Lucien
Goldmann (1913–70); and of Lukács’ heirs in the Budapest School,
notably Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér (1933–94). It was true also
of the Italian revolutionary leader Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937),
and of the French existential Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80)
(cf. Goldmann, 1964; Heller & Fehér, 1986; Sartre, 1976). At its
origin in the early 1920s, this stress on agency and consciousness
provided both Lukács and Gramsci with the means to underwrite
a leftist rejection of the political fatalism implicit in economic
determinism, in favour of the immediate possibilities of revolu-
tion. As Gramsci observed of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917,
it was a revolution against Capital (Gramsci, 1977, pp. 34–7). But
as the moment of revolutionary optimism failed, as Lukács came
to terms with Stalinist Communism and Gramsci struggled to
produce the Prison Notebooks in an Italian Fascist prison, so the
emphasis shifted towards an analysis of the system-supportive
nature of cultural legitimations.

Georg Lukács
Where scientific socialism theorised the relationship between
culture and society in terms of the base/superstructure model,
western Marxism sought to understand both base and super-
structure as particular moments within a contradictory totality.
Thus for Lukács, the revolutionary principle in Marx, as in Hegel,
was that of the dialectic, ‘the concept of totality, the subordina-
tion of every part to the whole unity of history and thought’
(Lukács, 1971, pp. 27–8). For the Lukács of History and Class
Consciousness, this notion of totality provided the positive pole
against which to develop the central, critical concept of reifica-
tion. Here Lukács expanded upon the discussion of commodity
fetishism in Capital, reading it in the light both of Hegel and of
Weber’s rationalisation thesis (but not that of the still unpublished
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts), to develop what was, in
effect, a version of the theory of alienation. By ‘reification’ Lukács
meant something similar to what Marx had meant by ‘commod-
ity fetishism’. But Lukács generalised the notion beyond the
commodity relation, insisting that capitalism was itself a system

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