Young Georg Lukács as a Crisis Thinker. Subjectivism and the Problem of Form

This paper argues that the work of the young Lukács can be read as a wide-ranging mediation on what I am labelling ›the crisis of subjectivism‹. Reading Lukács this way allows us to see important continuities between his pre-Marxist and Marxist period. Most significantly, it allows us to see how positing the proletariat as a ›subject-object‹ of history and developing a crisis diagnosis of bourgeois society, allowed Lukács to bring the fruits of his earlier intellectual labour under conceptual control.