The Ontology of Social Being, Volume 3: Labour

by György Lukács

Description currently unavailable

Genres: Philosophy, History, Sociology

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1980

About the author

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian and critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.

His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

Reviews

[Osman Tümay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zor metin; çevirmen ne yapsın?

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will have to reread this. The Ontology is in desperate need of a full translation as well as editing, introductions and even annotations to make Lukacs' meaning more clear and less word salad. The main points are condensed by Lukacs elsewhere, name that labour is a special relationship forged by mankind through its use of tools and "teleological positing," actions with a purpose. Labour, in the sense of the application of effort with teleological purpose, is the model for increasingly complex tasks as the complexity of human social being develops, thus labour is the model for social practice.