Lukács in Plain English is a blunt, readable guide to György Lukács—one of the twentieth century’s most influential and most misunderstood Marxist thinkers. It traces his path from Austro-Hungarian bourgeois origins through revolution, exile, arrest, and life under communist rule, showing how his ideas were shaped by defeat, compromise, and survival. Along the way, it explains his key concepts—reification, totality, class consciousness, dialectics, realism, and the party—in straightforward language, focusing on what problems they were meant to solve, why they once seemed persuasive, and why some of them aged badly in practice. Major works such as The Theory of the Novel and History and Class Consciousness are treated as historical interventions rather than sacred texts, and Lukács is compared with Hegel, Marx, Korsch, Gramsci, Sartre, and the Frankfurt School. The book also follows his afterlife in Hungary, the Budapest School, and the strange career of “reification” as it escaped Marxism and spread into modern critical theory. No prior background required—just curiosity and a tolerance for ideas that refuse to stay polite.
