Georg Lukács’s Destruction of Reason

Abstract

In 1952, the Marxist philosopher and cultural critic Georg Lukács published a huge polemic against post-Hegelian German philosophy and sociology from Kierkegaard to Heidegger. The Destruction of Reason was unsparing in its contention that with almost no exceptions, the post-Hegelian idealist tradition prepared the ground for imperialist, even fascist thought. While Arthur Schopenhauer, neo-Hegelians such as Ranke and Wilhelm Dilthey, and the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre come in for a share of criticism, the main culprits are Friedrich Nietzsche and Martín Heidegger. These writers are accused, in turn, of introducing irrationalism into social and philosophical thought, pronounced antagonism to the idea of progress in history, an aristocratic view of the “masses,” and, consequently, hostility to socialism, which in its classic expressions are movements for popular democracy—especially, but not exclusively, the expropriation of most private property in terms of material production.