Date: 09 Jun 1996 14:10:14 EST From: "SCOTT R MCLEMEE" <MCLEMEE-AT-MAIL.LOC.GOV> Subject: LUKACS, DESTRUCTION OF REASON Well, I tried to read THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON but gave up; thought it was ghastly crap, the sort of thing that gives Marxist polemic a bad name. Theodor Adorno puts it much more cogently in an essay: "It was probably in his THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON that the destruction of Lukacs' own reason manifested itself most crassly. In that work the certified dialectician lumped together , most undialectically, all the irrationalist tendencies in recent philosophy under the category of reaction and fascism, without pausing to consider that in those tendencies -- in contrast to academic idealism -- thought was combating the very same reification of existence and thinking that Lukacs was in the business of criticizing. . . Under the guise of an ostensibly radical critique of society he smuggled back the most pitiful cliches of the conformism to which that critique had once been directed." (NOTES TO LITERATURE). Scott McLemee mclemee-AT-mail.loc.gov --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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