Introduction

In the Times Literary Supplement of June 11th 1971, published just a few days after his death, the Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist Georg Lukács introduced the English-speaking world to the members of what he dubbed the ‘Budapest School.’ Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, György Márkus and Mihály Vajda, had, Lukács speculated, even at this early stage of their intellectual lives already produced a body of work that would see them emerge as “the forerunners of the philosophical literature of the future.”1 At the time of this publication only a handful of these works had been translated into English. It is not surprising, then, that Lukács’ identification of a new generation of critical Marxist theoreticians was met by a general scepticism in the West.2 Part of this scepticism may be attributed to the problematic nature of Lukács’ own ‘recon- ciliation’ with communist reality. Part may be associated with the intensity of the totalitarian coercion that Hungary experienced during the Stalinist period. Either way, it soon became clear that, whilst the great thinker may have been guilty of speaking with a bias born of familiarity and fidelity alike, the members of the Budapest School were in fact a group of independently minded Marxist intellectuals who expressed a profound commitment to both the critical renewal of Marxist philosophy and the political reform of ‘actually existing socialism.’ Indeed, it is as both scholars, if not disciples, of Lukács and critics of the now-defunct Soviet system that the members of the Budapest School remain best-known in the English-speaking world today. Whilst this reputation is no doubt justified, the present work is motivated by the thought that this com- monly held view captures only part of a much broader, much more interesting and philosophically relevant intellectual itinerary. Without question, both Lukács and Marx, no less than the experience of and confrontation with the Soviet system itself, have remained constant points of reference for these thinkers. However, this should not lead us to conclude that these relationships have remained unchanged. For the members of the Budapest School philosophy finds its voice through its connection to the needs and aspirations of the

1 Georg Lukács, “The Development of a Budapest School,” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 3615 (1971). For the original letter, dated 15th February 1971, and the circumstances sur- rounding its conception and publication see Georg Lukács, “Statt eines Vorworts: ein Brief von Georg Lukács,” in Individuum und Praxis: Positionen der ›Budapester Schule‹ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975). 2 See Ivan Szelenyi, “Notes on the ‘Budapest School’,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 8, no. 1 (1977).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395985_002 2 Introduction times in which it finds itself. In their pursuit to meet the ‘demands of the day,’ these thinkers have come to emphasise less the solutions that had occupied their geistig progenitors than the questions themselves—questions that bare directly upon the conditions under which human beings can live together in a more humane, open and responsible world. It is, more precisely, just this unwavering commitment to the convictions which had animated the tradi- tion of critical Marxism since its inception—that it is better to be free than otherwise, that the needless suffering of human beings ought to be mitigated, that the world needs more solidarity and not less—that has led the members of the Budapest School to transcend the framing of these core problematics within the limited purview of a ‘oppositional’ or ‘revisionist’ Marxism. In the process, they have shed light on a number of the most pressing problems with which philosophers and critical theorists are occupied today, dealing with top- ics as diverse as the historical legacy of 20th century totalitarianism, the nature of justice and the politics of the body, modernity as culture and the place and role of philosophical critique within contemporary society. Oriented towards the evolution of the School’s variously articulated critical theories, the present work offers, inter alia, a reconstruction of its members’ journey beyond Marxism towards the development of their own penetrating and in many ways path-breaking analyses of the antinomies of modern life. In recent years, studies by Simon Tormey and John Grumley have treated in depth the long and highly productive career of Agnes Heller and presented in compelling terms her importance to contemporary philosophical and political discourse.3 So too, György Márkus’ philosophy of culture, taken up from the perspective of his critical readings of both Marx and Lukács, has been the subject of Jonathan Pickle’s pioneering doctoral dissertation, a work that rep- resents the first full-length engagement with Márkus’ oeuvre to be written in English.4 To these more extensive forays one may also add the growing number of edited collections, each of which aims to both raise the profile and assess the merits of their subject authors.5 Whilst it is, therefore, fair to say that a

3 See Simon Tormey, Agnes Heller: Socialism, Autonomy and the Postmodern (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001); John Grumley, Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History (London: Pluto Press, 2005). To these two commanding studies can now be added the recent work of Lucy Jane Ward. For the latter see Lucy Jane Ward, Freedom and Dissatisfaction in the Works of Agnes Heller: with Marx against Marx (Lanham; MD.: Lexington Books, 2016). 4 See Jonathan Pickle, “György Márkus and the Philosophy of Culture: Critical Theory, Enlightenment and Emancipation” (Ph.D. Thesis, The New School for Social Research, New York, 2011). 5 For the most recent of these collections see Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell, eds., Critical Theories and the Budapest School: Politics, Culture, Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2018).