Georg Lukács

György Lukács (1885-1971) came from a wealthy bourgeois family of Jewish origin during the Austro-Hungarian era. He was born in Budapest to a banker father. Lukács studied at the universities of Budapest and Berlin, earning his doctorate in philosophy in 1906. In 1914, he joined the Hungarian Communist Party. From 1945, he served as a professor of aesthetics at the University of Budapest. A proponent of de-Stalinization, he served as Minister of Culture in the Nagy government in 1956, after whose fall he went into self-imposed exile for a short period. His major works include: "Soul and Form" (1911), "The Historical Novel" (1936), "Goethe and His Age" (1946), "The Young Hegel and the Problems of Capitalist Society" (1948), "The Destruction of Reason" (1954), and "Solzhenitsyn" (1964).