The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics (The MIT Press) by György Lukács

The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics (The MIT Press) Reviews

• 
  Arthur Dal Ponte Santana

  O trabalho histórico-filosófico que o Lukács emprega aqui é coisa de outro mundo. Seu entendimento da dialética como forma filosófica não aparece aqui somente nas exposições que faz da construção do pensamento hegeliano, mas também na própria forma pela qual ele a apresenta e a desvela historicamente. É um trabalho exegético absurdo, ligando e situando o pensamento hegeliano não só dentro das tradições filosóficas, mas dentro do seu tempo histórico de uma maneira muito bem articulada, não retirando de Hegel sua originalidade, mas também não o destacando para fora das limitações do seu tempo e espaço. Em algumas partes, eu só conseguia dar risada de quão bem articulados eram alguns pontos, e sempre muito esclarecedores acerca dessa massa problemática de palavras que são os textos de Hegel. Um exemplo muito importante de como o trabalho de comentar e apreender a história da filosofia pode ser também a construção de uma filosofia mesma.
• 
  Robert Wood

  Written in the late 1930's,Lukac's reading of Hegel is certainly engaging. Lukacs returns to the early Hegel to respond to what he sees as a series of substantial misreadings of the work, inspired by the rise of fascism, and on the part of liberals attempting to neutralize the radical potential of the work. Through that process, Lukacs offers a series of very interesting and useful readings of Hegel's early theological and republican period, and how his conceptual framework shifted to a more conservative, albeit much more philosophically rich approach. It's a serious engagement with the work, and I left with a better sense of the project. There are a few clunkers condemning the revisionism of the second international and the superiority of the work of Lenin and Stalin that remind you that you're reading a book written in the Soviet Union in the late 1930's, but Lukacs manages to minimize that rhetorical framework.
• 
  Chris Nagel

  The butler did it.
  
  Lukács was frickin brilliant. Nothing I've read about Hegel's development comes anywhere close to being as clear, especially about what this little number called the dialectic is, where it came from, how Hegel does it, and what he does it for.
  
  Of course, Lukács has the benefit of looking backwards from Marx' critique, and he does do some reverse-engineering, I believe, to interpret Hegel's "method" (assuming there is a coherent method) as being an idealist version of the more-or-less-the-same dialectic as in dialectical materialism. He also claims with uncertain provenance that the English word alienation is the origin of the German Entäusserung and Entfremdung--translated into German from the context of political economy and widely extended in usage and meaning by our boy G.W.F.
  
  Whether that's just Lukács using a sonic screwdriver or not, his etymology leads to an interpretation of the movement of the Phenomenology of Spirit that is (a) intelligible, and (2) non-magical, both of which are great advances over most interpretations, and over almost all bourgeois readings. It places human work at the center of the development of Spirit/self-consciousness, right up until Hegel falls victim to his own idealist mystifications in the Absolute Knowing section of the book.
  
  Genius on every page.
• 
  Mario

  Sólo me he leído unos cuantos capítulos que me interesaban, pero creo que puedo afirmar del libro entero que cae en el vicio de centrarse mucho en aspectos biográficos en detrimento del contenido filosófico. No lo recomierdo
• 
  Dionysius the Areopagite

  When one is even amidst the rudimentary level undergoing a part of the whole of Hegel, time spent examining Hegelian scholarly bibliography divides up into dense ideological encampments. If Hegel is making no sense to you, it will at least make sense that there a number of ways to proceed. Though I have found a number of these volumes do not even have a single review online, there are some that do, and it boils down to muted objectivity. In order to gather an individual consensus concerning Hegel, one must do away with consensus altogether.
  
  Depending on one's modus operandi and Hegel's corpus (Books, lectures, letters) this could, to begin, result in clear Hegelian religiosity or atheism. Yes, there are other philosophers whose critics, translators, and interpreters range from one extreme to the other; however, Hegel's ties to Marx and Marxism's main currents, from cradle to grave, are still within the last night of man's history. There is, for better or worse, a literally tremendous deal of clandestine assumption concerning where to seek Hegel (That is, biographical and systemic clarity rather than dogmatic opinion, dated generational futility, re: Hegel).
  
  With this in mind, Lukacs's book is materialistic historiography with a high accessibility rate. When I first came upon the book in Harvard Square I was offended by its lack of footnotes (Though I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now). One lacking the discerning process concerning Hegelian myth and legend, the Frankfurt-Marxist m.o., will either be swept up in a take on Hegel's humble origins presented as revelation or lost not in a sea of jargon, but in considerations and reprisals of Germany's lugubrious politico-economical history. Wherewithal regarding the French Revolution and its continental impact are mandatory for an authentic reading experience. With this in mind, the hypothetical reader should keep in mind Koselleck and Rebecca Comay. The latter's Mourning Sickness Critique and Crisis
  
  Thus, one does not need a traditional grounding in either Kant or Marxism in reading Lukacs's Young Hegel. These elements are assumed on the reader's behalf, but neither is as important as a serious grasp of German history at the time of Hegel. Again, Koselleck and Comay should be considered as serious predecessors to this volume. Their texts combine in a thorough way to seriously get the scholar into the frame of mind to begin to understand Hegel's life from inception unto Phenomenology.
  
  It is less beguiling than reconciling to take into consideration not just one side of Hegelian scholarship but all of them, including the obscurer Hermetic centerpiece(s). The Left's stranglehold on academia leads to a naturally recurring albeit singly unoriginal and dogmatic materialistic interpretation of Hegel. It is, of course, the incorrigible banality of evangelical atheism.
  
  In Hegelian scholarship there is a general trend to mold Hegel into the concept one sees fit. In truth, Hegelian linguistics almost appear to lend themselves to subjective reconstruction at first glance. Schopenhauer is not bitter when he condemns Hegel as a charlatan.
  
  However, I argue that Hegel is more like a charlatan factory than a philosophical charlatan himself. I did not come to this conclusion until I had seriously examined atheistic, agnostic, Christian, and esoteric readings of Hegel, which themselves have their own natural plethora of bibliographical and scholastic requirements. If Hegel produces charlatans, he has the chance to do so like any thinker with enough enduring profundity for secular discipleship. Hegel produces charlatans in the same way that the Left gets Trump elected, and further, is itself a Nazi factory. The more they point the moral finger, the more they inspire their worst nightmare.
  
  Thankfully in the case of Hegel no one is getting assaulted or imprisoned out on the streets of crocodiles, but rather finds themselves in a glorious time to undertake Hegelian inquiry. For if one can approach Hegel without the baggage of the erroneously attributed dialectic, the pre-Marx function, and can focus on the man's life, work, and European history both internal and external leading up to his philosophical life, one will be met with a canon of unknown books written in a time when the academic circuit was far less fascist and hence conscious of the Hegelian multitudes.
  
  Summarily, like Goethe before him, he transcended politics. Politics were beneath Hegel as they were Goethe, the way it should be. Like Schopenhauer, 'Minding not the times but the eternities.' In order to approach Lukac's Hegel one must aim to proceed on philosophical knowledge alone. When at last one is well equipped and in the mood, I recommend this as ideal beach reading. At least it was, is, for me, for I find the ocean disgusting, yet umbrellas and shade relaxing, but that is another story.