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Georg Lukács and the Leap of Faith

ABSTRACT This article explores the young Georg Lukács (1885–1971) through the prism of his early intellectual identifications and obsessions with Kierkegaard, his model, Mann, his poet, Dostoyevsky, his prophet, and Weber, his mentor. Through his interactions with these figures, it attempts to reconstruct the mental universe of the pre-communist Lukács through two key motifs: the leap of faith and cultural despair. I argue that a striving, wilful, agonistic and totalising religiosity—which included a desire for personal and cultural salvation—was the determining factor in Lukács’s conversion to communism. In his writings on and responses to these figures, it was the spiritual and moral concern that was always uppermost. This thread runs throughout his life in different forms, from the pre-Marxist to the later Marxist Lukács.