Protest Against Closing Down the Lukács Archive

I think it is absolutely necessary to criticize such an attempt by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Lukács is not only incredibly important for the Hungarian intellectual scene - he is one of the greatest, most influential and debated about thinkers of the 20th century, whose works encouraged a majority of the critical and socially aware European and American thought for more decades. His "History and Class Consciousness" (especially his concept of "reificaiton" of human relations in a capitalist society) from 1923 almost single-handedly opened a new conceptual continent which gave way to philosophers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin and Marcuse, or Lucien Goldmann (the latter providing sound arguments that Heidegger's "Being and Time" was merely a polemic with Lukács). Less directly, his popularization of young Marx-Hegelian term "alienation" (that also entered numerous disciplines henceforth) is responsible for the philosophical development of thinkers such as Kojève, Lefebvre, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty. In general, the thinkers of which no one is willing (at least not yet) to close down their archives, but are generally understood as the seminal philosophers of the 20th century.

His literary studies, including his very early theory of novel and history of modern drama (and especially his accomplished work on historical novel), have still been influential on literary criticism and literary historiography academic scene worldwide.

Apart from that - Lukács's work is becoming more relevant than ever. It does not really matter whether you read his early essays on reification and its connection to the "second nature" of capitalism's immediacy (where every potential innovation is understood as "unnatural" and "incomprehensible") or his later works about social and political implications of irrationalist philosophy - Lukács's critical eye would not at all have been surprised by the ongoing irrational commodity-driven conformism diving in a free-fall into neofascism. Instead, his books are a necessary conceptual tool to grasp the today's seemingly confused conditions analytically; this, finally, is a precondition to resolve them successfully.

I would love to help with the archive, if possible (and needed).