Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought

This book is the product of an unprecedented, and unrepeatable, conjuncture. Written immediately after Lenin’s death in 1924, and thus on the cusp of a period of bureaucratic reaction in the Communist movement, it consists of the reflections of the most important Marxist philosopher of the twentieth century on the thought of the most significant Marxist politician of the century. In sharp contrast to contemporary and later characterisations of Lenin either as a cynical and shallow opportunist or as a source of readymade dogmas and formulae, Georg Lukacs restored to Lenin’s thought its true intellectual and political stature. Bringing to bear the concepts of totality, concreteness and the dialectic that he had developed in his masterwork History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs convincingly demonstrated that the key conceptual innovations in Lenin’s political thought–the revolutionary alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry, the role of the vanguard party, the analysis of imperialism and national liberation movements, the state was a weapon of class struggle and the unifying force of the Soviets–constituted fundamental ruptures with the mechanical fatalism that had hitherto characterised ‘official’ Marxism. In Lukacs’s elegantly crafted, concise and accessible account, Lenin emerges as the consummate dialectician, the ‘theoretician of practice and the practitioner of theory’.