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Contents

Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: Lukács and the Problems of Law

Part One. Preliminary Skirmishes with the Questions of Law

Chapter 1 Encounters of the Young Lukács with Law
1.1 Legal Studies
1.2 Friendship with Felix Somló
1.3 Relationship with Gustav Radbruch

Chapter 2 Glorification of Consciousness in History and Class Consciousness
2.1 The Search for a Way Opposed to Institutions: Law as Force and as Consciousness
2.2 Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat and its Dramatized Legal Conception
2.3 Messianism as the Core of Lukács' Preconception

Chapter 3 Provisional Summaries and Question Marks
3.1 Ruthlessness and its Trap in The Destruction of Reason
3.2 Allusions to a Synthesis in The Specificity of the Aesthetic

Part Two. The Ontology: A Copernican Revolution

Chapter 4 The Ontological Approach as a Methodological Possibility of Transcending Socialist Normativism
4.1 The Genesis and Methodological Significance of the Ontology
4.2 Socialist Legal Thinking
4.3 The Making of an Ontological Approach to Law

Chapter 5 The Ontological Concept of Law
5.1 Law as a Complex of Mediation
5.2 Law as Objectification and as Actual Functioning
5.3 Is Law a Reflection of Reality?
5.3.1 Teleology and Causality
5.4 Law in Action: Formal Legality versus Social Optimum

Chapter 6 The Ontological Approach as a Horizon in The General Renewal of Marxism

Appendix: "Thing" and Reification in Law
A.1 "Thing" or Reification in Marxist Philosophy?
A.2 Concepts of "Thing" as Fictions in the Law
A.3 Objectification, Reification and Alienation as Qualities of the Existence of Law
A.3.1 Objectification
A.3.2 Reification
A.3.3 Alienation
A.4 Conclusions

Name index
Subject index
Index of Lukács' Works

Postscript: The Contemporaneity of Lukács' Ideas with Modern Social Theoretical Thought (The Ontology of Social Being in Social Science Reconstructions - with Regards to Constructs Like Law)
P.1 Ontologies and The Ontology of Social Being
P.2 Some Key Terms of LUKÁCS' Ontology
P.3 The Ontology of Social Being as Applied to Law
P.4 Gattungswesen and Alienation

Index
Index of Names

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Introduction

...

In this study, I shall try to trace Lukács' occasional encounters with law and the emergence of a definite legal concept in the Ontology, the summary of his lifework, holding out the promise of a new Marxist legal theory.

These explications will be mosaic-like. No biography of adequate depth has emerged so far amongst the numerous existing detailed studies concerning but the various aspects of Lukács' life. Many vague points will be subjected to close scrutiny. The main point is, however, that Lukács' views on law have a fragmentary nature. This is explained by the fact that Lukács did not have a genuine interest in law as such, as it has already been indicated.

As a literary critic, Lukács is often criticized for his priorities do not lie with literary creation itself, but with the political and social context (or rather the context as he sees it) of the work in question. Avoiding to analyze the legitimacy of this criticism of Lukács or the scholar's attitude from which it grows out, however, one undoubtedly finds an analogous phenomenon in the case of law. Law usually has the role of illustrating something else in most of Lukács' ideas. What determines Lukács' attitude to the problems of law is that the decisive question for him is always the whole as given at any time, the totality, which, when translated into the context of social and political events, amounts to the issue of power, the prime regulator of social and political conditions. Law serves him with good examples and he is quite willing to go into legal issues when talking about the tactic or strategy to be adopted, but his interest is hardly more than incidental. In his train of thought, law is merely a component of more comprehensive units, an instrument of politics. And Lukács is interested in the relationships between these major units and not in the inner world of the law.

His fragmentary discussion in Towards the Ontology of Social Being does not go beyond this level of interest, either. But I have been encouraged to write the present study by the radically different way in which Lukács outlined the problems of law in that work. For in the Ontology, the extremely complex nature of social mediations, that among other things also infers specific functioning of relatively autonomous complexes of being, is of decisive importance. And to illustrate this, Lukács could not have found a better example than law which is a formally autonomous formation, still it is organically built into the system of social activities. So law no longer appears here as a simple functional subordination to the whole as given at any time (politics, economy, etc.), but appears, on the one hand, in its specific motion influenced by the formal enactment of a system of norms and, on the other, in the dialectical contradiction (apprehensible only ontologically) that breaks through the logic of this specific motion in its everyday actualization and, by various manipulations, channels it towards practical compromise solutions.

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