The late Franz Borkenau once said, after he had broken with the
Communist Party, that he could no longer put up with the practice of discussing municipal regulations in the categories of Hegelian logic, and Hegelian logic in the spirit of meetings of the town council. Such contaminations, which date back to Hegel himself, bind Lukacs to that cultural level which he would like to raise to his own.

The Hegelian critique of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, the impulse, so powerful in speculative philosophy, to rise above the merely superficial ethos of isolated subjectivity, all this becomes in his hands an ideology for bigoted party officials who have not even reached the level of subjectivity. Their aggressive narrow-mindedness, a legacy of the backwardness of the petty bourgeoisie in the 19th century, is lent a spurious dignity by the attempt to interpret it as an adaptation to reality freed from the shackles of mere individuality. But a true dialectical leap is not one which leaps out of the dialectic itself and transforms the unhappy consciousness simply by the force of conviction into a happy collusion, at the expense of the objective social and technical factors governing artistic production.

Based on such foundations the would-be loftier standpoint must necessarily remain abstract, in accordance with a proposition of Hegel’s from which Lukacs would hardly dissent. The desperate attempt at a profundity intended to counter the imbecility of the boy-meets-tractor literature, does not protect him from declamatory statements which are at once abstract and childish : ‘The more general the significance of the theme of a work of art, and the deeper writers probe into different aspects of the laws and tendencies governing reality, the more completely will this reality be transformed into a purely or predominantly socialist society, and the closer will grow the ties between critical realism and socialist realism. In the process the negative (but: non-rejecting) perspective of critical realism wIll gradually be transformed into a positive (affirmative), a socialist perspective’ (p. 114). The jesuitical distinction between the negative ‘but non-rejecting’ and the positive (affirmative) perspective shifts the problems of literary quality into that same sphere of pre­ ordained convictionswhich Lukacs wants most to escape from