The intellectual career of Georg Lukács is unique.¹ It runs from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Wilhelmine Germany, through the First World War and the Russian, German and Hungarian Revolutions of 1917–19, into the inter-war transformation of the Comintern and the victories of Fascism, the Moscow Trials, the Popular Front and the Nazi—Soviet Pact. It spans the "anti-Fascist" coalitions of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, the subsequent Cold War, the crisis of Stalinism, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the Sino—Soviet split, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It closes with Lukács an internationally famous scholar, engaged at the end on monumental general systems of philosophy and aesthetics. Lukács and his admirers have constructed the myth of an independent Marxist thinker who, while making formal concessions to the Stalinist bureaucracy in the form of double-edged formulations, self-criticisms, Aesopian writings on literary rather than directly political matters, and long silences, nonetheless produced a great body of Marxist work, an important and unique contribution to the Marxist theory of literature and art. In particular, Lukács is always anxious to appear as an opponent of the "dogmatic sectarianism" which he sees as the essential character of Stalinism.²