Providing a timely reassessment of Georg Lukács’s <i>History and Class Consciousness, </i>Konstantinos Kavoulakos rescues the critical potential of Lukács’s theory of reification and transformative praxis from its long-congealed history of misreading and mistranslation, letting us see it with fresh new eyes, and letting it speak to our own troubled times.

Nikolas Kompridis, Research Professor in Philosophy and Political Thought, Australian Catholic University, Australia

In its orientation toward social transformation and toward new experiments in the meaning of being human, Lukács's philosophy of praxis was too far ahead of its time. Its time has finally come, and Kavoulakos has given us an interpretation of Lukács’s revolutionary Marxism that is a fit for this moment in history. His careful recovery of Lukács’s neo-Kantian formation together with his meticulous reconstruction of the core arguments of the “Reification” essay make Kavoulakos’s text a vital contribution to contemporary critical theory.

J. M. Bernstein, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research, USA

Kavoulakos’s book is an outstanding piece of scholarship that shows, with deep insight, how Georg Lukács was able to give a unique philosophical foundation to revolutionary politics in “History and Class-Consciousness” (1923) by combining Neokantian and Hegelian concepts with the Marxist theoretical foundations. Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is still relevant today and cannot be reduced, as so many critics have argued, to an “idealist” argument.

Michael Löwy, Emeritus Research Director of Sociology, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France