Lukács made a cult of history, and it anesthetized his mind. It
numbed his sense of reality and eventually addicted him to the
illusion that his own view of the dialectic and the dialectic of
reality corresponded with each other. Lukács never entertained
the slightest doubt about this original principle, and he re-
mained a dogmatist all his life, resolving existential and em-
pirical antinomies by all the casuistry at his disposal--even
when history deluded him. On one of those occasions, his be-
lated recognition that the Germans as a people had not behaved
according to history's universal imperatives by carrying out a
proletarian revolution after 1933 may have dampened his his-
torical optimism temporarily. But Lukács quickly recovered his
general confidence in the logic and predictability of history. As
a Marxist, of course, he believed that there was meaning to his-
tory and that history was evolving toward justice on earth,
which would ultimately emerge from the crucible of an apoc-
alyptic collision between the forces of good (socialism) and evil
(capitalism, fascism.). This indwelling conviction had long
since become instinctive to Lukács by the thirties. Socio-
economic processes unfolded in accordance with eternal his-
torical laws, and the classes of human society were inexorably
swept along by them. These immutable forces of history could,
however, be identified and defined. Following the lead of the
proletariat, mankind could then adapt itself to the laws of evo-
lutionary and revolutionary development and thus--merging
freedom and necessity, subject and object, theory and prac-
tice--participate in the historical process.

"The absolute dominion of the whole, its unity over and
above the abstract isolation of its parts: this is the essence of
the dialectical method," Lukács wrote in 1919, this was "or-
thodox Marxism"; ¹ and if empirical facts appeared to contradict
the whole, he quoted Fichte, "so much the worse for facts." ²

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