Gyorgy Lukacs (; Hungarian: ['jorj 'luka:tS]; also Georg Lukacs; born Gyorgy Bernat Lowinger; 13 April 1885 - 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness.
Whilst at university in Budapest, Lukacs was part of socialist intellectual circles through which he met Ervin Szabo, an anarcho-syndicalist who introduced him to the works of Georges Sorel (1847-1922), the French proponent of revolutionary syndicalism. In that period, Lukacs's intellectual perspectives were modernist and anti-positivist. From 1904 to 1908, he was part of a theatre troupe that produced modernist, psychologically realistic plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Gerhart Hauptmann. Lukacs spent much time in Germany, and studied in Berlin from 1906 to 1910, during which time he made the acquaintance of the philosopher Georg Simmel. Later, in 1913, whilst in Heidelberg he befriended Max Weber, Ernst Bloch, and Stefan George. The idealist system to which Lukacs subscribed was intellectually indebted to Neo-Kantianism (then the dominant philosophy in German universities) and to Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In that period, he published Soul and Form (1911; tr. 1974) and The Theory of the Novel (1916/1920; tr. 1971). In 1915, Lukacs returned to Budapest, where he was the leader of the Sunday Circle, an intellectual salon. Its concerns were the cultural themes that arose from the existential works of Dostoyevsky, which thematically aligned with Lukacs's interests in his last years at Heidelberg. As a salon, the Sunday Circle sponsored cultural events whose participants included literary and musical avant-garde figures, such as Karl Mannheim, the composer Bela Bartok, Bela Balazs, and Karl Polanyi; some of them also attended the weekly salons. In 1918, the last year of the First World War (1914-18), the Sunday Circle became divided. They dissolved the salon because of their divergent politics; several of the leading members accompanied Lukacs into the Communist Party of Hungary.

Q: What was the Pre-Marxist period?
A: Lukacs was part of socialist intellectual circles through which he met Ervin Szabo, an anarcho-syndicalist who introduced him to the works of Georges Sorel (
What were the circles called
revolutionary syndicalism. Sunday Circle, From 1904 to 1908, he was part of a theatre troupe that produced modernist, psychologically realistic plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Gerhart Hauptmann.
From 1904 to 1908, he was part of a theatre troupe that produced modernist, psychologically realistic plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Gerhart Hauptmann.