Lukács and Kierkegaard: Decadence or Despair

Abstract A distrust of focus on subjectivity and the individual provoked by his meeting with Sartrean existentialism led György Lukács to turn his early but qualified admiration of Søren Kierkegaard into an accusation of fostering a bourgeois culture of the kind Kierkegaard is usually thought to have opposed. Not every Marxian thinker has been equally wary of subjectivity, but all have found in Kierkegaard a crucial absence of concern for human exploitation within a context of natural scarcity. However, a more measured reading suggests a case for resolving the need to choose between Lukács’s insistence on “spirit” as a collective notion and Kierkegaard’s as cultivation of a trans-historically oriented, self-stabilizing social will.