Book review essay: The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism. (August 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Terezakis, Katie
• Is Part Of: Thesis eleven. Volume 165:Number 1(2021)
• Page Start: 179
• Page End: 185
• Publication Date: 2021-08
• Subjects: Ágnes Heller -- György Márkus -- Ferenc Fehér -- György Lukács -- Marxism -- Budapest School -- Critical Theory -- democracy -- modernity -- postmodernity -- alienation -- reification -- ideology -- historical imagination; Social sciences -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; 301
• DOI: 10.1177/07255136211032862
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0725-5136

Abstract

J.F. Dorahy's The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism (2019) offers contemporary readers a conscientious assessment of the intellectual initiatives of Ágnes Heller, György Márkus, and Ferenc Fehér, both in the years immediately following their apprenticeship with György Lukács, and later, through their independent philosophical endeavours. Dorahy's book also pinpoints the Budapest thinkers' proposal for a radical democratic reckoning, and begins to suggest how that proposal might today bear on global practice and globally-minded theories. The book is an excellent introduction to the ideas of Heller and Márkus. But through them, it is also a striking and thoroughly relevant consideration of the possibilities for an ethics of planetary commitment, and for a critical theory fixed upon incorporating the vigorous rootstock of radical democracy with a multidimensional, pluralistic social order.