The Hidden Structure: Lucien Goldmann

Abstract

When Lucien Goldmann, influenced by Kant, by the neo-Kantian Max Adler, and by Piaget, looked to Marxism for intellectual resources, it was in the direction of Georg Lukács that he turned. In this he was at least consistent. Lukács had elaborated a version of Marxism without ever thoroughly reworking and negating his own neo-Kantian past. Raymond Williams has assured us that he was not deterred from embracing one of the main ideas of Goldmann and Lukács by labels like ‘left-bourgeois idealism’(?), and declares, ‘if you’re not in a church you’re not worried about heresy; the only real interest is actual theory and practice’.¹ This misses the point by a wide margin. Lukács’s reconciliation of Marxism and neo-Kantian idealism was indeed a question of ‘actual theory’. And the practice of Lukács, as we have seen (above, Chapter 4) was no mere matter of accident or personal character, but was entirely consistent with an idealist view of ‘adequate consciousness’ which is disembodied, separated from the working class and personified in a bureaucratic party and leadership standing over the class. If Williams wants only to select pragmatically from a list of concepts those which seem fruitful in literary criticism, that is his affair, but it has little to do with the ‘actual theory and practice’ of Marxism.