A Note on Weber and Lukacs.

The article explores the relationship between the two great scholars, Georg Lukács and Max Weber. The Weber-Lukács nexus touches upon a wide range of problems relating to an equally wide spectrum of scholarship, including sociology, political science, ethics, and philosophy of history. The common concerns and themes around which the two men forged an intellectual bond in Heidelberg, where their relationship first began in 1912, included four major problematics, their critique and rejection of the vulgar Marxism of the Second International, and the concurrent adherence to neo-Kantian epistemology; their interest in sociology of art and literature; the "Russian experience," i.e., the reception of Russian novelists, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy; and their interest in problems of ethics, especially ethics and political action. Lukács influence upon Weber can be seen in Weber's two masterful essays, "Science as a Vocation" and "Politics as a Vocation," which summarize his sociology of science and politics, respectively. In turn, Weber provided Lukács with ideas that took root in his work. Lukács' collection of essays "History and Glass Consciousness," and especially its "reification" essay, relies much less on Marx's arguments than on Weber's ideal typical definition of capitalism.