György Lukács

Born Bernát György Löwinger in 1885, he became one of the founders of Western Marxism - the branch that broke from Soviet ideological lockstep. He developed the theory of reification and advanced Marx's ideas on class consciousness, then formalized Lenin's revolutionary tactics into a philosophy of vanguard-party action. In 1919 he served as Minister of Culture in Hungary's brief Soviet Republic, which lasted only from March to August. His real mark came as a literary critic: he reimagined realism and the novel as a genre through Marxist theory. For decades he was the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though his legacy resists easy summary - he appeared to endorse Stalinism as the true expression of Marxist thought while simultaneously advocating a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism. He died in 1971, having spent a career in the gap between doctrine and dissent.