Agnes Heller

"radical universalism" after the "grand narrative"

Simon Tormey

pp. 169-191

in: Lawrence Wilde (ed), Marxism's ethical thinkers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001

Abstract

Agnes Heller is perhaps the best known of the theorists to have emerged from the loosely constituted "Budapest School" formed by Georg Lukács in the middle of the 1960s. The Budapest School is itself associated with the attempt to develop what has been termed either "Marxist humanism" or "humanist Marxism". Neither of these labels is, it has to be said, particularly helpful in capturing either the essence of the School's theoretical agenda or Heller's particular contribution to left radicalism. To begin with, the aim of the School was in Lukács's phrase, "the renaissance of Marxism", rather than the development of a rival orthodoxy, "humanist" or otherwise. The term "renaissance" should not be taken lightly here, for what it indicates is as much the encouragement of plural visions of Marxismas any concern with "the human" lurking at the "origin" of Marx's thought. It was a vision of Marxism as heterodox, critical, iconoclastic; in other words, much like Lukács's own "Marxism" which, particularly in his later years, resisted easy framing, labelling, or "closure". In this spirit it would be misguided to see the Budapest School as a School in anything but name. It was a collection of the brightest and best of the students Lukács could find to argue with, not a group of acolytes charged with the task of developing a distinct approach or "philosophy".

Cited authors

Marx Karl

Heller Agnes