György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian and critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution. His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

Philosopher. He taught theoretical philosophy at the University of Milan from 1970 to 1999. Later, he went to live at Pietrabianca di Sangineto (Calabria), from which he continues to write and publish. He was a disciple of Enzo Paci and wrote his dissertation on Husserl's unpublished works. His philosophical position is characterised by the concept of phenomenology ("phenomenological structuralism") influenced by Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Bachelard. Some indications about phenomenological structuralism are contained in the online article: "Die Idee eines phänomenologischen Strukturalismus". His thought is oriented towards the philosophy of knowledge, the philosophy of music, and the fields of perception and imagination.