Introduction

My aim is to uncover and develop a moral Marxist aesthetics, inextricably linked to nineteenth-century German idealistic art theory, particularly Hegel’s and Schiller’s. This moral aesthetics takes three forms. The first is social and historical realism, as in Hungarian German-speaking Marxist Georg Lukács’ The Historical Novel of 1936–1937, and many writings by German-speaking Lucien Goldmann in the France of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This is an aesthetics which fundamentally places the work of art within reality, particularly social reality. Realism can take three possible forms, a mirroring of nature, a mirroring of social reality, and an expression of self as social being. I will use the term embeddedness or realistic embeddedness to characterize social realism, historical realism, and the realism of the social self. Marxist aesthetic realists that link to German aesthetic idealism typically concentrate on artworks with thick descriptions of social reality, and sometimes history. An example is the aforementioned Historical Novel, a study produced by Lukács during the triumph of fascism in Germany. This work studied history, politics, and class in such novels as Walter Scott’s Rob Roy.