with Ateş Uslu and Ali Yalçın Göymen
Topic
More than seven decades have passed since the publication of The Destruction of Reason by Georg Lukács. To this day, the book remains highly controversial. Many critics disapprove of its allegedly dogmatic framework and its harsh treatment of various strands of 19th and 20th century German philosophy. In our discussion, we seek to contextualize The Destruction of Reason, examining its methodology as a work of intellectual historiography and understanding it as part of a larger philosophical project rather than merely as a symptom of dogmatic rigidity. We also aim to explore whether the book offers relevant insights for understanding the ideological resurgence of authoritarian populism and neo-fascist movements in the 2020s.
Speakers
Ateş Uslu is Professor at the Istanbul University, the Faculty of Political Sciences and International relations. From October 2024 until September 2025, he is a visiting scholar at the Chair for Social Philosophy (Prof. Rahel Jaeggi) at Humboldt-University. and works on his research project: “Political Implications of György Lukács’s Ontology of Social Being”.
Ali Yalçın Göymen, PhD, is a research associate and a Fellow of Einstein Foundation Academic Freedom Programme at the Centre for Social Critique, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research focuses on Marxist theory of alienation, politics of the commons, and theories of revolution in the 21st century.