In histories of Marxism, Karl Korsch’s name is often linked with that of Georg Lukács. Two Central European intellectuals, from Germany and Hungary, respectively, Korsch and Lukács were both radicalized by the impact of World War I and aligned themselves with Russia’s October Revolution and the Communist International that was formed in its wake.

In 1923, the two men published works that sought to give revolutionary Marxism a more elaborate philosophical content: Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy and Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. The response in some quarters of the newly formed communist movement was distinctly frigid. Grigory Zinoviev, the Bolshevik leader who served as chairman of the Comintern during the 1920s, dismissed the pair as “professors spinning out their theories.”

Korsch and Lukács sought to play a role as leaders of their national communist parties: Korsch served as a communist MP in the German Reichstag, while Lukács took up a position as commissar for education and culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Yet their paths sharply diverged from the second half of the 1920s. Korsch was expelled from the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1926, while Lukács remained within the movement throughout the Stalinist period and beyond.