Kettles boil, classes struggle

Terry Eagleton

A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’: Tailism and the Dialectic by Georg Lukács, translated by Esther Leslie

Changing the world involves a curious kind of doublethink. If we are to act effectively, the mind must buckle itself austerely to the actual, in the belief that knowing the situation for what it is is the source of all moral and political wisdom. The only trouble is that such knowledge is also desperately hard to come by, and perhaps unattainable in any complete sense. The difficulty is not so much the solutions themselves, but grasping the way it is with a particular bit of the world. If you get this right, it will intimate the kinds of solution you should look to. Answers are not the hardest thing.

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Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester. His books include Literary Theory, After Theory and, most recently, The Meaning of Life.