70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Literally 'Lived Thought', it connotes the nexus between life and thought Lukacs was trying to capture. The fact that the autobiography was never written out is a great loss, because Lukacs was aware of the methodological problems of writing autobiographies to an extent often lacking in other writers of memoirs. The subjective nature of the autobiography lies for Lukacs in its attempt to show "how in the context of a given development a person comes to himself {zu sich kommt) or misses himself". This has to be based on the objective corrective of temporal exactness. The chronology * must be correct. The effort lies in capturing the specific essential lines of development. "Not my life in its immediate sense. Only how (humanly how) from life this direction of thought, this mode of thought (this behaviour) towards life arose." The significance of past acts emerges from the heightened awareness of the point of view of the biographer. Lukacs does not read meaning into past situations —that is how a positivist would look at it. Rather, the dialectics of reconstruction of the past allows the essential significance of past actions to emerge in their coherence. The actor is unable to oversee the totality available to the autobiographical view. Individuality is neither the origin nor the goal. It is the complicated and difficult perspective of capturing how "individual qualities, inclinations, tendencies developing according to circumstances have tried to merge into the generic, species specific {Gattungsmassigkeity\ The shade of Hegel lies unmistakably over these notes of a Marxist. In the conversations Lukacs insisted on the strong connection between everything in his life, on his organic development. The Autobiographer capturing this organic development was both poet and philosopher. The philosopher's abstraction and the danger of generalisation from spontaneous action much too early are counter-posed by the poet's memory of concrete (!) feelings. Lukacs was born in 1885 in an affluent "pure Jewish family" settled in Budapest. The father was a rich and successful banker. Interestingly, he remarks that the Jewish background is precisely the reason why Jewish or Zionist ideologies had no influence on him. In common wih the life styles of many other assimilated Central European Jewish families, Lukacs' family looked upon religion as ceremonial necessity, as a matter of home protocol. He relates his father's ironic remark at the beginning of the Zionist movement that if a Jewish state were to be constituted he would like to be its counsel in Budapest. But protocol, whether resulting from religious conventions or social etiquette, with its attendant hypocrisy, was a matter Lukacs revolted against spontaneously. He relates an amusing but extremely characteristic anecdote. As a small boy he waged a "partisan war' against his strict mother who punished the children for their mistakes by shutting them in a dark room till they apologised. His brother and sister immediately apologised, but Lukacs differed