72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST important friends and influences. Lukacs characterised the theoretical position he had reached in the period before the First World War as a synthesis of "conservative epistemology and left wing ethics". His opposition to the war was total and led to a break in the friendship with many German colleagues who became victims of the nationalist fever. Lukacs saw the war as a product of all the social forces he had hated since his earjiest youth. For him the pseudo-consolidation in Europe till 1914 was, in Fichte's terms, "the age of completed (yollendet) sinfuln^ss". His well known position was: "The German and the Austrian armies will probably defeat the Russians and Romanovs will collapse. That is good. It is possible that the German and Austrian armies will be defeated by the English and French armies, and that the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns will collapse. That is good. But who will then protect us from Western democracy?" It was a historical-philosophical position which led Lukacs to "remain outside. Since more than the 'Theory of the Novel' as protest impossible for me. Sympathy for Jaures and Liebknecht without the slightest possibility of going their way." Looking back, Lukacs emphasises that what was missing was the Leninist perspective. The answer to his problem was provided by the October Revolution. He mentions in this context that the "honour of the International was saved almost exclusively by Lenin who announced that the task of the working class lay in overthrowing capitalism precisely in connection with the war. We were able to approach this insight exclusively via Lenin". After a period of hesitancy Lukacs joined the Hungarian Communist Party and played an important role in the Hungarian Commune (1918/1919). But he emphasises that there was no real knowledge about Lenin in the Hungarian movement. It was only after the counter-revolution forced him to emigrate to Vienna for ten years that he started studying Lenin and realising his "real theoretical importance" and the importance of his "intellectual, practical, moral physiognomy". "With the exception in a specific sense of Lenin", Lukacs notes, "no one has realised that the social emergence of the new man is a factual synthesis of all individual attempts at coming to terms in honest revolutionary manner with the new reality." Lukacs' Marx-Lenin studies in Vienna were conducted however in the context of ths Hungarian Communist Party in exile trying to come to terms with the collapse of the commune. He caustically remarks that like the others he was a "messianic sectarian", convinced that the world revolution would come the next day. This attitude influenced History and Class Consciousness towards ultra-left radicalism. Lukacs notes: "Hope kept alive by actions." Lenin's rejection of his position made a profound impression on Lukacs. Lukacs repeats the criticism he made elsewhere too, that the basic mistake of the book was ontological. Since only social being is recognised and the dialectics of nature rejected, it missed precisely the universality of