70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST developing in strugglesi but like a plant. This is not evaluation; it is a statement. I am like this, I have to live in this way. But what is important is something else: why was it that such devoted, flexible and fast intellects as Irma and Leo (whom I see today this way; and I think rightly) helped me so much? I think because they were strong enough to feel what I thought but not quite strong that after they started out with me they would turn into a different plane. But their inner life is more sensual and faster than mine so they found or made me find several things in the plane of the way of my thinking which my essentially rational, asensual, asexual way of thinking would not have found. This is why they were so fertile. PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND LUKACS'S VIEW OF THE TRAGEDY OF CULTURE: THE HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN DRAMA In The History and Development of Modern Drama the sense of inessentiality, the absence of fulfilment to live life at the level of the "whole man", — man as "species being", — is analysed in a historical-social framework. This book, written for a literary competition and published in 1909 gives an overview of the development of the genre. Drama, the most social of all art forms, as Lukacs defined it— raised a number of questions about culture, the modern individual, social institutions and communication.3 These are anthropological ideas taken up by Lukacs to show how the possibilities of human interaction changed in the course of modernity, how the life-world became objectified, how knowledge became increasingly fragmented and the individual started leading a life of 'triviality5. The social character of art, first emphasized by Georg Simmel initially served Lukacs as a basis for the discussion of literature.4 Lukacs adapted SimmePs insights and developed them into a system to accommodate the history of modern drama linking it to individualism and social existence in modernity. Lukacs's analyses show how individual freedom, the variation of inwardness produces autonomous forms and the modern individual's way of life and lifeworlds go through objectification. At the level of modern drama this is expressed by the incompatibility of a "trivial" life and the "essentially human" protagonist. The drama indicates how the protagonist struggles "to create the form of his life", to make his life "essential". Lukacs links the history of modern drama to the notion of dramatic and non-dramatic ages, to the relationship of classes and to the formation and fragmentation of the bourgeoisie. Lukacs describes a dramatic age as the epoch of decline of a class and, along with that