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Friday Roundup, September 13th

As impressive as the quantity of Professor Lukacs’s scholarship has been, I think the magnitude of that achievement has been outweighed by the quality of his thought. I would like to be able to say that for any writer the edifice of his output stands securely on a deep foundation of thought, but how often is that the case? History and the Human Condition shows the degree to which Professor Lukacs’s body of work integrates what the historian says with how he says it and, if you pardon the abuse of a verb, how he thinks it. Sometimes directly, sometimes as an aside, sometimes tacitly, Professor Lukacs teaches his readers how they ought to think about the past. Note: not what his readers ought to think, though that of course matters, but how they think.