PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS | DOI 10.1163) 9206X-12341550 17 Elsewhere, I have emphasised the same reading of Lukdcs as Feenberg pres- ents here.*! Of course, Rehmann’s egregious yet typical account of Lukaes isn’t so much the point here. The point is that compared to the objective, sympa- thetic and nuanced scholarship that Feenberg has brought to bear on Lukacs, the tired clichés and outright misrepresentations which abound in Lukécs scholarship appear as just that. Politics, Mediation and System In this final section 1 will disagree with one area of Feenberg’s otherwise-ex- cellent analysis. Intentionally or not, Feenberg’s approach resembles radical neo-Kantianism more than it does Hegelian-Marxism. Mostly, this does not encumber his account of Marx and Lukaes. The exception is where questions of the state and polities are concerned. As regards Marx, the distortion is quite stark. As regards Lukées, while he understands his political theory well, he fails to pereeive its centrality and structural importance. This is in evidence when Feenberg contrasts Lukies’s approach to Hegel's, He claims that while the lat- ter solved the ‘irrationality of the contents’ with a system of categories, Lukas did not, instead following Emile Lask (p.77). While not disputing his clear debt to Lask, I believe that for Lukées (following Hegel), mediation is like a chain ~ rising from the most ‘deep’ or essential point in the social totality, tothe whole. In Lukacs, this culminates in political praxis. Hence his mediations constitute a system of objective, necessary and increasingly concrete categories which were revealed by the actual political praxis of the European working class be- tween 1917 and 1923. ‘The tendency to elide the state and politics begins with Feenberg's relatively brief comments on Marx's Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and On the Jewish Question, Feenberg is quite right to note that the apparent rationality of polities is borne of the irrational egotism of eivil society. Therefore, any attempt to realise reason through purely political action will accept and re- inforce the antinomy between reason and need, or, between state and civil so- ciety. However, Feenberg subtly falls into the opposite mistake when he writes: For Marx, it is necessary to transform civil society into a sphere of ratio- nal interaction. But paradoxically this is not a political goal... Marx be- lieved political revolution to be through and through tied to class society because in it moral principles contrary to the material interests of the 31 Lopez 2014. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM (2018) 1-26