Alabert Fogarasi


Alabert Fogarasi, also known as Béla Fogarasi was a Hungarian philosopher and politician.

Life

Fogarasi was born 25 July 1891 in Budapest, and studied in Budapest and Heidelberg. In 1910 he translated Henri Bergson's Introduction à la metaphysique into Hungarian. He was a member of the so-called Sunday circle around Béla Balázs and György Lukács. With Karl Mannheim, Arnold Hauser and Ervin Szabó he was also involved in the Budapest Free School of Humanities, founded by Lukács. A December 1915 lecture on historical materialism to the Hungarian Philosophical Society criticized economic determinism. His March 1918 lecture to a joint meeting of the Sunday Circle and the Sociologial Society, 'Conservative and Progressive Idealism', opposed positivism and associated radical politics with philosophical idealism.
In December 1918 he joined the Hungarian Communist Party and was appointed as editor of Vörös Újság. In April 1919, speaking as director of the new Marx-Engels Workers' University, he lectured on 'The Philosophic Foundations of the Human Sciences', arguing that socialism needed to be joined to philosophy rather than the natural sciences. He was Director of Higher Education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. After the Republic fell he emigrated to Vienna, and from 1921 to 1930 lived in Berlin, where he was a member of the Communist Party of Germany. In 1921 he published "Observation on Scientific Education and the Proletariat" in Communist Review. His Introduction to Marx's Philosophy appeared in 1921 or 1922, and in 1923 he reviewed Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy for Die Internationale. In 1923 he lectured, alongside Lukacs, at the Marxist Work Week, out of which later grew the Institute for Social Research.
In 1930 Fogarasi moved to Moscow to work for the Comintern. A Fellow of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he worked with Eugen Varga, Stalin's economic advisor. In 1945 he returned to Budapest, where he became rector of the University of Economics. He received the Kossuth Prize in 1952. He died in Budapest on 28 April 1959.

Works