Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at William Paterson University (USA). He received a BA in Languages and Literature from Rutgers College, studied sociology and philosophy at Humboldt Universität in Berlin, and earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His books include The Politics of Inequality (Columbia, 2017), The Domestication of Critical Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment (SUNY Press, 2019) as well as the forthcoming, Twilight of the Self: The Eclipse of Autonomy in Modern Society (Stanford).

Georg Lukács was one of the most important intellectuals and philosophers of the 20th century. His last great work was an systematic social ontology that was an attempt to ground an ethical and critical form of Marxism. This work has only now begun to attract the interest of critical theorists and philosophers intent on reconstructing a critical theory of society as well as a more sophisticated framework for Marxian philosophy. This collection of essays explores the concept of critical social ontology as it was outlined by Georg Lukács and the ways that his ideas can help us construct a more grounded and socially relevant form of social critique.