István Mészáros (,ánMészá , ; 19 December 1930 – 1 October 2017) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Described as "one of the foremost political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" by Monthly Review, Mészáros wrote mainly about the possibility of a transition from capitalism to socialism. His magnum opus, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (1995), was concerned not only with this theme but provided a conceptual distinction between capitalism and capital, and an analysis of the current capitalist society and its "structural crisis". He was interested in the critique of the "bourgeois ideology", including the idea of "there is no alternative", and he also elaborated analysis on the failures of "real socialism".
Biography
Early life in Hungary
Mészáros was born in Budapest, Hungary. He was raised by his single mother and his maternal grandmother, and at age twelve falsified his birth date to work along with his mother in an airplane factory building engines. The poor working conditions would later arise "his lifelong hatred of exploitation and oppression". When he was 15 or 16, Mészáros was introduced to the Marxist philosophy during visits to a bookshop. After having contact with Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Friedrich Engels's Anti-Dühring, and Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto, he became interested in the works of György Lukács about Hungarian literature. Mészáros liked Lukács's works "so much" that he even sold personal belongings to buy them and decided to enter the University of Budapest. He did so in 1949 when he won a scholarship with the emergence of a Communist state in Hungary.
At the university, he affiliated himself to the so-called "Budapest School", a group of Hungarian philosophers who were taught or influenced by Lukács, including Ágnes Heller and György Márkus. During this period, Lukács was very criticised by the Hungarian Communist Party and Mátyás Rákosi's government banned some of his works between 1949 and the mid-1950s. Because of his allegiance to Lukács and his attendance of Lukács's seminars, Mészáros almost got expelled from the university. Later, Lukács nominated Mészáros as his assistant at the Institute of Aesthetics because of his public contestation of the censorship of Mihály Vörösmarty's play Csongor és Tünde denounced as a "pessimist aberration". His pro-Vörösmarty essay, published in the literary magazine Csillag, earned him the 1951 Attila József Prize and helped the reincorporation of the play in the National Theatre's repertoire.
During the 1950s, Mészáros was an active member of the Hungarian Writers' Union and was involved in artistic and literary circles, notably in the anti-Stalinist Petőfi circle—a group associated with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This interest for cultural issues reverberated in his 1955 doctoral dissertation in philosophy entitled Szatíra és valóság ("Satire and Reality"). In the following year, he was made editor of the cultural magazine Eszmélet, created by Lukács, composer Zoltán Kodály, and other personalities. Mészáros was also chosen to be an associate professor of philosophy and Lukács's successor at the Institute of Aesthetics. However, after the defeat of the revolution and Lukács's imprisonment for supporting it, Mészáros verified that "there was no hope for socialist transformation in Hungary". So, after the Soviet invasion in 1956, he left the country, becoming one of the first citizens from a Communist country to criticise Stalinism.