This work develops the aesthetic agreement and the political difference between Hegel and the young Lukács, who wrote the "Theory of the Novel". The young Hungarian author appropriates the conceptual structure of the Hegel's "Aesthetics", because he understands the poetic forms in their relation with the development of historical content. Lukács and Hegel thereby conceive the two forms of the great epic (Greek epic poem and novel) in close connection with the historical moment in which they arise: the archaic Greece configured by Homer and the experience of fragmentation and consolidation of the lyrical subjectivity brought by modernity itself. Despite the assumption of Hegel's aesthetic heritage, the young Lukács departs from Hegel's positive conclusions about modernity, namely: from the suspension of the fragmented and lyrical liberty of the bourgeois civil society by the objective freedom in the unity and totality of the State form, unity and totality truly seized by the philosophical form. Lukács, in opposition to Hegel, understands modernity from the negative starting point, that is, he does not understand it as the consumation of human freedom, but as the experience of the human subject fragmented and separated from the social structures.
"Theory of the Novel"; lyrics; novel; State; bourgeois civil society; young Lukács; Hegel