In 1944, Lukács returned to Budapest and became a professor at the local university. In 1948, he published his two-volume study titled The Young Hegel (written partly during the 1930s in Moscow) and participated in debates about socialist realism in literature. In 1949, he also traveled to Paris to engage in a debate about existentialism and Marxism with Sartre. The works of this period reflect both his allegiance to orthodox Soviet Marxism and his uneasiness with the Stalinist post-war situation. A widely criticized example of his writing of this time is The Destruction of Reason, published in 1954. It denounced much of the German philosophical and literary tradition after Marx as an outgrowth of “irrationalism” and as bearing responsibility for the ascent of National Socialism. During this time, Lukács also continued to defend a rather conservative ideal of realism in aesthetics (see 1951).