Already in the reification essay, Lukács describes Hegel’s philosophy as the only “bourgeois” theory of history and freedom that comes close to a solution of the problem of reification due to its insight that the abyss between subject and object can only be overcome by seeing both as elements within an process that actively produces the very distinction between them. Thus, Lukács remains committed to the claim that Marx social theory must be read as a critical completion—rather than as a rejection—of Hegel. This means, however, that he must show that the Hegelian idealist metaphysics that Marx rejects does not exhaust Hegel’s philosophy. His writings on Hegel, most prominently The Young Hegel (1948) and the relevant sections in the Ontology of Social Being, can be read as a defense of this commitment. In the former work, Lukács argues that Hegel’s development of dialectics was informed by his reading of the British economists Steuart and Smith. According to Lukács, this empirical grounding enabled Hegel’s dialectics to draw on an idea of objective, social-historical progress and understand modern society and economy as a processual totality that is structured by contradictions. Hegel’s view of an ontological dialectics must therefore be read as reflecting the structure of objective social reality. The resulting “objectivism” allows Hegel to avoid the subjectivist conception of dialectics that (as Lukács alleges) Kant and Fichte still subscribed to. Hegel, however, subordinates this objectivist ontology to logic in the course of the development of his system. It is this “logicism”, i.e., the primacy of categories over being, which leads Hegel to postulate the idealist conception of the “subject-object” which is needed to explain the identity of logical categories and ontological determinations. This split between a “genuine” dialectics which reflects the objective contradications of society (even if in an idealist manner) and a “logicist” system is the main argument in Lukács’ discussion of Hegel in the Ontology (see GW 13: 489f., 506, 520–523)