While the condemnation of Lukács’ work by party intellectuals (and Lukács’ compromising reaction) might have been motivated by political expediency, there were real shortcomings in the conception of society and in the conception of political practice contained in History and Class Consciousness: In particular, the idea of the proletariat as the “subject-object” of history seemed to entail a Fichtean conception of the self-constitutive capacities of the revolutionary agent, unlimited by historical circumstances and, correspondingly, of a self-constitutive form of practice, hostile to any objectivity. This conception imports moments that are alien to a Marxist view of history into his theory (even on a non-orthodox reading of Marx). In spite of these objections, in his later work, Lukács remains committed to the idea that understanding society as a totality must be the basis of the social ontology of a non-reductive Marxism. He admits, however, that the notion of totality as the product of a collective subject, as he developed it in 1923, needed to be modified in order to remedy these problems.