Following Weber, Lukács characterizes the bourgeois form of life in terms of the primacy of an ethics of work and inner strength. Corresponding to this form of life, Lukács claims, there has been a form of art which was capable of expressing an unproblematic relationship between life and form (for example, in Theodor Storm’s case, the insight that the bourgeois citizen must concentrate on his work and entrust the formation of his life to fate, see 1910a: 60). However, when that bourgeois life-form disappeared, the remaining bourgeois “way of life” transformed into a form of asceticism which became hostile against life itself. The same holds true for the corresponding movement within art of rejecting life in favor of “art for its own sake”, that is, of a form of artistic production that self-consciously (and with justification) refuses to express life because it has no foundation in a corresponding life form.