From fertile hostility to stale benevolence: Guest editors' introduction.

Takács sets out by retracing the sustained criticism of existentialism articulated by Lukács at various stages of his post-war thought (from his 1948 I Marxism and Existentialism i , to his 1954 I Destruction of Reason i , to his posthumous I Ontology of Social Being i ), in which he consistently condemned existentialism's "idealist and irrationalist" anthropological underpinnings. Keywords: Existentialism; Marxism-Leninism; Eastern Europe; Philosophy EN Existentialism Marxism-Leninism Eastern Europe Philosophy 367 372 6 08/31/23 20230901 NES 230901 The papers in this special issue address the reception, critique, and appropriation of existentialist philosophy in state-socialist Europe from complementary thematic and methodological vantage points, focusing either on specific case studies from the various socialist states or developing a more comprehensive transnational perspective. Consequently, the previous positive reception of existentialism at the hands of Marxists humanists came to be seen as a subjective idealist deviation, whereas existentialism remained ill-reputed until the late 80s. [Extracted from the article]