"The work of Lukacs is important, not because he solves but because he poses in its sharpest and most acute form the fundamental dilemma of the Marxist conception of class and of the proletariat, the dilemma of the gap between the proletariat as an empirical entity and the role assigned by history to the proletariat as a class—the gap which Marx revealed, but did not explore, when he invented the dismissive category of the "Lumpenproletariat"."