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Chvostismus und Dialektik, a text recently discovered in the Russian archives, and which has been published in Budapest, contains the answers formulated by Lukacs to the criticism which his book, History and Class Consciousness (1923) met with on the part of the communist orthodoxy of the time. Bearing the mark of the manichaean character of the ideological conflicts within the Communist movement in the 1920s, the text offers an opportunity to take stock of the tumultuous history of the reception and interpretation of Lukacs’ most famous work, which aroused the interest, even the enthusiasm, of minds as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Cornelius Castoriadis, or Jürgen Habermas. The parallel examination of the theses outlined by Lukacs in The Ontology of the Social Being and those elaborated by Habermas in his Theory of Communicational Action can throw light on one of the most recent episodes of this heritage, the reverberations of which are far from over.