Abstract

Abstract The idea of “literary democracy” can be traced back to the early twentieth century, which this article does by looking initially at the work of Georg Lukács. His distinctly humanist view of literary democracy resonates with other key thinkers, including Erich Auerbach and Mikhail Bakhtin. But it is in the contemporary work of Jacques Rancière that an explicit engagement with this idea resurfaces. The task, then, becomes to trace the progression in thought in the passage between these two thinkers, and to evaluate the differences in their concept of literary democracy. Whilst Lukács presents a humanist view of the relation between literature and democracy, Rancière, I argue, presents an anti-humanist view. This claim leads to a critique of Rancière’s anti-humanist position, which has much in common with concepts of democracy in critical theory at-large. The essay ends by returning to Lukács’ work, which provides some solutions to the problems posed by Rancière’s.