Ágnes Heller (1929–2019)

Ágnes Heller was born in Budapest, Hungary into a Jewish family of Austrian descent. During World War II, her father, a musician and writer, helped people flee the Nazis until he was deported and murdered in Auschwitz. Ágnes originally enrolled in the medical school at the University of Budapest, but changed her focus to philosophy after attending a lecture by György (George) Lukács, the most influential philosopher and critic of that era. She became Lukács’ aide in 1947 and joined the Communist Party. Together with a group of philosophers gathered around Lukács, Ágnes founded the "Budapest School" of thought. She and others became targets of the pro-Soviet Hungarian Communist Party, which reacted violently to any attempt at critical re-evaluation of Marx. Ágnes was expelled from the Party in 1949, and demoted
from the university along with Lukács, and spent many years teaching high school, banned from publishing. In 1968, after she protested against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, she faced new political repression. In 1977, she was permitted to emigrate to Australia with her husband Ferenc Fehér, Four years later, she was invited to teach political philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In the USA, she became a famous philosopher and was academically and politically active around the world.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, she returned to her native Hungary, where she was appointed a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1995, she received the Szechenyi National Prize in Hungary and went on to receive international honors such as the Hannah Arendt Prize, the 2010 Goethe Medal, and the Concordia Prize in Vienna. She wrote or contributed to nearly three dozen books, beginning with Towards a Marxist Theory of Value, published in 1972. She was one of the strongest critics of the Hungarian nationalist government of Viktor Orbán.