George Lichtheim

George Lichtheim (Berlin; 1912 – 1973; London) was a German-born intellectual whose works focused on the history and theory of socialism and Marxism.

The son of the scholar and Zionist activist Richard Lichtheim, he defined himself as a socialist and stated in a 1964 letter to The New York Review of Books that "I am not a liberal and never have been. I find liberalism almost as boring as communism and have no wish to be drawn into an argument over which of these two antiquated creeds is less likely to advance us any further."

His work appeared in the Palestine Post, Commentary, Partisan Review, Dissent, the New Leader, Encounter, the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. He also translated Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.

He committed suicide in Hampstead in 1973.

His sister was the Egyptologist Miriam Lichtheim.

Selected works

 * The Pattern of World Conflict (1955)
 * Marxism (1961)
 * Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (1964)
 * Marxism in Modern France (1966)
 * The Concept of Ideology, And Other Essays (1967)
 * The Origins of Socialism (1969)
 * A Short History of Socialism (1970) ISBN 978-0006540267
 * Lukács (Fontana Modern Masters, 1970)
 * Imperialism (1971) ISBN 978-0713901979
 * From Marx to Hegel (1971)
 * Europe in the Twentieth Century (1972)
 * Thoughts Among the Ruins: Collected essays on Europe and beyond (1973)