Biography

Matthew J. Smetona is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Intellectual Heritage Program. His research interests center on critical theory; the history of political thought; and the history of the novel, especially the nineteenth-century European realist novel. His most recent book, Recovering the Later Georg Lukács: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, was published in 2023 by the MIT Press. A précis of the book will be published inthe Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft. The book has been reviewed in Rethinking Marxism and Socialist History.

His first book, Hegel’s Logical Comprehension of the Modern State, was published in 2013 by Lexington Books and reviewed in Perspectives on Politics. He is the author of peer reviewed articles published in journals such as Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Rethinking Marxism, Angelaki, and Theoria; book chapters published in Georg Lukács and the Possibilities of Critical Social Ontology (Brill, 2019) and Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Politics (Routledge, 2018); a translation of an essay authored by Lukács from the German with an introduction published in Angelaki; and a book review published in The Philosophical Quarterly.

He serves on the editorial board of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities as a contributing editor, and he has served as a manuscript referee for the University of Michigan Press, Routledge, Historical Materialism, Rethinking Marxism, The Review of Metaphysics, Theory & Event, European Journal of Political Theory, Constellations, Journal of Social Philosophy, Moral Philosophy and Politics, and Political Research Quarterly. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Temple University.

Selected Publications

• Recovering the Later Georg Lukács: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Reviewed in Rethinking Marxism vol. 36, no. 2 (2024): 291-295. Reviewed in Socialist History vol. 2023, no. 64 (Autumn 2023): 72-86.
• Georg Lukács, “The Problem of Perspective.” Translated from the German with an Introduction. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities vol. 30, no.5 (2025): 153-157. “Das Problem der Perspektive” (1956). In Georg Lukács Werke 4, 651-657. Neuweid & Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962-1986.
• “Lukács’s ontology of social being and the material basis of intentionality.” In Georg Lukács and the Possibilities of Critical Social Ontology, ed. Michael J. Thompson, 41-77. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019.
• “Lukács and the project of a Marxist literary history: Balzac and Dostoevsky.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theoryvol. 20, no. 3 (2018): 340-370.
• “Reification: A defense of Lukács’s original formulation.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities vol. 23, no. 5 (2018): 32-47.
• “Hegel and the end of a particular historical development.” In Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Politics, ed. Michael J. Thompson, 301-325. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.
• “Marx’s normative understanding of the capitalist system.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society vol. 27, no. 1 (Jan. 2015): 51-64.
• Hegel’s Logical Comprehension of the Modern State. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Reviewed in Perspectives on Politics vol. 12, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 907-909.

Courses Taught

• IH 0851 and 0951 (Honors): Intellectual Heritage I
• IH 0852 and 0952 (Honors): Intellectual Heritage II
• POLS 2496: Introduction to Political Philosophy