It is a seminal work in the development of Western Marxism, moving beyond the economism and determinism of the Second International and exploring the dialectical relationship between the subject and object of history, particularly class consciousness and reification.

It has been suggested that the concept of reification as employed in the philosopher Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) was influenced by History and Class Consciousness, though such a relationship remains disputed.

"[6] Lukács maintains that it is through Marx's use of the dialectic that capitalist society can be seen as essentially reified and the proletariat viewed as the true subject of history and the only possible salvation of humanity.

[3] History and Class Consciousness was republished in 1967 with a new preface in which Lukács described the circumstances that allowed him to read Marx's newly re-discovered Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in 1930, two years before their publication.

After reading them, Lukács concluded that in History and Class Consciousness he had made a basic mistake, that of confusing Hegel's and Marx's respective concepts of alienation.

[8] However, in 1996, a manuscript kept "secret for more than seventy years" was published for the first time, casting significant doubt on the degree to which Lukács' public self-repudiations reflected his actual beliefs on the merits of History and Class Consciousness.

[5] History and Class Consciousness helped to create Western Marxism in Europe and the United States and influenced the sociologist Karl Mannheim's work on the sociology of knowledge.

[7] The critic Frederick Crews writes that in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács "made a fatefully ingenious attempt to abolish, through metaphysical prestidigitation, the newly apparent chasm between Marx's historical laws and the triumph of Bolshevism.

[14] Others influenced by History and Class Consciousness include the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose initial understanding of Marx came through the book,[15] and the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, the neurobiologist Steven Rose, and the psychologist Leon Kamin.

[19][20] The critic George Steiner writes that Lukács shares with Heidegger "a commitment to the concrete, historically existential quality of human acts of perception and intellection.