Described as "one of the foremost political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" by Monthly Review,[1] Mészáros wrote mainly about the possibility of a transition from capitalism to socialism.
He was interested in the critique of the "bourgeois ideology", including the idea of "there is no alternative", and he also elaborated analysis on the failures of "real socialism".
[1] At the university, he affiliated himself to the so-called "Budapest School", a group of Hungarian philosophers who were taught or influenced by Lukács,[5] including Ágnes Heller and György Márkus.
[7] Later, Lukács nominated Mészáros as his assistant at the Institute of Aesthetics because of his public contestation of the censorship of Mihály Vörösmarty's play Csongor és Tünde denounced as a "pessimist aberration".
[1] His pro-Vörösmarty essay, published in the literary magazine Csillag, earned him the 1951 Attila József Prize and helped the reincorporation of the play in the National Theatre's repertoire.
[1][8] This interest for cultural issues reverberated in his 1955 doctoral dissertation in philosophy entitled Szatíra és valóság ("Satire and Reality").
In the following year, he was made editor of the cultural magazine Eszmélet, created by Lukács, composer Zoltán Kodály, and other personalities.
[1] During his time in Turin, he wrote a book of memoirs about the Hungarian uprising titled La rivolta degli intellettuali in Ungheria ("The Revolt of the Intellectuals in Hungary") that was published in 1958 by Giulio Einaudi Editore.
[5] His 1970 book Marx's Theory of Alienation established his reputation in the English-speaking world,[5] and won him that year Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize.
[17][19] In late 1972, Mészáros was appointed professor of philosophy to teach political theory courses at York University, Toronto, and then resigned his position at Sussex.
[24] First published by Merlin Press in 1978[25] and then by M. E. Sharpe in 1979,[24] it contained a 23-page introduction,[25] which would be later re-published in Journal of Contemporary Asia as a part of a tribute done in 2000 after Constantino's death.
[5] In 1995, he retired from Sussex, was nominated for the Michael Harrington Award for his work Beyond Capital, and was also elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
[31] Usually associated with conservative figures like Margaret Thatcher, Mészáros stated it reached Labour parties, Communist statesmen like Mikhail Gorbachev, and former radicals turned post-modernists.
[33] Mészáros argued that the accumulation process "was done in a very improper fashion from the point of view of productivity" and in a 1982 essay said that it would eventually collapse because of this fact—and not because of US-backed anticommunist military policies.