El imperativo ético era, para Lukacs, un "narrowing of the soul", dice F. Jameson.
“Thus read, as the attempt to resolve the dilemmas of totality, the philantropic mission intersects with one of the great themes of dialectical philosophy, the Hegelian denunciation of the ethical imperative, taken upon again by Lukacs in his Theory of the Novel. On this diagnosis, the Sollen, the mesmerization of duty and ethical obligation, necessarily perpetuates a cult of failure and a ferishization of pure, unrealized intention. For moral obligation presupposes a gap between being and duty; and cannot be satisfied with the accomplishment of a single duty and the latter’s consequent transformation into being. In order to retain its own characteristic satisfactions, ethics must constantly propose the unrealizable and the unattainable to itself. But narrative, according to Lukacs, can take only the empirical as its raw material; a character driven by ethical abstraction can thus be adequately represented only by a certain ‘narrowing of the soul,’ by endowing it with a ‘demonic obsession with an existing idea which it posits as the only and the most ordinary reality’. Lukacs’ model here is obviously Don Quixote; if he did not anticipate the peculiar flowering of the philanthropic novel in the nineteenth century, it was because he saw the ethical drive in the traditional sense, as the confrontation between an ethical individual and an individual casus. The [nineteenth century] philanthropic project, however, taking as its object not a single individual but a whole class or collectivity, expands the ethical act to its ultimate limit, that is, to that point beyond which it must necessarily become political.”