There are innumerable instances suggesting that modern intellectuals do not believe themselves, that they don't really believe what they say, that they say certain things only in order to assure themselves that they possess opinions and ideas that are different from those that are entertained by the common herd of men.
- John Lukacs
The eminent historian John Lukacs, a World War Two Hungarian Nazi labour camp survivor and escapee from post-war Communist Hungary to America, called himself a “reactionary” because he was a traditionalist and a persuasive advocate of the necessity of historical knowledge to make any sense out of most things, and because he lamented the transformation of science into a false religion and the over-commercialisation of economic progress. he thought post-structuralism of the French and postmodernism as a passing fad for lazy navel gazing bourgeoisie intellectual minds.
For all this he was viewed as curmudgeonly. He was, in fact, unimpressed with much that was modern but not a pessimist; he never resented disagreement, and was always good-natured in debate.
He was an important historian of great integrity and originality, and certainly one of the greatest American historians of modern Europe.
The historian must enter into the dialectic of the actual and the potential contained in every critical moment of the past. Memory is the real psyche or life force and nothing is genuinely more alive than the historian’s disciplined rejoining of the past; apprehended in the right way, history becomes palpable.
- John Lukacs
A fine modern historian whose writing was influenced by his upbringing in war torn Hungary and as a devout Catholic. Lukacs was an iconoclast who brooded over the future of Western civilisation, wrote a bestselling tribute to Winston Churchill, and produced a substantial and often despairing body of writings on the politics and culture of Europe and the United States.
A proud and old-fashioned man with a cosmopolitan accent, and erudite but personal prose style, Lukacs was a maverick among historians. In a profession where liberals were a clear majority, he was sharply critical of the left and of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. But he was also unhappy with the modern conservative movement, opposing the Iraq war, mocking hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller as the “Zsa Zsa Gabor of physics” and disliking the “puerile” tradition, apparently started by Ronald Reagan, of presidents returning military salutes from the armed forces.
Lukacs completed more than 30 books, on diverse subjects including his native country and 20th century American history, as well as the meaning of history itself. His books include “Five Days in London,” the memoir “Confessions of an Original Sinner,” and “Historical Consciousness,” in which he contended that the best way to study any subject, whether science or politics, was through its history.
He considered himself a “reactionary,” a mourner for the “civilisation and culture of the past 500 years, European and Western.” He saw decline in the worship of technological progress, the elevation of science to religion, and the rise of materialism. Drawing openly upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings about a “tyranny of the majority,” Lukacs was especially wary of populism and was quoted by other historians as Donald Trump rose to the presidency. Lukacs feared that the public was too easily manipulated into committing terrible crimes.
Hitler and Stalin were Lukacs’ prime villains, Churchill his hero. Lukacs wrote several short works on Churchill’s leadership during World War II, focusing on his defiant “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech as the Nazis were threatening England in May 1940. Lukacs wrote that the speech was at first not well received and that instead of having a unified country behind him, Churchill had to fight members of his own Cabinet who wanted to make peace with the Nazis.
One Churchill book attained unexpected popularity after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Rudolph Giuliani, then New York City’s mayor, held up a copy of Lukacs’ “Five Days in London,” declared he had been reading it and likened New Yorkers to the citizens of London.
Quietly published in 2000, the book jumped into the top 100 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list. But Lukacs was not entirely grateful. He noted that “Five Days in London” had little to say about how Londoners endured the Nazi assault, and he rejected comparisons between London in 1940 and New York City in 2001.
“The situation was totally different,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time. “As a matter of fact, it was much worse in England.”
He wrote about how the postwar era signaled the end of an age of civility. Modernity, he argued, had run its course since the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, and a new barbarism would take its place.
Lukacs’ ideas defied easy classification. He was for a time a darling of conservatives, but he rejected the notion that people could be defined as hewing to the political left or right.
The Cold War, he argued, had never been a conflict between communism and democracy; rather, it was a struggle between Russia and the United States. At the same time, he insisted that economic conditions never determined human belief.
Born Jan. 31, 1924, in Budapest, Lukacs Janos Albert had a Catholic father and Jewish mother, making him technically a Jew, although he was a practicing Catholic for much of his life. For the Nazis, who occupied Hungary in 1944, being half Jewish was enough to be sent to a labour camp.
By the end of 1944, he was a deserter from the Hungarian army labor battalion, hiding in a cellar, awaiting liberation by Russian troops. Within months of living under Soviet control, he fled the country on a “dirty, broken-down train” to Austria. In 1946, he arrived by ship in Portland, Maine, his youthful affinity for communism shattered.
Lukacs was a visiting professor at Princeton University, Columbia University and other prominent schools but spent much of his career on the faculty of the lesser-known Chestnut Hill College, a Catholic school (all girls until 2003) in Philadelphia where he taught from 1946 to 1994.
He called himself a “reactionary” because he was a traditionalist and a persuasive advocate of the necessity of historical knowledge to make any sense out of most things, and because he lamented the transformation of science into a false religion and the over-commercialisation of economic progress, and was viewed as curmudgeonly. He was, in fact, unimpressed with much that was modern but not a pessimist; he never resented disagreement, and was always good-natured in debate. He was an important historian of great integrity and originality, and certainly one of the greatest American historians of modern Europe.
A pessimist by definition, he often expressed personal contentment. He wrote warmly about his enjoyment of romance, friendship, books, teaching and the rural life, the “pleasure of fresh mornings, driving alone on country roads, smoking my matutinal cigar, mentally planning the contents of my coming lecture whose sequence and organization are falling wonderfully into place, crystallizing in sparks of sunlight.”
“Because of the goodness of God,” he concluded in his memoir, “I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one.”
Wednesday 31 January 2024 is the centenary of the birth of historian John Lukacs (31 January 1924 – 06 May 2019), who was born in Budapest, Hungary, on this day one hundred years ago.
Lukacs was a prolific writer who not only wrote many books of history, but also many books on historical thought, which give something of an anti-realist and non-Copernican view of history in which history does not fall short of the mark of science, but is something more than science.
Books on shelves line my walls. They are like a lifeline for me.
Along one wall are the books I’ve completely read and kept. I look at the bindings and recall not only the contents of the book but also the places and times in life when I read them. They are markers of my life with learning.
On another wall are the books I have not yet completely read. The show me that there is still so much to…
Education has become a bureaucracy focused on diplomas instead of learning
Education has become a bureaucracy focused on diplomas instead of learning
More institutional schooling emerged over the 20th century, and it created a type of educational inflation “diminishing drastically the content and quality of learning: more and more young people, after twenty years in schools, could not read or write without difficulty” (John Lukacs, At the End of an Age, p. 25).
Yikes! I surely do not know the numbers, but my impression is that during my…
By Ferrell Foster
Here are some thought-provoking words from historian John Lukacs on education in recent decades as the “modern age” has begun to pass.
“The age of institutional schooling was another feature of the Modern Age. … By the nineteenth century the ideal of general and public education … became sacrosanct. Still, much of the training and the proper education of children remained the…
They divorced when I was eight years old, a tragedy for me.
John Lukacs, on his parents’ divorce, in passing in an essay on books https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2017/December/41/12/magazine/article/10842995/
Surrounded by books has been a main circumstance of my long life. So it is now, near the end of my 94th year, when I am in my large library
