The historian John Lukacs liked to distinguish between a “fact” and an “event.” A fact is what happened; an event is what that fact means. Lukacs called this our “historical consciousness.”https://t.co/AraYIlhhEh
— Intercollegiate Studies Institute (@ISI) September 22, 2020
My personal memories of John Lukacs, Hungarian-American historian of Jewish descent, of "reactionary" Catholic views, unfortunately in Hungarian language.https://t.co/hWkUPTzdhNhttps://t.co/JSlPN9LVjk pic.twitter.com/fyb5JesTHi
— Ferenc Hörcher (@HorcherF) May 6, 2020
Although best known as the father of “containment,” the mainstay of American Cold War policy, Kennan first revealed his radical decentralist tendencies in his 1993 book entitled Around the Cragged Hill. “We are…a monster country…And there is a real question as to whether ‘bigness’ in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.” He also noted “a certain lack of modesty in the national self-image” of the U.S. He proposed decentralizing the U.S. into a “dozen constituent republics” including New England, the Middle Atlantic states, the Middle West, the Northwest, the Southwest (including Hawaii), Texas, the Old South, Florida, Alaska, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. “To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect – large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp.”
Robin Dunbar: How Many Friends Does One Person Need? from The RSA on FORA.tv
Robin Dunbar: How Many Friends Does One Person Need?
Feminism:
Is Feminism a Heresy? by Donna Steichen
Diet and Health:
Understand the calcium myth; here's what really makes healthy bones
Aloe Vera Gel
All Things Leptin - Leptin 101
Office Hours with Eric Westman:
A Gut Check for Many Ailments
The Daily Lipid: My Interview with Dave Asprey and Armi Legge
Catholic:
The Other Successors of Peter: The Patriarchs of Antioch
Père Abbé du Barroux sur Direct8/Dieu merci !
Fontgombault: Claude Pateau interviewé par l’Homme nouveau
John Hunwicke preaching in Latin - Anniversary Sermon in Newman's Pulpit
Music:
Something recent with Jero.
Misc:
Chris Costa!
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unneces-sary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, Patrick J. Buchanan, Crown, 501 pages
by John Lukacs
Just a quibble with the last point Dr. Lukacs makes:
But there is a fatal contradiction in Buchanan’s theses: Hitler’s regime—including, one may think, its expansion—was evil, but warring against him was unnecessary and wrong. Either thesis may be argued, but not both.
But it isn't contradictory. Buchanan is not arguing both x and not-x.
Edit: Some reactions to the review--
Tom Piatak, John Lukacs, Neocon?
Daniel Larison, On Lukacs And Buchanan
Marcus Epstein, The American Conservative, John Lukacs, and The Unnecessary Review
The fundament (and the unavoidable component) of determinism, and of Objectivism, and of what Descartes established as "the scientific method," is mechanical causality. Mechanical causality means three things. First: that the same causes must--always and everywhere--have the same effects. Second, that there must be an equivalence between the force of cause and that of its effect. Third: that the cause must always and everywhere precede its effect. (113)
Neither wisdom nor profound philosophic disquisitions are needed to point out that this kind of causality does not always--indeed, not really--apply to human life (again: to the lives of the most complex organisms in the entire universe). The principal element, or instrument, that disrupts these causalities is the human mind. It intrudes into the structure (and also into the sequence) of events: because what happens is inseparable from what one thinks (or from what most people think) happens. (114)With respect to history, instead of being an economic determinist, Lukacs sees it as a product of human choices, and pays due respect to the rational nature of man:
Many of the present 'schools' of social history depend on the concept of Economic Man, from the--at times veiled--'scientific' belief that the basic realities of human existence and of historic life and development are materal, whereof the mores and morals and thoughts and beliefs of most people are the superstructures. My belief, from an early time in my life, has been the opposite: that (perhaps especially in the democratic age and in democratic societies) the most important matter is what people think and believe--and that the entire materal organization of society, ranging from superficial fashions to their material acquisitions and to their institutions--are the consequences thereof. (66)
Thus, Lukacs reflects on his own writing of history: "I have consistently tried to apply my convictions about the hierarchy of historical factors (perhaps presumptuously: my perspective of human nature) in a successsive series of books. My conviction of the primacy of mind over matter--that what is important is what people think and believe and that the entire materal and institutional organization of the world is largely a superstructure of that--was suggested and, here and there stated, in my earliest books." (148)
Lukacs has been influenced by Modernity; he is probably aware of this, but is he aware of the limitations of the Modern way of seeing things? Though he is saved from grave errors, undoubtedly because of his Faith, still his thinking has not remained untouched, and points to the weakness of our intellects and our dependence upon others and culture. In describing human freedom, he writes "What mattered--surely in the long run, but often instantly, too--was their relationship to other people, which dependend on their ideas, rather than on their management of things... What mattered were the ideas they adopted or represented or wore--the ideas they had chosen and that they, on occasion, preferred to wear. In sum: the inclinations of their mind. After all, everything a man does depends on some kind of belief." [emphasis mine] (87-8) Who else but a Modern would explain human behavior in terms of ideas, instead of making use of desire or appetite or character? Or knowledge except in terms of ideas and beliefs?
Perhaps he would be sympathetic to those who would create a "virtue epistemology": "We are responsible for what we think--because we choose our thoughts. Consciousness includes intentionality. It contains intentionality... It is increasingly evident--again, especially because of the rapid increase of mental and not physical occupations--that large numbers of people nowadays demonstrate their failing ability to pay attention (including their failure to listen)." (124-5)
(A Thomist can concede that the act of judgment is dependent upon the will, and we chose to come to a judgment that turns out to be premature and false for various reasons. And ultimately, to be an excellent reasoner one needs the moral virtues. But he cannot accept an analytic epistemology which employs epistemic or moral virtue merely as a standard to distinguish and justify knowledge. As a rule-based epistemology it continues to suffer from the same defects that afflict any modern theory of epistemology.)
Despite these weaknesses, he seems to be an author worth reading, and is citied by many traditionalists and paleoconservatives. I look forward to reading his book on Hitler and Stalin. Some other extracts from At the End of the Age follow.
On the breakdown of the family
Women thought (or, rather, convinced themselves) that they were reacing against the age-old and often senseless categories and assertions of male authority; yet their dissatisfaction often arose not because of the oppressive strength but because of the weakness of males. The rising tide of divorces and abortions, the acceptance of sexual liberties, including pre-marital (and at times post-marital) habits of frequent copulation and other forms of cohabitation, the increasing numbers of unmarried women and single mothers, the dropping birth rate--thus the decline of the so-called 'nuclear' family--were, especially after 1955, grave symptoms suggesting vast social changes. They
included the perhaps seldom wholly conscious, but more and more evident, tendency of many young women to desire any kind of male companionship, even of a strong and brutal kind, if need be at the cost of their self-respect. In sum, the professional recognition as well as the legal protection of women had risen, while the respect for them had declined. Some of this was due to the twentieth-century cult of youth--which was especially widespread in America during the last phase of its urban and bourgeois period. However, it is not difficult to see that beneath the cult of youth there lurks the fear of death and even the fear of growing up: the fear of having to assume the responsibilities of maturity. The increasing 'freedoms' granted to young people in the twentieth century were, in some ways, a return to the practice before the Modern Age, the treatment (or non-treatment) of children as if they were smaller versions of adults. The education (in the original sense of the word) of children toward maturity was another bourgeois ideal fading away. (23-4)
1. "tendency of many young women to desire any kind of male companionship, even of a strong and brutal kind, if need be at the cost of their self-respect" -- but is it not the case with many that they do not have adequate self-respect to being with, not having a father or father figure in their lives, and so on?
2. Also, even when both parents are present, they may have failed to give the proper moral formation to female sexuality which is often enmeshed with Romantic notions of love. Consequently, women doing stupid things out of what they think is "love." Hence I would see this tendency as not only a sign but a result of the breakdown of community and families.
3. I wonder if Lukacs is asserting that "the tendency to protect and educate children (note the original meaning of 'educate': bring up, guide forth) was another new bourgeois habit" without sufficient support. While it may be true that "during the Middle Ages children were sent out to work, often for others" (22), might it not be more out of economic necessity than because the medievals didn't want to or know how to handle children? With growing prosperity in the Modern Age, there would be more opportunity to keep children home and to raise them. Also, one must differentiate between moral and intellectual formation here--intellectual formation can be delegated to a tutor or a school or to a master of a craft or skill without the responsibility for moral formation also being given.
On Education:
In the United States the principal and practical function fo the schools often became custodial (especially when both parents were working away from home), though this was seldom acknowledged. After 1960 at least one-fourth of the population fo the United States spent more than one-fourth of their entire lifetime in schools, from ages to twenty-two. As on so many other levels and ways of mass democracy, inflation had set in, diminishing drastically the content and the quality of learning: more and more young people, after twenty years in schools, could not read or write without difficulty. Schools were overcrowded, including colleges and universities. In this increasingly bureaucratized world little more than the possession of various diplomas mattered. Since admission to certain schools--rather than the consequently almost automatic acquisition of degrees--depended on increasingly competitive examinations, the word 'meritocracy' was coined, meaning that the rise and positions to be acquired in society depended on the category of the degree and on the category of the college or university wherefrom one graduated. In reality the term 'meritocracy' was misleading. As in so many other spheres of life, the rules that governed the practices and functions of schools and universities were bureaucratic rather than meritocratic. It is bureaucracy, not meritocracy, that categorizes the employment of people by their academic degrees. The number and the variation of degrees awarded by higher institutions grew to a fantastic, and nonsensical extent. Besides being custodial, the purpose of institutional education was now the granting of degrees to provide instant employment. (25-6)
...The confusion and the split-mindedness characteristic near or at the end of an age appears. Most 'conservatives,' votaries of what is still wrongly called 'capitalism' and of technical progress, deny the need to preserve or conserve. Most 'liberals' still cling to outdated dogmas of the so-called Enlightenment, unwilling to question the validity of 'Science.' This kind of schizophrenia is evident, too, among the Greens or environmentalists--otherwise an interesting and promising appearance of a movement that, for the first time in modern
history, prefers the conservation of Nature to the inroads of Finance and Science--since the same "Greens" who militate in favor of laws and authority to halt the ravages against nature at the same time militate against laws and authorities that still claim to protect families and forbid abortions. The very word 'environmentalism' is inaccurate and even misleading, as if mankind were on thing and its 'environment' another. Instead of recognizing their unavoidable coexistence, many environmentalists are also anti-humanists, wishing to exclude
all human traces from their cult of wilderness and wildness. (38)
For a long time, I have been convinced that we in the West are living near the end of an entire age, the age that began about 500 years ago. I knew, at a very early age, that "the West" was better than "the East" -- especially better than Russia and Communism. I had read Spengler: But I believed that the Anglo-American victory over the Third Reich (and over Japan) was, at least in some ways, a refutation of the categorical German proposition of the inevitable and imminent Decline of the West. However -- Churchill's and Roosevelt's victory had to be shared with Stalin. The result, after 1945, was my early decision to flee from a not yet wholly Sovietized Hungary to the United States, at the age of 22. And 20-odd years later, at the age of 45, I was convinced that the entire Modern Age was crumbling fast.See also his At the End of an Age.
But there is a duality in every human life, in every human character. I am neither a cynic nor a categorical pessimist. Twelve years ago, I wrote: "Because of the goodness of God I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one." I wrote, too: "So living during the decline of the West -- and being much aware of it -- is not at all that hopeless and terrible." But during these past 10 years (not fin de siècle: fin d'une ère), my conviction hardened further, into an unquestioning belief not only that the entire age, and the civilization to which I have belonged, are passing but that we are living through -- if not already beyond -- its very end. I am writing about the so-called Modern Age.
What were its main features? First of all, it was the European Age. Until about 500 years ago, the main theater of history was the Mediterranean, and the principal actors were the people along or near its shores, with few important exceptions. With the discovery of the Americas, of the East Indies, of the shape of the globe itself, all that changed. The European age of world history began.
Yet the very adjective, and designation, of "European" was something entirely new at that time, 500 years ago. The noun "Europe" had existed for a long time, although infrequently used. But "European," designating the inhabitant of a certain continent, was new. Until about 500 years ago, "Christian" and "European" and "white" were almost synonymous, nearly coterminous. After 1492, "Europe" expanded in several ways. Entire newly discovered continents became settled by white people, and Christianized. The lands conquered or colonized by the settlers soon became parts of the empires of their mother countries. Finally, European institutions, customs, industries, laws, inventions, buildings spread over most of the world, involving also peoples who were not conquered by Europeans.
But after the two world wars of the 20th century, during which the peoples of Europe grievously wounded each other and themselves, almost all of that came to an end. There were no more new settlements of Europeans (and of white people) on other continents. (One exception was the state of Israel.) To the contrary: The Europeans gave up their colonial empires, and their colonists left their Asian or African homelands. Yet the Christian churches in Africa, Asia, Oceania seem to have survived the reflux of white people, at least in many places. What also survived -- indeed, it spread athwart the globe -- was the emulation and the adaptation of institutions, industries, customs, forms of art and of expression, laws that were originally European. But the European Age was over.
It was over, at latest by 1945 (if not already by 1917), when the two superpowers of the world (meeting in the middle of conquered Europe) were the United States and Soviet Union. There remained no European power comparable to them, not even Britain. That brings up a terminological question. Was (is) the United States European? Yes and no. Yes: in the sense that its origins and laws and institutions -- and for about a century the majority of its inhabitants -- were of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic origin. No: since its population is now becoming less and less European. And the United States, too, is affected by the crumbling of the institutions and the ideas of the Modern Age that had produced it at its beginning.
To list the evidences of the ending of the Modern Age would fill an enormous book. Here I must try to sum up -- or, better, to suggest -- some of them.
The progressive spreading of democracy has marked the history of mankind, certainly during the past 200 years but in many ways throughout the entire Modern Age. That progress was usually gradual, at times revolutionary, and not always clearly visible on the surface of world events. How long the democratic age will last no one can tell. What "democracy" really means is another difficult question. But there is a larger consideration. We are living through one of the greatest changes in the entire history of mankind, because, until relatively recently, history was largely (though never exclusively) "made" by minorities, while increasingly it is "made" by majorities. (In reality it is not so much made by majorities as it is made in the name of majorities.) At any rate, this has become the age of popular sovereignty (at least for a while).
"Aristocracy" ought not to be categorically defined as the rule of kings and/or noblemen. "Democracy" also means something more than the rule of "the people," more, indeed, than mere popular sovereignty. But, especially in Europe, between the highest and the lowest classes (or between the rulers and the ruled) there was another, rather particular, class in the middle: the so-called bourgeois class or classes, whose origins and first influences go back well beyond the beginning of the Modern Age and whose rise marked much of it, together with its achievements.
By the end of the 20th century, the very term "middle class" had lost much (if not all) of its meaning because of its tremendous inflationary growth, perhaps especially in the United States but also in other nations where a governing upper class, whether in politics or in society, has practically ceased to exist. At the same time, "bourgeois" remains, in retrospect, a historical reality. The existence of a bourgeoisie was marked by recognizable forms of behavior and of ideas. We ought to honor its achievements -- not only constitutional government and its attempts to balance equality with liberty, but the fact that most of the great minds and the greatest artistic creations of the past 500 years were the products of people of bourgeois origins and of bourgeois status. Which is why it is at least possible and, in my opinion, reasonable to give the Modern Age (or at least its two centuries before 1914) a telling qualifier or adjective: the Bourgeois Age.
The Bourgeois Age was the Age of the State; the Age of Money; the Age of Industry; the Age of the Cities; the Age of Privacy; the Age of the Family; the Age of Schooling; the Age of the Book; the Age of Representation; the Age of Science; and the age of an evolving historical consciousness. Except for the last two, all of those primacies are now fading and declining fast.
By the second half of the 20th century, the near-universal principle of government was that of popular sovereignty rather than that of the state; indeed, the power and authority of the state, and respect for it, began to decline. The most evident example of that is Russia, where, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the problem is no longer the overwhelming power of the state but, to the contrary, its weakness. Elsewhere, too, the breakup of entire states has begun, of which the "privatization" of some of the state's former functions and services, or the formation of such supranational institutions as the European Union, are but superficial -- and perhaps even transitory -- appearances, together with the evident lessening of the authority of the state. Popular resentment against "government" merely masks the essence of this phenomenon from which the United States is not at all exempt.
The Modern Age has been the age of money -- increasingly so, perhaps reaching its peak around 1900. During the Middle Ages, there were some material assets, often land, that money could not buy; but by 1900, there was hardly any material thing that money could not buy. But during the 20th century, the value of money diminished fast. One symptom (and cause) of that was inflation. By the end of the 20th century, the inflation of stocks and of other financial instruments became even more rapid than the inflation of money, at the bottom of which phenomenon another development exists, which is the increasingly abstract character of money -- due, in part, to the increasing reliance on entirely electronic transactions and on their records. Income is more important than capital, quick profits more than accumulation of assets, and potentiality more than actuality -- that is, creditability more than actual ownership. What has been happening with money is, of course, but part and parcel of a much more profound development: the increasing intrusion of mind into matter. That this happens at a time when philosophies of materialism are still predominant only reflects the mental confusion of our times.
The Modern Age was, by and large, marked by an increase in the numbers of people; and by an increase in the production of goods and in their availability. But we must recognize that the Age of Industry was remarkably short-lived. It was less than 130 years ago (in 1874) that the majority of people in England were employed in industrial work, not in agricultural production. The people of the United States followed that pattern. But, by 1956, the majority of the American population were no longer engaged in any kind of material production, either agricultural or industrial. They were employed in administration and in services. That proportion has grown fast ever since, and in all "advanced" states of the world. It may be said that the production of consumption has become more important than the production of goods.
The Modern Age was the age of the town. The word "bourgeois" is connected to the word for "city" in about every European language. Bourgeois civilization was largely, though not exclusively, urban. The adjectives "urban" and "urbane" acquired added meanings during the Modern Age. After 1950, the decline of the cities set in. The once urbane populations had begun to move out of the cities, into the suburbs. By the end of the 20th century, the association of urbanity with civilizing disappeared: the presence of an urbane middle class within the cities lost its influence and importance.
The Modern Age discovered the virtues -- and pleasures -- of privacy. Life in the Middle Ages -- both in and outside the dwellings of people -- was public, in more than one way. Soon after the beginning of the Modern Age, there came a change. The most evident material sign of that was the new ideal of the bourgeois house or "apartment." (The latter word is telling: It meant the separation of working and public places apart from private chambers, whether in the palaces of kings or in the houses of the bourgeois.) The recognition of interiority affected our very language (and our very thinking); the increasing recognition of imagination (arising from the inside) rather than of inspiration (occurring from the outside). Thereafter, the increasing emphasis on political and legal rights of the "individual" seemed to affirm the rights to privacy, at least implicitly. But the idea of the private -- and thereby autonomous -- "individual" was a fiction. In a mass democratic society (perhaps especially in the United States), the desire for privacy was much weaker than the desire for respectability, usually within a particular community. Compared with the wish for public recognition, the cultivation of private behavior, of private appearances, of private opinions remained confused, occasional, and feeble.
The modern cult of privacy had, at first sight, a common ground with the cult of what is still called "individualism" (a questionable term); but, at closer sight, that connection is deceiving. Privacy had more to do with the developing bourgeois cult of the family. During the Middle Ages, children were sent out to work, often for others. During the early Modern Age, children returned to the family (or, more accurately, they were kept within the family for a longer time). The tendency to protect and educate children (note the original meaning of "educate": bring up, guide forth) was another new bourgeois habit, eventually spreading up and down, to the nobility as well as to the working classes.
As the 19th century progressed, bourgeois ideals concerning the protection and the education of children were adopted by various governments. More important: So far as family life went, toward the end of that century, for the first time, large numbers of married women, including mothers, no longer had to work in the fields or in factories -- because of the wages and the industrial employment of their husbands. Like the entire Industrial Age, that development was short-lived.
During the 20th century came many changes, including the availability of divorce, and of abortion. Yet on many levels, those were consequences rather than causes. As happens before or near the end of a great age, the mutations of institutions, societies, mores, and manners involved the very relations of the sexes. The ideal of the family woman, wife and mother and homemaker, began to fade. Many women, restrained for a long time by certain social customs and habits, became eager to prove their abilities in various kinds of employment: a justifiable aspiration. Yet -- especially in the United States -- the desire of a woman to be employed somewhere in the so-called "marketplace" was often not the result of financial necessity but, rather, of a new kind of impulse: The life of a housewife -- especially in the suburbs -- proved to be lonely and boring. Women thought (or, rather, convinced themselves) that they were reacting against the age-old and often senseless categories and assertions of male authority; yet their dissatisfaction often arose not because of the oppressive strength but because of the weakness of males.
The age of institutional schooling was another feature of the Modern Age. There were universities in the Middle Ages but few (or no) schools of general learning. By the 17th century, schooling became extended to younger and younger ages, eventually including children of the poor. By the 19th century, the ideal of general and public education, increasingly involving the responsibility of governments, became sacrosanct. Still, much of the training and the proper education of children remained the responsibility of parents in the home. During the 20th century, that changed. Like so many other things, the role of the schools became inflated and extended, diminishing the earlier responsibilities of parents. As on so many other levels and ways of mass democracy, inflation had set in, diminishing drastically the content and the quality of learning: More and more young people, after 20 years in schools, could not read or write without difficulty. Schools were overcrowded, including colleges and universities.
In that increasingly bureaucratized world, little more than the possession of various diplomas mattered. Since admission to certain schools -- rather than the consequently almost automatic acquisition of degrees -- depended on increasingly competitive examinations, the word "meritocracy" was coined. In reality the term "meritocracy" was misleading. As in so many other spheres of life, the rules that governed the practices and functions of schools and universities were bureaucratic rather than meritocratic. It is bureaucracy, not meritocracy, that categorizes the employment of people by their academic degrees. The number and the variation of degrees awarded by higher institutions grew to a fantastic, and nonsensical, extent. Besides being custodial, the purpose of institutional education was now the granting of degrees to provide instant employment.
The inflation of "education" had much to do with the decline of reading (and of its declining requirement in the curriculums of the schools). That was another sign of the end of the Modern Age, which was also the Age of the Book. The invention of the printing of books coincided with the beginning of the Modern Age. At first, it was the availability of books, rather than of schools, that led to an increase of readers -- until, by the 19th century, men and women who could not read became a small minority among the populations of the Western world. Around the same time, the flood of reading matter, including newspapers, rose even higher than the ever-rising flood of books: With the rise of universal literacy (due to the extension of schooling) there was now a new reservoir of potential readers to be tapped. But the inflation of printed matter unavoidably reduced its quality; and there were other influences at hand. The reproduction of more and more pictures in newspapers, magazines, and books; the advent of moving pictures and, finally, of television led to a condition in which -- again, not unlike the Middle Ages -- the routine imagination of large masses of people became pictorial rather than verbal.
I now come to the most difficult of these necessarily generalized and inaccurate summaries of devolution: that of art, which in the Modern Age was inseparable from the ideals not only of beauty but of representation. Much of the art of the Middle Ages was symbolic, and idealized. The Renaissance, of course, discovered humanism, the beauty of the human body, and the complexity of human nature; and it began with an emulation of Greek and Roman art that was marked by "mimesis" or in another word: "re-presentation." A deep shift in consciousness at the end of the 18th century then affected art, first of all poetry and painting. That was the conscious recognition of imagination, beyond the older idea of inspiration (an early recognition of the inseparability of the observer from what he observes). During the 19th century, literature and architecture were increasingly influenced, if not altogether inspired and formed, by historicity. Meanwhile, Realism and Naturalism in poetry and painting were more and more affected by the artist's comprehension of the limitations of "objectivity" -- that is, of the entire separation of the observer (and, of course, of the artist) from his subject.
After the early 19th century, the artist was no longer seen as an artisan, meaning a craftsman, but rather as a person of unusual, indeed, superior sensitivity. By the early 20th century -- even before the catastrophe of World War I -- what was oddly, and belatedly, called "modern art" meant a drastic and brutal departure from the traditions and the achievements of the Modern Age. The ending of the ideals of re-presentation was also marked by an increasing tendency in letters, buildings, music, painting, poetry, to ugliness.
This Jeremiad has its conditions, and limitations. One of them involves the distinction between the passing of the Modern Age and the Decline of the West. Of course, almost all of the symptoms of the ending of the Modern Age have been most evident within the so-called Western world. But because of the continued influence of Western habits and institutions and practices all over the globe, not a few differences between the customs of the Western and the non-Western world are now sometimes hardly more than differences in timing.
Another limitation is even more evident. That is a chronological limitation of my Jeremiad. The rapid dissolution and the malfunctioning of the institutions and ideals of the Modern Age gathered speed during the 20th century, and especially during its second half. Is that not too shortsighted a view? No, history is not a mechanical clock: The pendulum never swings back. But human events and minds change, though slowly; something different, something new is beginning.
A third limitation consists in the condition that the mutation of characteristics and institutions and habits is especially (though not at all exclusively) evident in the United States and in the industrially or technically most "advanced" countries of the Western world. That should not be surprising: After all, the American historical handicap (as well as the once-American advantage) was due to the condition that the institutions of the United States were born in the very middle of the Modern Age, in the century of the so-called Enlightenment, whereby the people of the United States have been less immune to the shortcomings of modernity than other peoples whose mental and physical makeup carries some living memories of older epochs, of an older and different past. After 1989, an unprecedented situation arose: The United States was the only superpower in the world. Does that connote the apogee of the Modern Age (the age that had given birth to the United States of America)? Not at all.
And then there is Christianity. Its churches have been emptying. Yet something like that has happened before, and often. (One example: Perhaps never in the 2,000 years of the Holy See was a Pope as bereft of prestige and power as Pius VI was 200 years ago, in 1799.) Is Christianity disappearing? I do not think so.
And now: the Contra-Jeremiad. A list of the enduring achieve-ments of the Modern Age. Enduring; and lasting; and matters still in progress. We are healthier than ever before. (To be more precise: less affected by pain and by contagious illness.) Our life span has become longer and longer. Large masses of people are now able to live in conditions of comfort available only to the richest or most powerful of our great-grandparents. Large masses of people drive their own automobiles. Institutional slavery has largely ceased to exist. Almost every state now proclaims itself a democracy, attempting to provide a minimum of welfare to all of its inhabitants. Men have been propelled to the moon and back.
We cannot crank our lives backward. We must also know that there were (and are) no Golden Ages of history. The evidences of decay all around us do not mean that there was any ideal period at any time during the Modern Age. In certain fields of life and art and thought: perhaps. In others: certainly not. Yes, it would be pleasant to meet Rembrandt or Bach or Montesquieu or Washington -- or perhaps even to live in the age of Edward VII: but only with plenty of money at our disposal, and in at least near-perfect health.
Moreover, history and life consist of the coexistence of continuity and change. Nothing vanishes entirely. The institutions, the standards, the customs, the habits, the mental inclinations of the Modern Age still exist around us.
So does the respect for many of its creative achievements -- political, social, but, even more, artistic. (One of them is polyphonic music, which was a unique European creation sometime during the beginning of the era.) The respect for older things has now acquired a tinge of nostalgia -- almost certainly part and parcel of the uneasiness with "progress." During the past 40 years, the meanings of the adjectives "old" and "old-fashioned" -- especially in the United States -- have changed from "antiquated" or "outdated" to suggest some things that are reliable, solid, enduring, desirable.
In any event, there is every reason to believe that the respect for (and even the occasional emulation and adaptation of) some of the creations of the Modern Age (surely its achievements in art) will continue and grow. The time will come (if it is not already at hand) when people will look back and respect and admire (perhaps with a sigh, but no matter) -- indeed, when they will recognize -- the past 500 years as one of the two greatest eras in the history of mankind, the other having been the "classical" one, Greece and Rome. But here is a difference -- and a significant one. The last time something like that happened was 500 or 600 years ago, involving but a small minority of people, which is not what is happening now. At that time, men began to look back at the achievements and the letters and the art of Greece and Rome, idealizing them, and emulating them. (All art begins with emulation.) That was the Renaissance, a re-birth: The word is telling. It marked the beginning of modern historical consciousness -- although that was imperfect and incomplete, because of its almost unrestricted idealization of the Classical Age, of the ancients. Its admirers dismissed the entire Middle Ages. They took their inspiration from two ages away, farther back.
That is not happening now. Something else is: our respect and admiration for the age that is now past but which existed immediately before our times and that, in many ways, is still close to us and extant within us. And that is a symptom of the evolution of our historical consciousness, which may be acquiring novel forms and which is not weakening.
But now we arrive at the greatest and gravest duality -- indeed, the greatest and gravest problem looming before us at the end of the Modern Age. Now, for the first time in the history of mankind, dangers and catastrophes of nature are potentially (indeed, here and there actually) threatening nature and humanity together. Those dangers are man-made. They include not only horribly destructive atomic and biological weapons but many effects on the nature and on the atmosphere of the globe by the increasing presence and intrusion of the results of applied science. So, at the end of the Modern Age, the control and the limitation and even the prohibition of some of the applications of science -- including genetic engineering -- becomes a, sometimes global, necessity. At the same time, there exists no international or supranational (and in most cases not even a national) authority that would enforce such measures.
In view of that prospect, the confusion and the split-mindedness characteristic near or at the end of an age appears. Most "conservatives," votaries of what is still wrongly called "capitalism" and of technical progress, deny the need to preserve or conserve. Most "liberals" still cling to outdated dogmas of the so-called Enlightenment, unwilling to question the validity of science. That kind of schizophrenia is evident, too, among the Greens or environmentalists -- otherwise an interesting and promising appearance of a movement that, for the first time in modern history, prefers the conservation of nature to the inroads of finance and science -- since the same Greens who militate in favor of laws and authority to halt the ravages against nature militate against laws and authorities that still claim to protect families and forbid abortions. The very word "environmentalism" is inaccurate and even misleading, as if mankind were one thing and its "environment" another.
Still, after all, the existence of Greens and of environmentalists is a promising symptom -- despite their still present split-mindedness of being anticonservative and conservative at the same time. At the end of the Modern Age, for the first time in 200 years, more and more people, in more and more fields of life, have begun to question the still present and now outdated idea of progress.
Some time during the past quarter of the 20th century, the word "postmodern" appeared: another symptom of the uneasy sense (rather than a clear recognition) that we are living through (or, rather, facing) the end of an age. The prefix "post," in itself, is telling. There is some sense of historical consciousness in it (as for example in "post-Communist" or "post-Impressionist" or "post-liberal"). Yet the meaning (as different from the sense) of "postmodern" has been and remains inadequate, and worse than imprecise: It is vague, to the extent of being unhistorical. Besides, most academics and "postmodernist" intellectuals still shy away from abandoning their faith in the Enlightenment, in the Age of Reason.
There is a difference between "postmodern" intellectualism and "postmodern" art. We have seen that the Modern Age -- as we still use that approximate term -- began about 500 years ago. Yet the widespread usage and application of the adjective to life and art, such as "modern woman," "modern design," "modern architecture," "modern art," and so on, appeared mostly in the 1895-1925 period. So: What is "postmodern"? A reaction to the 20th century? Or to the 19th? Or to the 18th, 17th, 16th? A reaction to, or a step ahead from, Picasso? Or Meissonier? Or Poussin? One form of art to which "postmodern" may be applicable is music: but, again, only in a narrow chronological sense. By "modern music," we customarily designate the period beginning from Wagner (or, even better, from Debussy), ending with Poulenc, Ibert, Honegger, Webern, Duruflé -- the period recognizably 18801950. Is "postmodern" music therefore a reaction to, or a step ahead from, not only, say, Strauss but also Gershwin? If so, then only orchestral compositions after about 1950 are "postmodern." In popular music, "modern" was the high period of jazz, approximately 1914-1950, after which "postmodern" is rock, an electronic application of primitivism and barbarism. In architecture, "modern," after about 1895, amounted to anti or nonhistorical, or to anti or nontraditional. And "postmodern" architecture either does not exist or it is hardly more than a reaction against Bauhaus and Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier -- but often only in bits of ornamentation and a few other smallish details. If "postmodern" architecture and art are nothing more than reactions to post-1895 modernism, the term is inadequate and imprecise.
Yes, we are at -- we are living through -- the end of an age. But how few people know that! The sense of it has begun to appear in the hearts of many; but has not yet swum up to the surface of their consciousness.
That will happen, even though there exist many obstacles to it -- among them, enormous but corroding institutions. As these lines are being written, something is happening in the United States that has had no precedent.
A great division among the American people has begun -- gradually, slowly -- to take shape: not between Republicans and Democrats, and not between "conservatives" and "liberals," but between people who are still unthinking believers in technology and in economic determinism and people who are not. Compared with that division, the present "debates" about taxes and rates and political campaigns are nothing but ephemeral froth blowing here and there on little waves, atop the great oceanic tides of history.
However -- this is not a political or social pamphlet. Its theme is simple. It has to do with conscious thinking. We have arrived at a stage of history when we must begin thinking about thinking itself. That is something as different from philosophy as it is from psychoanalysis. At the end of an age, we must engage in a radical rethinking
of "progress,"
of history,
of "science,"
of the limitations
of our knowledge,
of our place in the
universe.
John Lukacs is a professor emeritus of history. His books include Five Days in London, May 1940 (Yale University Press, 1999). This article is adapted and condensed from his At the End of an Age, to be published next month by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2002 by John Lukacs.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Page: B7
By JOHN LUKACS
The history of politics -- more, the history of human thinking -- is the history of words. Consider what happened to the word "liberal" in the United States.
It has become a Bad Word for millions of Americans. Confident that a large majority of the American people have come to regard, see, or hear the adjective "liberal" as definitely pejorative, the president of the United States found it proper and useful to affix it to his opponent in campaign speeches day after day, across this vast country. Meanwhile, his opponent thought it best not to identify himself as a liberal.
This accusatory label is reminiscent of the habit of some political speakers 50 years ago who declared that their opponents were "Communists" or "Communist sympathizers." Such a similarity, while not precise, is at least interesting, since the increasingly rapid fall of the popularity of "liberal" began just about 50 years ago. It may be worth tracing the curve of its descent.
In the year 1951 no less a demagogue than Sen. Joseph McCarthy still used "liberal" positively, at least on one occasion. In a speech he accused Gen. George C. Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson of being part of "a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so bleak that, when it is finally exposed, its principles shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all liberal men." In that very year Sen. Robert A. Taft, idol of recent American conservatives, thought it necessary to state that he was not a conservative but "an old-fashioned liberal."
But lo and behold: By 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower would declare that he was a "conservative." A tectonic shift in the development of American thinking, and of politics, had begun.
I put "thinking" before "politics," since the history of the latter is often a slow -- and belated -- consequence of what is happening under the surface of publicity. In 1964 Barry M. Goldwater, the first outspokenly conservative candidate for the presidency, lost in a landslide. In 1980 Ronald Reagan, a self-designated conservative, won in a landslide. Thereafter, the congealing of the meaning of "liberal" as something bad and anti-American became one mark of the recent presidential campaign. But what was happening was something well beneath the verbal habits of electioneering.
"Conservative" was a word (and a political idea) that Americans eschewed for a long time. During the 19th century much of the political history of Europe and, in particular, of Britain was marked by the debate between conservatives and liberals. In the United States that was not so.
There was no Conservative Party in the United States. There were a few American authors and thinkers in whose writings and statements we can detect properly conservative elements; but they, too, with practically no exceptions, shied away from affixing the conservative label to themselves. Moreover, again practically with few or no exceptions, Americans believed in the concept of "progress"; indeed, it may be said that the more liberal a man was, the more he believed in and advocated progress. That American configuration, seen in politics in the association of liberalism and progressivism, prevailed until about the middle of the 20th century. In 1950 the cultural critic Lionel Trilling declared that the only dominant philosophy in America was the liberal one. In 1955 a Harvard professor, Louis Hartz, wrote that the perennial and prevalent American creed was liberalism.
They were wrong. Those reputable academics pursued the obvious (to quote Oscar Wilde) "with the enthusiasm of shortsighted detectives." Right before their eyes antiliberalism was rising fast. Within a few years antiliberals would adopt "conservative" as an adjective; they began to affix it to themselves proudly (and often imprecisely, but that is not the point). Symptoms and examples would fill a large book. Consider just one: In 1955 the first self-described "conservative" weekly of opinion appeared, The National Review, edited and directed by William F. Buckley Jr. It had few subscribers. Twenty-five years later its circulation was larger than that of The Nation and The New Republic combined. Its enthusiastic readership was the vanguard of the massive popular wave that propelled Ronald Reagan to power.
What were -- what still are -- the sources of American distaste for liberalism (a distance from, rather than a disillusionment with, liberalism)? One was the gradual liberal acceptance, indeed advocacy, of the welfare state. During the 19th century, liberalism, by and large, meant political and economic individualism, an emphasis on liberty even more than equality, a reduction and limitation of the powers of government. From the beginning of the 20th century, liberals, by and large, accepted and advocated the spread of equality, meaning more and more legislation and government bureaucracy to guarantee the welfare of entire populations. That kind of administrative intervention, with its occasional legislative and bureaucratic excesses, turned millions of Americans against "government" (though they were often the same Americans who were enthusiastic about the political and military powers of government).
Another source of the dislike of liberalism was anti-Communism. Just as the political advocacy of liberalism had moved closer to socialism, the ideology and foreign policy of liberals and Democrats often seemed (and were) more tolerant of Communism and the Soviet Union than were nonliberals and most Republicans. Liberals were, or seemed, less patriotic (more precisely, less nationalistic) than most Americans. And it is, of course, the viscous cement of nationalism that binds so many of the preferences and beliefs of masses of people together.
Beneath these political and ideological sentiments there was the sense, more or less apparent, of a general disappointment with liberal ideals. There was the inclination, sometimes fatal, of liberals to take the ideas of the Enlightenment to extremes: to propagate a public morality devoid of, if not altogether opposed to, religion; to insist more and more on institutionalizing the promotion of justice, at times even at the expense of truth; to emphasize freedom of speech, often at the expense of thought; to make abortion legal; to approve same-sex marriages and affirmative action.
To an increasing mass of Americans, "liberal" began to mean -- rightly or wrongly -- a toleration, if not a promotion, of what many considered to be immoralities. That the private lives and the moral behavior of many self-professed conservatives hardly differed from those of their liberal opponents mattered not, at least until now. What may matter in the future is a division between conservatives who love liberty more than they hate liberals and conservatives who don't -- or between conservatives who believe in patriotism and tradition and other conservatives who believe in nationalism and technological progress. But that is another matter.
For a long time in common American parlance, to be antiliberal meant also to be anti-intellectual. That is no longer so, for many reasons, one of which is the increasing presence of serious conservative thinkers, writers, and academics. Meanwhile, most academics, however, are still anti- or nonconservative, and remote from the mainstream of people. That is not unusual: Isolation of intellectuals and academics from the great mass of people has almost always been thus.
That liberals in academe have contributed to that isolation by asserting unreasonable ideas, contributing thereby to the increasing confusion and corruption of both higher education and intellectual commerce, may be largely true. Alas, the defense of traditions of humanism ceased to be the monopoly of liberals long ago. Still, intellectual dishonesty (and its customary consequence, selective indignation) is not a monopoly of liberals, either: There is evidence of it among self-identified conservative and neoconservative writers, thinkers, and academics.
We must now understand that the collapse or near collapse of liberalism has not been merely an American phenomenon. Worldwide, we are in the presence of a dual historical development.
On a nearly worldwide level, liberal principles, advancing through centuries, and particularly in the 19th century, have triumphed. There is less institutionalized injustice around the globe than ever before. The abolition of slavery; the promotion of universal education, universal suffrage, freedom, and equal rights for women; and the provision of health services, guaranteed help for the poor, popular sovereignty, etc., if not perfectly or everywhere, but at least in principle, have been widely adopted around the world.
But the institutionalization of those reforms, aimed at the elimination of all kinds of injustice, has also led to an increasing prevalence of half-truths of many kinds. Hence the other, the uninspiring side of the liberal coin, evident -- and not only in the United States -- in the decline of Liberal parties, particularly in much of Europe. Evidence of injustice may still animate millions of people, perhaps, especially, the young; but the political label of "liberal" has become soiled, outdated, torn at its edges.
That is a pity, I must say, as a historian who has never been a liberal. A pity: because consider only the relationship of the word "liberal" to the word "democrat." Two hundred years ago -- and for a long time thereafter, especially in the English-speaking world -- "liberal" was a term of praise, unquestionably so. It not only suggested but meant generosity nay, magnanimity; not only breadth of a mind but strength of soul; a reference to someone "free from narrow prejudice," and "worthy of a free man," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. One need not only open the dictionary for proof: It is all around, in the immortal prose of a Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, or William Thackeray.
When it came to the formation of the democracies of the West, the concepts of liberalism and democracy, while not inseparable, were surely complementary, with the emphasis on the former. Among the founders of the American republic were serious men who were more dubious about democracy than about liberty. They certainly did not believe in -- indeed, they feared -- populism; populism that, unlike a century ago, has now become (and not only in the United States) the political instrument of "conservatives," of so-called men of the "Right." It is significant that in Europe, too, the appeal of the term "liberal" has declined, while "democratic" is the adopted name of a variety of parties, many of them not only antiliberal but also extreme right-wing nationalist.
Yes, democracy is the rule of the majority; but there liberalism must enter. Majority rule must be tempered by the rights of minorities and of individual men and women; but when that temperance is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing else than populism. More precisely: Then it is nationalist populism. It may be that the degeneration of liberal democracy to populism will be the fundamental problem of the future. True, many liberals have contributed to the inflation -- the degeneration -- of the original meaning of "liberal." But the acceptance of the word "liberal" as a connotation of something damnable, unhealthy, and odious is to be deplored.
Liberalism in its noblest, and also in its most essential, sense has always meant (and, to be fair, here and there it still means) an exaltation, a defense of the fundamental value and category of human dignity. But much of scientism and technology (yes, including the orthodoxy of Darwinism and the absolute belief in progress) declares that there was, there is, and there remains no fundamental difference between human beings and all other living beings. But if that is so, what happens to the emphasis on human dignity? Either human beings are unique or they are not. Either thesis may be credible, but not both. That is not just a question for religion.
John Lukacs is a professor emeritus of history. His newest book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, will be published by Yale University Press in February.
A Conversation with John Lukacs
Historian John Lukacs talks with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole about history and its heroes. Lukacs has written a dozen books, among them Historical Consciounsess, The Passing of the Modern Age, and Five Days in London, May 1940. His most recent is Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian.
Bruce Cole: You’ve written about a variety of subjects: the intellectual history of the past five hundred years, the history of the Cold War, the city of Budapest, the rise and fall of Europe, the history of the United States. What draws you to a given topic?
John Lukacs: There’s a simple answer to this: whatever interests me. Professionally, sometimes, this is a handicap. Other historians may say, “What is he doing on my turf?” Yet I can only say: whatever interests me. If something really interests me, then I’m writing not for money, not for reputation--but because I can’t help it.
Cole: While you’re researching one topic, does that spark off ideas on another that leads to a book, maybe not immediately, but somewhere down the road a bit?
Lukacs: It often does spark an interest. During research, you often find what you’re looking for, but very often you find other things too that, for the reason of economy, you don’t want to include in the same book.
Cole: Yes. Right.
Lukacs: It may just lie fallow. It might result in an article. Who knows, it might even lead to another book.
Cole: You’ve observed that you cannot separate history from the historian. How did you become a historian?
Lukacs: This goes back to a very different world, and to a very different time. As you know, I was born in Hungary. I was interested in history, but it was not until I entered the university that I decided that I was going to get a degree in history, a degree not quite the equivalent to an American Ph.D., but by and large similar. That’s how I became a historian.
Cole: As a child you were interested in history?
Lukacs: The other day I was just thinking about this. I started to read novels and literature, I would say, in my early teens. When I look back, I was always interested in the kind of literature that has much history in it-- not the historical novel as such, but novels that described a time, a place, and people, how they were, what they were thinking, how they and their places were at a particular time.
Cole: I understand. Besides your writing, you’ve had a long career as a college professor. Is there a relationship between your teaching and your research and writing?
Lukacs: Absolutely. I always wanted to write. Frankly, when I got my first teaching position, I said, “All right. This will enable me to write.” I think that I was a responsible and a reliable teacher, but my teaching ambitions were secondary. I was not interested in moving from college to college to college up the academic ladder.
Then, halfway through my teaching career which has almost covered half a century, I discovered that my teaching had very much helped my writing and even that I have been especially fortunate to teach in a good little undergraduate college. If I had been appointed to a large university and taught graduate students, I don’t think I would be as good a writer. I had to talk to undergraduates about complicated things simply but not superficially. It taught me a great deal about economy of expression.
Cole: Well, that’s certainly characteristic of your books: you make complicated events and situations crystal clear. So you find that when you’re in the classroom, you need to get to the essence of what you’re talking about and present it in a way that is fathomable to an undergraduate?
Lukacs: Yes. I have to use my words carefully, and this is what writing is all about. I have shocked many of my historian colleagues by saying that history consists of words, that the words are not just the packaging of the facts. In our minds the facts do not exist apart from the words with which we express them.
Cole: We really don’t know what we know or how we know it until we start to either speak it or write it.
Lukacs: Yes. This goes against the rules in the natural sciences: your expression clarifies your mind.
Cole: It’s that whole creative process that is scholarship, I think. One of the things that I’m very interested in is history in general and American history in particular. Many people in the history profession are working in what I would call silos. They are hyperspecialized and they are really writing for each other.
In many cases that deep specialization is not a bad thing, but it also seems to me that the historian has a wide audience that is very receptive to history. I’m thinking of David McCullough and Ken Burns and The History Channel and C-SPAN. What is the relationship between the historian and the wider public? Certainly it’s been different in the past when there really wasn’t this age of hyper-specialization in history.
Lukacs: You touched on two subjects that are very close to me. There is today among the public--especially among the American public, but this is almost a worldwide phenomenon--a broad interest in history. Of course, this appetite can be filled with all kinds of things.
This appetite is one of the few healthy things in the cultural mess we live in today. Many professional historians are not aware of this. There is another thing. You said there is much specialization of history and you regretted this. Yet specialization in history is not necessarily a bad thing.
Cole: No. I agree.
Lukacs: The bad thing is that often the specialist is not really very much interested in what he’s doing. He has picked a specialty because he thinks that this will further him in his profession. The true specialist is an eccentric: he is someone who is really and deeply interested in something about which he wants to know more and more.
Cole: Almost obsessed?
Lukacs: Yes. The more he knows, he finds that the less he knows. Yet there are specialists now today. Again, at the risk perhaps of lack of charity, I suspect that the people who do it are interested in their historianship rather than in history.
Cole: In other words, in the professional side of their career rather than in the substance of the work.
Lukacs: Yes. In their standing among their peers. There are all kinds of minuscule privileges that come in academic life. Nobody is immune to it. But if the entire emphasis on your ambition and your mental interest is directed there, that is a deep loss.
Cole: How does your work reflect you?
Lukacs: As I said, whatever I’ve written or I’m writing about is something that interests me very much. Another thing is that I am constantly aware of the inevitable relationship of history and literature. History is scientific in a way, but it is an art in another way, in a different way. History is written, thought, taught, spoken in words of everyday language.
Cole: Let’s talk for a minute about history as art. This relation between history and literature, I hope you will agree, is found superbly in Churchill?
Lukacs: Oh, yes. Churchill, as you know, was not a professional historian. There’s a great English historian, Veronica Wedgwood, who expressed it right. She said, “History is an art—like all the other sciences.”
Cole: One of the things you’ve written about is the concept of the great man. We see this certainly in your wonderful Churchill books. Is this nowadays a less traveled path for historians?
Lukacs: So it is, but that will pass. The present tendency of making history into something like retrospective sociology will continue, but will be refined. We’ll definitely become better. I can see that we live in a democratic age and we have to deal with the lives and the history of large numbers of people. This is so obvious that it is hardly worth repeating. Someone who foresaw this, as he foresaw many things, was the great Tocqueville. Tocqueville has a chapter in the second volume of Democracy in America, which asks, “What will be the characteristics of historians in democratic times?” I think that small chapter ought to be pasted above the desk of every historian.
Cole: He says, “The writing of history in the age of democracy will be more difficult than and different from the writing of history in ages ruled by aristocratic minorities.”
Lukacs: Exactly. I think of this again and again.
Cole: The NEH is launching a new initiative called “We the People,” and one of its aspects is that we are going to establish a lecture series on heroes and heroism, with the idea that we don’t believe that history is only created by vast impersonal forces, but that individuals do make a difference and do themselves decisively shape history.
Lukacs: Worth discussing. Yes.
Cole: With that in mind, let’s turn to that remarkable figure, Winston Churchill. How long have you been interested in Churchill?
Lukacs: This goes back to when I lived in Hungary in 1940. I was sixteen or seventeen years old. I have very greatly admired him since that time. Then I read his history of the Second World War. It took about another thirty years for this to crystallize into what you might call a professional historian’s interest.
Cole: Churchill, as far as historians go, has certainly has had his ups and downs. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Lukacs: Balfour, who was a great speaker but had difficulty in writing, said about Churchill’s The World Crisis,--his multivolume history of the First World War--that Churchill had written an autobiography and called it The World Crisis, which is both funny and a bit mean.
Along similar lines, I had a telling and sad experience some years ago. A colleague--a medievalist--had worked on Richard II, a tragic and complex figure in English history. I said, “You really ought to read what Churchill wrote about Richard II in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.” He absolutely refused to do that, saying that Churchill was not a historian. This is an extreme example of a professional mentality that I regret.
There are passages in some works of Churchill which are stunning, not only because of his language but because of his ability to summarize things in an almost Olympian way.
Cole: Absolutely. I’ve been reading The Great Republic, the book that excerpts sections on the United States. It has appended to it a number of journalistic pieces that Churchill did about the United States, which are really very insightful.
Lukacs: Yes.
Cole: --and often very, very amusing. His ability to synthesize and to get to the absolute nub of things with his magisterial language is absolutely thrilling.
Lukacs: Yes.
Cole: What about Churchill’s reputation today?
Lukacs: Churchill’s reputation today is very high. I think there are two elements in this. I’m not only speaking of his reputation among historians. Compared to the rather mediocre leadership we had in the Western world since him, he stands out and certainly is a heroic figure in the Second World War. That is rather obvious.
But I think there’s another element, too, in the stance he took, adversary as he was not only of Hitler but also of Russian Communism. I think after the fall of the Soviet empire it became apparent that, by and large, most people had exaggerated the power and the influence of Soviet Russia. The power and the ability of the Germans in World War Two was much greater. The Russians were never close to winning the Cold War.
Cole: This makes Churchill’s role, especially in those dark days that you talk about, even stronger.
Lukacs: Yes. He did not win the Second World War, but he was the one who didn’t lose it. He was a single man in Hitler’s path. Hitler knew that. He hated Churchill.
Cole: And the feeling was reciprocated, right?
Lukacs: Not exactly. Churchill was a magnanimous person. Yes, he hated Hitler. But, contrary to what many Germans think, he did not hate the German people. When the news came to him at dinner that Hitler had killed himself, in Berlin, his first reaction was, “Well, I must say that he was perfectly right to die like that.”
Cole: Fascinating.
Lukacs: He was worried that toward the end of the war Hitler would fly to England and say, “Do with me”--these are his words, Churchill’s--”Do with me what you want to do, but spare my unfortunate people.” I think this would have put the Allies in a considerable dilemma.
Cole: What do you think Churchill would have done?
Lukacs: Hitler was not like Napoleon. Churchill would not have had a free hand. He would have had to consider Stalin and Roosevelt. Perhaps he would have liked to put him in some St. Helena in the Tower of London. I don’t know. But he couldn’t do this alone.
Cole: You were just a boy in Hungary at the time this great war was being played out.
Lukacs: I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and a precocious and very insufferable young man, yes. (Laughter.)
Cole: Budapest was really blown apart at the end.
Lukacs: I was right there during the siege. That’s another story. That was a great education for me, having lived through the Second World War, in the middle of it.
Cole: Your decision then to come to the States, that must have given you a different worldview.
Lukacs: This was after the Russians had come. Hungary still did not have a communist government, but I knew that Hungary was in the Russian sphere, so it was only a matter of time until the Communists ruled entirely. I was already too much identified with the British and American side. Our great advantage, due to my mother, was that I spoke English rather well.
Cole: Yes.
Lukacs: And I worked for the Americans, which counted against me, of course. I didn’t do anything very confidential, but still . . . I had a chance of going to any of the English-speaking countries. My natural destination should have been Britain because I had been in school in England for a while before the war, but eventually my venue was the United States, because of my connection with Americans in Budapest.
Cole: You speak of Churchill as a visionary.
Lukacs: He had visionary powers that were extraordinary. Bismarck said that a great statesman can see correctly, at best, five years ahead. Churchill beat that.
Cole: Do you think his vision matured as he aged or do you think this was always the case?
Lukacs: I think this was always the case. He says some very startling prophetic things in his earliest books. Yet I think it matured. He knew a great deal about the world. The British are now understandably contrary to the union of Europe and so forth, but Churchill had a tremendous knowledge of the history of Europe.
Cole: Do you have a favorite book by Churchill? If you were to be shipwrecked on a desert island and could only take one, what would that be?
Lukacs: I would probably take My Early Life, because it’s so delightfully written. It can be reread and reread and reread again.
Cole: How old was he when he wrote his first book?
Lukacs: He wrote his book at the age of twenty-three.
Cole: I think of him as one of the great Victorians, although he’s a little younger than that. He had an active professional life in government with many, many responsibilities and duties; still he wrote and wrote and wrote, in the way those great Victorians did. How did he find the time to do all of this?
Lukacs: In the 1920s, he lived very well, but he didn’t have much money. He had not married for money at all. Sometime in the 1920s he discovered he could make money writing. But it was not money that made him write. He couldn’t help it. He had to write.
Cole: I think you feel like that too; is that correct?
Lukacs: I certainly don’t want to compare myself to him, but perhaps in different ways, yes.
Cole: That’s just something that you need to do?
Lukacs: Writing, in a way, clarifies the mind.
Cole: There has been an opening of the Churchill Archives. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Lukacs: There is one minus in it, but a greater plus than the minuses. It is in a very ugly building in Cambridge, a monstrously modern building.
Cole: He probably would have hated it.
Lukacs: He probably would have hated it, yes. But the archives are in very good shape. The archives include, of course, a lot of people who were involved in his life and they leave their papers there. The archives grow all the time.
An English historian, David Reynolds, is doing an important job. He is reconstituting how Churchill wrote some of his histories; the original drafts of his histories are there.
As you know, Churchill had a fair number of helpers who did research for him. Professional historians may be jealous of that, but they ought not to be. For instance, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rubens had thirty or forty helpers.
Cole: That is correct, and they produced the greatest works of art.
Lukacs: Yes.
Cole: Was Churchill a careful collector and preserver of his own papers? Did he have his eye towards history?
Lukacs: I think so. For example, many of his research materials are preserved. I do not like to be overwhelmed with paper. When I finish a work, except, of course, the main draft, I throw all the index cards away.
Cole: I do that too.
Lukacs: I don’t think it’s a very good idea, but you have to economize.
Cole: What do you think Churchill thought his place in history was going to be? Do we know that?
Lukacs: I cannot tell you, but I tell you he was quite modest about his historianship. He writes these books that are second to none, and he says, “This is not really history. It’s a contribution to history.” I don’t think this was an artificial modesty. He meant that.
Cole: What about his role as a world figure?
Lukacs: I think he knew what he was doing. He knew not only what he ought to do, he knew what it was that he achieved, and what he could have achieved and could not achieve.
Cole: Did he have his eye on how his action would result in his place in the world?
Lukacs: I don’t think that he was a man very much suffused with vanity. At the very end of the war, V-Day, when the people in London cheered him to high heaven, he said, “No, it was not due to me. It’s due to you.”
Cole: You’ve been writing for a decade now that the Modern Age is over.
Lukacs: Well, nothing is really over, but yes.
Cole: What makes you think it’s coming to an end?
Lukacs: The Modern Age was the age when Europe extended its power over other continents. It meant many things: white rule, the power of the state, the idea of schooling, the centrality of the family. It was also the Age of the Book and the Age of Money. That is changing. One hundred and seventy- five years ago, Tocqueville saw that something truly new was beginning. Aristocratic minorities had ruled; we were in the Aristocratic Age, and now the Age of Democracy is beginning. This was a very slow passage, a co-existence of aristocracies and democracies. As time went on, the power and the prestige and even the social position of the aristocracies declined, and the power and prestige and the influence and the social democratic structure rose. Now democracy is nearly universal. As Tocqueville also said, this is not a simple theory. People thought the Age of Democracy would be much simpler than when courtiers ruled, but it is not so. What happens is less rule by the people than rule in the name of the people. The people who are doing the ruling have to be nominated and elected, which of course is very democratic. But the very structure of government and election and the actual representation of the people is very complicated.
Cole: What will be the ideas that define the next era?
Lukacs: I’m not a prophet, I’m only a historian. (Laughter.) The wonderful thing about history is--well, wonderful but also maddening--is that it is unpredictable.
Cole: Well, thank you for taking the time to talk with us. I appreciate it, Professor Lukacs.
Lukacs: I've enjoyed it.
Humanities, January/February 2003, Volume 24/Number 1
