John Lukacs

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John Lukacs (born 31 January 1924 in Budapest his name spelled Lukács) is a Hungarian-born historian who has written more than twenty-five books, including Five Days in London, May 1940 and The New Republic. He was a professor of history at Chestnut Hill College from 1947 to 1994, and the chair of that history department from 1947 to 1974. He has served as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and at the University of Budapest.

Contents 1 Views 2 The Hitler of History 3 Later Work 4 Works 5 See also 6 External links 7 References

[edit] Views

Lukacs was born Jewish. His parents divorced before World War II. Although Lukacs was eventually baptized, he served in a Hungarian labor battalion for converted Jews during that war. He evaded deportation to the death camps and survived the Siege of Budapest. In 1946, he fled Hungary for the United States to escape increasing Communist influence in the Hungarian government. In the early 1950s, Lukacs wrote several articles in the Commonweal criticizing Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he described as a vulgar demagogue.

Lukacs sees populism as the greatest threat to civilisation. By his own description, Lukacs considers himself to be a reactionary. In Lukacs's view, the essence of both National Socialism and Communism was populism. Lukacs does not believe in generic fascism, in his opinion the differences between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were far greater then the similarities. Lukacs sees himself as the defender of the traditional values of Western civilization against what he regards as the debasing leveling effects of modern mass civilization, and above the institution that Lukacs sees as the supreme guardian of Western values, namely the Roman Catholic Church.

Lukacs has argued that the best form of government is that of an enlightened elite, preferably a Catholic elite. A major theme of Lukacs's writing has concerned an assertion by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century that all states, whether monarchies or republics, had been dominated by aristocratic elites, and the age of aristocratic elites was drawing to a close and the age of democratic elites reflecting the interests and concerns of the masses was dawning. Much of Lukacs's writings are concerned with what he regards as this transition from aristocratic to democratic elites and its consequences.

By his own admission an intense Anglophile, Lukacs’s favorite historical figure is Winston Churchill, whom Lukacs considers the greatest statesman of the 20th century and the savior of not only Great Britain, but also of Western civilization. Lukacs holds strong neo-isolationist beliefs, and perhaps unusually for an anti-Communist Hungarian émigré, was strongly opposed to the Cold War. Lukacs often argued his belief that the Soviet Union was a feeble power on the verge of collapse, and contended that the Cold War was an unnecessary waste of American treasure and life. Likewise, Lukacs is strongly critical of the administration of George W. Bush and has condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many have seen Lukacs as a leading spokesmen for Paleoconservatism in the United States.

In his 1997 book, George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946, a collection of letters between Lukacs and his close friend George F. Kennan, both Lukacs and Kennan criticized the New Left interpretation of the Cold War being caused by the United States. Instead, Lukacs argued that though Joseph Stalin was largely responsible for the beginning of the Cold War, it was the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, which missed the chance for ending the Cold War in 1953, and thus unnecessarily allowed the Cold War to go on for decades more.

[edit] The Hitler of History

From about 1977 on, Lukacs has been one of the leading critics of the British historian David Irving, whom Lukacs has often accused of engaging in unscholarly practices and of having neo-Nazi sympathies. In part, Lukacs’s 1997 book, The Hitler of History, a Prosopography of the historians who have written biographies of Adolf Hitler contains a substantial critique of Irving’s work. Irving in his turn has engaged in what many consider to be vitriolic and anti-Semitic attacks against Lukacs (Lukacs is quite proud of his Roman Catholicism, but because of Jewish descent on his mother's side, Irving has always disparagingly referred to Lukacs as a Jewish historian). Irving has often threatened Lukacs with a libel lawsuit, but never followed through on these threats.

In The Hitler of History, Lukacs examines the state of Hitler scholarship inspired by the example of Pieter Geyl's book, Napoleon For and Against, while at the same time offering his own observations about Hitler. In addition, The Hitler of History was intended to serve as the beginning of the "historicization" of Hitler as called for by Martin Broszat in an 1986 essay.

In Lukacs’s view, Hitler was a racist, nationalist, revolutionary, populist who draw his strongest support from the middle classes and above the working class. Lukacs has often criticized those left-wing historians who claimed that the majority of the German working class were strongly anti-Nazi; in Lukacs’s view, the exact opposite was the case. Each chapter of The Hitler of History is devoted to a particular topic such was Hitler a reactionary or revolutionary; a nationalist or a racist; and the roots of Hitler’s ideology. Lukacs has concluded that Hitler’s claim in Mein Kampf that he developed his anti-Semitic ideology in pre-World War I Vienna is false; instead, Lukacs has dated Hitler’s turn to anti-Semitism to 1919 Munich, in particular the events surrounding the Bavarian Soviet Republic and its crushing. Much influenced by Rainer Zitelmann's work, Lukacs has described Hitler as self-conscious modernizing revolutionary.

In Lukacs’s view, Operation Barbarossa was not inspired by anti-Communism or any long-term plans on the part of Hitler for the conquest of the Soviet Union, but was rather an ad hoc reaction forced on Hitler by Britain’s refusal to surrender. Lukacs has argued that the reasons that Hitler offered for the invasion; namely that Britain would not surrender because Churchill held out the hope that the Soviet Union might enter the war on the Allied state, thereby leaving Germany with no other choice other then to eliminate that hope, which many historians have argued was just an pretext, were indeed Hitler’s real reasons for Barbarossa. At the same time, Lukacs has been one of the leading critics of Viktor Suvorov, whose arguments about Barbarossa being an "preventive war" forced on Hitler Lukacs has often attacked.

[edit] Later Work

In his 2005 book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, Lukacs writes about the current state of American democracy. He warns that the populism he perceives as ascendant in the U.S. renders it vulnerable to demagoguery. He considers that this devolution from liberal democracy to populism is evident in such things as popular sentiment being the new substitute for what was once public opinion - and propaganda and infotainment over knowledge and history.

[edit] Works

• The Great Powers and Eastern Europe (New York : American Book Co., 1953).
• A History of the Cold War (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1961).
• Decline and Rise of Europe: A Study in Recent History, With Particular Emphasis on the Development of a European Consciousness (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1965).
• A New history of the Cold War (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1966).
• Historical Consciousness; or, The Remembered Past (New York : Harper & Row, 1968).
• The Passing of the Modern Age (New York : Harper & Row, 1970).
• A Sketch of the History of Chestnut Hill College, 1924-1974 (Chestnut Hill, PA: Chestnut Hill College, 1975).
• The Last European War: September 1939-December 1941 (Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor Press, 1976).
• 1945: Year Zero (New York : Doubleday, 1978).
• Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950 (New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981).
• Outgrowing Democracy : A History of the United States in the Twentieth century (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1984).
• Immigration and Migration: A Historical Perspective. AICF Monograph Series, paper no. 5 (Monterey, VA : American Immigration Control Foundation, 1986).
• Budapest 1900 : A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (New York : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).
• Confessions of an Original Sinner (New York : Ticknor and Fields, 1990).
• The Duel : 10 May-31 July 1940 : the Eighty-Day Struggle between Churchill and Hitler (New York : Ticknor & Fields, 1991).
• The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (New York : Ticknor & Fields, 1993).
• Destinations Past : Traveling through History with John Lukacs (Columbia, MO : University of Missouri Press, 1994).
• The Hitler of History (New York : A. A. Knopf, 1997).
• George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946 : the Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence, Introduction by John Lukacs. (Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri Press, 1997).
• A Thread of Years (New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, 1998).
• Five Days in London, May 1940 (New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, 1999).
• A Student's Guide to the Study of History (Wilmington, DE : ISI Books, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000).
• Churchill : Visionary, Statesman, Historian (New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, 2002).
• At the End of an Age (New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, 2002).
• A New Republic: A History Of The United States In The Twentieth Century(New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, 2004).
• Democracy and Populism : Fear & Hatred (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2005).
• Remembered Past : John Lukacs On History, Historians & Historical Knowledge : A Reader (Wilmington, DE : ISI Books, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005).
• June 1941: Hitler and Stalin. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2006 (ISBN 0-300-11437-0).

[edit] See also

• List of Adolf Hitler books

[edit] External links

• The People's Hitler Does Hitler's popularity discredit populism itself?: A Review of The Hitler of History by Adam Shatz
• Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian, a review of Lukacs' book
• The Anti-Populist Traditionalist historian John Lukacs laments the direction of conservatism in America by Jeet Heer
• Review of THE HITLER OF HISTORY by John Lukacs & EXPLAINING HITLER: THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF HIS EVIL by Ron Rosenbaum
• History in a Democratic Age: A Conversation with John Lukacs
• Towards the Fuhrer: Review of The Hitler Of History
• "A Student's Guide to the Study of History" by John Lukacs, from ISI's "Guides to the Major Disciplines
• Amazon.com: John Lukacs's list of the best historians
• The Universality of National Socialism (The Mistaken Category of `Fascism’) by John Lukacs

[edit] References

• Allitt, Patrick Catholic Intellectuals And Conservative Politics In America 1950-1985, Cornell University Press, 1993.
• Williamson, Chilton The Conservative Bookshelf: Essential Works That Impact Today's Conservative Thinkers, Citadel Press, 2004.