Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West Reconsidered 9780815365709, 9781351260848

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Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West Reconsidered

Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West remains one of the most insightful analyses of Nazi thought ever written. First published in 1938 it was a revelation for many readers. Quite different in tone and approach from most other analyses of Nazism available in English, it was remarkable for the thoroughness with which it discussed the writings of Nazi thinkers and for the seriousness with which it took their views. In this edited collection published eighty years after the original book, a team of distinguished scholars reassess this classic text and also consider its continued relevance to contemporary politics. They address issues such as the comparison of Nazism and communism, anti-­Semitism, British and American perceptions of the Reich before the war and the Nazi legal theory of Carl Schmitt. This book is a vital source for historians of Nazism and Fascism. Wolfgang Bialas, self-­employed lecturer and translator, editor of Aurel Kolnai, Der Krieg gegen den Westen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015) and author of Moralische Ordnungen des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vanden­ hoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).

Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right Series editors: Nigel Copsey Teesside University

and Graham Macklin

Center for Research on Extremism (C-­REX), University of Oslo

This new book series focuses upon Fascist, far right and right-­wing politics primarily within a historical context but also drawing on insights from other disciplinary perspectives. Its scope also includes radical-­right populism, cultural manifestations of the far right and points of convergence and exchange with the mainstream and traditional right. Titles include: Tomorrow Belongs to Us The UK Far Right Since 1967 Edited by Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley The Portuguese Far Right Between Late Authoritarianism and Democracy (1945–2015) Riccardo Marchi Never Again Rock Against Racism and the Anti-­Nazi League 1976–1982 David Renton Antifascism in Nordic Countries New Perspectives, Comparisons and Transnational Connections Edited by Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey and Johan Lundin The March on Rome Violence and the Rise of Italian Fascism Giulia Albanese Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West Reconsidered Edited by Wolfgang Bialas The Ku Klux Klan and Freemasonry in 1920s America Fighting Fraternities Miguel Hernandez

Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West Reconsidered Edited by Wolfgang Bialas

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Wolfgang Bialas, individual chapters, the contributors The right of Wolfgang Bialas to be identified as the author of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-8153-6570-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-26084-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



Notes on contributors List of abbreviations

  1 Introduction

vii ix 1

W olfgang B ialas

Part I

Topics addressed in Kolnai’s The War Against the West

15

  2 Aurel Kolnai’s comparison of National Socialism and communism in the context of contemporary comparisons of dictatorships

17

U we B ackes

  3 Nazism, Christianity and the development of political religion theory in Kolnai’s The War Against the West

35

R ic h ard S teigmann - ­G all

  4 Aurel Kolnai’s reflections on anti-­Semitism in contemporary context

56

M ic h a B rumlik

Part II

Comparing Kolnai with contemporary attempts of coming to terms with Nazism

67

  5 Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West and British attempts to understand Nazism before the war

69

D an  S tone

vi   Contents   6 Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West and the American debate on Nazism

83

M ic h aela Hoenicke  M oore

  7 Aurel Kolnai and Franz Neumann: normative criticism and structural analysis of National Socialism

102

R olf Z immermann

Part III

Kolnai’s work and the reception of The War Against the West

113

  8 Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West contextualised

115

L ee C ongdon

  9 Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West: contours of a contemporary analysis and critique of National Socialism

136

W olfgang B ialas

10 Nazi sexual politics: Aurel Kolnai on the threat of re-­primitivism

156

G ra h am J . M c A leer

Part IV

Kolnai’s political and moral philosophy

167

11 Aurel Kolnai’s War against Carl Schmitt’s War: the war of wars

169

Z olt á n B al á zs

12 The viability of Kolnai’s moral phenomenology: moral awareness and anti-­Utopianism

189

C h ris B essemans

13 The War Against the West and Kolnai’s post-­war moral and political philosophy

211

A ndrew S . C unning h am



Index

239

Contributors

Uwe Backes is Deputy Director at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism and Professor of Political Science at the Technical University of Dresden. He is the author of Political Extremes. A Conceptual History from Antiquity to the Present (London/New York: Routledge, 2010). Zoltán Balázs is Professor of Political Science at the Corvinus University, Budapest and Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. With Francis Dunlop he co-­edited Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai (New York: Central European University Press (CEU Press), 2004). Chris Bessemans wrote his PhD (2012) at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven Belgium, and with support of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) on Kolnai’s moral philosophy and analytic phenomenological value-­ ethics. He published previously on Kolnai’s moral philosophy and on moral conflicts, for instance ‘A Short Introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s Moral Philosophy’, Journal of Philosophical Research, 38 (2013): 203–32 and ‘A Glimpse of the Aurel Kolnai Nachlass’, Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica, 1 (2012): 153–73. Wolfgang Bialas works as a freelance lecturer and translator. He is the editor of Aurel Kolnai, Der Krieg gegen den Westen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015) and author of Moralische Ordnungen des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). Micha Brumlik is Professor Emeritus of Educational Science at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-­Universität Frankfurt/M. and was from 2000–2005 Director of the Fritz-­Bauer-Institute Frankfurt/M. Since 2013 he has been Senior Professor at Center for Jewish Studies Berlin/Brandenburg. His most recent publication is Wann, wenn nicht jetzt. Versuch über die Gegenwart des Judentums (Berlin: Neofelis, 2015). Lee Congdon is Professor Emeritus of History at James Madison University. He has been a Fulbright Research Scholar in Budapest and a Visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of Seeing Red:

viii   Contributors Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). Andrew S. Cunningham is a Canadian lawyer. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto (1999) and has published several articles on eighteenth-­century moral psychology. He has been interested in Kolnai’s writings for over thirty years. Michaela Hoenicke Moore is Professor of History at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–45 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Graham J. McAleer is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. Among his publications are Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics (New York: Fordham University Press 2005). He also wrote the introduction to Aurel Kolnai, Ethics, Value and Reality (London: Transaction, 2008). Richard Steigmann-­Gall is Professor of History at Kent State University. He is the author of The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edn, 2012) and The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2015). Rolf Zimmermann is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Konstanz. He is the author of Philosophie nach Auschwitz (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005) and Ankommen in der Republik. Thomas Mann, Nietzsche und die Demokratie (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2017).

Abbreviations

BArch CBS Gestapo ISIS KA LBC MS NS NSDAP NSDStB NSLB OWI POUM PPF sc. SPD SS TLS UK USSR WAW

Bundesarchiv Columbia Broadcasting System Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police [of Nazi Germany]) Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Kolnai Archive Left Book Club manuscript National Socialism, National Socialist Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (National Socialist Student League) Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund (National Socialist Teachers’ League) Office of War Information Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista President’s Personal File scilicet Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) Schutzstaffel The Times Literary Supplement United Kingdom Union of Soviet Socialist Republics The War Against the West

1 Introduction Wolfgang Bialas

Kolnai’s The War Against the West: an attempt at contextualisation Can we expect the contemporary analysis and critique of National Socialism to teach us something new about this phenomenon that goes beyond current research or at least something that would add to or modify the details of this research? Responses to this question, which is often asked merely rhetorically, usually focus on what contemporary writers either anticipated or had suspicions concerning National Socialism; these are, in other words, aspects that were confirmed by later research. Analyses from that time are not expected to yield any insights that add to present-­day research. So, what can the reconstruction of a contemporary critical analysis of National Socialist ideology contribute in terms of answering the questions posed by present-­day research into National Socialism? Did Kolnai ask the right questions? Did his treatment of the subjects he selected for his analytical approach bring crucial elements of National Socialism to light, or did he instead work on issues that seem rather marginal today? What picture of National Socialism does Kolnai’s book sketch out? How does Kolnai’s book fit into his work taken as whole? The contributors to this book have pursued these questions, among others. Beyond the specific subjects treated by Kolnai in his book, and its place in contemporary German and international examinations of National Socialism, the essays in this volume repeatedly take up Kolnai’s ideas and relate them to current debates. One of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century, Aurel Kolnai (1900–73) was nevertheless largely unknown in Germany for many decades. A Jew who converted to Roman Catholicism, he lived first in Budapest and then from 1930 to 1937 in Vienna, where he wrote his book, which was initially published in English by the Marxist publishing house, Victor Gollancz of London. In November 1940 Kolnai emigrated with his wife to the United States, before becoming Professor of Philosophy in Canada in 1947. He resigned from this post in 1955 to accept a research position at Bedford College in London, where he remained active until his death in 1973.

2   Wolfgang Bialas Kolnai was known for his interdisciplinary and wide-­ranging work in psychology and moral and social philosophy, for example, but also for his ideological critique of National Socialism and liberalism, and the comparison of dictatorships under Bolshevism and National Socialism. Besides psychology, Kolnai’s work covered subjects such as utopian thought (Kolnai, 1995) and moral philosophy (Kolnai, 1927; cf. also 1977), sexual ethics (Kolnai, 1930) and the dangers of the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century (Kolnai, 1938; cf. 1999, pp.  145–7). Equally as impressive as his interdisciplinary range of writings and his lifelong readiness to critically question and, if necessary, qualify his own positions is Kolnai’s approach, which extends beyond the traditional boundaries of disciplines and is appreciative of the diversity and complexity of the actual topics he dealt with. These virtues also distinguish his 1938 book, The War Against the West, which in 2015 finally became available in German translation as Der Krieg gegen den Westen. This edition allows us to appreciate comprehensively, by means of the corresponding bibliographical references, which are now compiled for the first time, Kolnai’s declared principle of having National Socialist texts, as well as texts he classified as either proto- or pro-­ Fascist, speak mostly for themselves. Kolnai completed his book in the summer of 1936, and so long before the Kristallnacht of November 1938 but after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws that codified racism and anti-­Semitism. Unlike contemporary analysts and critics of National Socialism before the Second World War and the Holocaust, today we know the direction in which Nazi Germany developed and can therefore judge what happened from historical distance. Contemporaries, on the other hand, were part of ongoing developments in which they themselves were participants or by which they were affected. It is precisely for this reason that their responses to the ideology, as well as to the issues within and conflicts of National Socialist Germany, can afford us insights that are still of great relevance into the actual developments that were occurring in Germany and internationally at that time. In particular, deliberations on the strategic options of National Socialist politics, but also the struggle by opponents of National Socialism to find persuasive responses to this politics, can be better understood by looking at contemporary debates. Common to these conceptually very diverse efforts was the intention to first understand what was new about National Socialism in the first place. The application of traditional concepts from political theory and philosophy soon reached its limits. The combination of set pieces from various theoretical approaches was much more promising than an attempt to use National Socialism to verify the superiority of a single theory’s reach compared to other explanatory approaches. These debates, as well as the controversies and conflicts that were still open-­ended at the time of their conclusion, shed light on the pluralistic and dynamic field of sociocultural conditions and the constellations of political power in which these debates and controversies were determined. Kolnai’s The War Against the West was in no way the only contemporary critical discussion in English of National Socialism, but it was certainly the most comprehensive presentation of its ideology. This raises the question of the status

Introduction   3 of the book in contemporary analyses and criticism of National Socialism. Would it be correct to assert that, in presenting National Socialist ideology, Kolnai largely trusted the explanatory power of the material he had compiled, without having situated himself in contemporary debates? And even if this were the case, what significance does his book have within these debates? Kolnai’s book is the English-­language counterpart to contemporary responses to National Socialism, such as Helmuth Plessner’s Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche [The Fate of the German Spirit at the End of Its Civil Era] (1935), Georg Lukács’s polemical writings from 1933 on, including titles such as Zur Kritik der faschistischen Ideologie [On the Critique of Fascist Ideology] ([1942] 1989) and Die Zerstörung der Vernunft [The Destruction of Reason] (1955), critical analyses of National Socialism by members of the Frankfurt School and Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State (1946). Like other contemporary writers who critically discussed National Socialism (Plessner, 1935; Lukács, [1942] 1989, 1948, 1955) or attempted to understand it historically from a National Socialist perspective (Steding, 1938; Hancke, 1941), Kolnai also provided a historico–philosophical identification of National Socialism in the context of German and European culture. For example, as Plessner and Lukács did, he complained that bourgeois society had undermined its normative foundations through self-­doubt related to ideological critique. Kolnai’s line of reasoning contains conceptual patterns that have played an important role in the history of research on National Socialism or continue to be of importance, such as the identification of National Socialism as ‘reactionary modernism’ (Herf, 1984), the thesis of the self-­destruction of bourgeois society through the critical questioning of its ideological foundations (Lukács, [1942] 1989, 1948), the characterisation of Germany as a ‘delayed nation’ (Plessner, 1935) and the assumption that National Socialism did not constitute a rupture with Western modernity but rather an expression and product of the latter’s ambivalence (Bauman, 1992). Such analogies first show that – despite his excessive analysis of National Socialist sources or texts that he situated in the ideological environment of National Socialism – Kolnai was not content to let these texts speak for themselves without attempting a systematic interpretation of National Socialism through them. It appears that none of the writers whose interpretations of National Socialism gave rise to conceptual trends were familiar with Kolnai’s The War Against the West. Accordingly, they neither linked their work to Kolnai’s nor did he anticipate their interpretations of National Socialism. Perhaps, as a contemporary and critical analyst of National Socialism, Kolnai was simply attentive, unbiased and, as a bourgeois intellectual, sufficiently disturbed about and sensitive to what was new about this brand of ideology and politics to describe the different facets of this ideology and then to juxtapose them, if as elements they could not be formed into a coherent overall picture. It is particularly this multifaceted and inherently contradictory delineation of the ideology of a political movement, which permits fascination and horror alike, that makes

4   Wolfgang Bialas Kolnai’s book so captivating; and this was evidently a political movement that had not yet arrived at the quiescent, fully fledged administration of its political power but which still had things in store – namely violence, terror and war. Perhaps Helmuth Plessner came closest to this educated, middle-­class attitude of alarm in his 1935 book, Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche [The Fate of the German Spirit at the End of Its Civil Era]. Bound no more than Kolnai to any party doctrine or theoretical school, Plessner took the liberty of first compiling the relevant empirical material, in his case on the intellectual and cultural history of Germany. While we can easily imagine a mutually beneficial exchange between the two writers, it never took place. On the other hand, in focusing on ideology as the ‘expression of deep historical forces … forming the sounding board of the ideas of an age’ (Plessner, 1959, p. 35), Plessner follows an approach that differs from Kolnai’s, with the former’s ‘Contribution to the Intellectual History of German Nationalism’ aiming to uncover ‘the roots of the ideology of the Third Reich and the reasons behind the development of its demagogical impact’ (Plessner, 1959, p. 13). At a time when other opponents of National Socialism still considered serious analyses of Nazi ideology to be superfluous, Kolnai’s book focused on the intellectual discussion of precisely that ideology. His analysis aimed to elaborate in detail the substance of National Socialist ideology, which posed a danger precisely through its eclectic collection and synthesis of wholly different ideas, by means of which it was able to mobilise people’s scattered feelings, fears and expectations for its own political ends. He took Nazism seriously without underestimating it as a temporary political movement that had no intellectual or moral substance. He saw it neither as an unoriginal version of capitalism in aggressive response to its existential crisis nor as a purely destructive nihilism, but instead as a new, radical political movement that could not be understood in terms of traditional political concepts like ‘reactionary’ and ‘conservative’. In clear contrast to liberal democracy, the ‘racial universalism’ of National Socialist ideology went in his view far beyond the Left versus Right opposition in contemporary debates. The misjudgement of this ideology as only a passing phenomenon with no relation to the formative developments of its day, as well as its stereotypical simplification within the framework of a common explanatory model in political theory or ideological critique, would be fatal and disastrous in Kolnai’s view. He considered the threat to Europe and the West by National Socialism too grave to content himself with merely using the ideology to test the scope and plausibility of different explanatory approaches.

Disconcerting and perplexing remarks made by Kolnai Kolnai’s book takes positions and makes arguments that today seem out of place, such as his expressions of prevailing contemporary views on homosexuality and traditional gender roles, and his attempt to apply these views to his analysis of National Socialism. For example, he distinguishes between ‘normal’ and

Introduction   5 ‘abnormal’ sexuality and declares homosexuality to be abnormal and biologically insignificant. In National Socialism Kolnai perceives a patriarchal, militaristic, male-­ dominated society. At the same time his discussion of National Socialism’s handling of traditional gender roles and sexual orientation indicates his own struggle with these issues. For example, he conjures up the danger of a weakening and barbarisation of National Socialism through a feminine undercurrent that could oppose military discipline and order through the use of irrational traits and instincts as anarchistic elements (Kolnai, 1938, p. 224). Taking for granted the intellectual superiority and natural leadership roles of men, Kolnai sees them as the main initiators and shapers of thought, forms of administration and progress. Masculine domination is in Kolnai’s view the precondition for a total equality of rights, dignity, self-­determination and equal opportunities for women. National Socialism also, of course, presupposes male domination, which adds, however, a thinly veiled contempt for the feminine. Such virile self-­consciousness in a National Socialist movement dominated by men, who felt too assured of their traditional supremacy and leadership role in all socially and politically relevant fields to consider it necessary to justify their superiority over women, quite naturally denied women equal rights in society. Under National Socialism, women would be driven out of all areas of public life and reduced to satisfying male needs and producing future soldiers. In Kolnai’s view, the feminine aspect of National Socialism does not contradict its virile bellicosity, but rather complements it in a paradoxical way (Kolnai, 1938, p. 224). On the other hand, he was clear that neither the charismatic love for the Führer, nor the emotional subjectivism of tribal self-­worship nor intoxication with the magical quality of virility were truly masculine traits. During war, Kolnai notes, it is the masses of hysterical women rather than the actual soldiers who act out their hatred of the enemy in orgies of patriotism (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  224–5). National Socialism is a combination of masculine militarism and feminine anarchism, with the male group serving as the model for the lives of soldierly youth. In any case, ‘the trampling of savage male feet over moral restraints, or the corpses of enemy tribes, will be more audible than … feminine power in the background’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  228–9). Kolnai considers it possible that after a period of victorious wars National Socialism could develop a matriarchal social system that would be hostile to abstract intellect and impartial objectivity, indifferent to progress and higher laws, and would instead rely on traditions and instincts (Kolnai, 1938, p. 225). This attempt to identify gender-­specific aspects of National Socialism as a bellicose balance between masculine and feminine elements is perplexing, especially because Kolnai singles out the irrationality and instinctual unpredictability traditionally ascribed to women as posing a particular threat of the political radicalisation of National Socialism. He sees women as potentially transforming the doctrine’s strategic and rationally calculated form of militarism into an anarchistic, unpredictable society that has lost control, in which the balance

6   Wolfgang Bialas between rational masculine and irrational feminine elements would be disturbed by feminine anarchy and unpredictability. It is clear that Kolnai speaks in favour of equal rights for women, but only sees these rights being protected under the condition of male domination. It is only when women acknowledge men’s intellectual superiority and leadership that they may expect men to bestow upon them equal rights and opportunities in the supposedly masterful, but in fact patronising, gesture of a superior race. Undermining this prospect is the danger that a feminine undertone in National Socialism could prevail over its masculine elements, giving rise to the dominance of an anarchistic irrationality that could radicalise National Socialism and render it politically unpredictable in a way that would constitute an unparalleled threat to Europe and the world. Such are the implications of Kolnai’s reflections, but they are not formulated by Kolnai himself. In fact, these reflections are so far-­fetched and marginal in the context of the book that they do not deserve serious critical attention in terms of either their factual basis or their historical role in Kolnai’s work. While Kolnai’s attempt to subsume National Socialist anti-­Semitism under the framework of the overall anti-­Western thrust of National Socialism, as he elaborated it, and thereby to qualify the importance of anti-­Semitism as the core of National Socialist racial policy and ideology (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 467–8) seems perplexing today, this viewpoint was nevertheless widespread in contemporary discourse as one of the elements of conceptual understanding of anti-­Semitism. At the time it did seem a plausible approach within an ideological critique that responded to the irrational and objectively non-­justifiable elements of racial anti-­Semitism. This line of reasoning was directed against the supposed hysteria and paranoia that massively exaggerated the extent and importance of the persecution of and discrimination against the Jews, while overlooking the symbolic significance of these attacks, a significance that had nothing to do with the Jews themselves. By subsuming anti-­Semitism under his overall view of National Socialism, Kolnai left no doubt as to his resolute rejection of the National Socialist policy towards Jews. Kolnai insisted on taking discrimination against the Jews seriously, as the Nuremberg Laws opened up a new and terrible perspective on racist inhumanity, injustice and superstition (Kolnai, 1938, p. 492). He expressly warned against underestimating the possible further political radicalisation of National Socialism, as well as discounting its aggressive practices and attendant ideological rhetoric as exaggerations that were not to be taken seriously. At the same time, Kolnai conceded to National Socialism ideology that a Jewish problem may very well exist. He even considered the hatred of Jews understandable in certain cases, for like all peoples and races among mankind, the Jews also possessed some inferior qualities. The fact that National Socialism is directed against the Jews and excludes them from German life does not warrant, for Kolnai, any hysterical invectives against National Socialism in itself (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 494–5). In Kolnai’s view, even vulgar and obscene forms of anti-­Semitism are historically quite warranted, although they do not capture the true significance of their

Introduction   7 opponent. While Jews never developed their plan of universal domination into a political project, such a vision of Jewish world domination did exist, even if it was not fully apparent to the Jews themselves. The self-­justified insistence by the Jewish religion on the correct fulfilment of the Law could be the starting point for ‘a narrow and self-­seeking spiritual nationalism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 231). Kolnai finds that National Socialism performed a service in sweeping away many contradictory compromises regarding the Jewish question and in now engaging in combat with the Jews no longer for Christian reasons but for racial, völkisch and pagan reasons (Kolnai, 1938, p. 494). At the same time, National Socialism opposes Christian and democratic Western civilisation in its emphasis on universalist ethics and personal responsibility before God, and on one’s fellow human beings irrespective of their ethnic or religious identity. Kolnai quotes Hitler, who had asserted that the Jewish race was distinguished by their stubborn will to live and a preservation of their own kind, quite comparable to the Aryan ideal of self-­sacrifice for the community. Kolnai unambiguously warns the Jews against finding hope of survival within the Third Reich in Hitler’s insidious remarks. Kolnai himself expects that the Jews will once again come to stand at the grave of their persecutors, as had hitherto always been the case throughout history (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 502–3). We would certainly be going too far to construe Kolnai’s remarks as an early anticipation of the Holocaust. He instead warns us against reading Hitler’s claims as an expression of a measure of National Socialist respect for the Jews that would lead to setting moral limits on its Jewish policy. We can also interpret Hitler’s assertion to mean that this Jewish will to survive, as a provocative challenge to National Socialist Jewish policy, could further strengthen their resolve to destroy the Jews. All this is but speculation. Kolnai contents himself with quoting Hitler and warning the Jews against misunderstanding his statements as a guarantee of their survival. Kolnai’s analysis and critique of National Socialist anti-­Semitism is ambivalent, with some passages in his book possibly giving the impression that Kolnai even has a general understanding for National Socialist Jewish policy. Without sharing the possible given reasons for resentment towards the Jews, he seems to find it understandable that people could harbour such feelings. One can add to this his conceptual incorporation and qualification of anti-­Semitism within the broader context of a National Socialist world view directed against the West, bourgeois humanism and Christianity, to the extent that he attributes National Socialist anti-­Semitism to ‘the fatal tension between Germany and the West’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 511). In his view, National Socialist Germany is governed primarily by its hostility to Western democracies, and not by its particular aversion to the Jews. He viewed National Socialism as directed against Christian and Western civilisation, not as threatening the Jews with annihilation. Since the threat posed to Western democracy provided Kolnai with the overall ideological framework for National Socialist Jewish policy, his book treats the persecution of the Jews only marginally. The ‘anti-­Jewish obsession’ of National Socialism – for which

8   Wolfgang Bialas Judaism symbolised the persecution of freedom, reason and justice – mainly goes back to ‘the fatal tension between Germany and the West’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 260). It was not so much the Jews themselves who were persecuted, according to Kolnai, as their pacifistic or moral attitude that formed the substance of Jewish existence. Kolnai thus takes Judaism to be a symbol of Western values, and therefore the Nazis use anti-­Semitism as a stand-­in for Western society and its system of values that they otherwise openly combat. In this conceptual context, he urges the reader to neither over- nor underestimate Nazi anti-­Semitism. His warning to German Jews to not simply dismiss their persecution in National Socialist Germany as another episode in the historical chain of persecution they have endured was just as sincere as his call for a rational and calm stocktaking of the actual motivations, practices and dangers of National Socialist anti-­ Semitism.

Contemporary reviews of the book Contemporary critics of National Socialism were aware of the importance of Kolnai’s The War Against the West. The public perception of the book mostly stressed the discussion of the particular issues that would clarify the preconditions for an appropriate strategy to confront National Socialism: what importance did racialist thought and anti-­Semitism have in National Socialist politics and ideology? Was National Socialism anchored in German traditions and ideas or did it constitute a break with German political and intellectual history, meaning that it came to power through totalitarian assault on German traditions? Could National Socialism, as a political challenge to the West and its antipode, be kept at a distance or did its political success present a challenge for Western democracies to re-­examine their value systems and normative foundations? Were such systems and foundations suitable as the conceptual basis for militant democracy in order, if necessary, to rejuvenate themselves in meeting this challenge? How great was the danger of a war initiated by Nazi Germany, and how could such a threat be countered? What was the relationship between National Socialism and Bolshevism, which both equally – even if they had different ideological justifications and goals for social policy – participated in a struggle against bourgeois society? Contemporary reviews singled out the relationship, elaborated by Kolnai, between the political success of the National Socialist movement and the West’s inability, owing to the existential crisis of bourgeois political humanism, to recognise and respond politically to the threat posed by National Socialism. W. J. Rose writes, for example, that Kolnai holds European civilisation partially responsible for the political success of Nazism – not only because of the Treaty of Versailles, to which Germany responded radically in light of the national humiliation set out by the agreement, but principally because of Western democracies’ weakness and inability to respond in a politically appropriate way to the dangers posed by National Socialism (Rose, 1939, p. 532). As Kolnai outlined, National Socialism presents a real threat of war that must be met through a

Introduction   9 renewal of democracy. National Socialists would perceive concessions made by the West only as a sign of weakness (Heindel, 1938, p. 314). In his review of the book, C. J. Friedrich complains that in focusing on supposedly German ideas and traditions, but especially through his great exaggeration of the importance of National Socialist ideology, Kolnai has overlooked what was dangerous about Nazism (Friedrich, 1939, p.  101), whereas R.  J. Heindel’s review explicitly praises Kolnai for not trying to understand Nazism solely in terms of the economic and moral crisis of post-­war German society, but rather seeking its causes in German history, even if Nazism’s claim to embody all that is German is far from defensible (Heindel, 1938, pp. 314–15). Another review praises Kolnai’s contribution in not underestimating Nazi ideology as a chimaera of insignificant demagogues, as he instead addresses its actual significance and complexity. The review singles out for praise Kolnai’s cultural decoding of Nazi ideology as the continuation of basic traditions of German thought, and his refusal to isolate National Socialism as a foreign body in German history without offering an account of the developments and debates in that history that would have explanatory value. Kolnai therefore shows that National Socialist ideology was not simply an arbitrary development at the hands of just any demagogue (Jászi, 1938, p. 1166). According to Jászi, Kolnai persuasively argued that the real danger of a future war lies in the quasi-­religious crusade against the values of Western civilisation. The ability of the latter to oppose National Socialism will decide the future of Western democracies. Should they not pass this test, they will be condemned to their downfall. In focusing on National Socialism, however, Kolnai misjudged the dangers of Bolshevism for bourgeois society and fatally placed Bolshevism in the camp for the defence of humanistic values (Jászi, 1938).

Overview This book gathers together, along with a few additional texts, the contributions to a conference held at the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden on the occasion of the publication of the German edition of Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West, which focused on important topics raised by the book in the context of contemporary German, British and American discussions of National Socialism. While treating the book as an analysis and critique of National Socialist ideology, the contributors also, among other things, consider the book in the context of Kolnai’s work as a whole and compare it with contemporary German discussions of the time, notably Franz Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Prac­ tice of National Socialism (Zimmermann) and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Brumlik). Even if the conference participants agree on the political importance and intellectual quality of the book, the chapters published here are far from uncritical in their analyses of Kolnai’s work. The chapters also address Kolnai’s evaluations and conceptual preferences, such as his subsuming of anti-­Semitism under the anti-­Western thrust of National Socialism (Brumlik), his characterisation of

10   Wolfgang Bialas National Socialism as a political religion (Steigmann-­Gall) and his disregard for the threat posed to bourgeois society by Bolshevism, to which, in contrast to National Socialism, Kolnai granted a basic orientation towards humanism and universalism; these are assessments and perceptions that various contributors to this collection present as one-­sided or mistaken. Besides Kolnai’s impressive and rigorous ability to reconstruct the complex, multifaceted nature of National Socialist ideology without getting lost in its numerous contradictory, unfounded and absurd statements, we can also find certain passages and evaluations in his book that are disconcerting in their polemical exaggeration or resentful aggressiveness. These remarks also show that Kolnai arrived at one-­sided and perturbing assessments with the intention of brining people’s attention to the threat to the West posed by National Socialism, for example by stigmatising right-­wing conservative intellectuals, but also writers like Friedrich Nietzsche (Kolnai, 1938, p.  14), Ernst Jünger and Stefan George, as proto- or pro-­Fascists in his interpretation of anti-­Semitism or in his identification of the gender-­specific elements of National Socialism. Uwe Backes traces Kolnai’s investigation of National Socialism and Bolshevism up to The War Against the West in the context of the international debates on Fascism, Bolshevism and totalitarianism of the 1920s and 1930s. He demonstrates that Kolnai considered National Socialism the greater threat to Western democracies, without systematically comparing National Socialism to other totalitarian ideologies and movements. Richard Steigmann-­Gall discusses Kolnai’s thesis on the irreconcilability of National Socialism and Christianity, while fundamentally questioning Kolnai’s view that National Socialism is a genuine anti-­Christian and pagan movement. Steigmann-­Gall sees Kolnai’s Catholicism as a reason for this misinterpretation, which is also expressed in Kolnai’s conception of totalitarianism as a ‘patho­ logical’ consequence of modernity. He considers Kolnai’s view of National Socialism as an anti-­Christian challenge to the Enlightenment as standing in a long tradition of denial and repression, in which the West itself has wrestled with and questioned the values of the Enlightenment from the very beginning. It is therefore wrong, Steigmann-­Gall claims, to see National Socialism solely as a war against the West, as after all National Socialism was also a defence of the West against the heresies released by the French Revolution. Micha Brumlik discusses Kolnai’s definition of anti-­Semitism in the light of his main thesis that anti-­Semitism is an attitude directed against normatively defined Western culture. By making reference to Adorno and Horkheimer’s theses on anti-­Semitism in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Brumlik shows that anti-­Semitism belongs to the core of Western thought, while Kolnai’s analysis of anti-­Semitism found no basis for it within Western culture. Dan Stone focuses on Kolnai’s ability to immerse himself in National Socialist thought, an ability that was repeatedly praised in the public reception of the book in Great Britain, despite the fact that or precisely because popular and scientific British analyses of National Socialism before the Second World War only seldom recognised the threat it posed. Unlike British analysts and critics of

Introduction   11 National Socialism, Kolnai’s analysis concentrated on its racist ideology, which was neglected in Britain because of the racial theories that were also widespread there too. In her discussion of political and intellectual pre-­war and post-­war debates in the United States, Michaela Hoenicke Moore elaborates on how Kolnai was the first to address central issues that would govern the United States’ position on National Socialism in subsequent years. In particular, the concept of Vansittartism, which characterised National Socialism as the aggressive expression of a mindset that was deeply rooted in German history, came close to Kolnai’s explanatory approach. While this explanatory model was taken up by the Roosevelt government, it remained controversial in the United States until 1944. According to Hoenicke Moore, this fact had to do with the prevalence of pacifism in American society at the time and with basic tolerance of deviant ideologies. Rolf Zimmermann elaborates on the intersections between Kolnai’s The War Against the West and Neumann’s Behemoth, the latter of which was published in 1942 and 1944 in original and expanded editions respectively. In terms of Kolnai’s approach of criticising ideology, he draws attention to the ideal–typical distinction between the egalitarian universalism of the West and the particularism of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft. In his structural analysis of National Socialism, Neumann demonstrated, with a similar focus to Kolnai, that the tension between state and party on the one hand and the ‘totalitarian monopolistic economy’ on the other dissolves the classical sovereignty of the state, replacing it with the rule of lawlessness. In different ways, according to Zimmermann, both Kolnai and Neumann made clear that National Socialism cannot be understood as a crisis-­ridden consequence of instrumental Enlightenment rationality or capitalistic economics, but is rather a political development in its own right. Lee Congdon investigates Kolnai’s The War Against the West in the light of Kolnai’s life history and his contemporary context. He sees the particular importance of Kolnai’s book as lying in his recognition that the war against the West was at its core a war of paganism against Christianity. After the defeat of Nazism, Kolnai considered communism to be the greatest threat to Christian civilisation. In analysing Kolnai’s moral philosophy, Congdon finds that he decided upon the irrelevance of moral failings to the universal acknowledgement of the binding character of moral standards and values and their intercultural validity, which he viewed as crystallisations of the collective moral wisdom of mankind. My own chapter reconstructs Kolnai’s 1936 sketch of National Socialism in the context of present-­day research. I consider both the substantive points stressed by Kolnai and his intention to enlighten the West about the threat from National Socialist and thereby move it to decisive political action. The reconstruction of National Socialism from Kolnai’s perspective serves here as a foil for the critical assessment of his historical achievement. Graham J. McAleer relates Kolnai’s philosophical essays from the 1920s and 1930s to his The War Against the West. McAleer traces a philosophical thread

12   Wolfgang Bialas that runs through Kolnai’s analysis of National Socialist ideology, namely the vitalism that this ideology used to oppose the Enlightenment and rationality. Zoltán Balázs argues in his chapter that Kolnai used Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political from 1932 as a means to provide a positive contrast with his own concept of the political and to determine the relationship between politics and morality. Taking as his starting point Kolnai’s lifelong interest in utopian thought, which had governed his understanding of politics as well as his response to Schmitt’s concept of the political, Balázs emphasises Kolnai’s understanding of politics as an autonomous sphere, given the moral limits imposed on the political. In his chapters on Kolnai’s moral philosophy, Chris Bessemans points to the subtle conservatism of Kolnai’s political philosophy and its emphasis on the susceptibility of modern democracy to an identity-­focused egalitarianism. He singles out Kolnai’s anti-­utopian writings as the point of connection between his political and ethical works. On the basis of his elaboration of the philosophical significance of moral experience and the phenomenological description of ethically relevant phenomena, Kolnai developed, in Bessemans’s view, a particular kind of moral cognitivism and contextualism. Andrew Cunningham discusses Kolnai’s thought in the context of twenty-­first century conservatism, particularly the thinking of Karl Popper and Michael Oakeshott. According to Cunningham, Kolnai saw the advantages of conservatism as being found above all in the acceptance and recognition of the internal and ineluctable complexity of human existence. Kolnai regarded the devaluation of individual personality as the essence of the political philosophy and practice of utopian socialism, but also of National Socialism. Paradoxically, Cunningham goes on to say, both doctrines characterised ordinary humans as the embodiment of all values, while also insisting on their powerlessness within the wider community.

References Bauman, Zygmunt (1992). Dialektik der Ordnung. Die Moderne und der Holocaust. Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Cassirer, Ernst (1946). The Myth of the State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Friedrich, Carl Joachim (1939). ‘Review of Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West’. The Review of Politics 1, 1: 101. Hancke, Kurt (1941). Deutscher Aufstand gegen den Westen. Eine geistesgeschichtliche Auseinandersetzung. Berlin: Dunker und Dünnhaupt. Heindel, Richard H. (1938). ‘Review of Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 200: 314–15.  Herf, Jeffrey (1984). Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jászi, Oscar (1938). ‘Review of Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West’. The American Political Science Review 32, 6 (December): 1166–7. Kolnai, Aurel (1927). Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder.

Introduction   13 Kolnai, Aurel (1930). Sexualethik. Sinn und Grundlagen der Geschlechtsmoral. Paderborn: Schöningh. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Kolnai, Aurel (1977). Ethics, Value and Reality. London: Athlone. Kolnai, Aurel (1995). The Utopian Mind and Other Papers: A Critical Study in Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Francis Dunlop. London: Athlone. Kolnai, Aurel (1999). Political Memoirs, ed. Francesca Murphy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lukács, Georg (1948). Schicksalswende. Beiträge zu einer neuen deutschen Ideologie. Berlin: Aufbau-­Verlag. Lukács, Georg (1955). Die Zerstörung der Vernunft. Der Weg des Irrationalismus von Schelling zu Hitler. Berlin: Aufbau-­Verlag. Lukács, Georg ([1942] 1989). Zur Kritik der faschistischen Ideologie. Berlin: Aufbau-­ Verlag. Plessner, Helmuth (1935). Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürger­ lichen Epoche. Zürich: Niehans Verlag. Plessner, Helmuth (1959). Die verspätete Nation. Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Rose, W. J. (1939). ‘Review of Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West’. International Affairs 18, 4: 531–2. Steding, Christoph (1938). Das Reich und die Krankheit der europäischen Kultur. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt.

Part I

Topics addressed in Kolnai’s The War Against the West

2 Aurel Kolnai’s comparison of National Socialism and communism in the context of contemporary comparisons of dictatorships Uwe Backes Introduction Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West – first published in London in 1938 and written in the Vienna of Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg’s ‘corporate state’ under the impact of the ‘seizure of power’, the rapid consolidation of the regime and an ominous display of the power of German National Socialism – devotes several hundred pages to engaging with the intellectual challenge of the extreme right in more detail than any other previous studies had done. The book’s main concern is an analysis of the racialist ideology of National Socialism, and its intellectual sources and peddlers. To provide a historical contextualisation of the book, an understanding of its origins and its relationship to the author’s intellectual biography, however, it is important to consider National Socialism’s relationships with other ‘anti-­Western’ (anti-­liberal, anti-­democratic and anti-­constitutional) trends, especially Stalin’s Soviet Union. What differences and similarities between ideologies, movements and regimes does Kolnai recognise, and how does his understanding of the mid-­1930s relate to his earlier writings? Of particular interest is Kolnai’s position within the discussions on totalitarianism in the 1930s, which attempted to work out the structural similarities of the ideologically antagonistic movements of Fascism/National Socialism on the one hand and Bolshevism/communism on the other; the point of comparison here in the political system of the ‘West’, for the most part, was the richly varied combinations of democracy and the constitutional state.1 Did Kolnai actively participate in these discussions? Did he avail himself of the neologisms ‘totalitarian’ and ‘totalitarianism’ that emerged in 1920s Italy and were soon to be adopted within the mainstream language of the West? What role did the comparison of Fascism/National Socialism and Bolshevism/communism play? The first part of this chapter discusses the kind and importance of comparative reflections that are presented in The War Against the West. We will see that Kolnai identifies in Nazism the principal enemy of the West, while Bolshevism appears to him as a movement that is intellectually more akin to the West. Consequently, the second part considers how Kolnai’s position should be

18   Uwe Backes situated in the broad spectrum of the time between the extreme poles of anti-­ Bolshevism and philo-­Bolshevism. In this discussion I make reference to Kolnai’s positions in his earlier publications as well as his autobiographical reflections, which are characterised by their exceptional intellectual honesty and practice of self-­criticism. On this basis, I conclude by questioning why Kolnai does not treat National Socialism and Bolshevism as doctrines that are equally (or similarly) anti-­Western. Decades later, in his memoirs, he considered this to be one of his greatest political errors.

The War Against the West The War Against the West is Kolnai’s most comprehensive work, containing, as it were, the quintessence of his early writings. This quintessence takes the form of a pro-­Western attitude, which is already expressed in his first writings, and is committed to the political values and manifestations of the Anglo-­Saxon constitutional states in particular, an attitude that in the 1920s was anything but self-­ evident for Hungarian, Austrian and German intellectuals – not even in the different socialist, Christian and Left Catholic academic circles in which Kolnai moved. His unusual degree of ‘independence in intellectual orientation and personal commitment’ (Honneth, 2007, p.  158)2 was manifested not least by his inability to feel a sense of belonging to any particular political camp without significant reservations. As a philosopher of Hungarian–Jewish origin and a Catholic convert, during his Viennese years he kept a distance from the Christian Social Party with its clerical, authoritarian corporate statist and philo-­Fascist tendencies. At the same time, he remained a maverick and critic of Marxism within the Social Democratic Workers’ Party – within which he was for a while in Otto Bauer’s Covenant of Religious Socialists – to which he belonged from late 1930 until its dissolution in 1934 (Kolnai, 1999, p.  148; Dunlop, 2002, pp. 131–6). Kolnai’s pro-­Western orientation provides the ethical and political system of coordinates in which his analysis of National Socialist ideology can be found. At the beginning of the book, he precisely summarises the basic elements of this system. In describing his most important sources of inspiration, he mentions Tomáš G. Masaryk’s methodical writings on Nová Evropa (written in St. Petersburg in 1917 and published in London in 1918 The New Europe. The Slav Standpoint; German edition in 1922) and Die Weltrevolution. Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen 1914–1918 (1925; published in English as The Making of a State in 1927; Kolnai, 1938, p. 27), which celebrated the Western Allies of the First World War as democratic champions of national self-­determination against autocratic powers, the ‘pillars of masterful theocracy and of monarchical aristocracy’ (Masaryk, 1927, p. 369),3 and which developed the guiding principles of ‘democracy and humanity’ as the spiritual foundations of the nations of ‘liberated peoples’. Kolnai also refers to the former London Times editor-­in-chief, writer and expert on Central Europe, Henry Wickham Steed, who characterised National Socialism and its Aryan doctrine – in one of the first English-­language

National Socialism and communism   19 publications about the new regime in Germany (alongside Italy and the Soviet Union, the latter of which is only mentioned in passing) – as a movement diametrically opposed to ‘Western liberal civilisation’ (Steed, 1934, p. 151).4 In Kolnai’s idealised account, the West, or Europe, in contrast to the Asian East, with its once-­dominant ‘theocratic societies’ and enslaved subjects, has been understood since the days of the ancient Greeks as a ‘society with a free constitution and self-­government under recognised rules’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 24). Their leaders were ‘not magical incarnations of divinity, but organs and functionaries of an earthly community … ruled on lines of rational ethics and secularized politics’; ‘terrestrial power … is no longer absolute, but becomes relative, hence a correspondingly heightened appreciation of human personality and individual conscience’. This process is essentially characterised by ‘Christianity, with its appeal to the human “soul” and its sundering of “God and Caesar” ’, prepared for by ‘Socratic and Stoic thought’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 24–5). Additional here is the ‘Roman legal order, and the rationalisation of property relationships’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 25). Christianity enters into a synthesis with ‘Roman Imperial universalism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 25). Certain magical and traditional elements are balanced by ‘rational utilitarian and egalitarian elements’, while political powers are divided up and intertwined with one another. The ‘democratic principle of a constitutional “opposition” … is deeply rooted in the general philosophy of the West – the postulate of empiricism requiring all original beliefs to be proven by experience’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  26). The concept of ‘personal dignity’ in turn paves the way for the ‘emancipation of women’. In addition, Western-­style nations understand themselves to be members of a ‘society of nations’, a ‘supra-­ national cosmos of civilisation, a universal mankind transcending closely defined political units and sovereignties of power’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 26). This brief summary of the relevant fundamental values and rules of conduct, with their emphasis on universalism and egalitarian elements, unmistakably points towards the analysis of National Socialist ideology on which the book focuses. Kolnai provides a critical exegesis and analysis of its intellectual sources: ‘tribal egoism’, ultra-­nationalism, the homogenising concepts of community, the heroic– demonical image of man accompanied by the dominance of masculine, warlike qualities, neo-­paganism and racial-­paganised Christianity, the ‘morality of greatness and unscrupulousness’, the ‘socialism of inequality’, the ‘servile society’, and biological racism and imperialism. Kolnai proves to be an expert in Nazi ideology, its intellectual origins, and (intentional or unintentional) helpers within and outside the movement. Kolnai was one of the few writers of his time to display an intimate knowledge of the extensive range of the production of ideology, evaluate the writings of more than 100 authors, take this reservoir of ideas seriously despite its coarseness, eccentricities and irrationality, warn Anglo-­Saxon readers against intellectual arrogance and underestimating the phenomenon (Stone, 2013, p. 73),5 recognise its powerful and seductive sides, and show in what areas deeply rooted mindsets and habits of thought are being fruitfully tapped. To be sure, Kolnai hardly uses the category of the ‘West’ to capture more accurately the special characteristics of Nazi ideology in comparison to

20   Uwe Backes ‘anti-­Western’ ideologies and movements. Even the brief section on ‘The Totalitarian State’ contains only a few passages that compare ideologies or regimes. What receives the most treatment, and falls under the history of ideas, is the doctrine of the ‘total state’, as sketched out by legal scholars who were drawn to National Socialism (Ernst Forsthoff, Ernst Rudolf Huber, Carl Schmitt and others). Kolnai briefly contrasts Fascist Italy with the Nazi regime by characterising both systems as ‘one-­party states’ and emphasising that ‘the supra-­political encroachment by the Party is incomparably stronger and more serious in the Nazi Empire’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 160) than in the Italian equivalent. Remarkably, Kolnai does not draw a comparison to the ‘one-­party state’ in Bolshevist Russia. The few comparative remarks that are made serve merely to make note of differences, rather than to state structural similarities. On a number of occasions Kolnai quotes from the work of the United States economist and Russia expert Calvin B. Hoover on Germany’s emergence as the Third Reich (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  20, 374, 394, 639), but he fully disregards Hoover’s comparative observations on the Bolshevist system.6 Hoover’s detailed comparative study on Dictators and Democracies was published too late for it to be used by Kolnai (Hoover, 1937).7 Kolnai’s comparative observations are limited to a few remarks. At the beginning of the section on the ‘Totalitarian State’, for example, he states that, in contrast to ‘communism’ and ‘Collectivism’, Fascism and National Socialism in no way claim ‘to regulate all social, or even private, life of the citizens’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  160).8 Evidently considering it to be synonymous with ‘total state’, Kolnai applies the expression ‘totalitarian’ as a designation exclusive to the various forms of Fascism, and indeed only reserved for them. Kolnai extends the concept by speaking of totalitarian ‘tendencies’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 161) in relation to precedents in the history of ideas, such as Plato’s kingdom of philosophers and Hegel’s idealist notion of the state. Interestingly, Kolnai also uses the expression ‘totalitarian democracy’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 163) for later trends in the French Revolution, years before Jacob L. Talmon’s studies, without even beginning to elaborate on the concept. Kolnai refers to Heinz Otto Ziegler’s study within the history of ideas, Die moderne Nation (The Modern Nation), and to the liberal critique of Rousseau and democracy in the nineteenth century (Ziegler, 1931).9 Contrary to his original claim that the totalitarian states of National Socialism and Fascism do not aspire to total encroachment on the private lives of their subjects, we now find Kolnai speaking of the ‘ideal’ of ‘the absolute enslavement of man to the Total State’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 166). But Kolnai’s claim that ‘totalitarian politics’ are ‘incompatible with any non-­tribal religion and ethics’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 167) seems to fit within this ideal. Referring to the observations by the social anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1965, pp. 68–9; Kolnai, 1938, p. 31), among other sources, Kolnai elaborates in detail on the ‘tribalism’ of National Socialist ideology, with its notion of a völkisch tribal community, for which ‘the closed collective body, as a clearly defined unit of mind, will and power, is the ultimate reality in human life’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 30). On the other hand, he does

National Socialism and communism   21 not address the ‘tribalism’ of Bolshevism, whereas Karl R. Popper, whom Kolnai met in Vienna at a seminar conducted by the Christian Socialist, economic historian and social theorist Karl Polanyi, at least alluded to the matter in his general condemnation of the philosophical forerunners of totalitarianism (The Open Society and Its Enemies).10 Kolnai then excludes the regime established by Lenin, as well as the ideological basis for its legitimation, by definition from the domain of ‘totalitarian politics’. This reasoning is particularly compelling insofar as, towards the end of the paragraph, Kolnai categorically distinguishes the ‘Bolshevist state’ as ‘demonio-­absolutistic’ from the ‘totalitarian’ state of Fascism and National Socialism. In the ‘demonio-­absolutistic’ state the ‘eternal existence of man’ himself and the ‘immortality of the soul’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 168) seem in danger, whereas the ‘totalitarian state’ leaves this sphere unscathed, or at least that is its intention. However, this statement conflicts with the initial thesis that ‘National Socialism is at bottom incomparably more anti-­Western than Bolshevism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  18), and even more so with the following remark: ‘The most virulent form of Bolshevism is still infinitely more akin to the civilian (bürgerlich) idea than is Nazi Anti-­Liberalism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 22). Looking at this judgement in isolation, one could – with a degree of exaggeration – consider Kolnai’s book to be nothing less than a manifesto for anti-­anti-totalitarianism. Apart from the greater closeness of Bolshevism to the West, relatively speaking, Kolnai emphasises the special status of National Socialism, which in the form of a racial doctrine breaks with ethical universalism.11 Kolnai thus concludes that ‘the most extreme Left Atheism has infinitely more in common with Christian morality and its social implications than has Nazi Paganism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 22). The racial anti-­Semitism central to National Socialist ideology is the expression of ‘its negation of mankind and its intrinsic enmity to Western democratic society’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 495). This is less so in the case of Italian Fascism. While the ‘barbarism of the Nürnberg legislation and the mentality underlying it’ follows the ‘general line of Fascism’, it goes a crucial step further: ‘A new and horrible perspective of tribal inhumanity, injustice and superstition has been opened up by Naziism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 495). Kolnai is thus one of the few critical observers of the time to have recognised the destructive potential of Nazi ideology and to have appreciated its practical relevance. The hypothesised special moral status of National Socialism when compared with Bolshevism probably led Kolnai in his book to largely neglect isomorphisms that had already been elaborated by his contemporaries, some of whom were notably Catholic (Chappel, 2011, pp. 561–90).12 While Kolnai was working on his book, an analysis by one of the leading experts on Bolshevism, the Catholic writer Waldemar Gurian, appeared in a Swiss publication who closely linked National Socialism (‘brown Bolshevism’; Gurian, 1935, p. 45)13 to the regime in Russia, given their outstanding structural similarities. Even earlier, the left-­wing Catholic and former leader of the Italian People’s Party, Don Luigi Sturzo, had drawn attention to the similarities between

22   Uwe Backes Bolshevism and Fascism. Sturzo had already explored them in detail in his book on Italy and Fascism, which appeared in Germany in 1926.14 As Kolnai was finishing his book, Sturzo published the first study on the ‘Totalitarian State’, in which he also compared and contrasted the Nazi regime with both Bolshevism and Fascism. It appeared in 1935 as an independent publication of the left-­wing Catholic Madrid monthly, Cruz y Raya, and a year later in English in the journal of the New York New School, Social Research (Sturzo, 1935, 1936).15 These analyses systematically worked out the structural similarities between Fascism and National Socialism on the one hand and Bolshevism on the other. These were: extreme administrative centralisation (Sturzo, 1935, p.  28), accompanied by the destruction of communal and provincial autonomy, and all other public and semi-­public entities, religious and cultural associations, and universities; the radical dismantling of independent legislative and judicial bodies; the establishment of a ‘political police’ (Sturzo, 1935, p. 28) with practically unlimited powers of intervention; a single political party (‘partido único’; Sturzo, 1935, p. 29) with an armed wing that suppressed every form of political, civilian, individual and collective freedom; the establishment of special tribunals, concentration camps and internment centres, and a comprehensive system of spying and suppression in order to enforce conformity both internally and externally; the militarisation of the country (Sturzo, 1935, p. 30), the state party and the nation’s youth through military parades and field exercises; the ideologisation of the education system through the addition of political and religious characteristics (Sturzo, 1935, p. 33) and a cult of the state (Sturzo, 1935, p. 33) with reference to the nation, race or class; the mobilisation of society through parades, festivals, processions, plebiscites and athletics; the ardent veneration of heroes and demi-­gods; and, finally, far-­reaching interventions in economic life (Sturzo, 1935, p. 35). Sturzo’s work was evidently unknown to Kolnai. If the ‘political religion’ approach had a certain impact on The War Against the West (1938, pp.  24–5), then it was possibly through Kolnai’s reading of Carl Christian Bry’s perceptive psychological interpretation of ‘religions in disguise’ (Verkappte Religionen; 1924).16 On the other hand, it was only years later (Kolnai, 1999, p.  210) that Kolnai read the study by the German correspondent of the Manchester Guardian for many years, Frederic Voigt, entitled Unto Caesar (1938), which systematically developed this approach and was published in the same year as The War Against the West.17

Between anti-­Bolshevism and philo-­Bolshevism Someone ignorant of Kolnai’s intellectual biography before the publication of The War Against the West might be able to explain the particular status ascribed to National Socialism in relation to Western values by noting the widespread positive image of the Soviet Union among intellectuals during the 1930s. This explanation might be additionally supported by making reference to the place where Kolnai’s book was published: Victor Gollancz’s London-­based Left Book

National Socialism and communism   23 Club was a welcoming home to the Left in the mid-­1930s and for a time readily accommodated naive, pro-­Soviet romanticism (Congdon, 2001, p.  54). Nevertheless, Kolnai did not even hint at philo-­Bolshevism either in The War Against the West or in his earlier writings. Although The War Against the West does present Bolshevism as the lesser evil when compared with Fascism and National Socialism, it considers Bolshevism to be an evil nonetheless and in no way a source of hope for a new and better world.18 While Kolnai downplays the anti-­ Western orientation of Bolshevism by reticently stating that he ‘admit[s] that proletarian and Russian Socialism confront the world of Western democracy with a series of complications and embarrassments’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  22), he clearly did not belong to the crowd of intellectual Soviet enthusiasts who were yoked to Soviet propaganda, especially after the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern (July–August 1935) distanced itself from the ‘Social Fascism’ thesis and launched a change in strategy by turning to the Popular Front (Leonhard, 1968, p. 44; Schlögel, 2008, p. 146).19 To adequately capture Kolnai’s position, we must consider the importance of the fellow travellers who helped shape the intellectual climate around disputes between Fascism and National Socialism on the one hand and Bolshevism and communism on the other during the mid-­1930s.20 Here we may merely recall the strong criticism André Gide’s travel report, Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (November 1936), received, which created a furore one year before the publication of Kolnai’s book (Schneyder, 1996, pp. 27–31).21 In June 1935, while still president of the International Writers Congress, Gide rose to his feet along with the others present (including one of the founders of the Congress, Ilya Ehrenburg) to begin in ceremonial singing of the Internationale (Schneider, 1978, p. 198). One and a half years later, Gide had fallen out of favour with many leftist intellectuals. The reason for this change was his long-­planned journey to the ‘Fatherland of all workers’, from which he returned sooner than expected (Schneyder) since the dream of a superior form of society without religion or the institution of the family had dissolved into thin air. Gide’s sympathy for the Russian people and the Russian youth remained unchanged; his report also contained many positive impressions and, in the spirit of reconciliation, concluded with an acknowledgement of the Soviet support for Spain: ‘The help that the Soviet Union is giving to Spain shows us what fine capabilities of recovery it still possesses. The Soviet Union has not yet finished instructing and astonishing us’ (Gide, 1937b, p. 85). But the expression ‘recovery’ indicates that, in Gide’s view, there was much that was fundamentally wrong in the Soviet Union and urgently in need of correction. The negative things he had observed so offended the sensibilities of friends who admired the Soviet Union that they assailed him with pleas not to publish his observations. But Gide stuck to his plan, asserting that ‘truth, however painful, only wounds in order to cure’ (Gide, 1937b, p.  17). And so Gide described a society razed to the ground that threatened to totally destroy the individual. He spoke of long lines in front of department stores, of the lack of quality products and of the lack of motivation among the workers. While Gide admired the USSR for its ‘extraordinary élan towards education and towards culture’, he found that

24   Uwe Backes ‘the only objects of this education are those which induce the mind to find satisfaction in its present circumstances’ (Gide, 1937b, pp. 47–8). Foreign observers who view the universally required ‘self-­criticism’ as proof of the capability for reform fail to understand that its primary purpose is to ensure that people are ‘in the right line’ (Gide, 1937b, pp. 47–8). Conformist Soviet media install in their citizens the belief that everything in their country is better than abroad. For Gide, ‘compliance’ and ‘conformity’ prevail everywhere in the Soviet Union. At the same time, ‘the smallest protest, the least criticism, is liable to the severest penalties and … is immediately stifled’. And then comes a damning sentence that must have struck all champions of anti-­Fascist Popular Front alliances like a blow to the stomach: ‘And I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler’s Germany, thought be less free, more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized’ (Gide, 1937b, pp. 62–3). We don’t know whether Kolnai knew of this criticism; his memoirs, which extensively list influential sources, make no mention of it. It appears, however, that he also held the Soviet Union of the mid-­1930s in much greater esteem than Gide did, even if Kolnai was far from sharing the Soviet enthusiasts’ attitude, for whom Gide’s criticism meant a betrayal of internationalism – and all the more so as Soviet support measures for the Spanish Republic were by then underway, and Moscow now appeared to stand at the head of the international defence front against ‘Fascism’. But what these admirers of the Soviet system did not know was that the foreign aid and weapons for Spain were accompanied by a large contingent of military advisers, economic experts and agents who often assumed control, especially within the military and security apparatus, and where they had a say created an atmosphere ‘as had prevailed in Moscow during the Yezhov years’ (Schlögel, 2008, p.  147). It was especially in Barcelona in the spring of 1937, under the leadership of the Moscow-­oriented communists, that distrust and fear soon became rampant among the ranks of Republicans.22 Members of the council communist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) and the anarchists were bitterly fought against, persecuted, arrested, tortured and killed, a wave of repression that reached its highpoint in the show trials of members of the Executive Committee of POUM:  Only the intervention by André Gide, Georges Duhamel, Roger Martin du Gard and François Mauriac with government head Juan Negrín provided legal guarantees to the effect that the death sentences demanded by Spain’s Communist Party would not be passed, and that instead the sentences would be limited to 15 years in prison. (Schlögel, 2008, p. 150) Nor did the intrigues conducted by Moscow and its accomplices fail to leave their mark on the second International Writers Congress, which took place in July 1937 in Valencia, Madrid and Paris. The Soviet delegation, and in particular Michail Kolzow and Ilya Ehrenburg, who attended the Congress as correspondents

National Socialism and communism   25 for the Moscow press organs Pravda and Izvestia, used the situation to spread pro-­Soviet propaganda23 and attempted to obtain an official condemnation of André Gide (Thornberry, 2000, pp.  601–2). The latter had followed up his Russian report with some ‘afterthoughts’, wherein he replied to his critics and took an even harsher position (Gide, 1937a). Trotsky’s ‘left opposition’ was shut out; the main representatives of the ‘Trotskyite-­Zinovievite terrorist centre’ were convicted in show trials in August 1936 and executed. The hunt for Trotskyites in Spain lasted several months and took place before the gates of the Writers Congress, as it were, even if the ‘purge of POUM nests’ (Kolzow, 1986, p. 520) in Valencia occurred much too hesitantly in the Stalinists’ view. But wasn’t André Gide also a Trotskyite in disguise? His second book on the Soviet Union contained ‘blatant Trotskyite rantings’, and the writer Alexei Tolstoy, who had travelled from Russia, was right to urge that Gide be ‘deprived of his status as a people’s writer’ (Kolzow, 1986, p.  529). Criticism of the Soviet Union meant betraying the cause of the people. As Octavio Paz, one of the participants, wrote in retrospect, it was the ‘absence of criticism’ (Paz, 1995, p. 24) that killed the Republic – and the Writers Congress markedly contributed towards this end. Although, as has already been mentioned, in The War Against the West – the manuscript of which was completed in the summer of 1936 (Kolnai, 1999, p. 162) – Kolnai maintained distance from giving voice to excessive enthusiasm about the Soviet Union, his assessment of Bolshevism did change over the years. Ever since Lenin’s name began appearing in the daily press (1917), Kolnai had always maintained an attitude of aversion and distrust towards the Bolshevists’ project, his ‘leftist’ and ‘radical’ inclinations to the contrary (Kolnai, 1999, p. 26). During the final phase of the First World War, in siding with the Western Allied cause, which also helped to shape his ‘leftist’ political self-­understanding, Kolnai steered clear of philo-­Bolshevism while a grammar school student (Kolnai, 1999, p. 26). This attitude was reinforced by the experience of the short­lived Soviet Republic of Béla Kun, whose ‘gang’ instigated a blood bath in Budapest on 22 February 1919 (Kolnai, 1999, p.  57). Soon after (in 1919), Kolnai’s family fled to safety in Pressburg (Kolnai, 1999, p. 60). Kolnai’s antipathy towards ‘imperial’ Germany dwindled as the German Social Democrats led by Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske proved to be an anti-­Bolshevist force for order (Kolnai, 1999, p. 60). At the same time, the image of his native country became gloomier, and he would soon turn his back on Hungary. While Germany and Austria began shedding their anti-­democratic traditions and drew closer to the West’s constellation of values, Hungary persisted in its anti-­Western attitude by moving from one extreme to another: the ‘Red Asiatic seduction’ (or ‘Red counter-­revolution’) was followed by a ‘not much less barbarous reactionary nationalism’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 60). As early as his first independent publication Psychoanalyse und Soziologie [Psychoanalysis and Sociology], which Kolnai wrote while he was still a student in Vienna and a member of the International Society for Psychology (Kolnai, 1999, pp.  73–4), he presented an interpretation of anarchism and communism inspired by, among other things, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and which

26   Uwe Backes was geared towards the exposure of their psychopathological, dogmatic and destructive aspects (Kolnai, 1920, pp. 88–152). It earned him vehement criticism from both Moscow and the psychoanalytic school (Reich, 1934, pp.  5–6).24 At the same time, he published a review of Elfriede Friedländer’s Sexualethik des Kommunismus [Sexual Ethics of Communism], in which he harshly judged a view that after the ‘destruction’ of capitalism events would culminate in an ‘unimaginably dreadful oppression running contrary to human personality’ (Kolnai, 1921, p. 210). Kolnai was among the few writers to compare Bolshevism to (Italian) Fascism as early as the second half of the 1920s. Kolnai made an initial comparison of the two ‘opposite extremes’ during his ‘early Catholic years’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 211),25 when the newly converted Catholic contributed to Gustav Stolper’s journal Der deutsche Volkswirt (based in Berlin). Comparative studies of the opponents were popular among all political camps in 1926, following the Matteotti Crisis and the Italian Fascists’ conspicuous establishment of power.26 Kolnai’s article is densely written and evidences a high level of differentiation in its comparisons. He trenchantly identifies, on the one hand, the common opposition of both forms of dictatorship to democracy and, on the other, additional similarities, as well as differences and areas in which they were diametrically opposed, all the while paying due attention to the time-­bound and processual character of the two regimes. The final passage is particularly fruitful for drawing a comparison with the characterisation of Bolshevism in The War Against the West, which assesses both movements and regimes from the perspective of moral philosophy. For Kolnai, while Fascism affords greater freedoms than Bolshevism, the former also accomplishes a ‘more repugnant comedy’ (Kolnai, 1926, p.  213) – as demonstrated by the Matteotti trial. If Bolshevism – unlike Fascism – is ‘undeniably ideologically linked to the greatest ideals of humanity’, its ‘cold-­blooded betrayal of them seems more than ever an outrageous disgrace’ (Kolnai, 1926, p. 213). As he puts it in a nutshell,  in the end, both fascism and Bolshevism are the devil’s, and not God’s, work. But Bolshevism contains incomparably more positively good and noble things, as well as a darker malice and boundless presumptuousness, than does fascism. It [Bolshevism] is closer to both God and the devil than the latter [fascism]. (Kolnai, 1926, p. 213) Distinct from his later work, in The War Against the West, Bolshevism does not at all appear here as the lesser evil, despite its greater proximity to ethical universalism, in Kolnai’s view. However, Kolnai does not make the comparison with the Nazi movement, whose populist orientation he will train his sights on in an article that appears a few months later (Kolnai, 1927b, p.  670). For that matter, given his comparison of Bolshevism and Fascism, one could describe the early Kolnai as a theorist of totalitarianism in the broadest sense avant la lettre. After all,

National Socialism and communism   27 he impressively elaborated upon the structural similarities and differences between the ideologies, movements and regimes, even if important features of the conceptualisation of totalitarianism are lacking, which Luigi Sturzo had already mentioned in his book on Italy – in particular, conceiving of characteristic distinctions from older autocracies and the religion-­like aspects of the ideology as driving elements of the movements. Kolnai evidently remained unaware of Sturzo’s writings, which is rather astonishing, given the prominence of this priest and Party leader who had fallen from power and was much admired among leftist Catholics. The translations of Sturzo’s book on Italy (from 1926) introduced the terms ‘totalitarian’ and ‘totalitarianism’ into English and French, while the German version by Alois Dempf and his wife still employed the terms ‘total’ and ‘totality system’.27 Remarkably, in October 1933 Kolnai did employ the term ‘totalitarianism’ in his article on the ‘Totaler Staat und Zivilisation [Total State and Civilisation]’, which appeared in the Der Österreichische Volkswirt, where he reserved its use for his conceptualisation of a ‘total state’, as it had emerged in Italy and Germany, and for the analysis of Fascism and National Socialism (as he did later in The War Against the West; Kolnai, 1933b, p. 113).28 A few years before, Kolnai had employed the concept of despotism, derived from ancient theories of the state,29 in order to articulate the similarities between Bolshevism and Fascism: If, therefore, every thinking supporter of democracy rejects Bolshevism, this grandiose experiment aimed at establishing for society as a whole an all-­ encompassing, political, economic and cultural despotism that virtually rests on the faith in being able to bring forth despotically a new human being assumed to be ‘better’, then he must no less resolutely also reject Fascism, which basically limits itself to political despotism. (Kolnai, 1928, p. 856) In Kolnai’s view, this ‘grandiose experiment’ was doomed to failure and morally unjustifiable, as it negated the fundamental rights of man. For Kolnai, these rights included the right to private property. Kolnai was influenced by the Catholic writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton far more than he was by his academic mentor Karl Polanyi, the former of whom rejected capitalism and communism equally as being against private property (similar to Hilaire Belloc in his book The Servile State (1912), which was much admired by Kolnai) – in the case of capitalism because it one-­sidedly favoured large trusts against small and medium-­sized businesses. A democratic form of ‘distributionism’ would counteract this deplorable state of affairs (Kolnai, 1927a).30

Reasons for the higher esteem in which Bolshevism is held in The War Against the West Implicit in any appraisal of Bolshevism’s ‘grandiose experiment’ is a judgement about Bolshevism’s intentions. In his egalitarian and emancipatory plea, Kolnai

28   Uwe Backes had greater affinity to the intellectual world of the West than to Fascism or National Socialism. This was the crucial aspect for Kolnai the moral philosopher, whose doctoral dissertation, completed in 1926 in Vienna, had the title ‘Ethical Value and Reality’ (‘Ethischer Wert und Wirklichkeit’).31 Indeed, his attention was always focused on the moral–philosophical categorisation of a phenomenon. Years later he frankly admitted that politics interested him only in its ‘ideological aspect’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 138). While familiar with the theories of Marxism and Leninism, he knew much less about the ‘phenomenological’ practice he vehemently called for as a student of Edmund Husserl. Kolnai’s extensive readings notwithstanding, his memoirs completely pass over the literature of the 1920s and 1930s on Bolshevist Russia. While working on The War Against the West in Vienna, Kolnai’s main concern was with the analysis of Fascism and National Socialism. While Kolnai – like many of his friends – had still flirted with the idea of annexing Austria to the more progressive Germany during the ‘golden years’ of the Weimar Republic, the increasingly authoritarian Dollfuss regime was now becoming a bulwark against the ‘total state’ of National Socialism. He fundamentally criticised the ‘militant irrationalism’ of Carl Schmitt’s political theories (Kolnai, 1933a), and in the anti-­Nazi (though with an affinity for the corporate state) journal of his academic role model and Husserl pupil Dietrich von Hildebrand,32 he unmasked the ‘organic’ state theory of Othmar Spann as anti-­democratic and anti-­Christian ‘totalitarianism’. Spann, in Kolnai’s view, frankly admits that ‘Bolshevism still pleases him more’ (Kolnai, 1934, p.  10; ‘Totalitarismus’ appears on p.  9)33 than ‘plutocratic’ democracy. In the same forum, Kolnai expresses approval of Chesterton’s ‘devastating criticism of the outrageous, pagan presumptuousness of “eugenics” long before the emergence of National Socialism’ (Kolnai, 1936, p.  620). In the meantime, he became extensively familiar with Nazi journalism and its intellectual environment, as he demonstrated in The War Against the West. Irrespective of this legitimate focus of attention, the fact that The War Against the West hardly takes up any of Kolnai’s earlier comparative observations does, however, require explanation. Apart from the theoretical difference in terms of moral philosophy that was already established between the antagonists, it was especially the contemporary circumstances that moved Kolnai to emphasise the special character of Fascism and National Socialism. The London publisher and journalist Victor Gollancz, who in the fall of 1934 expressed interest in the first draft of the book, did not influence his author, according to Kolnai (Kolnai, 1999, p. 162). It was instead during the years from 1934 to 1936, when he was working on the book, that Kolnai came to perceive Fascism and National Socialism to pose the greater danger by far to the continuance of Western democracies – a not unrealistic conclusion in light of Hitler’s massive rearmament campaign and the self-­inhibiting internal struggles in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In his memoirs Kolnai writes that the increasing military threat posed by the ever more powerful Third Reich led him in 1934–5 to welcome both the formation of a Popular Front with the communists against the

National Socialism and communism   29 extreme right as well as the emerging potential establishment of a French– Czech–Soviet alliance (Kolnai, 1999, p. 144). This again illustrates the ‘foreign-­ policy constellational dependence’ (Jänicke, 1971, p. 78)34 of threat assessment and counter-­balancing that also governed other comparative studies of National Socialism and Bolshevism.35 Had Kolnai written The War Against the West in the wake of the Hitler–Stalin pact, he would have likely drawn on his earlier comparative studies and presented more starkly the similarities between the ideological antagonists. In reserving the concept of the ‘total state’ in The War Against the West for Fascism and National Socialism, Kolnai was stuck to the view that was widespread in ‘Marxist circles on the extreme Left’ (Gleason, 1995, p.  32), while at the same time distancing himself from the increasing number of writers who considered National Socialism and Bolshevism to be on par with one another as ‘totalitarian movements and regimes’. For Kolnai, the choice between National Socialism and Bolshevism was like being caught between a rock and a hard place, while opting for the latter because of the greater chances of surviving it. In the difficult deliberations he undertook in 1936, which did not consider the present but if anything the numbers of victims to be expected in the future from the antagonists’ actions, his particular sensitivity to discrimination against the Jews and to the deprivation of their rights probably played an important role. If Kolnai in later years condemned himself in unsparing criticism for the political and ethical appraisals that had entered into this deliberation, then he also did so as the result of an increasingly conservative attitude. In his memoirs he deeply regrets his own ‘leftist fixation’ between 1934 and 1942 (Kolnai, 1999, pp. 26–7). At the time, Kolnai writes, he did not understand that, in comparison with Fascism, communism was waging the more radical assault on Western culture and the human understanding of values (Kolnai, 1999, p.  144). Kolnai only returned to the comparative perspective on totalitarianism avant la lettre that could be found in his earlier writings as an émigré teaching in Quebec and then later in London. His important writings on the subject, however, such as ‘Three Riders of the Apocalypse’ and ‘The Utopian Mind’, were for the most part published posthumously many years later (Kolnai, [1950] 2011; 1995)36 and are deserving of a separate appraisal that goes beyond the confines of this chapter.

Notes   1 This does not concern positions that formulated a critique of Bolshevism or National Socialism from the perspective of council communism or Christian corporate statism. For the council communist variant, simply consult: Mike Schmeitzner, ‘Brauner und roter Faschismus? Otto Rühles rätekommunistische Totalitarismustheorie’. In: Totalitarismuskritik von links. Deutsche Diskurse im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Mike Schmeitzner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), pp. 205–27. Criticism of the National Socialist ‘total state’ from a Christian corporate statist perspective came from writers for the Viennese journal Der Christliche Ständestaat, for example, for which Kolnai also contributed articles in the 1930s, without himself flirting with authoritarian corporate statist notions. For more on this journal, see Elke Seefried, Reich und Stände. Ideen und Wirken des deutschen politischen Exils in Österreich 1933–1938 (Düsseldorf: Drostel, 2006), pp. 195–215; and Kolnai, 1999, pp. 128–31, 198–9.

30   Uwe Backes   2 This is what Axel Honneth (2007) writes in the comparison he makes with Walter Benjamin, a kindred spirit in this and other respects.   3 See also Tomáš G. Masaryk, The New Europe: the Slav Standpoint (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1918).   4 See Chapter 5, ‘The Third Empire and the Totalitarian State’.   5 This was an attitude that was widespread in Oxford at the time.   6 ‘The psychological resemblance to Russian Bolshevism is noticed by almost everyone who is familiar with Soviet Russia.’ Calvin B. Hoover, Germany enters the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 160.   7 On the importance of Hoover for the early debate on totalitarianism in the United States, see Gleason, 1995, p. 40.   8 The text in full:  The Fascist conception of the Totalitarian State, the scope of which is extended in National Socialism, does not exactly mean that the governmental apparatus of the State affects to regulate all social, or even private, life of the citizens. This would deserve the term ‘communism’, or at all events, ‘collectivism’.  (Kolnai, 1938, p. 160)   9 Alexis de Tocqueville, whom Kolnai mentions only once (1938, p. 452) in passing, spoke of the danger of a ‘despotisme démocratique’ in his famous book on the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, biographie, préface et bibliographie de François Furet, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), p. 387. 10 Popper had high regard for Kolnai’s exegesis of literature that had an affinity to National Socialism, but he could not find in Kolnai’s work any support for a critique of Hegelianism as the source of leftist collectivism and ‘historicism’. See Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, 4th rev. edition (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 71–2, 78, 315–17, 359. On the importance of Kolnai’s work for Popper, see also: Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 387. 11 This point had already been criticised by Kolnai’s countryman Oszkár Jászi in his otherwise quite appreciative review: Oszkár Jászi, ‘The War Against the West’, American Political Science Review, 32 (1938), pp. 1166–7. 12 Unfortunately, the author overlooks the liberal/left Catholic influence on the early formation of the concept. 13 For further details on Gurian’s interpretation of totalitarianism, see Heinz Hürten, ‘Waldemar Gurian und die Entfaltung des Totalitarismusbegriffs’. In: Totalitarismus und politische Religionen. Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs, ed. Hans Maier (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996), pp.  59–70; and Ellen Thümmler, Katholischer Publizist und amerikanischer Politikwissenschaftler. Eine intellektuelle Biografie Waldemar Gurians (Baden-­Baden: Nomos, 2011), pp. 217–47. 14 See also Uwe Backes, ‘Luigi Sturzo: Begründer und früher Wegbereiter des Totalitarismuskonzepts’. In: Den totalitären Staat denken, eds Frank Schale and Ellen Thümmler (Baden-­Baden: Nomos, 2015), pp. 31–50. 15 A year later the analysis by Arthur Feiler, an émigré economist and expert on Russia, who was originally from Königsberg, appeared. See: Arthur Feiler, ‘The Totalitarian State’. In: Planned Society. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. A Symposium by Thirty-­five Economists, Sociologists, and Statesmen, ed. Findlay MacKenzie (New York: Prentice Hall, 1937), pp. 746–74; reprinted in Eckhard Jesse (ed.), Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Bilanz der internationalen Forschung, 2nd edition (Baden-­Baden: Nomos, 1999), pp. 53–69. 16 See the reference in Kolnai, 1999, p. 78. See also: Carl Christian Bry, Verkappte Religionen. Kritik des kollektiven Wahns (1924), edited with a preface by Martin Gregor Dellin (Munich: Franz Ehrenwirth, 1979). On the importance of this work, besides

National Socialism and communism   31 Martin Gregor Dellin’s preface, see Hans Otto Seitschek, Politischer Messianismus. Totalitarismuskritik und philosophische Geschichtsschreibung im Anschluss an Jacob Leib Talmon (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005), p. 96. 17 For a detailed account of Voigt’s work and its reception, see Markus Huttner, Totalitarismus und säkulare Religionen (Bonn: Bouvier, 1999), pp. 99–142. 18 Lee Congdon (2001, p.  54) thus somewhat exaggerates when he characterises Kolnai’s book as being ‘more subtly Russophile’. 19 For a detailed account of Voigt’s work and its reception, see Markus Huttner, Totalitarismus und säkulare Religionen (Bonn: Bouvier, 1999), pp. 99–142. 20 See especially David Caute, The Fellow-­Travellers. Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Sophie Cœuré, La grande lueur à l’Est. Les français et l’Union soviétique 1917–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 1999); and Gerd Koenen, Die großen Gesänge. Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-­tung. Führerkulte und Heldenmythen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a. M.: Eichborn, 1991). 21 The February 1937 edition of Der Christliche Ständestaat contained excerpts from an article by the economist of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (‘Sozialismus und politische Diktatur’), which featured in-­depth appreciation of André Gide’s unmasking of the ‘Communist total state’: ‘André Gides Anklage gegen Russland und den totalen Staat’, Der Christliche Ständestaat 4 (1937), pp. 120–1, p. 120. 22 See also George Orwell’s report on the mood in: George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin Books 2000), Chapter 11. 23 Here is a sample: ‘La constitución staliniana, ese documento grandioso en la historia de la liberación de la personalidad humana, descubre ante el escritor nuevas y amplísimas posibilidades de creación’, El Sol (Madrid: 8 July 1937), p.  4; reprinted in Manuel Aznar Soler and Luis Mario Schneider (eds), Il congreso internacional de escritores antifascistas (1937), vol.  3, ponencias, documentos y testimonios (Barcelona: Laia, 1979), pp. 82–7. 24 On the importance of this work, however, see Honneth, 2007, pp. 146–7. 25 From the section of the book, ‘My early Catholic years (1926–8)’. 26 See from this year alone: Francesco Nitti, Bolschewismus, Faschismus und Demokratie (Munich: Hanfstaengl, 1926); Luigi Sturzo, Italien und der Faschismus (Cologne: Gilde-­Verlag, 1926); and Edgar Tatarin-­Tarnheyden, ‘Bolschewismus und Faschismus in ihrer staatsrechtlichen Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 1 (1925–6), pp. 1–37. For further comparisons, see, for example. Jean Alazard, Communisme et ‘fascio’ en Italie, preface by Jean Bourdeau (Paris: Bossard, 1922); and Marcel Mauss, ‘Fascisme et bolchevisme. Réflexions sur la violence’ (1923). In: Marcel Mauss, Écrits politiques. Textes réunis et présentés par Marcel Fournier (Paris: Fayard, 1997), pp. 509–13. Published somewhat later was the comparative work of Waldemar Gurian, an expert on Bolshevism who, like Kolnai, came from a Jewish family and converted to Catholicism and whose writings were evidently unknown to Kolnai: Waldemar Gurian, ‘Faschismus und Bolschewismus’, Heiliges Feuer 15, 5 (February 1927–8), pp. 197–203. On Gurian, see, in particular, Heinz Hürten, ‘Waldemar Gurian und die Entfaltung des Totalitarismusbegriffs’. In: Totalitarismus und politische Religionen. Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs, ed. Hans Maier (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996), pp.  59–70; and Ellen Thümmler, Katholischer Publizist und amerikanischer Politikwissenschaftler. Eine intellektuelle Biografie Waldemar Gurians (Baden-­Baden: Nomos, 2011), pp. 217–47. 27 See Giovanna Farrell-­Vinay, ‘Introduzione’. In: Luigi Sturzo a Londra. Carteggi e Documenti (1925–1946), ed. Giovanna Farrell-­Vinay (Soveria Mannelli: Catanzaro, 2003), pp. 3–31; Farrell-­Vinay, ‘The London Exile of Don Luigi Sturzo (1924–40)’, Heythrop Journal 45, 2 (2004), pp.  158–77. See also Uwe Backes, ‘Luigi Sturzo; Jean-­Luc Pouthier, Luigi Sturzo et la critique de l’État totalitaire’, Vingtième Siècle 21 (1989), pp. 83–90. 28 ‘Totalitarianism is mainly primitivism’.

32   Uwe Backes 29 For detail on the conceptual history, see Mario Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris: PUF, 2001). 30 On the importance of Chesterton and Belloc to Kolnai’s intellectual biography, see Kolnai, 1999, pp. 16–18, 87–8, 105–17. 31 For more on Kolnai’s moral–philosophical position, see Kolnai, Ethics, Value, and Reality: Selected Papers (London: Athlone Press, 1977), including the introduction by David Wiggins and Bernard Williams, pp. ix–xxv. See also Chris Bessemans, ‘A Short Introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s Moral Philosophy’, Journal of Philosophical Research 38 (2013), pp. 203–32; and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, ‘Zwischen Phänomen­ ologie und analytischer Philosophie: Aurel Kolnai’. In: Expressivität und Stil. Helmuth Plessners Sinnes und Ausdrucksphilosophie, eds Bruno Accarino and Matthias Schloßberger (Oldenbourg: Akademie Verlag, 2008), pp.  285–95; also online available at: www.uni-­marburg.de/fb03/philosophie/institut/mitarbeiter/ vendrell/vendrell-­kolnai.pdf, accessed 12 May 2018. Bessemans has also written an overview of Kolnai’s as yet unpublished work, paying particular attention to his writings in moral philosophy: Bessemans, ‘A Glimpse of the Aurel Kolnai “Nachlass” ’, Rivista di Filosofia Neo-­Scolastica 1 (2012), pp. 153–73. 32 On the role of the journal and its editor, see Elke Seefried, Reich und Stände. Ideen und Wirken des deutschen politischen Exils in Österreich 1933–1938 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2006), pp. 195–215. See also Dietrich von Hildebrand, Memoiren und Aufsätze gegen den Nationalsozialismus 1933–1938, with Alice von Hildebrand and Rudolf Ebneth, ed. Ernst Wenisch (Mainz: Grünewald, 1994); Kolnai, 1999, pp. 128–31, 198–9. 33 See also A. van Helsing, ‘Othmar Spanns Ganzheitslehre’, Der Christliche Ständestaat 1 (1934), pp. 4–8. That this pseudonym may have been an ironic reference to the hero in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula has been speculated upon by John Haldane, ‘Ethics, Politics and Imperfection’ 2008 [online], available at: http://online­ library.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741–2005.2007.00204.x/epdf, accessed 12 May 2018, pp. 389–98, here 392. 34 Eckhard Jesse, ‘Die Totalitarismusforschung im Streit der Meinungen’. In: Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Bilanz der internationalen Forschung, ed. Eckhard Jesse, 2nd edition (Baden-­Baden: Nomos, 1999), pp. 9–40. 35 In this respect, simply consult the intellectual biographies of Ernst Fraenkel and Richard Löwenthal: Uwe Backes, ‘Vom Marxismus zum Antitotalitarismus: Ernst Fraenkel und Richard Löwenthal’. In: Totalitarismuskritik von links. Deutsche Diskurse im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Mike Schmeitzner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), pp. 327–54. 36 See also the following edition: Aurel Kolnai, Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, edited and with an introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney (Boston/Oxford: Lexington Books, 1999).

References Belloc, Hilaire (1912). The Servile State. London/Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis. Chappel, James (2011). ‘The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe’. Modern Intellectual History 8, 3: 561–90. Congdon, Lee (2001). Seeing Red. Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Unversity Press. Dunlop, Francis (2002). The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai. Aldershot: Ashgate. Gide, André (1937a). Afterthoughts: A Sequel to Return from the U.S.S.R., trans. Dorothy Bussy. London: Secker & Warburg. Gide, André (1937b). Back from the U.S.S.R., trans. Dorothy Bussy. London: Secker & Warburg.

National Socialism and communism   33 Gleason, Abbott (1995). Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gurian, Waldemar (1935). Bolschewismus als Weltgefahr. Lucerne: Vita-­Nova Verlag. Honneth, Axel (2007). ‘Afterword’. In: Aurel Kolnai, Ekel, Hochmut, Hass. Zur Phänomenologie feindlicher Gefühle. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp: 143–75. Hoover, Calvin B. (1937). Dictators and Democracies. New York: Macmillan. Jänicke, Martin (1971). Totalitäre Herrschaft. Anatomie eines politischen Begriffs. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Kolnai, Aurel (1920). Psychoanalyse und Soziologie. Zur Psychologie von Masse und Gesellschaft. Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Kolnai, Aurel (1921). ‘Rezension von Elfriede Friedlander, Sexualethik des Kommunismus’. Imago 7, 2: 209–10. Kolnai, Aurel (1926). ‘Fascismus und Bolschewismus’. Der deutsche Volkswirt 1, 7: 206–13. Kolnai, Aurel (1927a). ‘Der Abbau des Kapitalismus. Die Soziallehren G.  K. Chestertons’. Der deutsche Volkswirt 1, 47: 1382–6. Kolnai, Aurel (1927b). ‘Rechts und Links in der Politik’. Der deutsche Volkswirt 2, 23: 665–71. Kolnai, Aurel (1928). ‘Tote und lebendige Demokratie’. Der deutsche Volkswirt 2, 26: 854–7. Kolnai, Aurel (1933a). ‘Der Inhalt der Politik’. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 94: 1–38. Kolnai, Aurel (1933b). ‘Totaler Staat und Zivilisation’. Der österreichische Volkswirt 26, 5: 113–16. Kolnai, Aurel [under pseudonym ‘A. van Helsing’] (1934). ‘Othmar Spanns “organische” Staatslehre’. Der Christliche Ständestaat 1: 7–10. Kolnai, Aurel [A. van Helsing] (1936). ‘G. K. Chesterton’. Der Christliche Ständestaat 3: 619–21. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Kolnai, Aurel (1995). The Utopian Mind and Other Papers: A Critical Study in Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Francis Dunlop. London: Athlone Press. Kolnai, Aurel (1999). Political Memoirs, ed. Francesca Murphy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kolnai, Aurel ([1950] 2011). ‘Three Riders of the Apocalypse: Communism, Nazis, and Progressive Democracy’. In: The Great Lie. Classic and Recent Appraisals of Ideology and Totalitarianism, ed. F. Flagg Taylor IV. Wilmington, NC: Barnes & Noble: 241–59. Kolzow, Michail (1986). Spanisches Tagebuch, 3rd edition. Berlin (East): Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Leonhard, Wolfgang (1968). Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, 10th edition. Cologne/ Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien (1965). The ‘Soul’ of the Primitive. London: Allen & Unwin. Masaryk, Tomáš G. (1918). The New Europe: The Slav Standpoint. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Masaryk, Tomáš G. (1920). Nová Evropa, stanovisko slovanské. Prague: Dubský.  Masaryk, Tomáš G. (1922). Das neue Europa: der slavische Standpunkt. Autorisierte Übertragung aus dem Tschechischen von Emil Saudek. Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke & Sohn.

34   Uwe Backes Masaryk, Tomáš G. (1927). The Making of a State. Memories and Observations, 1914–1918. New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Paz, Octavio (1995). ‘Prólogo’. In: Ideas y costumbres. I. Obras completas, vol.  9. Mexico City: FCE: 24. Reich, Wilhelm (1934). Dialektischer Materialismus und Psychoanalyse. Copenhagen: Verlag für Sexualpolitik. Schlögel, Karl (2008). Terror und Traum, Moskau 1937. Munich: Hanser Verlag. Schneider, Luis Mario (1978). Il congreso internacional de escritores antifascistas (1937), vol. 1, Inteligencia y guerra civil en España. Barcelona: Laia. Schneyder, Peter (1996). ‘Vorwort’. In: André Gide, Gesammelte Werke VI: Reisen und Politik, vol. 2, Zurück aus Sowjetrussland, Retuschen zu meinem Russlandbuch, Soziale Plädoyers. Stuttgart: DVA: 27–31. Steed, Wickham (1934). Hitler Whence and Wither? London: Nisbet. Stone, Dan (2013). The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory. Essays in the History of Ideas. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sturzo, Luigi (1926). Italien und der Faschismus. Cologne: Gilde Verlag. Sturzo, Luigi (1935). ‘El Estado totalitario’, Cruz y Raya. Madrid: Cruz y Raya. Sturzo, Luigi (1936). ‘The Totalitarian State’. Social Research 34, 2: 222–35. Thornberry, Robert S. (2000). ‘Writers Take Sides, Stalinists Take Control. The Second International Congress for the Defense of Culture (Spain, 1937)’. Historian 62, 3: 589–605. Voigt, Frederic A. (1938). Unto Caesar. London: Constable. Ziegler, Heinz Otto (1931). Die moderne Nation. Ein Beitrag zur politischen Soziologie. Tübingen: Mohr.

3 Nazism, Christianity and the development of political religion theory in Kolnai’s The War Against the West Richard Steigmann-­Gall When we discuss the question of Nazism’s genesis, many scholars still abide by the notion that Nazism was born of a rebellion against Christianity. In its alleged call for traditionalism, as well as love and forgiveness, the standard narrative tells us, Christianity was a barrier to the message of modern secularism, embracing hate and genocide, contained in Nazism.1 Kolnai’s The War Against the West was an early leading expression of this view. As it is put in the preface, ‘Germany would still in essence be waging the War Against the West, and leading Teutonic Paganism on to victory over the Christian God of justice, mercy and humanity, and over the universalism of Rome’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 11). In what follows I will attempt to interrogate Kolnai’s understanding of Nazism with regards to religion. Of course, while Kolnai devoted one section of The War Against the West to ‘paganized Christianity’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 236–76) the entire book is shot through with a concern for addressing the alleged anti-­ Christianity of Nazism. So I will not simply be analysing the one section that considers pagan religious thought, but rather investigate passages throughout the book that touch on religious themes and arguments. Along the way, I hope to reveal how Kolnai was a symptom of his age, particularly with regards to his own Catholicity and its concomitant distrust of any utopian projects, including especially socialist and even liberal ones, and how these were elided through his adapted Catholicism; and the importance of this for elaborating an already established idea of totalitarianism theory and its sibling: political religion theory. My assessment will not be entirely critical; I find his exploration of the roots of Nazi religious thought from within many of these traditions to be salutary, even if it is unintended, since it goes against his own arguments that Christianity under Nazism experienced a departure from an apparently previously pristine faith. The second half of the chapter will then go on to make it abundantly clear that many in the Nazi leadership – including Hitler himself – believed the movement was predicated on Christian precepts. While they contended with a variety of outliers, who attempted to turn Nazism into a paganist religious movement, such efforts were clearly rebuffed at the highest levels of NSDAP decision-­making. In his The War Against the West, Kolnai picks and chooses which voices will represent Nazism – and which their Protestant supporters. Problems immediately arise: did anyone listen to Wilhelm Stapel within the Nazi Party? Did anyone

36   Richard Steigmann-Gall listen to Alfred Rosenberg within the Nazi Party? Did anyone listen to Rudolf Wolters? He constructs his own genealogy of Nazi ‘paganism’ or ‘paganized Christianity’ without asking the basic question of who read these men, or whether those who most obviously represented Nazi thinking would have acknowledged, let alone read, such sources. This kind of tendentiousness is to be expected from a contemporary conservative anti-­Nazi; that it continues today among certain historians of Nazi Germany, not least in the political religion milieu, should concern us. My own view, already established in my monograph from 2003 (Steigmann-­Gall), is that Nazism did not represent a political religion so much as a religious politics; and that Nazism did not represent a turn against Christianity but a particularly radicalised attempt to protect it. Revealed in their conceptions of Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, the Reformation and the Wars of Religion that followed, or in the way they discussed the ills that they believed had beset Germany and how to cure them, the Nazis revealed two things: first, that they were divided between two branches of religious thought, that of the ‘pagans’ and that of the ‘positive Christians’; and second, that the pagans, for all the fury they seemed to direct against all forms of Christianity, were in fact very partial in their critiques and very incomplete in their apostasy from Christianity. Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and most of the rest of the Nazi Party leadership, never mind the rank and file, rejected efforts to impose a new religion of paganism and reveal to us without ambiguity that the Nazi Party per se cannot be considered anti-­ Christian. To his credit, Kolnai went a great deal further than his 1930s contemporaries in surveying the spectrum of Nazism’s religious views – but he ultimately focuses on only a few chosen spokesmen of Nazi religious policy to the exclusion of other Nazi leaders who were actually in conflict with these so-­called pagans and who revealed in both word and deed a Christian understanding of their movement and themselves. I will not discuss church history as such, or ecclesiology. While I naturally appreciate that the two are connected, in the discussion of Nazism and religion my primary interest is in ideologies, not institutions. And what particularly strikes me in reading Kolnai is the way in which, convinced by his own arguments that Catholicism was the antipode to Nazism, he proceeds to embrace a series of views that Nazis would have agreed with. This is especially perverse regarding his characterisations of Judaism – the religion of his birth, after all – throughout sections of The War Against the West.

Nazism as political religion As early as the preface we see a classic iteration of a cultural Sonderweg theory, which was not, however, born of Marxist critique but rather of religious critique: Germany only learned late, and indirectly, the thought of Antiquity. Nor was she so strongly impregnated by Christianity as were the other peoples of Western and Southern Europe; and, perhaps for this reason, she has

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   37 preserved her original traits. It is, above all, this double tardiness which leads her to set up the concept of Kultur against the concept of ‘civilization’ and, not without disdain, to throw back the latter concept on to the West. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 7) Nazism laid the overcoming of a ‘barely-­there’ Christianity at the feet of paganism. The preface goes on to refer to Germany as ‘tardily and laboriously Christianized’, which meant that a ‘latent enmity against Rome has survived, an outburst of which characterizes every new epoch of German history’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 10). Already, it would seem, the path to Auschwitz has been fatally laid. Regarding religion, though, we see immediately here something that other conservatives of the era, apart from Kolnai, engaged in: a conflation of Catholicism with ‘proper Christianity’ itself. This is further demonstrated in the preface (which I appreciate was not written by Kolnai himself but was certainly written nonetheless in the spirit of Kolnai): ‘the Roman and the Western world are united on a basis which can aptly be described as Christian, rational, juridical, and equalitarian from the racial point of view’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 10). Permit me to point out that this is being written at precisely the same time that the Vatican, as John Connelly has recently demonstrated, was upholding the Italian conquests of Africa by proclaiming that race was an ‘advantage’ that God had allotted to certain ‘ethnical communities’. As is revealed in Connelly’s From Enemy to Brother (2012, p. 43), it was Pius XI who had already established this view – one that would certainly not diminish under his successor Pius XII. The discussion of Judaism and Jews in The War Against the West is the most obvious place where we see a tension between, on the one hand, being able to scrutinise the origins of this paganism from within the very Christian sources that paganism allegedly seeks to destroy and, on the other hand, reiterating the very views that this paganised, and therefore ‘corrupted’, faith itself upheld. For instance, in his discussion of ‘the attempt to heathenize Christianity’, he sees the starting point as being when the Christian religion achieved a revulsion from Judaism (as a national community with a religious privilege) to world-­wide humanity, which means, to the ‘Gentiles’ in general. To this point the blasphemous idea can be attached that Christianity aims at a confirmation and rehabilitation of diverse ‘national’, ‘ethnic’, and ‘local’ forms of devotion and morals as opposed to the ‘intolerant Monism’ of the one Jewish form. The Christianity of the ‘Gentiles’ contends that all peoples except the Jews are ‘chosen’, which is only conceivable if each race poses as the chosen one to its own members. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 249) A salutary analysis, one might suppose, of the latent nationalistic potentialities that lie in a Christianity too committed to its overcoming of Judaism. If this constitutes a ‘corruption’ of Christianity, then Kolnai seems to concede that this is very deep-­seated indeed in the history of Christianity. And it would certainly

38   Richard Steigmann-Gall seem – seem – to rebuff Christian triumphalism, which was integral to Christian practice from the very start. And yet, in the same text, Kolnai articulates many of the same tropes that supersessionist Christians advocated; in one passage for instance, he declares, ‘We are not the “chosen Race” of God like the Jews, jealous, obtrusive, noisy, reminiscent of spoilt dogs’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  232). Theonomism that Kolnai paraphrases in the following passage can only be described as anti-­Semitic: ‘Mosaic religion is tainted by a narrow and self-­seeking spiritual nationalism, as well as by trivial self-­righteousness attached to the correct fulfilment of the Law. Christianity, far [surpasses] Judaism in breadth, depth and height’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  231). Kolnai clarifies his own position with what he says next: ‘[Christianity] contains latent possibilities of an even more final and catastrophic relapse into Heathenism: the religious practice of the Gentiles’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 231). For Kolnai, Christianity should be seen as a ‘purifying and transcending’ of ‘Jewish “law” ’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  233). In his conversion to Catholicism, in this period at least, he had practically no choice but to embrace a supersessionist view of Judaism as benighted, selfish and in need of being overcome. The men identified as the progenitors of the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate, one of Catholicism’s greatest blows against its own anti-­Semitic tradition, similarly demonstrate the toxicity internalised by theologians fighting what they understood as a ‘pagan’ form of anti-­Semitism. These men, some like Kolnai Jewish converts to Catholicism, embraced ideas about Judaism as the ‘absolute antithesis’ of Christianity and of Jewish ‘disobedience’ to God bringing persecution upon them. John Oesterreicher, the leader of this anti-­ Nazi reform of Catholicism, subscribed to such views; like many others, he supposed that he was fighting anti-­Semitism while nonetheless blaming the Jews for its existence. As Connelly suggests, for both Nazi racists and their Catholic opponents, the Jew was evil – the difference being that Catholics believed Jews could rid themselves of it, whereas Nazis did not. It was only after the Holocaust that the true answer was for Christians to abandon this idea, and therefore their mission to convert the Jews, but only after overcoming their own views that Jews were destined to suffer, that ‘God is an enemy to them’ (Connelly, 2012, p.  195). Perhaps more perverse still is that Rosenberg, Kolnai’s chosen avatar of Nazi evil, certainly agreed with all these characterisations of Judaism as venal, corrupt, rigid and tribal. Another modern heresy that Kolnai inculpates for the rise of Nazism is liberalist individualism and what he views as its philosophical child: relativism. As he puts it at one point, dogmas are the formal expression of a fundamental belief in an immutable divine and spiritual truth, whereas Nazism merely knows truth as the variable reflection of a peculiar Shape of Life or of a Master Type entitled to ‘create’ truth in exercising their power. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 263)

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   39 Kolnai is entirely wrong here – Nazis would indeed describe their world view as ‘the formal expression of a fundamental belief in an immutable divine and spiritual truth’. While Kolnai may have railed against the idea of cultural relativism and its perceived parent, liberalism, a Nazi would never concur that this accurately described them. Elsewhere, for instance on page 235 of the book, he blames a right-­wing ‘cult of relativity’ on the Left (Kolnai, 1938). And he takes liberalism to task for Nazism in another passage by, for instance, using a quote from Baron Wolzogen to make the unbelievable allegation that Nazism was individualistic. Part and parcel of this attack on liberalism is an associated attack on Nietzsche, long a bogeyman for the conservative Christian milieu who thought that in his nihilism they could see the foundations of Nazi ‘modernity’. For instance, Kolnai insists quite wrongly that ‘all Nazis rightly stress their descent from Nietzsche … perhaps the greatest Satanist of all times, and Stefan George, less great but, perhaps because of his homosexuality, more directly instrumental in creating the Third Reich’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 14; emphasis added). Here we can see a highly sneering, and deeply conservative, swipe at homosexuality as the root of Nazi ‘perversity’. One is reminded of Klaus Theweleit’s work, which at least presented a bona fide attempt to understand Nazistic or völkisch misogyny in terms of homosocial behaviour (Theweleit, 1987–9). But even in his rather journalistic analysis, nowhere did Theweleit lay Nazism at the feet of homosexuals, which of course, for writers such as Kolnai, would have been synonymous with amorality and a wilful rejection of Christianity. For the Catholic Kolnai, Nazism is a form of paganism. But in what I have already surveyed, an interesting ambiguity is reflected by, on the one hand, insisting that this is an infection of the ‘real Christianity’ represented in his own version of it and, on the other, admitting that this ‘infection’ has a long-­ established precedent. Even in certain aspects of an ‘original’, pre-­Reformation Christianity, one can see the seeds of this ‘paganism’ should only one step be taken in the wrong direction. I contend that he reflects the polemics typical of intra-­Christian conflict, in which it is one’s rival’s claim to the religion of Jesus who is actually the heretic, the apostate, the bearer of infection. And in this way – without intending to – he undercuts his own argument that Nazi Christianity was an aberration. This is particularly acute in his discussion of Protestantism, which is so fraught with sectarian hostility that it would make today’s Opus Dei blush with embarrassment: Protestantism, though re-­discovering and exalting some specifically Christian aspects of religion (both Judaic as opposed to Pagan worldliness and sensuality, and supra- Judaic), introduced a variety of new dangers: eccentricity, confusion, disintegration, and eventual paganization. The present-­ day oppression of the Lutheran Church in Nazi Germany, though it might goad a resurrected Luther into turning Papist or Communist, depends to a large extent on the original Lutheran ideology of religious amoralism,

40   Richard Steigmann-Gall personal bondage beyond the mere ‘voice of conscience’, anti-­clericalism, and omnipotence belonging of right to the secular authorities over the whole field of human society. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 231) Kolnai blames Lutheranism for an apolitical obedience to authority (Zwei-­ Reiche-Lehre): Especially in Lutheranism, this perfection of morality has become more or less distorted into its negation. No law of moral conduct, no objective canon of ‘goodness’ receives credit; there remains only ‘mere faith in the Saviour’, or the sovereign decision of individual conscience, or – and this is the important point – the sovereign moral competence of secular authorities as a substitute and an expedient for the practical needs of man. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 250) Kolnai was quite unambiguous in saying that Protestantism as such was one of the sources of modern day ‘anti-­Christian’ paganism: This backroad to Paganism is naturally reserved for Protestants, whose conceptions of the Church oscillate between the notion of an unorganized, inarticulate, purely spiritual community of souls, and the notion of a social body destined to secure the exercise of authority to Princes and Squires. Finally, there are some well-­known links between Christianity, particularly as an organized Church with established power and property interests, and a conservative attitude in politics, which may even end in connivance between certain branches of Christian opinion and a Totalitarian Fascist State. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 250) In this sense, it is not clear at all anymore what he means by paganism, except ‘that which I dislike’. Kolnai is in one sense correct in pointing out the proximity of Lutheranism to Nazism politically, but this was not due to the allegedly apolitical nature of Lutheranism – its abdication to secular authority. It was instead based on ideological proximity. This was particularly the case in terms of nationalism, to which the Protestant milieu was not structurally foreordained to be receptive. It is not just that Lutherans were more ‘accommodating’ of nationalism as a secular force, but that, as the case of Sedan Day so perfectly illustrates, Lutherans were at the forefront of German nationalism, in the same way that Protestants have been at the forefront of American nationalism in American history. This is something the Nazis certainly recognised. As Hitler himself put it in Mein Kampf: Protestantism as such is a better defender of the interests of Germanism, in so far as this is grounded in its genesis and later tradition.… Protestantism will always stand up for the advancement of all Germanism as such, as long

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   41 as matters of inner purity or national deepening as well as German freedom are involved, since all these things have a firm foundation in its own being.2 (Hitler, 1962, pp. 112–13) In Mein Kampf, Hitler theorises that Schönerer’s Pan-­Germanism failed because it took place in ‘a province absent from the general line of [Protestantism’s] ideological world and traditional development’ (Hitler, 1962, pp.  112–13). Hitler’s brand of ‘Positive Christianity’ is usually considered an ‘infected’ Christianity because it insisted the Germanic race took ontological precedence over the sacrament of baptism. But here Hitler plainly states his belief that a pre-­ existing variety of Christianity already held up to his racialist scrutiny. His understanding of Protestantism – much like that of a prior generation of nationalists and even many supposedly anti-­Christian pagans in his own party – already corresponded with Germanic values. Along with so many others in the religious-­ nationalist milieu – like the theologian Friedrich Gogarten, whom Kolnai refers to in The War Against the West as the advocate of a ‘muscular Lutheran piety’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 258) – Hitler regarded Luther as a völkisch hero, equalled only by Richard Wagner and Frederick the Great. Another example of the conceptual tension in Kolnai’s analysis of pristine versus infected religion appears when he turns his attention to the ‘Christian heresy known as “Theonomism” ’ or, to use Kolnai’s own words, ‘the teaching that God does not will the Good because it is good but that whatever God wills is good because God wills it’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 282). Theonomism is conventionally understood as the view that biblical law is applicable to civil law, and the proposal that biblical law should be the standard by which the laws of nations are measured and to which they ought to conform. Were Kolnai alive today, he would, for instance, reject Ted Cruz’s political ideology of Christian Dominionism, and probably that of most fundamentalist Americans for that matter, as a form of theonomism. But in this rejection of theonomism, one has reason to wonder whether Kolnai properly understands the ontological priority of traditional Christianity: was it his view that God telling Abraham to kill his son, even if God stops him at the last minute, is not – according to his own formulation – a form of theonomism? Is God committing heresy in Genesis 22? Or is he just a practical joker? Either way, Kolnai was wrong to state that ‘It requires a tremendous step, yet a step in the same direction, to argue that Caesar is not Caesar by the grace of God but that God is God through Caesar’s needing His grace’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 232). I grant the elegance and cleverness of Kolnai’s formulation here. But unless he identifies the origins of this problem not in modern Caesarism (which would reiterate the argument for an ‘infection’ of a previously ‘pristine’ faith) but rather in the original Christian Caesar, Constantine (during whose reign Christianity began its centuries-­long historical journey as an arm of official authority) would he not suggest that Constantine’s reign already represents the corruption of a previously pristine faith? If that is the case, then he would be turning his critical eye on Rome itself – which seems very unlikely.

42   Richard Steigmann-Gall For Kolnai, as for other Catholic conservatives of the period, the foremost public face of Nazism apart from Hitler was Rosenberg, the leading paganist of the party. But he demonstrates something about Rosenberg that is quite true, namely that his new paganism was not without its ambiguities regarding Christianity. About Rosenberg he has the following to say: He had called himself emphatically the ‘real’ Christian, proposing to purify Christianity rather than to suppress it, and endeavouring to deduce Christianity as a product of the Aryan racial genius rather than to oppose them. Both the primacy of race, the repudiation of the rational clarity of fixed tenets as an ‘Oriental abstraction’ and a ‘Jewish admixture’, and the plea for a ‘Teutonic’ religion, are derived from Chamberlain. He demands the restitution of a genuine deutsch-­christlich religion, a new Christianity purged of foreign rubbish. (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 240–1) This estimation of Rosenberg is quite accurate, in my view. Rosenberg’s writings do indeed vacillate between, on the one hand, seemingly condemning all forms of Christianity as such and embracing paganism in toto and, on the other, calling for a further reformation of Christianity, which could only occur within Protestantism. Such a call is not due solely to the alleged structural malleability of Landeskirchen (national churches) or the professed apoliticism embedded in Zwei-­Reiche-Lehre (doctrine of two kingdoms), but rather in the nationalism and most especially anti-­Semitism that he found in Luther’s own writings, particularly in Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (1543), Luther’s notoriously violent and vituperative tract, which receives no mention in Kolnai’s The War Against the West. Concerning Hitler himself, Kolnai rightly points out that ‘His first governmental enunciation solemnly promises to safeguard Christianity as the foundation of our morals. Hitler believes the Christian denominations to be “perpetuating factors of national substance (Volkstum)” ’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 268). Kolnai accepts that Hitler admires the firmness of Catholic dogmatics and is eager to imitate it in the National Socialist Party programme. But here Kolnai reiterates the political–religion theoretical explanation that any relationship between Nazism and Christianity is one of mimesis, not origin. We are left wondering, then, where the substance of Nazi ideas – most particularly anti-­Semitism – originates. Kolnai’s talent for laying Nazism at the feet of liberalism, socialism, homosexuality and other secularist ‘offspring’ can best be understood through his association with politically conservative Catholicism. What we have in The War Against the West is one iteration among many of totalitarianism theory and its twin: political religion theory. As James Chappel has recently pointed out, this theory marks a departure from the older notion of the stato totalitario, which had been used by both critics and defenders of Mussolini’s regime

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   43 since the 1920s. The novelty – the shift necessary to take the theory from a local description of Italy to a more general theory of the modern state and its pathologies – was marked by the inclusion of Bolshevism under its umbrella. That move, first made among Catholics in Germany, France, and Austria, marks the birth of totalitarianism theory as it would be used in the Cold War and beyond. (Chappel, 2011, p. 563) As Chappel further puts it: The fact that neither liberals nor socialists arrived at a fully fledged totalitarianism theory in the mid-­1930s is unsurprising. Whatever its social scientific merit, the theory has always been a tool of political polemic. Who, at the moment of the theory’s birth, had a political stake in drawing comparisons between Bolshevism and Nazism? British and American liberals could easily oppose them both without concocting elaborate theories to do so. The socialist and communist left had no stake in the comparison, either: this was the great age of the Popular Front, predicated on the incompatibility between communism and any form of fascism. European Catholics, however, could receive political mileage from the comparison. Conservative Catholics saw totalitarianism as the pathological consequence of modern freedoms, and lay the blame for both Nazism and Stalinism at the feet of the Enlightenment and 1789. In France, Catholics were responding to the rise of the hated Popular Front; any theory that could equate Bolshevism and Nazism delegitimized the very concept of a Moscow-­backed, antifascist Front populaire. In Austria, Catholic supporters of Dollfuss’s Ständestaat were in a similar position: their two major enemies were the Austro-­Marxists, just defeated in a civil war but still a threat, and the National Socialists, whose desire for Anschluss was finding worrying resonance within Austria itself. Totalitarianism theory allowed supporters of Dollfuss to undercut the National Socialists’ claim to represent a bulwark against communism. (Chappel, 2011, pp. 563–4) Kolnai’s work, proclaiming his defence of Western democracy, is nonetheless symptomatic of this very tendency, for instance when he waxes lyrical in praise of Professor Voegelin, since that shrewd thinker of a counter-­revolutionary society whose greatness is only partially due to his stupendous erudition, has two supports for his construction: he always stays at a certain refined distance from passionate partisanship. This may be the inner reason for his external choice of Austrian fascism in preference to the Nazi Empire. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 458)

44   Richard Steigmann-Gall For Chappel, the vision of political and civil society propounded by the originators of totalitarianism and political religion theories – not Marcuse, Kohn or Arendt but Gurian, von Hildebrand and Maritain – was at its heart deeply Catholic. Catholic political theory had, since at least the nineteenth century, argued for the decentering of sovereignty away from the nation state and towards nonpolitical institutions like the family and of course the Church. This was matched by a distrust of the ‘masses’ and, more broadly, of the nation state’s wresting of sovereignty away from traditional authority figures. The Catholic vision of society – of an overlapping set of hierarchies legitimized in the last instance by natural law, its organizing principle, and God, its supreme leader – is the one incarnated in totalitarianism theory. The theory assumes a religious notion of citizenship and human selfhood, in which the subject’s salvation and worth stem not from politics or society, but from faith and transcendence. This does not mean that more prominent totali­ tarian theorists like Arendt or Friedrich were crypto-­Catholics, but rather that they helped to translate a fundamentally theological notion into acceptably secular language. (Chappel, 2011, p. 565)

Nazism as religious politics Having unpacked Kolnai’s own subjectivity as a Catholic anti-­Nazi, we can fruitfully return to the question of what the Nazis themselves actually believed. Whether the Nazis perceived their movement to be a ‘political religion’ is must usefully explored by examining the actual efforts of some in the movement to turn Nazism into a literal Religionsersatz. Apart from Kolnai, those who uphold political religion theory most strenuously today, particularly the Discovery Institute’s Richard Weikart, usually point to ‘neo-­pagans’, like Rosenberg and Himmler, implying that their esoteric religious ideas were hegemonic within the movement. It is then often inferred that Hitler himself subscribed to their mysticism. However, even though Hitler was known for tailoring his remarks to please his audience, even in Rosenberg’s presence he was less than enthusiastic about the theorist’s attempted völkisch manifesto, Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930, The Myth of the Twentieth Century). What Kolnai could not have known at the time The War Against the West was published is that, before publishing his Myth, Rosenberg had asked Hitler for his opinion of the book (six months after receiving the manuscript, Hitler still had not read it). Hitler coolly replied that ‘It is a very clever book; only I ask myself who today is likely to read and understand such a book’ (quoted in Cecil, 1972, p. 100). It was a reflection of the insecurity of Rosenberg’s position that he replied by asking whether he should suppress it or even resign from party office. Hitler said ‘no’ to both, maintaining that Rosenberg had a right to publish his book since it was his intellectual property (Cecil, 1972, p. 101). However, in later, private meetings Hitler

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   45 would express regret that Rosenberg had written the book in the first place. According to Albert Speer, Hitler referred to it as ‘stuff nobody can understand’, written by a ‘narrow-­minded Baltic German who thinks in horribly complicated terms.… A relapse into medieval notions!’ (Speer, 1970, p. 96). Hitler was even more dismissive in his ‘table talk’, stating privately that I must insist that Rosenberg’s ‘The Myth of the Twentieth Century’ is not to be regarded as an expression of the official doctrine of the Party.… It is interesting to note that comparatively few of the older members of the Party are to be found among the readers of Rosenberg’s book, and that the publishers had, in fact, great difficulty in disposing of the first edition. (Hitler, 1953, p. 422 [11 April 1942])3 If Rosenberg’s esoteric religion received only a limited audience within the party, then Himmler’s mysticism fared no better. As Hitler told his circle of confidants,  ‘What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind, and now he wants to start that all over again.… To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint!’ Whereas Himmler attacked Charlemagne as the subjugator of ancient pagan Germanic tribes, Hitler declared that ‘Killing all those Saxons was not a historical crime, as Himmler thinks. Charlemagne did a good thing in subjugating Widukind and killing the Saxons out of hand. He thereby made possible the empire of the Franks and the entry of Western culture into what is now Germany’.  (Speer, 1970, p. 94) Hitler even approached Himmler himself, fully rejecting the foundation of a new religion, calling it a ‘chimera’ (Ackermann, 1970, p. 90). There is ample evidence that Hitler had no time for Himmler’s anti-­Christian neo-­paganism, but, even among the party’s other paganists, Himmler’s religious views were regarded as bizarre. Himmler unwittingly acknowledged this, warning his underlings that no polemics against such theories would be tolerated (Hermand, 1992, p. 64). The particular obsession with ‘glaciation cosmogony’ was too much even for Rosenberg, who sent a circular to all NSDAP offices assuring them that ‘adherence to these theories was no part of being a National Socialist’ (Cecil, 1972, p. 119). These were admittedly private expressions. But Hitler did not spare his paganist colleagues in the party from public derision. As he wrote in Mein Kampf, The characteristic thing about these people is that they rave about old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield, but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. For the same people who brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a

46   Richard Steigmann-Gall dressed bearskin with bull’s horns over their bearded heads, preach for the present nothing but struggle with spiritual weapons, and run away as fast as they can from every Communist blackjack. (Hitler, 1962, p. 361) He disdained ‘those German-­völkisch wandering scholars whose positive accomplishment is always practically nil, but whose conceit can scarcely be excelled’ (Hitler, 1962, p.  360). Any attempt at making Nazism a religious movement came in for total reproach: ‘Especially with the so-­called religious reformers.… I always have the feeling that they were sent by those powers which do not want the resurrection of our people’ (Hitler, 1962, p. 361). Hitler believed that failure to achieve German national unity would be the only result, For their whole activity leads the people away from the common struggle against the common enemy, the Jew, and instead lets them waste their strength on inner religious squabbles as senseless as they are disastrous.… I shall not even speak of the unworldliness of these völkisch Saint Johns of the twentieth century or their ignorance of the popular soul. (Hitler, 1962, pp. 361, 363) This last statement could have equally applied to the Gauleiter Artur Dinter, who sought to transform Nazism from a secular party into an explicitly religious movement. Dinter would ultimately be expelled from the party over his growing rift with Hitler on this issue; the grounds upon which he would be removed provide us with further insight into Hitler’s own thinking on religion. As this episode reveals, if Hitler believed his movement was religious, he entirely rejected the idea that it should be a religion. Like many in the Nazi leadership, Dinter held Luther in high regard, esteeming him as a nationalist figure who, among other things, had invented the German language. And among many Nazis there was an admiration for Luther’s religious struggle as well (Steigmann-­Gall, 1999). Dinter was among them, but he took his admiration to extreme ends, going so far as to formulate a plan for ‘completing’ the Reformation in Germany. While Kolnai acknowledges the presence of Dinter within the German religious milieu (Kolnai, 1928, pp. 241, 572), he does little more than discuss Dinter’s fanatical anti-­Catholicism and falsely frames it within the paganist milieu around the Ludendorffs. In fact, Dinter was emphatically not a paganist, and, in his own religious treatise, he saw it as the responsibility of the Nazi Party to complete the process of uniting Germans around ‘true Christianity’ that Luther had begun but failed to complete. Dinter enunciated this vision in his 197 Thesen zur Vollendung der Reformation (197 Theses for Completion of the Reformation) of 1926, in which he declared that the only path to German political renewal was through a religious revolution. The following year in Nuremberg, he established his own organisation, the Christian-­Spiritual Religious Association (Geistchristliche Religionsgemeinschaft) and a periodical, Das Geistchristentum.

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   47 Owing to Hitler’s disinterest in his proposal, Dinter grew increasingly opposed to Hitler’s leadership. Before expelling him from the party, Hitler instructed Gregor Strasser, the party organisation leader during the Kampfzeit, to solicit the party leadership to gauge how widespread Dinter’s views may have been. The form they received read as follows: In the journal Geistchristentum, Dr. Dinter attempts to convey the impression that there is a difference of opinion in the National Socialist movement between Adolf Hitler and the other leaders, and that Adolf Hitler alone is opposed to Dinter’s attempt to involve the movement in religious discussions. We, the undersigned leaders of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, Protestants and Catholics, decisively reject this attempt. Without prejudice to our respective personal views on religion, we will not allow the political movement to be drawn into the whirlpool of religious struggle. (BArch Berlin, 8 October 1928) Among those who responded were Goebbels and Göring, who both affirmed this position. Rosenberg was among those who did not respond (BArch Berlin, Personalakte Dinter). Hitler won – Nazism remained ‘not a religious reformation, but a political reorganisation of our people’.4 A few weeks after Dinter’s expulsion, Hitler gave a speech in Passau: We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls.… We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity … in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people. (BArch Berlin, 27 October 1928) Hitler unequivocally wished to cast Nazism as a religious politics rather than a political religion; while the movement would be informed by religious ideology, it would not take on the form of a religious movement. Furthermore, Hitler contended that the religious ideology in question would be Christian – and therefore closer in content to Dinter – not anti-­Christian, as the paganists had hoped. Most of the Nazi elite joined with Hitler in rejecting these political religions, especially Rosenberg’s and Himmler’s paganism. As Goebbels noted in his diary, Göring complained that if Rosenberg had had his way, there would be ‘only cult, Thing, myth, and that sort of swindle’ (Fröhlich, 1987, [entry for 13 April 1937]).5 In 1939 Göring confronted Rosenberg point-­blank, asking him, ‘Do you believe that Christianity is coming to an end, and that later a new form created by us will come into being?’ (Seraphim, 1956, p. 91 [entry for 22 August 1939]). When Rosenberg said he did think this, Göring replied that he would privately solicit Hitler’s view (ibid.). No record exists of Göring asking Hitler this question, but there is little doubt Hitler would have rejected Rosenberg’s

48   Richard Steigmann-Gall contention. Goebbels’s views on paganism closely matched Göring’s; his estimation of Rosenberg’s abilities were summarised in his reference to him as ‘Almost Rosenberg’: ‘Rosenberg almost managed to become a scholar, a journalist, a politician – but only almost’ (Krebs, 1959, p.  166). Elsewhere, Goebbels was characteristically more succinct, describing Rosenberg’s religious epic as an ‘ideological belch’ (quoted in Fest, 1970, p. 168). If Hitler rejected attempts to turn Nazism into a political religion, in what ways can Hitler or his movement be described as religious? We can begin by exploring his conceptions of God. In Mein Kampf, Hitler referred continually to a providential, active God:  What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race … so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.… Peoples that bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence. (Hitler, 1962, pp. 214, 327) Hitler cast his anti-­Semitism in economic, political and even eugenic terms, but he frequently made conclusions on a religious basis: ‘Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord’ (Hitler, 1962, p. 65). With this unambiguous reference to ‘the Lord’ we see a theistic dimension revealed in Hitler. Whereas reference to a vague providential force bears little resemblance to belief in the biblical God, elsewhere in Mein Kampf Hitler expresses more than a naturalist pantheism devoid of Christian content. Again, it was on the question of race and race purity where Hitler most frequently conveyed such a God; it was, in his view, the duty of Germans ‘to put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created’ (Hitler, 1962, p.  405). Even as Hitler elsewhere made reference to an anthropomorphised ‘nature’, and the laws of nature that humanity must follow, he also revealed his belief that these were divine laws ordained by God: The folkish-­minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God’s will, and actually fulfill God’s will, and not let God’s word be desecrated. For God’s will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord’s creation, the divine will. (Hitler, 1962, p. 562; emphasis in original) The reference to God as the Lord of Creation, and the necessity of obeying ‘His’ will, exposes a standard Christian conception. While Hitler was no less intent than Rosenberg on mingling religious and racial categories, unlike Rosenberg he maintained that this could be done within a Christian frame of reference.

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   49 Other sources point to a Christian identity in Hitler. In a party gathering at Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller in 1922, he dealt with the question of whether one could be both anti-­Semitic and Christian: I say my Christian feelings point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter (tumultuous, prolonged applause). They point me toward the man who, once lonely and surrounded by only a few followers, recognized these Jews and called for battle against them, and who, as the true God, was not only the greatest as a sufferer but also the greatest as a warrior.… [A]s a Christian and a human being, I read the passage which declares to us how the Lord finally rose up and seized the whip to drive the usurers, the brood of serpents and snakes, from the Temple! (tumultuous applause). (Völkischer Beobachter, 13 April 1922) In this speech, delivered in front of a mostly Nazi audience, Hitler referred to Jesus as ‘the true God’. He made it plain that he regarded Christ’s ‘struggle’ as direct inspiration for his own. For Hitler, Jesus was not just one archetype among others, but, as he said on another occasion, ‘our greatest Aryan leader’ (Jäckel, 1980, p. 635). While emphasising Jesus’s human qualities, Hitler in this instance also alluded to his divinity. It should be pointed out that Hitler said these words publicly: what did he say behind closed doors? At a private meeting of his confidants during the Kampfzeit, in which he explained why economics must be subordinate to politics, Hitler again spoke of a connection between Nazism and Christianity, one deeper than a simple ‘borrowing’: Socialism is a political problem. And politics is of no concern to the economy.… Socialism is a question of attitude to life, of the ethical outlook on life of all who live together in a common ethnic or national space. Socialism is a Weltanschauung! But in actual fact there is nothing new about this Weltanschauung. Whenever I read the New Testament Gospels and the revelations of various of the prophets … I am astonished at all that has been made of the teachings of these divinely inspired men, especially Jesus Christ, which are so clear and unique, heightened to religiosity. They were the ones who created this new worldview which we now call socialism, they established it, they taught it and they lived it! But the communities that called themselves Christian churches did not understand it! Or if they did, they denied Christ and betrayed him! (Turner, 1985, pp. 139–40; emphasis in original) Hitler claims that where the churches failed in their mission to instil a Christian ethic in secular society, his movement would take up the task. Hitler not only reads the New Testament, but also professes to be inspired by it. As a consequence, he also claimed that the substance of Nazi social theory is ‘nothing new’.

50   Richard Steigmann-Gall Whatever Hitler’s own personal religious beliefs – which certainly cannot be described as Christian in the conventional ecclesiastical sense – it contained a Christian element. Until the end of his life he esteemed Christ, so much so that he decided it was necessary to rescue Christ from his own Jewishness. Even while his anti-­clericalism grew, his opinion of Jesus remained high. As he said to his confidants in October 1941, three years after Kolnai published The War Against the West, The Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up his position against Jewry. … He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that is why the Jews liquidated Him.  (Hitler, 1953, p. 76 [21 October 1941]) In Hitler’s eyes, Jesus’s status as an Aryan remained unquestioned: ‘It is certain that Jesus was not a Jew’ (Hitler, 1953, p.  76 [21 October 1941]). However much Hitler claimed to be an enemy of organised religion, this conception of Jesus displayed a clear limit to his apostasy and the retention of a specifically Christian dimension to his beliefs. More than just Hitler, others in the Nazi movement exhibited a similar commitment to Christianity. One was the Gauleiter of East Prussia and eventual Reich commissioner of Ukraine, Erich Koch. In addition to being Gauleiter, Koch served in 1933 as the elected president of the provincial Protestant church synod. Contemporaries of Koch, including those ranged themselves against the Nazified ‘German Christians’, confirmed that his Christian feelings were sincere. According to the leader of the East Prussian Confessing Church, Koch spoke ‘with the deepest understanding of our church’ and consistently dealt with ‘the central themes of Christianity’ (quoted in Iwand, 1964, pp. 251–2). In his post-­ war testimony, taken by a public prosecutor in Bielefeld in 1949, Koch would insist that he ‘held the view that the Nazi idea had to develop from a basic Prussian-­Protestant attitude’ (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 15 July 1949). This Protestant orientation among the party elite, evident even in Hitler’s estimation of Protestantism as the ‘national religion’ of the Germans (Seraphim, 1956, p. 117 [entry for 19 January 1940]; Turner, 1985, pp. 19–21, 210), matched the party’s own heavily Protestant social base. Hans Schemm, Gauleiter of Bayreuth, Bavarian culture minister and head of the National Socialist Teachers’ League (NSLB), further illustrated this correlation. During the Kampfzeit, Schemm was known for his slogan, ‘Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland!’ His speeches were designed to cast Nazism as a religious politics; as a police report stated, Schemm spoke ‘like a pastor’ and often ended his speeches with the Lutheran hymn, ‘A Mighty Fortress is our God’ (Kühnel, 1985, pp. 134–5). In one of these speeches, he spoke of God in Nazism’s conceptual universe:  Our confession to God is a confession of a doctrine of totality.… To give ultimate significance to the totalities of race, resistance and personality there

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   51 is added the supreme totalitarian slogan of our Volk: ‘Religion and God.’ God is the greatest totality and extends over all else. (Kahl-­Furthmann, 1935, p. 124) Here Schemm makes specific reference to the ‘totalitarian’ nature of Nazism. But he made it clear that the ‘totalizing’ claims of Nazism as a Weltanschauung did not preclude the possibility that it could have been based on a variety of Christianity. Far from having conflicting loyalties, for Schemm Christianity and Nazism went hand in hand: We are no theologians, no representatives of the teaching profession in this sense, put forth no theology. But we claim one thing for ourselves: that we place the great fundamental idea of Christianity in the center of our ideology [Ideenwelt] – the hero and sufferer, Christ himself, stands in the center. (Künneth et al., 1931, p. 19) Schemm also dealt with the issue of the sanctification of racial science. In doing so, however, Schemm insisted that racialism was consistent with – indeed stemmed from – a Christian attitude. As he told a meeting of Protestant pastors, we want to preserve, not subvert, what God has created, just as the oak tree and the fir tree retain their difference in a forest. – Why do the trees in the forest not interbreed? – Why is there not only one type of tree [Einheitsbaum]? Why should our concept of race suddenly turn into the Marxist concept of a single type of human? We are accused of wanting to deify the idea of race. But since race is willed by God, we want nothing else but to keep the race pure, in order to fulfill God’s law. (Künneth et al., 1931, pp. 19–20) Again, these were public pronouncements, and as such they might be called into question. But, in private, Schemm retracted none of the things he professed. In party correspondence regarding the sectarian Protestant League (Evangelischer Bund), a leading voice of politicised Protestantism that sought active political cooperation with the Nazis, Schemm stated that ‘The Protestant League stands very close to the NSDAP. It is consciously German and, through moral religious energy, wants to contribute to the building up of the German people’ (BArch Berlin, 6 March 1931).6 The racial dimension to Schemm’s religion, while apparently so at odds with the message of Christianity, had in fact a rather impressive theological lineage. Within Germany, a generation of Protestant theologians had been erecting a theology of Schöpfungsglaube, which sanctified the Volk as an order of God’s creation. These were not marginal eccentrics or sycophants aping contemporary political trends but some of the most respected Christian thinkers of the day. Their theology carried with it a message of racial separation and superiority noticeable for its parallels with the efforts of contemporary American and South

52   Richard Steigmann-Gall African theologians to erect similar theologies of race.7 The sanctification of race, which for Burleigh qualifies Nazism as a political religion, was in these contexts yet again a matter of religious politics. These themes were replicated almost exactly by the head of the Nazi Party court and father-­in-law of Martin Bormann, Walter Buch. To an assembly of the National Socialist Student League (NSDStB) he declared the following: Life itself is struggle.… The National Socialist worldview stands unreservedly for this truth. It is the foundation of all its works and deeds.… With this conception we follow the example of no one less than our Savior. When Point 24 of our program says the party stands for a positive Christianity, here above all is the cornerstone of our thinking. Christ preached struggle as did no other. His life was struggle for his beliefs, for which he went to his death. From everyone he demanded a decision between yes or no.… That is the necessity: that man find the power to decide between yes and no. (Buch, n.d.)8 This stark black-­or-white vision makes clear the dualism of the Nazi worldview. Buch was particularly fond of Martin Luther: Many people confess their amazement that Hitler preaches ideas which they have always held.… From the Middle Ages we can look to the same example in Martin Luther. What stirred in the soul and spirit of the German people of that time, finally found expression in his person, in his words and deeds. (Buch, n.d.) Buch was fond of quoting Luther, even privately. As he wrote to a friend in 1929, Luther’s eloquent words, ‘the intellect is the Devil’s whore’, confirms my belief that the human spirit of the greatest magnitude is too small to alter the laws of life. And the highest law of life is struggle.… Nothing comes from ‘yes-­but’ [Zwar-­Aber]. (BArch Berlin, 1 December 1929; emphasis in original)

Conclusion Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West is a singular contribution to the debate around Nazism’s ideological essence. But in its Catholicism, it was also one of the first iterations of a once-­dominant narrative whose political legacies are still with us: the incorrect insistence that Nazism was, at the very root of its ideology and inspiration, anti-­Christian. Totalitarianism theory and political religion theory, with their conflation of Nazism and communism, are the handmaidens of his objective. Kolnai’s essentially false narrative regarding the ‘paganism’ of the Nazi movement would nonetheless find deep resonance through the decades

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   53 from intellectuals as disparate as Hannah Arendt and Roger Scruton, who were joined in their efforts to erect an anti-­Nazism that could marshal long-­standing traditions to a defence of ‘the West’ – at the expense of an historical acknowledgement that the West had been at war with itself since the Enlightenment. In this sense, Nazism did not represent a ‘war against the West’ per se, but rather a defence of a particular West against a rival West – namely, one that was ‘unleashed’ by the heresies of the French Revolution. Kolnai’s categories of analysis reveal a deep ambivalence in this sense – on the one hand, they disavow all that had been unleashed in this attack on the West, while, on the other, arguing that the seeds of this attack were planted very deeply in Western soil. Kolnai’s insistence on taking Nazi ideology seriously was salutary in an era when Nazism was too frequently seen as opportunist or lacking in belief; yet his ‘diagnosis’ of Nazism as paganist in the sense of excavating Christianity and replacing it with new content – a new wine in an old bottle, if you like – was essentially incorrect. In serving the politico-­moral needs of its time to rally as many religious Europeans against Nazism as possible, it nonetheless fundamentally misunderstood Nazism as constituting a ‘war against Christianity’, when in fact Nazis themselves saw their movement as a defence of Christianity against ‘free thinkers’, domestic German atheism, ‘godless Bolshevism’ or deicidal Jews. I believe that in his insistence that Nazism constituted a war against Christianity, either as a self-­consciously external pagan assault or a ‘slow infection’ from within beginning with Luther himself, Kolnai fails on his own terms. That he was making a foray into analysis right in the middle of events, and therefore without the benefit of objective distance, is an important caveat. But those who, almost 80 years later, continue to reiterate these arguments do not have that luxury. Particularly damaging to Kolnai’s analysis, permit me to suggest, is the cultural freight it carries. By supposing he had freed himself from the taint of Nazism by embracing its alleged antithesis, he gave himself free rein to engage in his own anti-­Semitism, anti-­communism, anti-­liberalism and homophobia.

Notes 1 For only the most recent – and particularly drastic – example of this argument, see Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich (New York: Regnery History, 2016). 2 I use here the version most commonly available in the United States (Hitler, 1962). 3 Myth was published as a private work, never becoming an official guide to Nazi thinking like Mein Kampf. It never received the official stamp of the NSDAP, nor did the party’s official publisher put it out. Hitler occasionally considered sanctioning the book but never did. However, Myth was occasionally banned lower down the ranks of the party, for instance by the Wrocław branch of the National Socialist Teachers’ League (NSLB). Bundesarchiv Berlin-­Lichterfelde (hereafter BArch Berlin), NS 22/410 (8 September 1935: Wrocław). 4 Dinter lashed out at this decision. According to a police report, ‘Dinter called Strasser’s Aryanness (Ariertum) into question. In his Das Geistchristentum he writes: “The name Strasser is a good Jewish name … a look at his characteristic business methods … is enough to confirm his racial composition” ’ (BArch Berlin NS 26/1370).

54   Richard Steigmann-Gall 5 Thing refers to the ‘Thing’ places, sites set up by Nordic paganists for their religious ceremonies. 6 In his original letter to Schemm, Wilhelm Fahrenhorst, head of the Protestant League, indicated that he had spoken with Göring on the NSDAP’s connection to Protestantism. BArch Berlin NS 12/638 (20 December 1930: Berlin). 7 For an exploration of Schöpfungsglaube and its theological origins, see Robert Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1985); Wolfgang Tilgner, Volksnomostheologie und Schöpfungsglaube: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Kirchenkampfes (Göttingen: Vandenhock & Ruprecht, 1966); and Daniel Borg, The Old-­Prussian Church and the Weimar Republic: A Study in Political Adjustment, 1917–1927 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984). On race and religion in South Africa, see T. Dunbar Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975); and Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). For the United States, see Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 8 The speech was given 1930–2.

References Ackermann, Josef (1970). Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe. Göttingen: Musterschmidt-­ Verlag. BArch Berlin (8 October 1928). NS 26/487: Munich. BArch Berlin (27 October 1928). NS 26/55: Passau. BArch Berlin (1 December 1929). NS 26/1375: Berlin. BArch Berlin (6 March 1931). NS 12/638: Berlin. BArch Berlin. Personalakte Dinter. Buch, Walter (n.d.). ‘Geist und Kampf ’ (speech), BArch Berlin. NS 26/1375. N.p. Cecil, Robert (1972). The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology. London: Batsford. Chappel, James (2011). ‘The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe’. Modern Intellectual History 8, 3: 561–90. Connelly, John (2012). From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dinter, Artur (1926). 197 Thesen zur Vollendung der Reformation: Die Wiederherstellung der reinen Heilandslehre. Leipzig: L. Beust. Fest, Joachim (1970). The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. New York: Pantheon Books. Fröhlich, Elke (ed.) (1987). Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente. Munich: Saur. Hermand, Jost (1992). Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hitler, Adolf (1953). Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens, intro. Hugh Trevor-­Roper. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hitler, Adolf (1962). Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin. Institut für Zeitgeschichte (15 July 1949). MC 1 (interview). Iwand, Hans (1964). Briefe an Rudolf Hermann, ed. Karl Steck. Munich: Kaiser. Jäckel, Eberhard (ed.) (1980). Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-­Anstalt.

Nazism, Christianity and political religion   55 Kahl-­Furthmann, Gertrud (ed.) (1935). Hans Schemm spricht: Seine Reden und sein Werk. Bayreuth: Gauverl. Bayerische Ostmark. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Krebs, Alfred (1959). Tendenzen und Gestalten der NSDAP: Erinnerungen an die Frühzeit der Partei. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-­Anstalt. Kühnel, Franz (1985). Hans Schemm, Gauleiter und Kultusminister. Nuremberg: Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. Künneth, Walter, Wilm, Walter, Schemm, Hans (1931). Was haben wir als evangelische Christen zum Rufe des Nationalsozialismus zu sagen? Dresden: Landsverein für Innere Mission. Luther, Martin ([1543] 2016). Von den Juden und ihren Lügen. Aschaffenburg: Alibri Verlag. Rosenberg, Alfred (1930). Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Wertung der seelisch-­ geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit. Munich: Hoheneichen. Seraphim, Hans-­Günther (ed.) (1956). Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs. Göttingen: Musterschmidt-­Verlag. Speer, Albert (1970). Inside the Third Reich. New York: Macmillan. Steigmann-­Gall, Richard (1999). ‘Furor Protestanticus: Nazi Conceptions of Luther, 1919–1933’. Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 12: 274–86. Steigmann-­Gall, Richard (2003). The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Theweleit, Klaus (1987–9). Male Fantasies, 2 vols. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, Henry Ashby (ed.) (1985). Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Völkischer Beobachter (13 April 1922).

4 Aurel Kolnai’s reflections on anti-­Semitism in contemporary context Micha Brumlik

Preliminary remarks As a world view, modern anti-­Semitism reacts to the crisis-­ridden development of capitalist modernity: to industrialisation, modernisation, the loss of obligatory views on life and the reification of human relationships. Modern anti-­Semitism holds a paranoid, conspiracist view of Jews, as expressed by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion1 (fabricated by the tsarist secret police), for example, which regards Jews as inveterate ‘decomposing agents’ (Zersetzer), who attack traditional handicraft-­based and rural economies through money, religion and morals through science and the Enlightenment, the state through treachery and disloyalty, social authority through unruly journalism, and the Volk and race through ‘diseased’ blood. In the late nineteenth century this racial discourse became incorporated into an ideology of integral nationalism, and not only in Germany.2 Against all these destructive forces neither pogroms nor outbursts of rage can help, Adolf Hitler writes in a letter to a friend in 1919; he goes on that only an ‘anti-­Semitism of reason’ implemented towards the removal of the Jews can work (Jäckel and Kuhn, 1980, p. 88). But a purely racist – in other words bio-­ hereditary and social Darwinist – form of hatred of Jews was not immediately accepted even during this time of crisis. In the mid-­1920s, for example, the nationalist writer Ernst Jünger published an article advocating an irrationalism of the blood as opposed to scientistic racism:  Blood without destiny is like an uncharged battery or a magnetic needle without a magnetic pull. The purity and high breeding of blood or the quality of its mixture is meaningless without this great power. Blood proves its value only by the touchstone of destiny. (Jünger, 2001, p. 193) Jünger’s additional remarks may be understood as a polemic against the Nazi Party’s understanding of race: We therefore reject all those efforts to support the notions of race and blood through intellectual means. Trying to prove the value of blood cerebrally,

Aurel Kolnai’s reflections on anti-Semitism   57 through modern science, means having the servant testify for his master. We have no interest in chemical reactions, injections of blood, shapes of the skull and Aryan profiles. All this must degenerate into nonsense and hair-­ splitting and leads the intellect into the realm of values that it can only destroy and never comprehend. (Jünger, 2001, pp. 193–4) The diffuseness of the National Socialist conception of race, which shifts between natural scientific obscurantism, scientific rigour and an arbitrary definition of ‘race’ in the human sciences, was exemplified in the debates that ultimately led to the racist Nuremberg Laws. Two schools competed with one another in the preparation of these laws: that of Mendelian-­type geneticists, who calculated the Jewish and non-­Jewish parts of a person according to mathematical distribution models to arrive at the notions of being a ‘half-­’, ‘quarter-­’ or ‘eighth-­Jew’, and ‘contagionists’. The best-­known among them was the Thuringian Gauleiter Artur Dinter, who was ultimately excluded from the Party by Hitler, claimed that even a single act of sexual intercourse between a Jewish man and a non-­Jewish woman would lead to his genetic material being introduced into her bloodstream, so that even a child subsequently given birth to by this woman with an Aryan man would have Jewish genetic material in its blood. Artur Dinter elaborated upon this delusion in his novel Die Sünde wider das Blut (The Sin Against the Blood).3 Both forms of anti-­Jewish hatred did, however, appeal to the natural–scientific model, while other well-­known ideologues, such as H. K. F. Guenther, particularly brought subjective efforts of the will – with the aim of developing a culture – to bear on their positive characterisations of an Aryan race. The völkisch, racist ‘redemptive anti-­Semitism’ (Friedländer, 2007, p. 87), which was adopted by the Nazis as their state ideology, was above all inherently inconsistent, and it was for exactly this reason that it served the purposes of exclusion, expropriation, stigmatisation and ultimately mass murder, as its unscientific character and ideological fuzziness could justify any arbitrary course of action. It was only an ideology such as this that could motivate a few people to organise and cover up the murder of six million European Jews between the years 1939 and 1945 – a state crime of a magnitude never before witnessed in history. Some scientists and writers, although they were only small in number, reacted to the Nazi world view, including its anti-­Semitism, at an early stage – among them was Aurel Kolnai, an author who has been rediscovered much too late.

Kolnai’s The War Against the West Aurel Kolnai’s monumental work, The War Against the West, was published in 1938 and offers nothing more and nothing less than a comprehensive, almost encyclopaedic, description of National Socialist ideology in all its nuances and diverse origins – it is a work that remains unparalleled even today. The book’s attempt to identify the role played by National Socialist, and particularly the

58   Micha Brumlik racially motivated, hatred of Jews (namely anti-­Semitism) raises problems of its own, however. At least at first glance – and we must consider whether this is also systematically the case – hatred of Jews, which Kolnai prefers to call ‘anti-­ Judaism’, seems to play a rather peripheral role in what he describes; apart from making occasional references in earlier chapters, he only addresses the subject in the eighth chapter, in its last section on ‘Nation and Race’. For example, Kolnai mentions the criticism, which is ascribed to Nietzsche (Kolnai, 1938, p.  237) and Goethe, of a universalist morality (Kolnai, 1938, p.  200), refers to Hans Blüher’s critique of Judaism’s exclusively heterosexual orientation (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  77–8) and the views of the German Christians (Deutsche Christen; Kolnai, 1938, pp.  231–2), and provides reports on Alfred Rosenberg’s interpretation of Paul as a sort of predecessor to Bolshevism (Kolnai, 1938, p. 239) and the beliefs of Count Reventlow, according to whom Jewish monotheism lacks metaphysical depth (Kolnai, 1938, p. 243). In this regard, Kolnai also addresses the neo-­pagan critique of Christianity; within this account, Kolnai himself – as a devout Catholic – discusses the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. He writes the following: The attempt to heathenize Christianity can start from three points in its fabric. (1) The Christian religion achieved a revulsion from Judaism (as a national community with a religious privilege) to world-­wide humanity, which means, to the ‘Gentiles’ in general.… As we see it [Kolnai continues], the Jewish community was the amazing self-­contradictory example of an anti-­tribal Tribe, the inhumanly narrow nucleus of a future humanitarian universalism; whereas Christianity came actually to create mankind as a unity in the love of God, governed by His justice and reason.… (2) Parallel [this is Kolnai’s own view of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity] to the abandonment of God’s own consecrated and moral Tribe, the kingless people governed by divine Law, Christianity also introduced a partially altered code of morals: less rigid and juridical, less narrow and imperious, more conscious of the multiplicity and interdependence of values, loosened from the historical and ritual traditions of a local community, and, above all, less easily applicable in terms of ‘correct accomplishment’ and ‘transgression’. (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 249–50; emphasis in original) In additional sections, Kolnai mentions the National Socialist condemnation of ‘Jewish capital’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 358) and intensively analyses the ‘racial creed’ to reach this convincing conclusion: ‘Categories like Aryan and Semitic are not racial in the more ethnological use of that term. They rest on a compound of linguistic, historical, racial, religious and political data and correlations’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  442) – a finding that led him to mention the racists’ obsession with Jewish striving for racial purity (Kolnai, 1938, p. 454). Kolnai ultimately and systematically develops these peripheral remarks in Chapter VIII, section 8 on ‘The Meaning of Anti-­Judaism’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  492–513). For Kolnai, it is important to criticise National Socialist

Aurel Kolnai’s reflections on anti-Semitism   59 anti-­Semitism from a universalist standpoint of his own choosing – in this case, Roman Catholicism: ‘Though I am myself of Jewish extraction, I disclaim all solidarity with such an attitude’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 495). Here Kolnai refers to the attitude of Jewish-­German patriots, whom he assumes for their part would be Nationalist Socialists were it not against their interests. He offers further remarks (in sentences that read in an odd way today at first): On the other hand, we must also refuse to be blind to the symbolic purport of the Nazi discrimination against Jews, and (here again, my Jewish descent cannot impose an ill-­conceived duty of ‘modesty’ on me, which would be no less subjective and self-­conscious) we must bear witness to the peculiar barbarism of the Nürnberg legislation and the mentality underlying it. This mentality is wholly in tune with the general line of fascism; but it embodies an essential forward step.… A new and horrible perspective of tribal inhumanity, injustice and superstition has been opened up by Naziism [here we see Kolnai’s prescience in 1938], and it has a full claim to special attention apart from ‘mere’ fascism, though the decisive truth remains that such a thing could not have happened except on fascist soil. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 495) That is how Kolnai put it clear-­sighted in 1936. In 1937 Poland had also established anti-­Jewish laws, even if they were altogether less severe. Of course, whether the Polish colonels’ regime qualifies as ‘fascist’ must remain an open question here.  In his attempt to analyse National Socialist hatred of Jews, Kolnai also addresses Hitler’s assumptions about Judaism and seems to concede that he has correctly hit upon ‘a real speciality of Jewish existence’, namely that ‘the naked egoism of individuals precludes Jewish state-­life on a limited territory. They have no sense of sacrifice and therefore cannot confine themselves to a definite sphere of sovereignty’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 504). Finally, Kolnai explains why he prefers to speak of ‘anti-­Judaism’ rather than ‘anti-­Semitism’, accepting the thesis of a now-­forgotten author, the socialist Anton Orel, that what could be characterised as a ‘Jewish nature’ is actually the product of religious belief and not a racial trait. Kolnai’s reflections culminate in the following thesis: What they [i.e. the National Socialists] are engaged in persecuting is not so much the Jews as the Jewish spirit, and not so much the Jewish spirit as the spirit. They have severely injured Judaism, but with the same action they also ‘thrust greatness upon it’: for they have made Judaism … the symbol of persecuted Liberty, Reason and Justice. (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 511–12; emphasis added) This is by implication to say that Jewish universalism, with its roots in the Prophets, is a product of the anti-­Semites. So, did Kolnai correctly understand

60   Micha Brumlik and analyse – or alternatively put, explain – anti-­Semitism? Did he ascribe it appropriate significance in relation to the Nazi movement and the Nazi state?

Dialectic of Enlightenment Five years after the publication of Kolnai’s book, which for all we know was unfamiliar to them, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer were getting together observations on the United States Pacific coast, which they published in 1947 under the title Dialectic of Enlightenment through a Dutch exile publishing house, reflections whose central part forms the chapter ‘Elements of Anti-­ Semitism’. This philosophy of sober despair relates to an equally sober analysis of the situation of the Jews after the Nazi takeover in Germany, which Horkheimer had already published in 1939, a year after the publication of Kolnai’s book, under the title ‘Die Juden und Europa’ (‘The Jews and Europe’) in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research), of which he was editor. In this article Horkheimer rejects any transhistorical explanation of anti-­Semitism and instead treats the phenomenon in a way that is consistently grounded in an analysis of National Socialism. Inspired by Marx’s essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, Horkheimer views nineteenth-­century Jewish emancipation, along with its democratic achievements, to be above all an ideological concealment of the development of capitalist forms of transaction. Here Jews are basically regarded as ‘agents of circulation’ in the context of a still liberal capitalism, who were to be disempowered in the course of a totalitarian capitalism that plans monopolistically. All the author’s outrage and compassion accordingly is related to poor, refugee Jews, while his distrust of nouveau riche Jews is at least as great as that of nouveau riche ‘Aryans’. The article is still written along the lines that people who do not wish to talk about capitalism should remain silent about Fascism, going so far as to tell Jews who naively cling to the idea of a liberal society that they have got Fascism wrong: ‘They shed many a tear for the past. That they fared better under liberalism does not guarantee the justice of the latter’ (Horkheimer, 2005, p. 236). It was ultimately his collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno on the Dialectic of Enlightenment that ended Horkheimer’s rather economistic attempts to explain anti-­Semitism, opening the way for a more sophisticated, psychoanalytically inspired theory of mimesis and projection, while also affording the possibility of reclaiming a new dignity for Jewish aniconism based on Freud’s critique of Christianity: ‘The human self-­reflection in the absolute, the humanization of God through Christ, is the proton pseudos [first substitution]. The progress beyond Judaism is paid for with the assertion that the mortal Jesus was God’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 145). On various occasions in his later work, Horkheimer’s partner in drafting the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno, expressed himself more or less systematically on issues of anti-­Semitism. It is worth noting that anti-­Semitism plays only a minor, if any at all, role in his pre-­war work. The subject became salient for

Aurel Kolnai’s reflections on anti-Semitism   61 Adorno during the mid-­1940s at the earliest while he and Horkheimer were working on the Dialectic of Enlightenment in Los Angeles. This work, first published in 1947 by Querido in Amsterdam, devotes an entire chapter to ‘Elements of Anti-­Semitism. Limits of Enlightenment’. The preface, written in 1944, states that this section of the book concerns a ‘philosophical prehistory of antisemitism’ that ‘derives from the nature of the dominant reason and of the world corresponding to its image’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. xix). The preface also notes that these theoretical reflections are ‘directly related to empirical research by the Institute of Social Research’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p.  xix). Finally, the authors remark that the first three theses of the ‘Elements’ were written in collaboration with Leo Löwenthal (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. xix). As no historical–critical edition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment has yet been produced, and perhaps never will be, we can hardly identify from this compilation which of the individual reflections can with certainty be attributed to Adorno. Nevertheless, we can suppose that the theses authored ‘solely’ by Horkheimer and Adorno more clearly express Adorno’s own particular claims when compared with the first three theses that were jointly written with Leo Löwenthal. In any event, ‘Elements of Anti-­Semitism’ is a groundbreaking work. While opinions, indeed studies, of a mostly historical nature regarding anti-­Semitism go back to the turn of the century, the social sciences were slow to conduct research on anti-­Semitism of a comparable extent to the current state of inquiry. Even if it was driven by other interests and sponsors, this research on anti-­ Semitism developed in parallel with the development of elements of anti-­ Semitism in the United States, and interacted in many different ways with theoretical reflections on the latter (Ziege, 2009, pp.  95–134). In addition, Adorno and Horkheimer were neither historians nor experts in Judaism, nor did they make a thorough study of the relevant literature and sources – apart from Paul Massing’s study on the origins of modern anti-­Semitism, first published in English in 1949, which was known to the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, and which they brought out in German in 1959. The works of Hermann Bahr and Richard Coudenhove-­Kalergi were either not known or politically suspect to the two authors. This explains why Horkheimer and Adorno’s interests focused mainly on modern, post-­emancipatory anti-­Semitism and on assumptions that were particularly based on Freud concerning Christian anti-­Judaism, while the many forms of anti-­Jewish hatred in antiquity, as well as in the entirely different epoch of the Middle Ages, were as foreign to them as the actual history of the Jews, which was already accessible in German through the monumental works of Heinrich Graetz and Simon Dubnow. From a historical perspective, the ‘Elements’ chapter combines a speculative theory of Christianity with a Marxist and psychoanalytically inspired analysis of post-­emancipatory anti-­Semitism, which largely excludes the Middle Ages, ecclesiastical history and the early Modern Age, and substantiates these assumptions (Horkheimer and Adorno’s original contribution) with a ‘philosophical prehistory’ that extends back to the origin of the human species.

62   Micha Brumlik Roughly speaking, the first thesis of the ‘Elements’ analyses anti-­Semitism along the lines of the classical, socio-­psychological theory of the scapegoat, while the second thesis pursues the specific character of anti-­liberal popular and mass movements. Lastly, the third thesis examines anti-­Semitism by means of a Marxist theory of the sphere of circulation in capitalist societies, while the fourth thesis postulates a theory of Christianity in the narrower sense of the sociology of religion – a perspective based above all on Freud’s late work, Moses and Monotheism. Only the fifth and sixth theses present Horkheimer and Adorno’s own specific perspective, and we may assume that Adorno’s theoretical intuitions in particular guided this section. The Neo-­Kantian and psychoanalytically radicalised theory of projective perception, which they develop in the context of a naturalistically understood history of the species, precisely matches what the preface had announced as a ‘philosophical prehistory of antisemitism’. Finally, the seventh and final thesis – paradoxically enough – looks at the supposed end of anti-­Semitism, while nevertheless attempting to demonstrate that its exclusively destructive content – following the foreseeable, official condemnation of völkisch, anti-­Jewish hatred – has transformed itself into an aggressive, anti-­ democratic conformism.

The War Against the West or Dialectic of Enlightenment? If we now wish to compare Kolnai’s and the Frankfurt School thinkers’ respective theses and accomplishments, we must first ask whether the intensive treatment of anti-­Semitism and the Holocaust in Adorno and Horkheimer’s case was done in response to the mass murder of the European Jews, as it very gradually became known in the early 1940s, or whether they had engaged with racism and anti-­Semitism earlier. The answer is sobering: Volume 2 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung from 1933 contains a long article by Paul Ludwig Landsberg that runs over around seventeen pages of small print and has the title ‘Rassenideologie und Rassenwissenschaft’ (‘Racist Ideology and the Science of Races’). Landsberg, who was arrested by the Gestapo in France in 1943, died in 1944 as the result of the hellish conditions in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. However, his study, which is historically and scientifically well grounded, leaves out anti-­Semitism altogether (Landsberg, 1933). A cursory investigation reveals that an article on anti-­Semitism only appears again in Volume 8 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung: Horkheimer’s essay on ‘The Jews and Europe’, which is still quite readable and worthy of discussion today, and will be considered in more detail later, since it contains arguments written as if Horkheimer had been aware of Kolnai’s book. On page 124 of Volume 9, published in 1941, a twenty-­page report begins with the title ‘Research Project on Anti-­Semitism’, a project conducted at the New York Institute for Social Research. There the reader will find not only Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis that National Socialist anti-­Semitism is an epiphenomenon of the transition from liberal capitalism to totalitarian capitalism (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1941, p. 141),4 but also their assumption that anti-­Semitism serves the

Aurel Kolnai’s reflections on anti-Semitism   63 Nazi regime’s interests in foreign policy and foreign trade: ‘As religion formerly won foreign soil for civilization and for home industry, today the missionaries of anti-­Semitism conquer the world for barbarism and German exports’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1941, p. 142). In their introductory remarks to the published research proposal, the authors list six kinds of theories of anti-­Semitism: 1. Theories denying the actual existence of this phenomenon; 2. Apologetic theses that all objections to Jews from anti-­Semites are merely lies or euphemisms; 3. Theories that, following Georg Simmel, for example, understand anti-­Semitism to be basically a form of xenophobia; 4. Theories that take anti-­Jewish hatred to be a response to a supposed higher level of intelligence among Jews; 5. Theories that take anti-­Semitism to be an expression of the ‘socialism of fools’, a form of wrong-­headed anti-­ capitalism; and, finally, 6. Theories that take anti-­Semitism to be a form of defence against revolutionary theory and practice (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1941, pp. 125–6). Reflections such as those pursued by Kolnai do not fall under any of these theories. They can, however, fit into the kind of polemic Hork­ heimer develops right at the beginning of his essay on ‘The Jews and Europe’, where we read: ‘The new antisemitism is the emissary of the totalitarian order, which has developed from the liberal one. One must thus go back to consider the tendencies within capitalism. But it is’ – and Horkheimer writes here as though he had known about Kolnai’s book – ‘as if the refugee intellectuals have been robbed not only of their citizenship, but also of their minds.… The “Jewish-­Hegelian jargon”, which once carried all the way from London to the German Left and even then had to be translated into the ringing tones of the union functionaries, now seems completely eccentric. With a sigh of relief they throw away the troublesome weapon and turn to neohumanism, to Goethe’s personality, to the true Germany and other cultural assets.’ (Horkheimer, 2005, p. 225) In fact, in his youth Kolnai belonged to left-­wing intellectual circles in Vienna, although for reasons that we do not have the space to discuss here, let alone evaluate, he converted relatively early to Catholicism. And on the final pages of his book Kolnai actually speaks of the all-­encompassing ‘Soul of the West’ which he – as if Horkheimer had indeed read his work – relates to the ‘great spiritual values of a Christian, humanistic and progressive Germandom’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  684), among other things. Moreover, in his later opposition to the Habsburg Empire, and unlike Joseph Roth, for example, he sees the future task as lying in forging anti-­imperial, Western nation states: ‘Our own lives must be devoted to re-­experiencing, restating and renewing Western Democracy’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 685). In fact, however, in his later years Kolnai – unlike, say, Hannah Arendt and the New York intellectuals of the Cold War – adhered to political Catholicism, going so far as to pay several quite sympathetic visits to Franco’s Spain. In Canada, Ingrid Vendrell Ferran writes,

64   Micha Brumlik Kolnai became friends in the 1950s with the Spanish philosopher Leopoldo Palacios, who enabled the publication in Spain of two books by Kolnai in 1952: Errores del Anticomunismo and La Divinización y la suma Esclavitud del Hombre. Both works have been enthusiastically received, and Kolnai was invited during the same year by several Spanish institutions to give talks in Madrid, Burgos, Barcelona and Valladolid. (Vendrell Ferran, 2008, p. 291) We can thus see that Kolnai always thought within the context of political Catholicism and shifted from the Left to the Right within this realm of thought. He was certainly the only anti-­communist intellectual to do so during the 1950s; Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, for example, all sided with the West during the Cold War and throughout the Vietnam War, notwithstanding their severe criticism of the capitalist form of society as an ‘administered world’. Nevertheless, we must ask – regardless of such political views – whether Kolnai’s perception and analysis of National Socialist anti-­Semitism aligns with the facts. In my opinion, it does not seem to. Kolnai’s main message considers anti-­ Semitism to be primarily concerned not with the Jews but with the ‘intellect’, and indeed National Socialist ideologues followed Ludwig Klages, among others, in taking the intellect to be an adversary of the soul and in claiming that both the Jewish faith and the Jewish way of life are governed by a destructive intellectualism rooted in Old Testament monotheism that sprung from the desert. In the high esteem in which he held the intellect, which culminated in a staunch, rationalistic Thomism on Kolnai’s part, we seem to find a close affinity with Judaism when characterised in this way. Also striking is that Kolnai finds no utility in the Freudian critique of Christianity, for example, and that he comes to such a blatant lapse of judgement that he claims that ‘Klages is not far from Freud’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  15). This on its own clearly indicates that Kolnai’s rationalism is not only uninformed in some respects, but even contains a blind spot: he replaces a sociological analysis with pure normativism, which, ultimately, during both the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War, exempted the Western way of life from criticism altogether and even went so far as not only to accept, but even to support, undemocratic regimes, as evidenced by Kolnai’s penchant for Franco’s Spain.

Notes 1 See Wolfgang Benz, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion. Die Legende von der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007). 2 See Christian Geulen, Wahlverwandte. Rassendiskurs und Nationalismus im späten 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004). 3 See Cornelia Essner, Die ‘Nürnberger Gesetze’ oder die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns: 1933–1945 (Munich/Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002); and also Alexandra Przyrembel, ‘Rassenschande’. Reinheitsmythos und Vernichtungslegitimation im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003). 4 They are actually talking here of the ‘totalitarian system’.

Aurel Kolnai’s reflections on anti-Semitism   65

References Friedländer, Saul (2007). Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945: The Years of Exter­ mination. New York: Harper Collins. Horkheimer, Max (1939). ‘Die Juden und Europa’. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8: 115–37. Horkheimer, Max (2005). ‘The Jews and Europe’. In: The Frankfurt School on Religion, ed. Eduardo Mendieta, trans. Mark Ritter. New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. (1941). ‘Research Project on Anti-­Semitism’. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 9, 1: 124–43. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin S. Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jäckel, Eberhard and Kuhn, Axel (eds) (1980). Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924. Stuttgart: DVA. Jünger, Ernst (2001). Politische Publizistik, 1919 bis 1933. Stuttgart: Klett. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against The West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Landsberg, Paul Ludwig (1933). ‘Rassenideologie und Rassenwissenschaft’. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 2: 388–406. Vendrell Ferran, Ingrid (2008). ‘Zwischen analytischer Philosophie und Phänomenologie: Aurel Kolnai’. In: Expressivität und Stil. Helmuth Plessners Sinnes- und Ausdrucks­ philosophie, vol. 1, eds Bruno Accarino and Matthias Schloßberger. Berlin: Akademie Verlag: 285–96. (Online: www.uni-­marburg.de/fb03/philosophie/institut/mitarbeiter/ vendrell/vendrell-­kolnai.pdf, accessed 4 May 2017.) Ziege, Eva-­Maria (2009). Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie: die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Part II

Comparing Kolnai with contemporary attempts of coming to terms with Nazism

5 Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West and British attempts to understand Nazism before the war Dan Stone The War Against the West in Britain Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West remains one of the most insightful analyses of Nazi thought ever written.1 In 1938 it was a revelation. Quite different in tone and approach from most other analyses of Nazism available in English, it was remarkable for the thoroughness with which it discussed the writings of Nazi thinkers and for the seriousness with which it took their views. Only a few other British scholars – such as R. G. Collingwood and E. O. Lorimer – and émigré authors – such as Franz Borkenau and Sebastian Haffner – took the Nazis at their word, and none of them offered such an in-­depth analysis of the Nazis’ own writings. In this chapter I will bring out the uniqueness of Kolnai’s achievement in The War Against the West and compare Kolnai’s approach with those taken in both popular and scholarly analyses of Nazism that were published in Britain before the war. In general, émigré scholars were better equipped than English authors to understand what Nazism meant, but The War Against the West, especially in its analysis of Nazi race thinking, was unique. Not only was Kolnai not in Britain when he wrote the book, but he had never even set foot in the country. Yet his ability to penetrate, in English, the mindset of the Nazis, was second to none, an accomplishment that was recognised in the book’s reception. Given that The War Against the West was written in English and published in London, one might be forgiven for thinking that the British context of contemporary analyses and understandings of Nazism would be crucial to judging its success. Yet The War Against the West was quite different from most British publications on the Third Reich. Furthermore, The War Against the West should be judged neither in the light of Kolnai’s later incarnation as a Cold Warrior nor by the fact that it was published by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club (LBC). For it neither discussed communism (or comparative ‘totalitarianism’) nor was it a standard, orthodox labour socialist LBC work. Victor Gollancz, the publisher of the LBC, himself claimed that the book was ‘without exception, the most important book that the Club has yet published’ and referred to it as ‘the bible of anti-­Fascism’ (Gollancz, 1938), quite a remarkable appraisal when one sees the extent to which it departs from the standard British leftist analysis of Fascism as

70   Dan Stone ‘crisis capitalism with a cudgel’, what Orwell called the ‘Strachey-­Blimp thesis’ in which ‘Hitler was a dummy with Thyssen pulling the strings’ (Orwell, 1970, p.  40). While Kolnai shared with Gollancz a variety of Christian Socialism, Kolnai’s understanding of Nazism went way beyond that ordinarily associated with the LBC. Likewise, his Personalist Christian conservatism – he sympathised, for example, with Hilaire Belloc’s description of the ‘servile state’ and the Distributist argument that freedom depended on the widest distribution possible of private property – would have been anathema to Labour Party intellectuals like John Strachey and Harold Laski, both closely associated with the Left Book Club.2 His task, as he saw it, was to educate British readers, making them realise the real meaning of Nazism: ‘English public opinion will have to learn that the mere removal of “injustices” and discriminations is far from touching on the core of the German problem, and the farthest possible from unseating National Socialism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 518). It should come as no surprise, then, that while the Manchester Guardian praised the book, other reviewers were less convinced by the unfamiliar, strident tone. The Sunday Times noted that the book sounded like Churchill but that ‘its idiom was un-­English’, and the TLS reserved its praise for Kolnai’s grammar. Many reviewers seemed to prefer Hermann Rauschning’s Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, also published in 1938 (in German as Die Revolution des Nihilismus, then in English in June 1939), a book whose emphasis was more on the Third Reich destroying itself than having to be destroyed from without (all reviews Kolnai, 1952–5, p. 84). By the time The War Against the West appeared, Kolnai had already spent most of the previous decade thinking and writing about little else. The book itself had been planned since at least early 1933. Perhaps Gollancz’s own Christian Socialism provided the link with Kolnai that overcame what seemed to be, on the face of it, incompatibility between Kolnai and the LBC.3 Gollancz certainly set much store by Kolnai’s book, agreeing to publish it years before Kolnai managed to bring it to completion: ‘Gollancz seems to be a brick; he even writes: “I have an instinct that this is going to be a most important book.” How quixotically English. Imagine a German publisher writing anything of the sort’ (1934).4 Fortunately, Gollancz was willing to wait. Quite apart from the enormous body of literature that Kolnai proposed to analyse, the content of that literature was not exactly uplifting: ‘I have some idea of the urgent necessity that my book should appear as soon as possible’, he wrote to his future wife in 1936, ‘but working on it makes me positively sick’ (1936). The fact that Kolnai wrote much of the book (in English) while sitting in a Nazi café in Vienna probably did not help, although he took a malicious pleasure in doing so. The book was finally published in July 1938 as the LBC’s ‘additional book’ for subscribers; it was, and remains, one of the finest studies of Nazi philosophy, providing dense and detailed discussions of many Nazi thinkers. In a letter to Irene Grant on 30 November 1934 Kolnai wrote that he was trying to decide whether Nazism constituted ‘Capitalism re-­arranged for fight’ or a ‘Mystical relapse into tribal barbarism’, or whether in fact the one was ‘a mere mask or implement for the other’ (cited in Dunlop, 2002, p. 145). By the time the book

British attempts to understand Nazism   71 was published, Kolnai was clear that the latter was closer to the truth but that this was a kind of barbarism that came wrapped up firmly in the clothes of modernity. No amount of quotation can do justice to Kolnai’s fierce irony, sharp analyses and barely disguised disgust.5 Much of the 700-page book was given over to allowing the Nazis and those considered by Kolnai to be their forerunners (Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan George, Martin Luther, Oswald Spengler and Ludwig Klages) to speak for themselves. Kolnai’s passages of interpretation are the real point of interest. Although these do not develop an authentically ‘conservative’ critique of Nazism, instead emerging from Kolnai’s liberal–democratic tendencies, the book is one of the few that insists on taking the phenomenon seriously, no matter how outlandish some of its claims may have sounded to British ears. And while Kolnai admitted that the arguments used by some of the Nazi thinkers were impressively constructed – ‘there is no immediate contradiction in fighting the intellect intellectually’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 57) – the doctrines they defended were subjected to harsh criticism. This criticism did not prevent Kolnai from doing what most other commentators refused to do: recognise the appeal of Fascism. ‘The National Socialist doctrines’, he wrote, ‘though ultimately false and immoral, and liable to degenerate into comic vulgarity, are at their highest endowed with spiritual grandeur and relevancy’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 18). This kind of claim is still shocking today; one’s instinct is to dismiss it out of hand. Kolnai, however, was not expressing a personal choice in favour of Nazism, but seeking to understand the sources of its attraction. To do so, Kolnai divided his study up thematically, showing how concepts such as ‘community’, ‘state’, ‘faith’, ‘morals’, ‘law’, ‘society’, ‘race’, ‘nation’ and ‘empire’ figured in Nazi thinking, and how the whole was held together by certain key concepts. Kolnai’s fundamental criticism of Nazism was that it replaced objective standards and rational thinking with ‘the mysterious and inexpressible “nobility” of particular breeds of men’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 34); it was not a theory of race as such that was the ‘vital point of the Nazi attitude’, but ‘the subjectivist conception of a peculiar breed of men, claiming, by virtue of its very peculiarity, to be a law unto itself, and ultimately the whole world’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 36). From this starting point, Kolnai analysed how the major concepts of Western philosophy were being distorted, often in remarkably articulate and seductive ways. Kolnai understood Nazism in the same way that he later understood communism – as a ‘fall away from Christianity’ (Dunlop, 2002, p. 137) – and fought it on the grounds of its atheism and its rejection of reason. Nazism, he argued even before it came into power in Germany, represented no mere counter-­ revolution but an ‘overturning of values’ (Umsturz der Werte; Kolnai, 1932, p. 1174). Hence, like Franz Borkenau, he argued that there was no point in trying to compromise with Nazism, but one must instead understand it in order the better to combat it. While this meant undertaking the distasteful task of entering into the thought processes of Nazis, this was, he maintained, the only way of really getting to grips with the phenomenon.

72   Dan Stone This methodology led to some potentially rather dangerous exercises in proximity. Kolnai sought, in a way that must have seemed quite shocking to British readers (for whom Kolnai explicitly wrote, in English), to elucidate the appeal of Fascism to its adherents. English writers, such as Collingwood, who had previously tried this sort of approach, found themselves isolated as intellectual renegades, but Kolnai did not face Collingwood’s problem of uppity Oxford colleagues and picked up where Collingwood left off. Outside of the descriptions of the Nuremberg rallies offered by fellow travellers of Fascism, statements like Kolnai’s about the Nazi doctrines’ ‘spiritual grandeur and relevancy’ were seldom heard, least of all in the LBC’s publications; they bespeak Kolnai’s intellectual bravery and his attempt to infuse anti-­Fascism with the sort of energy that drove the Fascists themselves.6 In an article from January 1939, Kolnai wrote the following: We … are hugging the complacent belief that the essence of democracy is compromise; so we book ‘compromise’ with the fascists, of the Munich type for instance, as a triumph not only of peace but even of democracy. We only forget that there is a marked difference between compromise within democracy, which presupposes the common ground of democracy accepted by all the various competing groups of the people, and compromise with the convinced and uncompromising mortal enemies of democracy. We are extremely afraid of tarnishing the immaculate beauty of our democracy by any use of violence or display of intolerance; not, however, of compromising democracy in its integrity. (Kolnai, 1939b, p. 88) Or, as he put it in his talk to the LBC summer school in 1939: The naïve people who in March 1939 accused the Germans of having committed a ‘breach of faith’, ‘deceived’ Mr. Ch[amberlain] at Munich, could have been spared their surprise and deception if they had not refused dogmatically to attach an importance to Nazi ideologies. (Kolnai, 1939c, p. 3) Thus, like Borkenau, Kolnai’s basic message was that attempting to understand Nazism through the tools of diplomacy, analysis of leaders’ speeches or Nazi legislation was fruitless. Rather, he argued that one had to grasp the will that drove the Nazi dynamic towards war and catastrophe; Fascism, he argued, would make war not to placate its supporters or to counter popular discontent but ‘to save its soul: to stave off the revelation of its inner barrenness, the vacuum of despair at its core’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 637). While this analysis necessarily took Kolnai – and his readers – too close to the core of Nazism for comfort, this was precisely the point, for treating Nazism as a difficult but otherwise ordinary political movement was, in his estimation, to set off down the road to ruin. In order to understand the appeal of Fascism, there was little point merely

British attempts to understand Nazism   73 condemning it. Every sane person would condemn it, but this was insufficient to combat Fascism. Kolnai went on,  We must have the courage to fight an enemy, – or rather, to reject a creed – of which we recognise the grandeur, the positive implications, the creative power. Evil may be ‘ultimately’ destructive, but no great evil is merely and altogether destructive. Else, it could not even be really, effectually destructive. (Kolnai, 1939c, p. 3) Hence, when Orwell began his May 1940 review of Borkenau’s The Totalitarian Enemy, he most likely had Kolnai’s argument in mind: ‘We cannot struggle against Fascism unless we are willing to understand it, a thing which both left-­ wingers and right-­wingers have conspicuously failed to do – basically, of course, because they dared not’ (Orwell, 1970, p. 40). Kolnai’s writings reveal that a theory proclaiming the need to crush Fascism, not compromise with it, had, by the start of the war, extended beyond the radical Left and contributed to the hardening of resolve required to end rightist appeasement, leftist pacifism and armchair anti-­Fascism, and to take on the Third Reich in the only way possible. As Kolnai noted in his memoirs, ‘With the birth of the Third Reich, the Second World War had virtually begun, and anti-­Nazi action came forthwith under the heading, not of domestic politics but of War operations’ (Kolnai, 1952–5, p. 10).7 It was this approach that distinguished Kolnai from mainstream British analyses of Nazism, for the latter steadfastly failed to understand that the Nazis really meant what they said. This is nowhere as clear as in relation to the question of Nazi race thinking and, above all, of Nazi anti-­Semitism. On the question of community, for example, Kolnai’s discussion was subtle in its analysis and forthright in its condemnation. Kolnai recognised that one of Nazism’s strengths was its invocation of the Volksgemeinschaft (the racial community). He thus set about to show that the Nazis did not actually understand what they meant by the word: ‘we go so far as to deny that he has a real understanding of the very essence of community’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 65). For Kolnai, community ‘can be based only on personality, which is the irreducible core of human existence’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 65).8 Hence the ‘superhuman community of the Tribalists, however powerful it may prove, is but a godless ghost, a monster that abuses the devotion of men’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 65). On the question of the place of warfare in Nazi ideology, Kolnai was especially insightful, for here he saw, like Borkenau, that the most pressing problem was not one of how to conduct international diplomacy, but of how to resist the expansion and aggression inherent to the Nazi system: Fascist dictatorship is bound sooner or later to attempt spectacular foreign expansion, because an achievement of this order is inseparable from its meaning, its unwritten law of constitution. It needs imperialistic enterprise, not to ‘placate popular discontent’, but to execute the Will that drives on, and holds together, its closest supporters.… Fascism must make war to save

74   Dan Stone its soul: to stave off the revelation of its inner barrenness, the vacuum of despair at its core. (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 636–7) This nihilistic energy was far more frightening than any individual threat or promise that Hitler might make, and to which Western politicians, journalists and scholars, being accustomed to believing that such language bore some relation to reality, devoted so much attention. Kolnai showed that the real threat was more profound, and more difficult to dislodge. Similarly, on eugenics, Kolnai did not dismiss the possibility that the science might have a ‘humanistic and rational meaning’, but noted that any such possibility was smothered in the Third Reich by ‘the overtones of superstitious “Teutonic” tribalism and Fascist arbitrariness in the Nazi formula’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 480). And he adumbrated today’s discussion about the combination of modern technology and rationality with phobic fantasies and desire for redemptive violence when he pointed out that the hyper-­rationality that drove eugenics could also end in social madness: These unattractive implications of misdirected social ‘rationalization’ and ‘planning’ become the centre of interest, when, instead of mere abstract fancies and schemes, they are inserted into a system of state-­power founded on an irrational creed of political mystery and racial discrimination. If arrogant madness is a danger in itself, if the hunger for a rational control (uncontrolled, in its turn, by commonsense and a tinge of healthy scepticism) is itself liable to work itself out in madness, then truly the original madman wielding the engines of high technical rationality portends embroilments of no little significance. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 483, emphasis in original)9 At each point, Kolnai’s method consisted of accepting the potential validity of the ideas on which Nazism was based, and then demonstrating that the Nazis themselves neither understood what it was they claimed so much to admire nor were able to control the forces they had unleashed. Kolnai’s most important contribution in this book comes in his discussion of the racial anthropology that underpins Nazism. The 120-page chapter on ‘Nation and Race’, together with other key subchapters elsewhere in the book, is a sophisticated and nuanced reading of the racial theories of numerous Nazi thinkers. Once again, Kolnai’s starting point was taking this Nazi philosophy seriously: ‘There is a little more in it than mere commonplace or idealistic nationalism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 478). It is also important to note, as a telling comment on the temper of the times, that Kolnai stressed the fact that Nazi racial policy would affect everybody, not just the Jews: ‘Though I am myself of Jewish extraction’, he wrote, ‘our judgment of the new Nazi Germany must be determined above all by its negation of mankind and its intrinsic enmity to Western democratic society, and not by its special ill-­will against Jews’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  495).

British attempts to understand Nazism   75 Indeed, he went so far as to claim that ‘Anti-­Jewish action belongs to the system of operations by which Teutonic Counter-­Revolution combats Christian, Roman, and Democratic Western Civilization’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 511). The attack on the Jews, then, since the accusations it launched had no basis in reality, derived from ‘the psychology of a declining aristocratic class, which associates all idea of a rational reorganization of society with a kind of uncanny witchcraft practised by a gang of alien conspirators’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  501). It implied more than just the persecution of the Jews: ‘What they are engaged in persecuting is not so much the Jews as the Jewish spirit, and not so much the Jewish Spirit as the Spirit’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 511). And he noted the bitter irony of the fact that, although the Nazis had injured Judaism, they had also inadvertently ‘thrust greatness upon it’, since they had made the Jews ‘the symbol of persecuted Liberty, Reason and Justice’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 511). In other words, Kolnai did not attribute much importance to demonstrating the scientific errors of Nazi racial theory, though he did this as well. Instead, he suggested ‘paying more attention to the moral falsity and essential aggressiveness inherent in the creed of racial mastery than to its alleged absurdity from a scientific point of view’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 585, emphasis in original).10 In this way, Kolnai is able to explain how it is that competing and even contradictory strands of anthropological and racial theory could be incorporated into Nazi wisdom: In the concrete reality of the Nazi movement, racial beauty and political soundness and valour mutually support each other in spite of an occasional absence of personal union between them; together they provide an unassailable guarantee of thoroughgoing racial superiority which neither of them alone could safeguard. From this we see how the racial creed is utilized (and violated) in the service of racial counter-­revolution; but we also see how seriously that counter-­revolution is meant, how far it exceeds any aim at mere restoration, how expressly it points towards a recreation rather than a mere restitution of a world of masters and serfs. (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 477–8) No other book published in English in these years provided so thorough a survey of Nazi philosophy nor demanded quite so plausibly and unceasingly that Nazism must not be dismissed as outlandish, but rather needed to be treated with all the seriousness that a movement disposing of untold reserves of ‘mystical’ energy deserved. Nothing in this required accepting Nazism’s estimation of itself, but it did necessitate a probing into the depths that took the reader (as Kolnai himself had been) about as close to identifying with the object of discussion as is ethically and emotionally bearable.

British approaches It is worth briefly comparing this approach of Kolnai’s with some of the more commonplace ideas about Nazi race thinking that one could find in British

76   Dan Stone publications on Nazism. I will not deal here with pro-­Nazi apologists (who were quite numerous)11 or with the popular books by Konrad Heiden or Hermann Rauschning, but only with those British authors whose views were firmly anti-­ Nazi. Despite their political position, they nevertheless often failed to understand the fact that at Nazism’s core lay an anti-­Semitic conspiracy theory and nor did they fully recognise the extent to which this theory was passionately held by the leading Nazis. Emily Lorimer, for example – author of a bestselling Penguin Special titled What Hitler Wants (1939) and a key protagonist in debates over the translation of Mein Kampf into English – managed to justify her anti-­Nazi stance with reference to stereotypes about Jews: The English reader, remembering with gratitude how much the stability of British finance has owed to the co-­operation of generations of British Jews with English bankers, would like some indication of just how Hitler would prove Jewish finance was necessarily so fatal to Germany, but Hitler does not attempt to prove any of his amazing theses. He asserts, and in Nazi Germany it is believed: such is the magic of the Führer’s word. (Lorimer, 1939, p. 49)12 Lorimer really sets the tone for the British understanding of Nazi racism a little later on, however, when she writes that ‘to justify his intention to exterminate the Jew, he had to evolve some theory of Race; hence he created the mythical Aryan, alternatively called the Nordic or, more bluntly, the German’ (Lorimer, 1939, p.  58). This combination of a suggestive understanding of where Nazi persecution of the Jews was heading (‘his intention to exterminate the Jew’) with a mocking tone that scoffs at Hitler’s inability to think for himself and finds the substance of his thinking laughable is absolutely typical of the British response to Nazi race thinking. On the one hand, we see here a quite prescient claim and, on the other, an explanation that undermines the insightfulness of the observation. Indeed, British writers were on the whole reluctant to take the Nazi idea of race seriously. The partial exception to this rule was ‘defence literature’, which collated documents testifying to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. This is typified by Gollancz’s publications, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror (1933) and The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany (1936), both of which emphasised the importance of anti-­Semitism for the Nazi regime.13 Other examples include Gustav Warburg’s Six Years of Hitler (1939), which argued that ‘Jew-­baiting in Nazi Germany is not incidental. It is the very basis of the regime’ (p.  14), and Joseph King’s The German Revolution (1933), which claimed, not dissimilarly from Kolnai, that ‘The Nazi Terror against the Jews is a world-­tragedy; it is nothing less than a high-­wall barrier between the great German nation and the rest of Western Civilization’ (p. 128). Such words constituted restrained calls to action; as Otto Dov Kulka noted, the authors of these books, ‘precisely because of their position as a combatant and persecuted party, imposed on themselves an exceptional degree of methodological

British attempts to understand Nazism   77 objectivity – perhaps possible only at that stage, which preceded knowledge of the concrete horrors of the Holocaust’ (Kulka, 1989, p. 341). Yet because ‘race’ as a concept was a standard component of most people’s mental world in the 1930s, and notions of racial superiority were basic presuppositions in the British Empire, most popular writers managed both to condemn Nazi race thinking and reproduce their own racialised world view without noticing the contradiction – they condemned the practice but did not disavow the conception. The Bonar Law College lecturer Hugh Sellon was thus typical when he condemned the idea of the Aryan race but then wrote that ‘it is quite futile to deny that there is such a thing as race’ (Sellon, [1937] n.d., p.  179). Although Sellon was reluctant to reach any firm conclusions on whether the Jews should be considered a race, he nevertheless felt able to say that  Whilst it is true that every European State has many Jews who are Jewish, and not European, in racial characteristics and habits, it is equally true that every such State has many people who, though they may be of Jewish descent, have no Jewish racial characteristics, but have become completely Europeanised.  (Sellon, [1937] n.d., p. 179)14 He thus reaffirmed his belief in a Jewish ‘race’ even as he admitted uncertainty over the matter. Kolnai’s approach was thus completely different. Most academics and journalists who considered Nazism as a political phenomenon focused on whether or not the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ made sense of it (Lassman, 1992). Others subscribed – especially after the start of the war – to a ‘Luther to Hitler’ style of propaganda or emphasised the opposition to Hitler.15 And among the most popular of the books on Nazi Germany were accounts by former inmates of Nazi prisons and concentration camps.16 Even when British authors analysed Nazi race thinking and even when they quarrelled – as did journalists Vernon Bartlett and Robert Dell17 – they tended to combine incredulity that the Nazis could be serious and condemnation of the ‘excesses’ to which it led with a failure to allow this criticism to induce them to question their own racialised assumptions. The only notable exceptions are émigré authors such as Franz Borkenau, Sebastian Haffner and Leopold Schwarzschild, and they struggled, even if their books sold quite well, to convince the broader public and the government that the Nazis meant what they said.18 Kolnai not only showed that the Nazis did indeed take race seriously and traced the intellectual origins of the race idea, but he also moved the discussion away from anthropological considerations of whether or not the Jews constituted a racial group – a discussion that quite missed the point about the power of the race idea as such – to show instead that race, for the Nazis, was a feeling, a generator for the Volksgemeinschaft. Indeed, the fact that ‘race’ had multiple meanings and evaded description, the fact that it was both ‘scientific’ and quite unamenable to being captured by scientific practice, was precisely, Kolnai understood, the source of its potency.

78   Dan Stone When, in 1939, Kolnai spoke at the LBC’s summer school, the talk he gave condensed the argument of The War Against the West and sharpened his claims about the necessity of responding seriously to Nazism. The abbreviated version of the book’s argument that one finds in this speech is perhaps the clearest statement of Kolnai’s views on the way in which Nazism needed to be tackled. Once again, his estimation of Nazism’s qualities is startling: there is an experience of freedom present in the fascist system and in the mental state of its subjects: though it be the extreme opposite of what we are accustomed to understand by freedom. It is the sense of an unlimited Power in which the subject is supposed to ‘participate’ in a mystical way, as it were: through patriotic loyalty, kinship of ‘kind’ as contrasted to ‘alien kind’, through the very fact of his absolute, total subjection. (Kolnai, 1939c, p. 1) And he argued that it is a mistake to conceive of Fascism as being merely destructive since, were that the case, ‘it would be far less dangerous’ (Kolnai, 1939c, p. 3). As in The War Against the West, Kolnai argued here that Nazism’s central position was the replacement of ethics with ‘an anthropology fraught with the idea of value’ (1939c, p.  4). His message was stark: it was no good merely condemning Nazism, as if that alone would defeat it. It was necessary to enter its thought processes, to understand its affective force and appeal. His call to action is still challenging: We must have the courage to fight an enemy, – or rather, to reject a creed – of which we recognise the grandeur, the positive implications, the creative power. Evil may be ‘ultimately’ destructive, but no great evil is merely and altogether destructive. Else, it could not even be really, effectually destructive. (Kolnai, 1939c, p. 3)19 Few thinkers have had the stomach to follow Kolnai, for fear of lending too much credence to the thing they seek to destroy. But he paved the way for a philosophical understanding of Nazism that remains as yet unfulfilled.

Kolnai’s contribution After the war, Gollancz received hundreds of letters from admirers, convinced that the LBC had helped bring about the Labour Party’s victory. As one member from Leeds wrote, ‘Along with thousands of others I am grateful for the extraordinary work of political education you have carried out during the last ten years, which contributed, I am sure, to the results of the General Election’ (Muir, 1946). Kolnai’s contribution to this outcome was, if not as directly ‘political’ as the books of G. D. H. Cole, John Strachey or Wal Hannington, crucial in turning the LBC’s members away from the anti-­war camp and thus hardening the

British attempts to understand Nazism   79 anti-­Nazi resolve in Britain. As he himself put it with admirable reserve, ‘I have published “The War Against the West”, which has earned a certain reputation in the English-­speaking world, and am therefore not a wholly nondescript unit’ (Kolnai, 1939a). Kolnai became a Cold Warrior after 1945, devoting much of his time to fighting communism. He enjoyed the atmosphere in Franco’s Spain, which he visited several times and where he would have liked to have lived (Dunlop, 2002, p. 249),20 and published articles that developed the links with Distributism and conservatism that he had cultivated in the 1920s and 1930s.21 He argued, in an analysis of Nazism, communism and ‘Progressive Democracy’ – the three threats to a stable and free society – that communism was ‘the absolute, classic and insuperable type of totalitarianism proper’ (Kolnai, [c. 1950] 1998, p.  7).22 The inclusion of Progressive Democracy in this trio of ideologies shows that Kolnai saw liberalism unhindered by transcendental bonds of religion as just as dangerous as Fascism. In his memoirs, he continued to acknowledge Nazism’s ‘unique evilness’, but also maintained that, although he ‘was happy to have my book published by Mr Gollancz’, he had ‘failed to understand, then, that the elemental destruction of civilization and of man’s unbiased and many-­sided sense of value, as wrought by communism, was not and could not be equalled by any kind of Fascism’. He believed that at the time, under the shock of Nazism, he had been under the illusion that ‘ “anti-­Fascism” must needs imply a resolute Leftism (short of communism) as its foundation and operational frame’ (Kolnai, 1952–5, pp. 72–3). In reality, he now thought, ‘not only was there greater moral weight in combating Fascism on conservative grounds, even “anti-­Fascism” as such made us miss the special edge of Naziism’ (Kolnai, 1952–5, p.  77). He did not imagine for a moment that it had not been necessary to destroy Nazism, but, writing in the mid-­1950s, it now seemed to Kolnai that ‘Communism is incomparably more evil than Naziism, which by contrast might be described as a benign and anodyne affair, a merely skin-­deep perturbation of the social order’ (1952–5, p. 82). No wonder that his writings today inspire the kind of anti-­liberal critiques that take such thinkers as Friedrich Hayek as their guides. Kolnai was indeed no typical LBC author; in 1938 his book was all the better for that.

Notes   1 Some of the material in this chapter is taken from Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Chapter 1.   2 On Personalism, see John Hellman, ‘From the Söhlbergkreis to Vichy’s Elite Schools: The Rise of the Personalists’. In: The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal Democracy 1870–1945, ed. Zeev Sternhell (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1996), pp.  252–65. John Strachey was the author of The Menace of Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933) and Harald Joseph Laski of Democracy in Crisis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933).   3 Kolnai’s friend and correspondent Irene Grant, whom he had got to know in Vienna, was involved in the English Christian Socialist revival. See Dunlop, 2002, p. 131.

80   Dan Stone   4 Kolnai to Irene Grant, 11 December 1934 (Kolnai Papers). Manuscripts belonging to Kolnai (1934, 1936, 1939a, and 1939c) were seen by the author when they were in the possession of Professor Francis Dunlop, University of East Anglia. They are now archived at the University of St. Andrews. See also Kolnai’s letter to Grant of 16 January 1935 (Kolnai Papers), expressing his amusement at becoming a British taxpayer following receipt of an advance from Gollancz (cf. Dunlop, 2002, p. 146).   5 I use the term advisedly. In his fascinating article on disgust (1929), Kolnai argued that it arises from the proximity of an object that simultaneously terrifies and allures us, disturbing one’s being. Among the symptoms of ‘ethical disgust’ Kolnai lists Lebensplus (extra-­vitality), which, he says, often implies a ‘decay of moral substance’. See Kolnai, ‘Der Ekel’, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 10 (1929): pp. 515–69; and Dunlop, 2002, pp. 123–5.   6 For recent reappraisals of anti-­Fascism, see Hugo García, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet and Cristina Clímaco (eds), Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics 1922 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016); and Kasper Braskén, The International Workers’ Relief, Communism, and Transnational Solidarity: Willi Münzenberg in Weimar Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).   7 For analyses of these different sorts of anti-­Fascism in Britain, see Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds), Varieties of Anti-­Fascism: Britain in the Inter-­War Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Daniel Tilles, British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932–40 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).   8 Here Kolnai recalls John Dewey, who in his ‘The Ethics of Democracy’ (1888) argued that democracy ‘means that personality is the first and final reality’ (p. 199). Dewey’s essay is reprinted in Louis Menand (ed.), Pragmatism: A Reader (New York: Viking Books, 1997), pp. 182–204.   9 Cf. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 10 See also Kolnai, ‘Der Sinn des Rassenwahnes’, Der Österreichische Volkswirt (17 March 1934) for a similar argument: ‘When the interest of the Volk demands it, Shakespeare and Rabelais can be German, Haeckel or Ebert un-­German, Hungarians Aryans, the Japanese Europeans, the Jews Asiatics, and Jesus of Nazareth Germanic’ (p. 539). 11 See my discussion in Stone, Responses to Nazism, pp. 83–92. 12 On Lorimer, see Dan Stone, ‘The “Mein Kampf Ramp”: Emily Overend Lorimer and Hitler Translations in Britain’, German History 26, 4 (2008): 504–19. 13 The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933); and The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936). See also Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-­Jewish Association, The Persecution of the Jews in Germany (London: Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-­Jewish Association, 1933). 14 In 1940, Sellon became professor of international politics at the University of Reading. 15 See, for example, Ivan Lajos, Germany’s War Chances as Pictured in German Official Literature (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939); William M. McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-­Nazi Political Philosophy (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1941); and a more sophisticated version of this argument in Rohan D’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (New York: E.  P. Dutton, 1942). On opposition, see Heinrich Fraenkel, The German People Versus Hitler (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940); and René Kraus, Europe in Revolt (London: Jarrolds, 1943). 16 For example, Wolfgang Langhoff, Rubber Truncheon: Being an Account of Thirteen Months Spent in a Concentration Camp (London: Constable & Co., 1938); Stefan

British attempts to understand Nazism   81 Lorant, I was Hitler’s Prisoner: Leaves from a Prison Diary (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939); G.  R. Kay, Dachau: The Nazi Hell. From the Notes of a Former Prisoner at the Notorious Nazi Concentration Camp (London: Francis Aldor, 1939); and Bruno Heilig, Men Crucified (London: The Right Book Club, 1942). See Dan Stone, Concentration Camps: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Chapter 3 for further discussion. 17 Bartlett was the author of Nazi Germany Explained (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933) and Dell of Germany Unmasked (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1934). See Stone, Responses to Nazism, pp. 106–7. 18 See F. Borkenau, The New German Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939); Sebastian Haffner, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde (London: Secker & Warburg, 1940); and Leopold Schwarzschild, World in Trance (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1943). 19 Should one be reminded here of Heidegger’s infamous statement concerning the ‘inner greatness’ of the National Socialist movement, one should note Kolnai’s article, written under the pseudonym Dr. A. von Helsing, ‘Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus’, Der Christliche Ständestaat (17 June 1934): 5–7, in which he accuses Heidegger of being ‘a prophet, visionary and inspiration of the Third Reich’ (p. 5). 20 It is important to note that earlier Kolnai had written, in a rather different vein, that ‘it does make a slight difference who “wins” and who “loses” the [Spanish civil] war’ (Kolnai, 1939b, p. 87). 21 See for example, ‘Bellocs Vision vom Sklavenstaat: Wirkungen des Kapitalismus – Wege zu seiner Überwindung’, Schönere Zukunft? 4, 6 (4 November 1928): 116–18; and ‘G. K. Chesterton’, Der Christliche Ständestaat (28 June 1936): 619–21. 22 See also Kolnai, ‘Notes sur l’utopie réactionnaire’, Cité libre (Montreal), 13 (1955): 9–20; and ‘La mentalité utopienne’, La table ronde (September 1960): 62–84. Borkenau too became a Cold Warrior, though this is less surprising in an ex-­communist; see his European Communism (London: Faber & Faber, 1953).

References Dunlop, Francis (2002). The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai. Aldershot: Ashgate. Gollancz, Victor (1938). ‘The Most Important Book the Club Has Issued’. Left News 25: 790–1. King, Joseph (1933). The German Revolution: Its Meaning and Menace. London: Williams & Norgate. Kolnai, Aurel (1932). ‘Die Credo der neuen Barbaren’. Der Österreichische Volkswirt 24 (3 September): 1174. Kolnai, Aurel (1934). Letter to Irene Grant (11 December), Kolnai Papers, University of St. Andrews. Kolnai, Aurel (1936). Letter to Elizabeth Gémes (20 March), Kolnai Papers, University of St. Andrews. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West. London: Victor Gollancz. Kolnai, Aurel (1939a). Letter to Irene Grant (16 January), Kolnai Papers, University of St. Andrews. Kolnai, Aurel (1939b). ‘Pacifism Means Suicide’. The Nation (21 January): 86–8. Kolnai, Aurel (1939c). ‘The Pivotal Principles of NS Ideology’, Kolnai Papers, University of St. Andrews, handwritten MS. Kolnai, Aurel (1952–5). Twentieth-­Century Memoirs, VII, Kings College London, Archives, MV29/8. Kolnai, Aurel ([c.1950] 1998). ‘Three Riders of Apocalypse: Communism, Naziism and Progressive Democracy’. Appraisal 2, 1: 4–11.

82   Dan Stone Kulka, Otto Dov (1989). ‘Major Trends and Tendencies in German Historiography on National Socialism and the “Jewish Question” (1924–1984)’. In: The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews. Volume 1: Perspectives on the Holocaust, ed. Michael Marrus. Westport, CT: Meckler: 215–42. Lassman, Peter (1992). ‘Responses to Fascism in Britain, 1930–1945: The Emergence of the Concept of Totalitarianism’. In: Sociology Responds to Fascism, eds Stephen P. Turner and Dirk Käsler. London: Routledge: 214–40. Lorimer, Emily O. (1939). What Hitler Wants. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Muir, Kenneth (1946). Letter to Gollancz (12 September), University of Warwick, Modern Records Centre, Gollancz Archive, MSS157/3/LB/1/61. Orwell, George (1970). ‘Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau’. Time and Tide (4 May 1940): 484; reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left 1940–1943, eds Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 40–2. Sellon, Hugh ([1937] n.d.). Europe at the Crossroads. London: Hutchinson & Co. Warburg, Gustav Otto (1939). Six Years of Hitler: The Jews under the Nazi Regime. London: George Allen & Unwin.

6 Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West and the American debate on Nazism Michaela Hoenicke Moore

Sound reason aware of its limitations but trustful of its application to objects outside the mind, reverence for the manifoldness of reality, open-­minded acceptance of the order of the universe and the realms of values as ‘given’ in our world-­ experience – to maintain or safeguard any of these, it was by no means necessary to embrace Catholicism. [But] … Entering the Church … also made me feel as if I were firmly lodged in one valid, universal and imperishable medium of communication with my fellow kind. So far as phenomenology fits together with any political conception, it should be a conservative one: emphasizing variety, distinctions and equilibrium – Aristotle’s ‘common good’, not, indeed, reducible to any particular will, taste or plausible scheme of preference – over and above all ‘evident’ single principles of construction. (Kolnai, 1999, pp. 108, 139)

This chapter situates Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West in the political context of the American debate on Nazism. Written in the early 1930s, completed by 1936 and published simultaneously in Britain and the United States in 1938, the book is one of a handful of early analyses of National Socialism that stands out for its clear and prescient warning that Nazi Germany was committed to violating and destroying the most salutary features of Western civilisation (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 24–6).1 As a historian of American foreign relations, my focus is on what I see as Kolnai’s key intention with this book, namely for it to serve as a wake-­up call to the Western world that was, at the same time, a call to arms. The War Against the West should be recognised not only as one of the earliest and most profound analyses of the Third Reich, but also as a moral philosopher’s effort to alert and mobilise in an overtly political, even propagandistic, sense English-­speaking Western audiences to the point where they would be willing to fight, if need be militarily, against Germany for a second time within a generation.2

The moral philosopher as political propagandist The War Against the West raises two broad questions about its origins and impact that are related in ways easily obscured to the eyes of a political and

84   Michaela Hoenicke Moore diplomatic historian: why was Kolnai among the few contemporaries who demonstrated a prescient grasp of the nature of Nazi Germany when many other responses ranged from finding something beneficial in Nazi policies to counselling a wait-­and-see attitude? And what legacy did this early anti-­Nazi activism and call to action leave, in particular for American foreign policy in the wake of the Second World War? Before I delve into a more detailed discussion of how Kolnai’s 1938 book fits into the broader politico-­intellectual American discussions of the Third Reich, I want to posit that the answer to both questions derives from the fact that Kolnai was a moral philosopher deeply engaged with the challenges to humanism in the twentieth century.3 As the quotes at the beginning of this chapter indicate, Kolnai, the Hungarian, Jewish-­born philosopher and phenomenologist, was, like his beloved heroes C. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, a Catholic and a conservative. But the religious and political paths he followed were as winding as his life’s journey from Vienna via the United States and Canada to the UK, the homeland of his spiritual guides. These travels led him through the existential valleys of the twentieth century, the two world wars and his personal escape from genocide, and past several siren calls, a brief flirtation with psychoanalysis and a slightly longer love affair with Western liberal democracy. Endowed with a linguistic and literary exuberance that he could express in several European languages, Kolnai was anything but a religious or political dogmatic. Rather, like other inquiring minds, he lived his life in exile from any conventional religious or political certainties. Kolnai’s clear-­eyed condemnation of Nazi Germany and call to arms are – retrospectively – at risk of being both underestimated in their prophetic urgency of the mid-­1930s and dismissed as yet another contribution to the militarisation and self-­righteousness of Western Cold War policies after 1945. Yet on both counts such an evaluation would be wrong. Kolnai’s clairvoyance, in the original sense of the word, was not only rooted in his proximity to and cultural familiarity with the intellectual and political traditions that culminated in the Third Reich, insights widely shared among European refugees; as his fellow German-­ Jewish émigré Toni Sender explained later, ‘we are sitting on a volcano and those who have actually experienced the eruption have a greater knowledge of the crater’ (Sender, 1941, p. 19).4 It was rather, in particular, Kolnai’s training and interest in moral philosophy that allowed him to understand early on that Germany had put itself outside the bounds of Western civilisation. With respect to his political impact once the United States entered the Second World War, Kolnai’s conversion to Catholicism and turn towards conservatism surprised and disturbed his fellow anti-­Fascists, while subsequent historians might misunderstand both stances as being too readily in line with a prevailing anti-­communist, anti-­totalitarian sentiment that dominated much of the political scene on both sides of the Atlantic and provided the glue for the Western alliance during the Cold War. But Kolnai’s views did not easily fit in a simple left– right political dichotomy. He, of course, was well aware of his unfashionable positions as this little vignette of a late 1940 dinner conversation at the American home of Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher, suggests:

The American debate on Nazism   85 I had spoken, not disparagingly but sceptically and rather gloomily, about democracy. ‘But then, you don’t believe in democracy?!’ the ladies [Maritain’s wife and sister] exclaimed, in a tone not so much indignant as frightened. ‘Believe in democracy – certainly not’, I said with decision. Scandal and terror in the countenances of my interlocutrices. ‘Oh, but are you a Fascist, then?!’ – the question came out like the swish of a whip. It was my turn to show some indignation. ‘A Fascist? – Heaven forbid!’ The ladies were visibly relieved, but all the more puzzled. ‘But then, what are you, after all?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘to put it briefly, I am a Conservative rather than anything else.’ ‘Oh … a Con-­ser-vative…. I see …’ one of the ladies whispered musingly, the other joining mutely in her stupefaction – much as if I had said I was a Primitive Methodist or a worshipper of Mithras. (Kolnai, 1999, p. 200) Kolnai’s idiosyncratic conservatism, more a philosophically grounded outlook on human society and history than a political programme, continued to vex many in his circles and undoubtedly led to more misunderstandings. It should be noted, however, that it was precisely his ‘conservatism’ that made Kolnai more tolerant and appreciative of other people’s political views than many of his politically engaged fellow émigrés.5

Relevance and resonance in the United States Several themes in Kolnai’s The War Against the West, written while the author still lived in Vienna, stand out in the manner in which they foreshadow or correspond with the subsequent American war effort against Nazi Germany. First of all, Kolnai’s work anticipates the American wartime admonition that you need to ‘know your enemy’ in order to combat it effectively or, in a less martial formulation, that understanding a problem properly comes before devising its effective solution. More specifically, three strategies that characterise Kolnai’s presentation of Nazism find their counterpart in United States propaganda. These include: (1) his deliberate method of letting the Nazis speak for and thus indict themselves; (2) his downplaying of the centrality of anti-­Semitism in the Nazi universe; and (3) his presentation of Nazi doctrine as deeply rooted in German thought, in other words, the notion that there were significant precursors to Nazism in German intellectual history, meaning that National Socialism was a peculiarly German phenomenon. This understanding of Nazi ideology was called Vansittartism in the contemporary Anglo-­American discourse on the Third Reich, and we will return to this central if controversial position in the American wartime debate in a moment. Kolnai summarises his analysis of Nazism in the form of ‘Ten Theses’ at the end of the book. Of these I want to highlight in particular four conclusions that, again, amount to a call for action, to which the United States government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt – eventually – responded. Kolnai argues that (1) the West must either surrender to ‘Nazi primacy’ or prepare to fight. Related

86   Michaela Hoenicke Moore to this statement of stark choice, he posits that no compromise is possible between the Third Reich and the West, namely that no ‘agreements’, ‘understanding’ or ‘concessions’ will be fruitful (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  676–7). Kolnai goes on to insist (2) that Nazism can only be destroyed by (military) force, thus anticipating one of the cherished key phrases in the America’s militarised global Cold War: ‘they only understand one language’. Taken together – the stricture on diplomacy and the call for military force – these two areas dominated United States wartime rhetoric on Nazi Germany and became subsequently enshrined in the so-­called ‘Munich lesson’, which cast a long shadow over post-­war United States foreign policy, dismissing diplomacy as weak and presenting the use of military force as the most effective way of fighting ‘evil’.6 Indeed, Kolnai himself had written and hoped to publish a separate work arguing that, in the face of the Third Reich, ‘Pacifism Means Suicide’.7 But it is important to keep in mind that in 1936 when Kolnai offered these conclusions, they went both against official Western polices and against the prevailing zeitgeist. Moreover, at the same time, Kolnai cautions: (3) that the problem Nazi Germany poses cannot be solved by military force alone; and, finally, (4) he concludes with the universalist claim that the Western cause is the cause of world civilisation ‘organized in real self-­awareness versus the rebels to mankind’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 677, emphasis in original). Each of these four conclusions and three strategies find their counterpart in the American discourse on Nazism. Kolnai prefaces his ten theses with a repudiation of appeasement, although he does not use the term, which comprised a much wider array of sentiments, arguments and policies than the diplomacy that culminated in the Munich Conference of September 1938. This brief but spirited presentation by a politically engaged philosopher of the time is particularly instructive for the purposes of a historian whose main challenge is to make plausible the idea that people in the 1930s did not know how this story would develop and end. From a post-­1945 perspective it is difficult to conceive that the ‘interwar period’ was, in fact, another post-­war period. Any consideration of Fascism and Nazism took place within a mental framework shaped by a widespread and deeply felt rejection of war as a means of resolving political conflict, in other words one characterised by a surge of pacifism unparalleled in the modern Western world and more specifically, by varied regrets over the Treaty of Versailles and other Allied post-­war policies towards a defeated Germany. At the same time, the collapse of the Weimar Republic was seen, especially from abroad, in the context of a general loss of faith in liberal democracy and parliamentarianism in particular. And, finally, early Nazi revisionist and expansionist moves were widely interpreted, especially in the United States, as just another manifestation of European power politics and imperialism (Rasmussen, 2003). The War Against the West was thus one of the earliest and most powerful analyses of the irreconcilable contrast between Nazism and the West, calling for a radical shift with regard to attitudes and policies.

The American debate on Nazism   87

The American debate on Nazism up to 1938 Kolnai’s 1938 presentation of Nazism and the West has, as the title of the book would indicate, a Manichean cast to it. But, in contrast to the widespread notion of Manichean enemy images populating the history of United States foreign policy, American contemporary political and cultural debates on Nazism never coalesced into a well-­focused enemy image of Nazi Germany as ‘the other’ (Hoenicke Moore, 2016). Instead American political and cultural elite and popular commentaries on the Third Reich, to which Kolnai’s 700-page analysis was added in 1938, were simultaneously insightful and highly conflicted.8 The contemporary injunction ‘know your enemy’ aptly expressed the modus operandi, namely the need to understand Nazism properly in order not only to defeat it militarily, but to devise effective safeguards against it politically. As the philosopher and educator Horace M. Kallen maintained in typical fashion, a correct diagnosis had to precede the proper cure of the German problem: ‘The convalescence of the bled and broken world into a healthy new one will be determined largely by how its medicine-­men interpret the German national character’ (Kallen, 1943, p.  4). Even beyond the widespread, often metaphorical, use of Nazism as a psychological disorder, as an illness, many popular as well as political analyses of the Third Reich took the tripartite form of establishing the patient’s – so Germany’s – case history, which then led to a political or psycho-­ cultural diagnosis, followed by proposed treatment (post-­war plans). At the same time, however, the United States war effort against the Third Reich – subsequently turned into a heroic tale of good defeating evil militarily in American popular consciousness – was anything but a single-­minded crusade (Casey, 2001). American conceptions of Nazi Germany were a striking counterexample to the usual tale of vilifying the enemy and essentialising the other. The American pre-­war and wartime discourse on one of the starkest historical examples of an immoral and criminal state remained complex and ambiguous. In briefly laying out the different factors that produced this situation, I will set the stage for the American reception of Kolnai’s book in 1938 and explain how his arguments and concerns played out in the American context. In the United States the debate on Nazism started in earnest in 1932 with journalistic contributions, such as Edgar A. Mowrer’s Germany Puts the Clock Back, which Kolnai cites in The War Against the West (Mowrer, 1933). By 1934, a collection of twenty essays on various aspects of Third Reich ideology and policies appeared under a title that anticipates Kolnai’s, Nazism: An Assault on Civilization (Van Paassen and Wagner, 1934). The authors were American rabbis, socialists, labour leaders, New Deal politicians, journalists and émigrés. This list also describes the composition of the early anti-­Nazi movement in the United States. They judged the new regime by its words and deeds and organised protests, mock trials and boycotts against it (Junker, 1988, pp. 62–4).9 The single most important group that shaped American understanding of the new Germany, however, was an assembly of talented foreign correspondents stationed in Europe during the 1930s. More than any other group they contributed

88   Michaela Hoenicke Moore to an early critical understanding of the Third Reich. What they shared with Kolnai is that they, too, took the Nazis at their word and urged their American audiences to do the same. A first little success story in this regard is the newly elected president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, in early 1933 in a handwritten note, thanks Houghton Mifflin for his copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but adds: ‘This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view of what Hitler really is or says. The German original would make a different story’ (President’s Personal File [PPF], 1933).10 Though Roosevelt pretended to know German from several summers spent in Imperial Germany as a schoolboy, his sense of the inadequacy of this early translation was owed to his close personal connections to some early American anti-­Nazi activists and journalists, who in turn urged their readers to take the Nazis at their word (Hoenicke Moore, 2010, pp. 21–40, 78–80, 318–20). Between them, the foreign correspondents formulated a set of enduring interpretations regarding the nature of the Third Reich. On the central question of German support for Hitler and later popular complicity in Nazi crimes, the journalists described ordinary Germans’ behaviour as ranging from sporadic acts of courage and decency to cowardice, acquiescence, occasional fanaticism and, mostly, self-­interested opportunism and apathy. Mowrer, whose book was published just as the Nazis came to power, emphasised, on the one hand, the role that Germany’s traditional elites had played in helping the right-­wing extremists to power and, on the other, the failure of liberals and social democrats to come to the defence of the Republic. As to the broader question of why the German people offered so little resistance to the Nazis, his colleague William L. Shirer concluded that ‘the majority of Germans … are behind Hitler and believe in him’ (Shirer, 1941, pp. 84–5). Mowrer and Shirer, like Kolnai, emphasised the deeper roots of Nazism in German political culture, as well as the broad popular support that Hitler enjoyed. By contrast, their colleague John Gunther, in his widely read account Inside Europe ([1936] 1937), focused on the Nazi leaders. Drawing on popular psychological interpretations he presented them as a simultaneously scary and entertaining freak show. This ambiguity in American representations of Nazism persisted; it was definitely not attractive, but how dangerous could these clowns be? In any case, it happened over there, an ocean away. Dorothy Thompson, the most prominent American journalist on ‘the German problem’, was vilified in the 1930s as a warmonger and in the 1940s as a German sympathiser. Yet it was she who offered the most profound and comprehensive analysis of the Third Reich. Supported by a small army of refugees as research assistants, Thompson introduced several of the enduring tropes into the debate: the dictator as buffoon; the masses as the problem; the early recognition, by 1936 and in line with Kolnai’s prediction, that Nazism meant war; the faith that Germany was salvageable; the concern over anti-­Semitism at home, which would obstruct American mobilisation for war; and, finally, the view that Nazism was a ‘disease with more than purely Germanic roots’, in clear contrast to Shirer, Mowrer and, on the surface, Kolnai (Thompson, 1941; see Hoenicke Moore, 2010, pp. 52–60 and passim).

The American debate on Nazism   89 In the United States, the journalists’ portraits of the new Germany were reinforced by Jewish groups and leftist political and labour organisations, some with contacts to the opposition in Germany.11 But for all their consistent coverage and remarkable insights, the reporting did not coalesce into a coherent image of Nazism that could have been easily digested into a wartime enemy image akin to ‘the Hun’. Thus throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich’s existence, journalists and anti-­Nazi activists bemoaned the persistent gap between their own reporting and the image of Nazi Germany as it emerged on the other side of the Atlantic. Let us now turn to 1938, the year of the Czech crisis, the Munich Conference, Kristallnacht and the publication of Kolnai’s book. Thanks to, among others, CBS Radio journalist H. V. Kaltenborn’s around-­the-clock radio broadcasts on the Munich crisis in September 1938 – producing more than 100 reports during the course of eighteen days – many Americans were aware of this European event, but remained ambivalent about what their country should do about it. Seventy per cent of Americans considered the United States’ entry into the First World War a mistake, yet at the same time 73 per cent were convinced that a new war was in the making and that Germany would be responsible for starting it (Gallup, 1972, pp.  65, 137; Cantril and Strunk, 1951, pp.  201, 203). Polls showed that a steadily growing number of Americans recognised the criminal nature of the German regime and condemned its policies. Asked about the Munich Agreement, 41 per cent considered the conciliatory efforts on the part of the Western powers a mistake; 60 per cent feared that this agreement could not prevent a war; 77 per cent regarded the German annexation of the Sudetenland as unjustified; and, finally, 92 per cent mistrusted Hitler’s assurance that he had made his last territorial demand (Gallup, 1972, pp.  112, 121, 179; Cantril and Strunk, 1951, p.  781). The majority of Americans did not want to fight the Germans, but they also feared that this outcome might be unavoidable (Brewer, 2009, p. 93). The most intense popular reaction against Germany, however, was caused by the pogrom of November 1938: an overwhelming 94 per cent condemned the outrage. But the question of ‘Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany’ was posed in conjunction with one about ‘Nazi treatment of Catholics in Germany’, to which 97 per cent of those polled likewise responded critically. This phrasing documents a strategic misrepresentation of Nazi anti-­Semitism as just another expression of anti-­religious sentiment in the Third Reich – a strategy that American anti-­Nazi activists, including the Jewish Non-­Sectarian Anti-­Nazi League, had inaugurated earlier and that the United States wartime propaganda agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), would continue later (Gallup, 1972, p.  128; Hoenicke Moore, 2010, pp.  57–60, 152–3). In his The War Against the West Kolnai may have had other reasons for downplaying the centrality of anti-­ Semitism to the Nazi world view. But he would have understood that this more pragmatic strategy – to reach a broader audience – supported his decision to appeal to universal values. Considering that this was the high-­water mark of American anti-­Semitism, it simply did not seem advisable; in fact, it was

90   Michaela Hoenicke Moore counterproductive to argue on behalf of a particular minority. Subsequently, American wartime propaganda emphasised the universalism of Western war aims, just as Kolnai had advocated in 1938, fearing that a particularist focus on Jews would undermine this general appeal (1938, pp. 24–6, 683–5).12

The American reception of The War Against the West: Kolnai as Vansittartist Within this context, Kolnai’s The War Against the West was published. In the October 1938 issue of The Nation, the Jewish-­American scholar of nationalism, Hans Kohn, warmly welcomed Kolnai’s book as ‘the first comprehensive survey in English of Nazi ideology as a counter-­revolution against the West’ (Kohn, 1938, pp. 329–30). He fervently wished the book a ‘wide circulation’, although Kohn could not help note that ‘the average reader … would prefer a condensation in many places, while the scholarly reader misses more detailed references’ (Kohn, 1938, pp.  329–30). A few months later, Carl Joachim Friedrich, the future author of Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), wrote in The Review of Politics: ‘Though one sympathizes with the vigorous criticism of Nazi “doctrine,” [Kolnai’s] treatment is objectionable’ because it does ‘violence to all the deeper moral issues involved’ and ‘lack[s] both in understanding and depth’ (Friedrich, 1939, p. 101). Friedrich’s main objection, however, was that Kolnai ‘cast [his treatment of Nazism] into the framework of superficial and outmoded propaganda slogans, and thus descends almost to the plane of Nazi literature on the subject of Liberalism’ (Friedrich, 1939, p. 101). Most other American reviews of The War Against the West sided with Kohn, not Friedrich – and indeed all emphasised and praised its significance as a warning against and a rejection of appeasement.13 It is for this purpose that Kolnai highlighted the singularity and vitality of Nazi ideology: its ‘absolute antagonism to Western liberal civilization’; its deep roots in German history and the German mind; the war menace it presented and the utter futility of concessions; as well as the wrong-­headedness of Western collective self-­doubt (Kolnai, 1938, p.  674) regarding the Treaty of Versailles, democracy or the League of Nations that often accompanied calls for a negotiated settlement (Heindel, 1938, pp. 314–15; Jászi, 1938, pp. 1166–7).14 I have singled out Friedrich’s review because it illustrates how Kolnai was grouped together with a particular view of the Third Reich that was pejoratively called Vansittartism, named after the high-­ranking British diplomat Robert Lord Vansittart (Später, 2003). Its core tenet was that Nazism was peculiarly German and that it had long, deep roots in German culture and history – most often demonstrated with long quotes from some of the same characters that populate Kolnai’s book. American proponents of Vansittartism, a diverse group of influential journalists, commentators and politicians, including – privately – Roosevelt, postulated a historical trend in German militaristic aggressive behaviour and also insisted that there was much popular support for Nazi foreign policy aims, racial views and

The American debate on Nazism   91 extreme nationalism. The Vansittartists argued that there was indeed something wrong with the Germans.15 To support one of their central claims, the Vansittartists seized on the German, pre-­Nazi, self-­proclaimed myth of a special path, a Sonderweg, which originally had positive connotations, and argued that there were indeed long and deep roots of a German cult of superiority.16 And to reinforce the message that Nazism meant war and that Germany was a threat to Western civilisation, Vansittartism also drew on the pre-­existing First World War enemy image of Imperial Germans as Huns. Carl Joachim Friedrich found this last aspect most objectionable and devoted a good portion of his review of Kolnai’s 700-page book to Wickham Steed’s seven-­page preface, which makes this point about continuity. In spite of its appeal as an enemy image, the Vansittartist presentation of the Third Reich remained contested in the United States and was even sharply criticised well into 1944. Apparently many Americans, including political experts and public intellectuals, were not ready to recognise the Germans of the Third Reich as ‘the other’, and thus the Vansittartist argument evoked angry counter-­ arguments. The most frequent charge levelled against the Vansittartists was the claim, as we see in Friedrich’s review, that their presentation amounted to ‘an inverted form of Hitler’s racial theories’ and that the Vansittartists talked ‘about the Germans in almost the same fashion that Nazis talk about Jews’ (Cowley, 1943, p.  586). This self-­critical concern with behaving differently than the enemy was pervasive in American public and official wartime pronouncements. To illustrate an important strand in the American rejection of Vansittartism, we will turn once more to the German-­Jewish socialist politician, formerly pacifist and fellow émigré, Sender. She had fled Germany in 1933 facing a personal death threat from the Nazis; since 1939 she had advocated American entry into the war and soon afterward began working for the Roosevelt administration. She had few illusions about Germany, yet by 1942 rejected Vansittartism on the grounds that if Germany was regarded as a ‘hopeless case’ characterised by ‘innate barbarism’, the Western world’s democracies would have no solution for it. For, she argued, democracy is based on faith in the common man, while Fascism believes in the permanent inequality of individuals and nations. This is the choice which is before every one of us and you cannot be in both camps at the same time. (Sender, 1942, pp. 19–20) Even though these two German-­speaking, Central European, Jewish, anti-­Nazi, pro-­interventionist émigrés differed in their political affiliations, Kolnai’s and Sender’s writings from these critical years reveal a shared adherence to Western universalism that outweighs partisan labels.

Kolnai prefiguring United States wartime strategies and rhetoric By 1940 mobilisation efforts in the United States, spearheaded by interventionist groups, which put European émigrés in prominent roles both in- and

92   Michaela Hoenicke Moore outside the government, had become a two-­pronged affair. It involved military preparation but also targeted the minds of ordinary Americans. In the midst of the German victories of that year, Dorothy Thompson, by then part of the administration’s behind-­the-scenes effort to rally support for a more activist policy, warned that There seems to be no way of opposing the Supermen-­by-virtue-­of-steel, except to prove that the rest of us who detest the whole business [of war] will nevertheless and against our reason, tastes, and intelligence, defeat them at their own game. ([1940] n.d.) Her call to arms touched on the two fundamental tenets of the interventionist credo that Kolnai anticipated in the conclusion of The War Against the West: Nazism had to be fought both militarily and ideologically. ‘You cannot kill an idea by killing the man who holds it’, wrote another adviser to Roosevelt (President’s Personal File [PPF], 1941). The West, here particularly the United States, had to offer something better, a more appealing post-­war vision – one that matched and surpassed the Nazi ‘spiritual grandeur and relevancy’, as Kolnai had demanded (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 17–18).17 In line with American Vansittartists and against a prevailing American conception on the origins of the Third Reich, Kolnai rejected the idea that Versailles or socio-­economic deprivations had caused Hitler’s rise: Even today, I see the chief peril in the famous ‘have-­nots’ theory – its smug simplicity and cheap generosity – with bleak conceit and Sunday-­school priggishness lurking behind it. As if daemonic evil were really a ‘product’ of unjust ‘curtailment’ and better still, could be spirited away by a stingy tip, or even by a lordly donation? (Kolnai, 1938, p. 674)18 Later, in the context of the United States wartime debate on Nazism, psychology, psychiatry and other behavioural sciences were put to work to explain what, it was generally agreed, defied reason or explanation. As Horace Kallen formulated in 1943: Especially since Hitler took power the pretensions and practices of the apostles of Deutschtum have contained something outside the scope of commonsense and common decency, something so utterly beyond belief that for many it could be only the intervention of malicious propagandists. Those who acknowledge its reality, on the other hand, find the usual categories of interpretation – religious, economic, political – inadequate to account for this incredible component. (Kallen, 1943, p. 4)19

The American debate on Nazism   93 Few American public commentators were ready to leave the bounds of social science discourse behind to point to a transcendent sphere to explain Nazism as a manifestation of the demonic, for example, as Kolnai had done. An exception was Vice President Henry A. Wallace, a key spokesman for a progressive vision of the nation and the world, but also for the war against Nazism, who characterised the Third Reich in terms of paganism in a famous speech in May 1942 that was later turned into a propaganda film with the title The Century of the Common Man. Wallace prophesied that the American people would ‘drive the ancient Teutonic gods back cowering into their caves. The Götterdämmerung has come for Odin and his crew’. For Wallace, the Germans were not only godless, they were an instrument of Satan: ‘Through the leaders of the Nazi revolution, Satan now is trying to lead the common man of the whole world back into slavery and darkness’ (Wallace, 1986, pp. 255–7). Wallace presented Germans as stooges who have been mentally and politically degraded, and who feel that they can get square with the world only by mentally and politically degrading other people. These stooges are really psychopathic cases. Satan has turned loose upon us the insane. (Wallace, 1986, pp. 255–7)20 Before we consider the remaining aspects of The War Against the West that foreshadow American wartime policies and rhetoric, we need to take a step back, once more, and acknowledge the uphill battle that Kolnai, his fellow émigrés, the interventionist groups and the Roosevelt administration were fighting. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, to the latter’s dismay, many Americans seemed quite capable of tolerating the idea that there were dictatorships in this world, even totalitarian ones, and maintained that their country did not have to do anything about it. Capturing a middlebrow version of this non-­interventionist, ‘live and let live’ approach to international crises, the popular historian Will Durant wrote in 1938, the year Kolnai’s call to arms was published, that: Democracy, Communism and Fascism are merely the molds in which diverse people in diverse conditions have been organized to pursue similar ends in diverse ways; they are the products of different geographical and historical conditions; they are not forms of national virtue or vice.… Only the simple, then, can see in these varied forms of political and industrial organization cause to go to war. (Durant, 1938, pp. 23, 48–9, 51–2) Thus, while the Roosevelt administration defined Nazi ideology as antithetical to American values and, in a separate but connected argument, presented Hitler’s foreign policy aims as a threat to American national security, their mobilisation campaign, as well as other early anti-­Nazi, pro-­interventionist efforts, were hampered by a set of political, ethnic and cultural factors that worked in favour of the German enemy and obscured the true nature of the Nazi regime in American

94   Michaela Hoenicke Moore public perception. These included the shock over the carnage of the First World War and disillusionment with Wilsonianism, the crusading, missionary strand in American foreign policy that aimed at making the world safe for democracy through military intervention. Backlash against the Great War and United States intervention caused an unprecedented loss of faith in war as a political means, a widespread sentiment that Kolnai eloquently refuted both in The War Against the West and his suppressed work ‘Pacifism Means Suicide’ (Gallup, 1972, pp. 65, 137; Kolnai, 1938, p. 673; Dunlop, 2002, p. 164).21

Factors leading to the ‘false lullaby of appeasement’ Throughout the 1930s, and rising to a crescendo with the ‘Great Debate’ of 1938–41, Americans were – politically and ideologically – at war with themselves before joining the Second World War. Scepticism and disbelief at home counteracted the impressive journalistic coverage of the Third Reich at several critical junctures. At the beginning of the Nazi revolution there were sympathetic musings about whether a strong leader or a dictatorship might not – in some cases – be a better alternative to failing democracies (Alpers, 2003). With regard to stories about the persecution of political opponents (mainly on the Left) and Jewish citizens, there were doubts whether things were really as bad as reported. Towards the end of the decade, as war broke out in Europe, the Great Debate on whether the United States should get involved in this war pivoted around the question of Nazi war aims. The claim that Hitler intended to attack the Western hemisphere and was aiming for global hegemony struck many Americans as an unrealistic exaggeration by Roosevelt and other ‘warmongers’. By 1940, the year of the first American peacetime draft and that in which the president sought an unprecedented third election, Republican leaders like Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover levelled the accusations of ‘dictator’ and ‘totalitarian’ not against Hitler but against Roosevelt; at their convention Republicans donned buttons that read ‘Third Reich. Third International. Third Term’, equating Nazism with communism and Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the meantime, at the Democratic Party convention Roosevelt urged Americans to take the Nazis at their word. And, like Kolnai a few years earlier, Roosevelt announced the theme of the irreconcilable contrast between Nazism and the West. He urged Americans to consider the great choice before them: Government by the people versus dictatorship … freedom versus slavery … religion against godlessness; the ideal of justice against the practice of force; moral decency versus the firing squad; courage to speak out, and to act, versus the false lullaby of appeasement. (Roosevelt, 1941, p. 302)22 Five months later in a ‘fireside chat’, the president cited Hitler’s own recent speech from 10 December 1940 on the ‘two worlds that stand opposed to each other.… One of these worlds must break asunder’ (quoted in Harsch, 1941,

The American debate on Nazism   95 p.  26; Shirer, 1941, p.  592). It was with satisfaction that Roosevelt concluded that ‘the Axis not merely admits but proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government’ (Department of State, 1943, p. 600). A final factor that counteracted Kolnai’s (and others’) call to arms against Nazism was American popular, culturo-­ethnic goodwill towards the German people themselves. For the most part, Americans during the 1930s and 1940s thought of Germans as people ‘like us’. The simple linguistic distinction between Nazis and Germans served to exonerate the latter for reasons of ethnic solidarity, cultural affinity, religious familiarity or liberal scruples. A month after Germany started the Second World War, 66 per cent of Americans polled agreed with the statement that ‘the German people are essentially peace-­loving and kindly, but they have been unfortunate in being misled too often by ruthless and ambitious rulers’. Barely 20 per cent (19.6) chose the opposite assessment that ‘the German people have always had an irrepressible fondness for brute force and conquest which makes the country a menace to world peace so long as it is allowed to be strong enough to fight’ (Gallup, 1972, p.  500). Other surveys confirmed this picture: a large majority of Americans plainly distinguished between a basically decent, possibly victimised German people and its bad leaders. This people-­ versus-government distinction reflected both a long-­cherished liberal tenet of American democracy and an accommodation of ethnic preferences (‘Gallup and Fortune Polls’, 1940, pp. 94, 96, 99).23 During the war, these factors also shaped how the OWI depicted the Third Reich: the enemy was an ideology not a people. In this way, the OWI allowed for rather than challenged popular opinion (Hoenicke Moore, 2010, pp. 105–6, 131–55). The OWI also heavily employed the strategy of letting the Nazis speak for and thus indict themselves. The most famous example was the Lidice massacre. But the meaning of this strategy had changed. In the 1930s, when Kolnai and other early outspoken anti-­Nazi critics quoted directly from National Socialist speeches and writings, it meant that they were taking the Nazis at their word (cf. Später, 2003, pp.  439, 447–8). Six years later, during the war, letting the Nazis speak for themselves was mainly an effective propaganda ploy. For example, The Nazi Guide to Nazism, published in 1942 by the American Council on Public Affairs and edited by Robert Dell, a British, anti-­Nazi journalist whom Kolnai cites, was packed with revealing quotes from major and minor Nazi figures on every conceivable topic ranging from family to colonies. A January 1943 review in the magazine Foreign Affairs commented that ‘If ridicule could kill, Nazism would now be extinct’ (Woolbert, 1943).

Conclusion It is difficult for us to fully appreciate the sense of urgency, bordering on despair, that had taken hold of all those who took the Nazis at their word. Germany’s total defeat, as well as America’s subsequent role in the Cold War, obstruct our view on the uphill battle that Kolnai and others were fighting against

96   Michaela Hoenicke Moore ‘appeasement’, deep commitment to pacifism, and general goodwill and tolerance for a world of different ideologies (Kolnai, 1938, p. 680).24 Similarly, the sense of malaise and loss of faith in liberal democracy that had deeply shaken the Western world is hard to imagine after the triumphalism of the Second World War and the Cold War, but it motivated Kolnai’s lyrical ode to the ‘entente’ and the ‘Soul of the West’ (or democracy) which had to be, in his words, ‘re-­experienced, restated and renewed’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 685). Kolnai’s and other liberal interventionists’ insistence that the United States had to respond to Hitler’s empire with a better vision for the post-­war world was realised, although probably not entirely to Kolnai’s taste (Kolnai, 1999, pp. 194–5, 200–2). The American debate on Nazism informed wartime planning for a new multilateral, cooperative international order, which included an expanded and strengthened human rights agenda and government support for economic recovery and relief as a means of encouraging democratic habits. The New Deal’s promise – to save liberal democracy and social welfare capitalism for another day – was only realised when the United States joined the war (Borgwardt, 2007; Katznelson, 2011, pp. 9, 48–51; Patel, 2016, p. 274). It is appropriate to conclude these reflections on how The War Against the West fits into the American debate on Nazism with a word on how the book fits into Kolnai’s overall politico-­moral universe. The same sensitivities, those of a phenomenologist and moral philosopher, that enabled him to sound the alarm in defence of Western democracy presciently and effectively in the 1930s led him to continue probing the philosophical/psychological underpinnings of liberal, capitalist democracy in the post-­war decades when geopolitical anxieties and Western, especially American, ideological triumphalism posited liberal democracy and capitalism as unquestionably superior. While Kolnai’s analysis of Nazism was – eventually – politically useful for Western democracy, his continued critical engagement with all forms of utopian political thought, including (American) liberalism, put him at odds with prevailing Western political sentiment after 1945 (Kolnai, 1999).25 Moreover, his contributions to the anti-­Nazi campaign could now be used for another war. The blueprint for a totalitarian enemy that left-­leaning liberals inand outside the Roosevelt administration, with essential help from émigrés like Kolnai, had developed to characterise Nazi Germany was transferred by 1945 to the Soviet Union. This characterisation included Nazi Germany’s master plan of world domination aimed at the destruction of the Western way of life; the Nazis’ conspiratorial preparations to achieve this goal; and the ideological motivation of Nazi policies, which made compromise futile and turned the struggle into a global conflict of slavery versus freedom. Each of these core elements of Kolnai’s analysis of the Third Reich and, subsequently, the constituent parts of the American enemy image of Nazism was, shortly after May 1945, applied to the Soviet Union in internal memoranda as well as public proclamations. Now used to describe the ideology, master plan and world-­conquering intentions of the Soviet Union, they turned out to be more compelling and less contested in the American domestic political context than they had been as a propaganda blueprint characterising the Third Reich (Hoenicke Moore, 2010, p. 348).26

The American debate on Nazism   97 Kolnai’s book and its reception in the United States highlight two important dimensions of this 1930s and 1940s anti-­totalitarian discourse that is often seen as a continuum but that should more properly be understood as a multilayered discourse in which academic, political and populist voices compete and the left–right dichotomy might be less useful than is conventionally assumed (cf. Gleason, 1997). On the one hand, the broader context of responses to the Third Reich underscores just how prescient and perceptive Kolnai’s analysis had been. How difficult it had been for him and others to warn about the meaning of Nazism in the face of ostensibly calming refutations and reassuring mantras that ‘it was not as bad as all that’. On the other hand, by the second half of the 1940s, a range of sources fed into a new-­ found anti-­appeasement, militantly democratic, Cold War vigilante mindset directed against a new enemy. There were different national variations on this theme. In the context of American foreign policy, it is fairly clear that a specifically American brand of anti-­communism has always been more powerful as a domestically, politically mobilising force than anti-­Fascism or Nazism. From our vantage point in the early twenty-­first century and for the purpose of this chapter, which has been to illuminate the intellectual context of American foreign policy debate, Kolnai’s writings could easily be misunderstood as just one more anti-­appeasement, anti-­totalitarian, pro-­militant democracy position that set (not just) American foreign policy on a problematic course of armed self-­ righteousness after 1945. But that was neither Kolnai’s intention nor, it has to be said, his effect; after a brief rise to anti-­Fascist fame, the author returned to relative public obscurity. Francesca Murphy admired Kolnai ‘for his failures’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. xi). Let us also praise him for his lack of celebrity. In contrast to other Husserlian offspring, such as Jean-­Paul Sartre or Martin Heidegger, Kolnai did not cast his lot with a fashionable left- or right-­wing ideology but continued to plot his way through the great socio-­political and ethical questions just outside the public limelight.27

Notes   1 Although Kolnai’s characterisation of ‘the West’ or ‘Western Civilization’ highlights the usual criteria – Roman, Greek and Christian heritage, rule of law, rational ethics and secularised politics, democratic principle, individual freedom and personal dignity – and thus includes all of Western Europe in geographical terms, his choice of language, English, not only revealed a personal affinity but also ensured that his message would reach the two ‘Western’ countries that were eventually at the forefront of the military alliance against Nazi Germany. For other contemporary anti-­Nazi analyses, see Wolfgang Bialas’s introduction to the German edition of the book, Aurel Kolnai, Der Krieg gegen den Westen, ed. Wolfgang Bialas (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).   2 The question whether democracies ought to use the tools of propaganda in their efforts against totalitarian regimes was as hotly debated in the United States at the time as was the term itself: did ‘propaganda’ only refer to what dictatorial regimes were doing, or did it also apply to democratic ones? Cf. Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922); Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); and Clayton D. Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors. America’s Crusade against Nazi Germany (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996).

98   Michaela Hoenicke Moore   3 For essential context cf. Zoltán Balázs’s and Graham J. McAleer’s essays in this volume, as well as the introduction by Francis Dunlop to Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai, eds Zoltán Balázs and Francis Dunlop (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), pp.  1–14. Aurel Kolnai himself explained ‘The Indispensability of Philosophy’ in a 1947 essay, reprinted ibid., pp. 143–54.   4 For a discussion of the broader context in which the early anti-­Nazi analyses appeared, in particular those by continental émigrés and refugees, cf. Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Richard Bodek and Simon Lewis (eds), The Fruits of Exile: Central European Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010).   5 According to those who knew him in person or have studied his correspondence, Kolnai had an unusual ‘ability to accept the validity of his opponents’ point of view’ and a deep appreciation of pluralism (Dunlop, 2002, p. 297).   6 See Gerhard L. Weinberg, ‘Munich After 50 Years’, Foreign Affairs 67, 1 (Fall 1988): 165–78; Joseph M. Siracusa, ‘The Munich Analogy’, Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner, 2002), pp. 443–54; and Jeffrey Record, The Specter of Munich. Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (Washington, DC: Potomac, 2007).   7 See Kolnai, 1938, p. 679, 1999, pp. 172–5; Dunlop, 2002, pp. 162–4.   8 The following outline is based on evidence presented in greater detail in my monograph, Hoenicke Moore, 2010.   9 ‘Indictment at anti-­NS Tribunal in NYC, 8 March 1934’. 10 It was only in 1939 that a second English translation, more faithful to the original, appeared in the United States. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939). 11 From March 1933 on cities like New York became centres of anti-­Nazi protests, boycotts and mass demonstrations. The following year a mock trial was held in Madison Square Garden by religious, political and labour–union leaders convicting the German government of crimes against civilisation. The Third Reich continued to provoke horror and outrage among Americans, reaching a climax in 1938 with Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia and the violent November pogrom and first deportations. 12 On the origins of Kolnai’s dedication to Western universalism, cf. Kolnai, 1999, pp. 25–8. For the ways in which American anti-­Semitism hampered American mobilisation and rescue efforts, cf. Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). On the idea that Western universal values, reinvigorated by confrontation with Nazism, shaped American wartime post-­war plans, see Borgwardt, 2007. 13 Kolnai’s Political Memoirs (1999) and Dunlop’s Life and Thought (2002) illustrate the networks made up of already established émigrés who worked together with American anti-­Nazi, interventionist elites that helped refugees come to the United States, find work and then become part of the interventionist campaign. See, for example, Hans Rudolf Vaget, Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner: Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011); and Lewis Mumford, My Works and Days. A Personal Chronicle (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). 14 On fellow Hungarian Jászi and Kolnai’s lifelong, if occasionally strained, friendship, cf. Dunlop, 2002, passim; and Lyman Bradley in Science and Society (1 January 1939): 538–42. 15 The Vansittartists also had serious reservations about the notion of ‘the other Germany’, namely a cultured, liberal, democratic Germany. They did not deny the existence of such Germans, but they doubted their efficacy (Hoenicke Moore, 2010, pp. 247–8).

The American debate on Nazism   99 16 Journalists like Mowrer and Shirer had shaped this understanding since the 1930s; the Society for the Prevention of World War III promoted this interpretation most effectively towards the end of the war. President Roosevelt, who had recommended Vansittart’s book Black Record to his psychological warfare coordinator, Bill Donovan, – privately – shared in particular the notion that the German people were deeply implicated in the crimes of the Nazi regime (Hoenicke Moore, 2010, pp. 116–20, 256–8). 17 In contrast to most other émigrés who adored Roosevelt, Kolnai was sceptical that American liberal democracy under Roosevelt could provide such a vision. Joachim Radkau, Die deutsche Emigration in den USA. Ihr Einfluss auf die amerikanische Europapolitik, 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag, 1971). 18 For the popularity of a socio-­economic explanation of Nazism, cf. Alpers, 2003. 19 Kallen, 1943, p. 4. 20 Kolnai’s observation (or hope) at the end of The War Against the West that ‘free humanity is on the march’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  675) anticipates the key theme of Wallace’s ‘march of freedom’ speech by nearly a decade. 21 That the Protestant theologian and interventionist Reinhold Niebuhr should take Kolnai’s side, against pacifism and for war against the Third Reich, is not surprising. See Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), pp. 297–314. 22 Noteworthy in this campaign speech are three formulations: the enduring ‘freedom versus slavery’ theme, a leitmotif in American foreign-­policy rhetoric; the emphasis on religion as a fundamental component of liberal democracy; and the contrast between action and appeasement. With the last pair of speeches Roosevelt linked the foreign foe to domestic critics of his policy. 23 In opinion studies Germany continually came out near the top when Americans were asked which other country they regarded favourably or felt close to. Thomas A. Bailey, The Man in the Street: The Impact of American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 224–5; and Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 1241–60. 24 See also Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘The Resurrection of Neutrality in Europe’, American Political Science Review 33, 3 (June 1938), which cites Kolnai’s The War Against the West, ‘especially Chaps. 1, 3, 6, 8, 9’ (pp. 483–4). The realist International Relations expert wrote about ‘ethico-­legal delimitations of the political sphere itself ’ in which international relations, including war, had been conducted from the nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries and which now had ‘been swept away by the totalitarian political philosophies and practices of recent years’ (pp. 483–4). 25 For a glimpse of Kolnai’s political views at the end of the Second World War, see also Dunlop’s summaries of the unpublished ‘Liberty and the Heart of Europe’ and ‘Three Riders of Apocalypse: Communism, Naziism, and Progressive Democracy’ (1950), in 2002, pp. 197–202, 212–20. 26 Similarly, the idea that Nazism was paganism, something that Roosevelt was also periodically interested in, primarily for propaganda reasons (Hoenicke Moore, 2010, p. 91), was put to work again after 1945: communism’s atheism was a major propaganda theme in the Cold War. And as Kevin Kruse has shown in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), Reverend James Fifield’s right-­wing organisation, called Spiritual Mobilization, set its 10,000 minister representatives to work spreading arguments against the ‘pagan stateism’ not of the Soviet regime in Moscow, but of the New Deal. 27 In her preface to Kolnai’s Political Memoirs (1999), Francesca Murphy confesses that she admires the philosopher ‘for his failures. He had more understanding of ‘difference’ than do those at home in saleable post-­modernity’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. xi).

100   Michaela Hoenicke Moore

References Alpers, Benjamin (2003). Dictators, Democracy and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Borgwardt, Elizabeth (2007). A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Brewer, Susan (2009). Why America Fights. Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press. Cantril, Hadley and Mildred Strunk (1951). Public Opinion, 1935–46. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Casey, Steven (2001). A Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War Against Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cowley, Malcolm (1943). ‘Vansittartism’. The New Republic 109, 17 (25 October): 586–8. Department of State (1943). Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941. Washington: GPO: 599–608. Dunlop, Francis (2002). The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Durant, Will (1983). ‘No Hymns of Hatred’. Saturday Evening Post (4 June): 23, 48–9, 51–2. Friedrich, Carl Joachim (1939). Review of Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West. The Review of Politics 1, 1 (1 January): 101. Friedrich, Carl Joachim and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1956). Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ‘Gallup and Fortune Polls’ (1940). Public Opinion Quarterly 4, 1 (March 1940): 83–115. Gallup, George H. (1972). The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–71, vol. 1, 1935–48. New York: Random House. Gleason, Abbott (1997). Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press. Gunther, John ([1936] 1937). Inside Europe. New York: Harper and Brothers. Harsch, Joseph C. (1941). ‘The “Unbelievable” Nazi Blueprint’. New York Times Magazine (25 May): 26. Heindel, Richard (1938). ‘Review of The War Against the West’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 200 (November): 314–15. Hoenicke Moore, Michaela (2010). Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hoenicke Moore, Michaela (2016). ‘The Nazis and U.S. Foreign Policy Debates: History, Lessons, and Analogies’. In: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Other, eds Michael P. Cullinane and David Ryan. New York: Berghahn Books: 142–62. Jászi, Oscar (1938). ‘Review of The War Against the West’. The American Political Science Review 32, 6 (December): 1166–7. Junker, Detlef (1988). Kampf um die Weltmacht: Die USA und das Dritte Reich, 1933–1945. Düsseldorf: Schwann Bagel. Kallen, Horace M. (1943). ‘What Shall We Do With Germany?’. Saturday Review of Literature 26 (28 May): 4–6. Katznelson, Ira (2011). Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton. Kohn, Hans (1938). ‘The Spirit of Nazism’. The Nation 147, 14 (1 October): 329–30.

The American debate on Nazism   101 Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Kolnai, Aurel (1999). Political Memoirs, ed. Francesca Murphy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Mowrer, Edgar A. (1933). Germany Puts the Clock Back. New York: William Morrow & Co. Patel, Kiran Klaus (2016). The New Deal: A Global History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. President’s Personal File [PPF] (1933). 373, FDR Papers, FDR Library. President’s Personal File [PPF] (1941). Attachment (Stanley P. Lovell) to note by Basil O’Connor to FDR, 31 May 1941, PPF 1820, Box 5 1941, FDR-­P, FDR-­L. Rasmussen, Mikkel Vedby (2003). ‘The History of a Lesson: Versailles, Munich, and the Social Construction of the Past’. Review of International Studies 29 (October): 499–519. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1941). ‘Radio Address to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, from the White House, 19 July 1940’. In: Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman, vol. 9. New York: Random House: pp. 293–302. Sender, Toni (1941). ‘We Must Face the Issues’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 216 (July): 16–23. Sender, Toni (1942). ‘Is Germany a Hopeless Case?’. Jewish Frontier 9 (August): 19–20. Shirer, William L. (1941). Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. New York: Knopf. Später, Jörg (2003). Vansittart. Britische Debatten über Deutsche und Nazis, 1902–1945. Göttingen: Wallstein. Thompson, Dorothy ([1940] n.d.). ‘The Nazis’. MS, Box 5, Series VII, Thompson Papers, George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University, New York [DT Papers]. Thompson, Dorothy (1941). Letter to Tom Lamont (1 Oct.), Box 1, Series II, Thompson Papers, George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University, New York [DT Papers]. Van Paassen, Pierre and Robert F. Wagner (eds) (1934). Nazism: An Assault on Civilization. New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas. Wallace, Henry (1986). ‘8. Mai 1942: Rede des Vizepraesidenten Wallace vor der Free World Association in New York’ (‘The Price of the Free World’ or ‘Century of the Common Man’). Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik vol.  1, 2. Frankfurt am Main: Alfred Metzner Verlag: 255–7. Woolbert, Robert Gale (1943). ‘Review of Nazi Guide to Nazism by Rolf Tell’. Capsule Review (January). www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-­review/1943-01-01/nazi-­ guide-nazism, accessed 26 June 2016.

7 Aurel Kolnai and Franz Neumann Normative criticism and structural analysis of National Socialism Rolf Zimmermann

Aurel Kolnai perceptively recognised the threat posed by National Socialism and presented the modern Western world with a fundamental alternative. The title of his book, The War Against the West, must accordingly be understood in a comprehensive way: intellectually, politically and metaphysically. In the following, I address the main normative points in his criticism of National Socialism and systematise them in the form of an opposition between moral–political formations: Western universalism versus völkisch particularism. As a normative standard in Kolnai’s study, an objective universalism clearly comes to the fore, which, on the one hand, has the advantage of providing a sharp demarcation against National Socialism and, on the other hand, itself requires differentiation. With the important study by Franz Neumann – Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (1967) – in mind, Kolnai provides a normative framework into which Neumann’s analysis can be placed, with its detailed treatment of the economics and power structure of National Socialism, the destruction of the rule of law in civil society and human rights, and its discussion of the excesses of anti-­Semitism. While Kolnai’s own methodical approach is easy to follow, it does present a problem, since his maxim ‘Let them explain themselves’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 18) refers to Nazi elaborations of self-­perception from various sources, which in turn must be assessed in terms of which of them played a central role in the Nazi movement that seized power in 1933. That Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels and Richard Walther Darré, whose writings Kolnai lists, belong to the inner circle given their roles is clear, but we can also associate these names with significant differences within the National Socialist structure. This differentiability applies even more to the intellectual currents that preceded the rise of National Socialism, which Kolnai rightly relates to the processing of German defeat in the First World War. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Ernst Jünger are just two examples that illustrate further differentiation, since such writers cannot immediately be classified as ‘National Socialist’. The reference to Nietzsche seems even more far-­fetched, who is properly characterised as neither (in Kolnai’s words) a ‘Satanist’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  14) nor a proto-­Fascist. I point out such inconsistencies at the outset because the intellectual– historical strand of Kolnai’s study – like other comparable studies – contains an

Aurel Kolnai and Franz Neumann   103 unresolved issue that should be distinguished from the normative and substantive parts of his analysis. For the thesis that National Socialism is ‘deeply rooted in German history and expressive of the German mind’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 18) is either trivially true or false: trivial true insofar as Germans or Austrians established and implemented National Socialism; false insofar as the German mind is not a monolithic entity, as Kolnai himself concedes in noting that National Socialism is not the same thing as Germanness (Kolnai, 1938, p. 18). What can be said at the most is that certain German traditions suggest an affinity with National Socialism or promote an identification with it, but this does not explain National Socialism on the basis of the German mind. For National Socialism to become a power that would dominate German history from 1933 on, concrete political circumstances were necessary that – theoretically speaking – related to historically contingent constellations. Following this clarification, I now turn to the strengths of Kolnai’s analysis, beginning with Chapter 6, ‘Morals, Law and Culture’. Here Kolnai states that a ‘ “German fascist state of pure blood” stands for an ‘ideal of irrational particularity’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 279) in conflict with general ideas of humanity. The ‘we’ of Germanness declares itself to be the ‘we’ of the ‘best of mankind’ and disavows any moral law applicable to all human beings. An excellent example of this sentiment is Darré’s restriction of Kant’s categorical imperative to German conditions of life (Kolnai, 1938, p. 279). This particularistic restriction of Kant’s ethics, which can also be documented in other National Socialist sources, appropriately marks the opposition between ‘moral universalism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 554, for example), which is repeatedly emphasised by Kolnai, and the particularism of National Socialism with its emphasis on Volk, race and blood. Although Kolnai is inclined to deny the particularism of National Socialism moral qualification, he sees the need to diagnose an ‘ideal of Nazi morals’ in the form of historical greatness and to characterise this ideal as the key to understanding ‘Neo-­German ethics’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  291). At the same time, however, Kolnai charges proponents of this view – such as Alfred Bäumler – with adhering to a ‘pseudo-­ethic’ or ‘pagan amoralism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 292). This ambivalence gives rise to a technical question that leads us to submit the wealth of material presented by Kolnai to contemporary analyses and discussions of National Socialist morality’s conception and characterisation. My approach distinguishes between different substantive characteristics of morality in a descriptive sense, on the one hand, and their normative evaluation, on the other. That is to say, the content of National Socialist morality is to be identified descriptively, even if, in agreement with Kolnai, our own moral view does not share that content. To be sure, an emotional hurdle inhibits us from speaking of a National Socialist morality at all, yet in making clear our moral standard of egalitarian universalism we will prevent any misunderstanding. The advantage of this approach is methodological clarity. The price to be paid is a historically informed moral pluralism in keeping with Kolnai’s substantive rejection of National Socialist morality, while not sharing in his moral monism, which if nothing else appeals to religious authority (Kolnai, 1938, p. 278).1

104   Rolf Zimmermann All this does not detract from Kolnai’s productive analyses in any way. Therefore, we can only concur when he pursues the morality of the völkisch particularism of National Socialism in terms of its relevance for the legal system and when he points out the tenets that drive the destruction of the rule of law in civil society. Kolnai clearly exposes Carl Schmitt’s view of the politicisation of the law, the attempt to ground the law in the ‘essence of the German people’ in the same vein as Erik Wolf and Roland Freisler’s conception of the law as being rooted in the organic life of the Volk (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  301–2, 306). Kolnai accordingly refers to revisions of the German legal code that open the door to arbitrary judicial decisions by introducing the criterion of ‘sound popular judgment’ into criminal law. The Nazi system of law promotes ‘contempt for the rights of man’ as shown not least by the anti-­Jewish laws that subject marriage or intimate relations between ‘Aryan’ Germans and Jews to legal sanctions on the grounds of ‘race defilement’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 308–9). His examination of the keyword ‘race’ is another strength of Kolnai’s study, for the ambiguity he identifies in the term shows that, while National Socialism does advocate a radical form of racism, it lacks a consistent or firm conception of race. Hitler is no exception here; his emphasis on race as the centre of the völkisch state (Kolnai, 1938, p. 437) in no way eliminates the fluctuation between biological, cultural and anthropologico–philosophical conceptions of race (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 439–43). Nevertheless, it is clear that the hierarchy of races associated with the conception of race precludes universal standards for mankind (Kolnai, 1938, p.  443). It is therefore understandable when Kolnai addresses the anti-­ Semitism of National Socialism in his critique of ‘tribal inhumanity’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  495) and attributes its ‘anti-­Jewish obsession’ primarily to the ‘fatal tension between Germany and the West’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 511). He accordingly gives priority to the notion of ‘anti-­Judaism’, which more adequately expresses the normative form of anti-­Semitism that views Jews as ‘carriers of the bacilli of freedom and progress’. This thought also links to current studies. As we can see from Barbara Zehnpfennig’s study of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Hitler’s racism is only apparently biological in character, and in truth pursues the homogeneity of mental qualities as anchored in particular peoples or races (Zehnpfennig, 2006, pp.  132–4). Kolnai comes close to such an analysis when, paraphrasing Hitler, he describes the ‘Jewish counter-­race’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 444) as the ‘historical and universal counterpart of the “Aryan” ’, a counterpart that stands for universal norms (Kolnai, 1938, p. 502). Kolnai’s failure to grasp fully the militant and murderous extremes to which anti-­Judaism was heading can be attributed to the period during which he wrote his study (through the summer of 1936). However, Kolnai does address the militancy of National Socialism on another level, and to this extent also articulates the threat posed by anti-­Judaism. For if we take National Socialism seriously as a new development, a view that Kolnai emphatically advocates (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 17–18), then we must see that the radicalness of völkisch, ‘tribal’ particularism (Kolnai, 1938, p. 404), together with

Aurel Kolnai and Franz Neumann   105 the Nazi ideal of historical greatness, is geared towards military conflict. Kolnai clearly raises the threat of war as an issue (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 404, 413–14, 426). He also perceives Hitler’s theses along these lines, reproducing Hitler’s deliberately one-­sided commentary on the outbreak of the First World War and noting his claim that the world does not exist for the sake of cowardly peoples. There is also Hitler’s claim that the rights of men override state law, while the right of a people to exist, in particular the Germans, qualifies as such a ‘right of men’. These claims express the conviction, guiding Nazism, that Volkstum (national identity) embodies the fundamental force of historical, cultural and political development (Kolnai, 1938, p.  435). In political and legal respects, giving Volkstum preference over the state yields a de-­differentiation or harnessing of human structures of order, which Kolnai appositely identifies. Finally, we must emphasise the overall picture drawn by Kolnai in cultural terms. In reference to Protestant or Catholic writers who attempt to draw a connection between Christianity and National Socialism, he speaks of the ‘roaring waves of Kulturkampf  ’ that indicate the far-­reaching spiritual upheaval that is leading, in the form of National Socialism, to a kind of paganised Christianity (Kolnai, 1938, p.  251). A similar picture emerges in the adaptation of science and education to tribal doctrines of National Socialism (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  310–22). Human self-­conception is being altogether subjugated to a metaphysics of Germanness that creates a world of its own, in which the individual functions as a ‘bearer of Volk substance’ and no longer as a ‘personality with its autonomous selfhood’ (Kolnai, pp. 562–3). Kolnai thus culturally characterises the war against the West as a ‘religious war’ rather than a ‘war of the worlds’ (Kolnai, p.  562). Kolnai has to leave the question open as to whether this war will lead to a new world war, but his analysis indicates the likelihood of precisely what would occur in 1939. In view of the later development of National Socialism and in anticipation of Neumann’s analyses, the main points that I have taken up from Kolnai’s work can be systematised according to ideal types of moral–political phenomena, in Max Weber’s sense of the term. The Western type and the Nazi type can be differentiated from one another as follows: first, we must settle on a basic moral understanding that, as a dominant centre for particular ‘I’ and ‘we’ perspectives, is considered binding. In the universalist, Western view, each person attributes to himself the same moral status as he does to any other person and understands himself as a member of a ‘we’ community in which every member shares this self-­conception. An expression of this view is the mutual recognition of equal rights for every person. Nazism opposes this centre of egalitarian definition with its own centre: Germans or Aryans claim a moral status that is higher than that of non-­Germans or non-­Aryans and partake in the self-­conception of a ‘we’ community that enforces this claim. This particularistic self-­conception is the existential and concrete adversary of egalitarian and universalist self-­conceptions that are rejected as ‘Jewish’. Kolnai makes an analogous distinction between a ‘Moralistic Type’, to which Judaism belongs, and an ‘Imperial Type’, to which Nazism corresponds (Kolnai, 1938, p. 406).

106   Rolf Zimmermann Second, a network of social norms and institutions exists for each type that is tied to the respective moral centre. For the Western type, this comes down to non-­violent civilian life, social and public condemnation of discrimination, and a legal system based on human rights, which also binds together the democratically organised political sphere of the particular society both inwardly and outwardly. Nazism, on the other hand, aspires to organise all social and political life for the purpose of strengthening the Aryan–German Volksgemeinschaft according to the Führer principle. Legal constraints on enforcing the interests of the Volksgemeinschaft exist neither internally nor as they are directed outwardly. On the contrary, as Carl Schmitt (1934) put it, ‘the Führer safeguards the Law’, implementing, so to speak, ‘true Law’ for the community. Third, both types are concerned with the relationship to violence. The Western form demands the non-­violent resolution of conflicts within the relevant ‘we’ communities and respect for the state’s monopoly on violence. In the case of the Nazi type – Kolnai’s ‘Imperial Type’ – violence is a legitimate means to assert the internal homogeneity of the ‘we’ community against ‘alien’ opponents. Similarly, outwardly directed violent racial struggle provides the basic orientation for the preservation and continued development of the Aryan–German Volksgemeinschaft and justifies wars of aggression in the guise of defensive action. In contrast, the Western type finds the militaristic use of force acceptable only in cases of self-­defence and in accordance with international law. This systematisation provides not only a guide to reading the wealth of detail Kolnai offers us, but it also offers a framework for better appreciating Neumann’s study Behemoth. A transition to Neumann’s Behemoth is offered in Kolnai’s description of the ‘Totalitarian state’, which he breaks down into the following characteristics: In truth, the Totalitarian State is the very opposite of a state which contains a variety of parties.… The Totalitarian State is (1) a State which claims to enforce a unitarian and obligatory scale of values upon the whole of society, and to some extent on every individual belonging to it; and (2) a State which is politically uniform in colour. i.e., identified with one definite trend or party, and a set of rulers appearing as a closed body outside competition. To put it briefly, it is the One Party State.… The aspect of ‘One Party State’ as such is developed to the same degree in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The aspect of the supra-­political encroachment of the Party is incomparably stronger and more serious in the Nazi Empire.… The Totalitarian State means the renewal of the Tribal State at the stage of industrial civilization. (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 160–1) Kolnai’s conception of the one-­party state combines ‘state’ and ‘party’ into a relationship whose internal difficulty takes us to the crux of Neumann’s analyses between 1941 and 1944. Neumann’s study of the tension between state and party led him to the thesis that the restructuring of the state, which can be observed in this case, culminates in a non-­state, a chaotic condition, ‘a rule of lawlessness

Aurel Kolnai and Franz Neumann   107 and anarchy’ (Neumann, 1967, p.  vii) to which he gives the name Behemoth. Apart from the biblical connotations, in political theory the name recalls Thomas Hobbes, whose work Behemoth, or The Long Parliament addressed the lawlessness during the time of the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. Hobbes’s Leviathan, on the other hand, presents an order that, as a matter of principle, maintains the rule of law and preserves individual rights (Neumann, 1967, p. vii). Apart from his analysis of the political structure of National Socialism based on the fundamental characteristics of the ‘totalitarian state’ (Behemoth, Part 1), Neumann examines the ‘totalitarian monopolistic economy’ (Behemoth, Part 2). This part, devoted to the economics of National Socialism, takes up a large part of Neumann’s book. Kolnai also allocates a chapter to the economy, but Neumann’s study is more wide-­ranging and detailed. However, Kolnai also finds that the Nazi understanding of socialism pursues a reorganisation of capitalism rather than its supersession. He thus speaks of a ‘revival of class-­rule’ in the context of ‘militaristic “communitarian” … modes of living’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 330) and clearly sees the connection between ‘trust capitalism’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  355–72) and the political ruling elite of National Socialism, which in his view is leaning towards a ‘Servile Society’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 373–93). The fact that Neumann dwells much more extensively on an economic analysis of National Socialism must be understood, in light of his Marxist perspective, as being related to the context of the Second International and to Neumann’s activities for the Social Democrats (SPD) in the Weimar Republic. Like the preeminent economist Rudolf Hilferding, Neumann first banked on the evolutionary surmounting of capitalism through the reformist workers’ movement under the leadership of the SPD. But he increasingly distanced himself from the conception of ‘organised capitalism’, which for Hilferding was accompanied by the hope that one day the democratic state determined by labour would domesticate capitalism and transform it into socialistic forms. Instead, the empirically ascertainable gradual monopolisation of the economy meant for Neumann that class struggle occurs on the political level, in an effort to determine the direction of state intervention. This is how politics can assume primacy over the economy: ‘Who is to interfere and on whose behalf becomes the most important question for modern society’ (Neumann, 1967, p. 260). This problem guides Neumann’s theorisation of power in his analysis of National Socialism. I will begin with the main points from his analysis of the totalitarian monopolistic economy and then go on to comment on his politico-­legal structural discussions in light of Kolnai. Neumann characterises the National Socialist economy in terms of two particular features: ‘It is a monopolistic economy and a command economy. It is a private capitalistic economy, regimented by the totalitarian state. We suggest as a name best to describe it, “Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism” ’ (Neumann, 1967, p. 261, emphasis in original). This concept precludes National Socialism as a form of state capitalism or even a form of classless society as a result of the Volksgemeinschaft ideology. By rejecting such ideas and entering into a detailed analysis of the National

108   Rolf Zimmermann Socialist economy, Neumann develops a model for how three types of economy can be distinguished and related to one another: competitive economy, monopolistic economy and command economy. Markets and competition are in no way eliminated but continue to operate in a private, capitalistic order largely geared towards large monopolistic companies (Neumann, 1967, p. 291). Additional to this are the party’s own economic sectors (the ‘Göring combine’, for example), which owed their establishment to gangster methods (Neumann, 1967, pp. 298–9). Other main factors are the ministerial bureaucracy and the Wehrmacht’s demands. The organisation of labour is authoritarian, and the labour market is controlled by eliminating the trade unions (Neumann, 1967, pp.  337–8), but this does not lead to the abandonment of regulations for employment contracts altogether (Neumann, 1967, pp.  339, 421). Neumann combines his economic analysis with a structural description of the dominant class in National Socialism, which consists of four groups: The army needs the party because the war is totalitarian. The army cannot organize society ‘totally’; that is left to the party. The party, on the other hand, needs the army to win the war and thus to stabilize and even aggrandize its own power. Both need monopolistic industry to guarantee continuous expansion. And all three need the bureaucracy to achieve the technical rationality without which the system could not operate. Each group is sovereign and authoritarian; each is equipped with legislative, administrative, and judicial power of its own; each is thus capable of carrying out swiftly and ruthlessly the necessary compromises among the four. (Neumann, 1967, pp. 397–8) This structural description makes clear that the undivided sovereignty of a unified state power has basically disintegrated into four blocks of power with mutually competing claims to sovereignty. A coherent constitutional order based on the example of the rule of law in civil society is thus in the process of dissolution, making the notion of ‘totalitarian pluralism’, which is found in the secondary literature, appropriate here (Bast, 1999, pp. 296–7). If a unified political sovereign no longer exists, a condition arises that corresponds, in terms of sovereignty theory, to a civil war situation. We thus arrive at something analogous to Hobbes’s Behemoth and to the evolutionarily progressive function of the rule of law in civil society in the tradition of the Leviathan. Neumann disagrees that the National Socialist system is a state in the true sense of the word, concluding that I venture to suggest that we are confronted with a form of society in which the ruling groups control the rest of the population directly, without the mediation of that rational though coercive apparatus hitherto known as the state. This new social form is not yet fully realized, but the trend exists which defines the very essence of the regime. (Neumann, 1967, p. 470)

Aurel Kolnai and Franz Neumann   109 In lieu of the rational function of a state, in National Socialism the charismatic leader mediates between the populace and the apparatuses of power, whose willingness to compromise with one another he must maintain. At the same time, the leader themselves is bound to the conditions of the indicated power structure and cannot fully resolve – at best they can only mitigate in an ad hoc fashion – the constitutional conflict between state and party that emerged soon after the Nazi seizure of power, for example (Neumann, 1967, pp.  62–3, 82). Appealing to Weber’s theory of charisma, Neumann locates the source of Hitler’s charisma in the ideology of national identity and in the amalgam of racism and anti-­Semitism to be found in both the Führer and his National Socialist movement (Neumann, 1967, pp. 98–9). Much more clearly than Kolnai, Neumann recognises that ‘National Socialism is the first anti-­Semitic movement to advocate the complete destruction of the Jews’ (Neumann, 1967, p. 111) and that its population policy ‘appears as a practice of men utterly pagan’ (Neumann, 1967, p. 112). Out of this diagnosis, Neumann develops a detailed critique of the destruction of the rule of law through the state’s anti-­Jewish legislation, which leads to the complete abrogation of legal protection that was previously guaranteed by the criminal code and, from 1943 on, finally excludes the Jews from the operation of the law and society (Neumann, 1967, pp.  113–15, 550). Neumann distinguishes between non-­totalitarian and totalitarian anti-­Semitism; the latter could also be characterised as a murderous or species-­negating incarnation of anti-­Semitism. Totalitarian anti-­Semitism has a magical character, according to Neumann, and is not amenable to rational discussion (Neumann, 1967, p. 122). On the other hand, the actual physical destruction of the Jews leads us again to ask ‘Why’? (Neumann, 1967, p. 550). Neumann offers two points of view in response, beginning with anti-­Semitism as the ‘spearhead of terror’, which serves to test methods of repression against other peoples or dissidents. On the other hand, he sees in the culmination of the persecution and destruction of the Jews a sort of identity politics conducted in terms of ‘collective guilt’: The participation in so vast a crime as the extermination of the Eastern Jews makes the German army, the civil service, and large masses perpetrators and accessories in that crime and makes it therefore impossible for them to leave the Nazi boat. (Neumann, 1967, pp. 551–2) These reflections point to the question of how far National Socialism should be clarified by means of the social psychology of the group of perpetrators that was able to develop within its power structure. Neumann at the time was not able to grasp the overall extent and details of the annihilation of the Jews, especially since the bulk of significant documents were not yet available at that time. The task of processing this wealth of material fell to Neumann’s student, Raul Hilberg, whose definitive book on the Holocaust has become an enduring standard for work in the field (Hilberg, 1961).

110   Rolf Zimmermann The aforementioned elements of Neumann’s study reveal how he leaves behind the paradigm of orthodox Marxism in two crucial respects. First, he does not attempt to give an economic explanation of National Socialism in terms of the developmental conditions of capitalism. National Socialism is not simply a tool of German industry (Neumann, 1967, p. 185), but must be analysed in relation to the sources of its radical ideology and mass appeal, as well as the circumstances of the failure of Weimar-­era democracy. The entanglement of National Socialism and monopoly capitalism represents a subsequent analytical task, which is primarily focused on the resulting power structure. Second, the critique of National Socialism in terms of the theory of sovereignty, and the emphasis on the formal rationality of the rule of law in civil society, both refer to important demarcations that permit a reading – along the lines of the aforementioned ideal types – of National Socialism as an independent historical phenomenon that stands in opposition to the Western type. In devoting a major part of his analysis to the legal sector, Neumann documents the moral, protective function of the law. He arrives at contrasts that substantially add to the typology defined earlier and that follow Kolnai. One such result is described here: If general law is the basic form of right, if law is not only voluntas but also ratio, then we must deny the existence of law in the fascist state.… But true generality is not possible in a society that cannot dispense with power.… Absolute denial of the generality of law is the central point in National Socialist legal theory. (Neumann, 1967, pp. 451–2) We must add to this characteristic the abandonment of legal generality on the level of international law, which Neumann demonstrates by pointing to Carl Schmitt’s anti-­universalistic ‘large space’ (Großraum) theory as the foundation of international law. Space (Raum) is no longer to be a binding legal form governing relations between sovereign states, but rather a foundation of international order – a principle in keeping with the goal of securing German imperialism against possible foreign interventions. Schmitt meanwhile rejects traditional international law as a Jewish and British imperialist invention (Neumann, 1967, pp.  156–7). This fact again underscores the contrast between Western universalism and Nazi particularism. Like Kolnai, Neumann worked out as early as 1935 that the National Socialist system was heading towards an imperialistic war (Neumann1967, p. 360), to the extent that Neumann can see this view confirmed by his later analysis. Indirectly, Neumann thus also confirms what Aurel Kolnai had perceptively anticipated.

Note 1 This is a reference to ‘divine law’; see also Kolnai, 1938, p. 421 regarding Scheler’s ‘objectivist ethics’.

Aurel Kolnai and Franz Neumann   111

References Bast, Jürgen (1999). Totalitärer Pluralismus. Zu Franz L. Neumanns Analysen der politischen und rechtlichen Struktur der NS-­Herrschaft. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hilberg, Raul (1961). The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Neumann, Franz (1967). Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944. London: Frank Cass & Co. Schmitt, Carl (1934). ‘Der Führer schützt das Recht’. Deutsche Juristen-­Zeitung 39, 15: 945–50. Zehnpfennig, Barbara (2006). Hitlers Mein Kampf. Eine Interpretation, 3rd edition. Munich: Fink.

Part III

Kolnai’s work and the reception of The War Against the West

8 Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West contextualised Lee Congdon1

Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West, an ‘Additional Book’ for the month of July 1938, which Gollancz nonetheless called ‘the most important book the [Left Book] Club has issued’ (Lewis, 1970, p.  91), was more subtly Russophile than previous books published by the Club and distinguished primarily by its Germanophobia. Of Slovak–Jewish extraction, Kolnai was born Aurel Stein in Budapest in 1900. Intellectually precocious, he read voraciously in several languages and, around his twelfth year, let it be known that he was an atheist, though one who continued to esteem the Judeo-­Christian moral tradition. Indeed, as the storm clouds of war gathered, he, unlike the majority of his countrymen, formed the opinion that tsarist Russia was less ‘hostile to the moral traditions of Christendom’ than Prussian Germany, ‘with its compound of pervasive militarism and boisterous commercialism underlain by a subconscious pagan and distorted Lutheran fervor of “piety” ’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 7). When war came, therefore, he sympathised with the Entente and opposed Germany, Austria – Hungary’s ally. ‘It was easier’, Kolnai later admitted, for a Jew – no matter how assimilated, liberal and unequivocally Hungarian in his national consciousness – than for a Gentile to take a detached view of the foreign situation and to choose his side after the mode, as it were, of a disinterested arbiter. (Kolnai, 1999, p. 11) At the same time, however, he pointed out that the Hungarian national tradition carried within it an anti-­German bias and a strong affinity for things French and, still more, English: ‘Thus did my loyalty to our Western “enemies” ’ treasonable as it might be, spring from the national soil which had bred me’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 13). By the time the United States entered the war and Woodrow Wilson became the principal Allied spokesman, Kolnai had come to view the struggle less as one for Western, Christian civilisation than as one for democracy and national self-­determination – ideals that have triggered many a conflict. ‘My being a pro-­ Ally’, he later recalled with regret, ‘turned me into a leftist, while the leftist

116   Lee Congdon movement in [Hungary] was both gathering momentum and assuming an explicitly pro-­Ally sign, with the Allied cause itself evolving toward the left’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 26). To be sure, he had not become a Marxist. As a worshipful admirer of Oszkár Jászi and a self-­styled ‘liberal Socialist’, he preferred progressive evolution to what he described disparagingly as regressive revolution. He rallied in support of the Mihály Karolyi government, but joined the silenced opposition when Béla Kun came to power. A fortnight before the Soviet Republic collapsed, he and his parents made their way first to Czechoslovakia and then to Austria. Early in 1920, the Steins ventured back to Hungary, only to find the White Terror still raging. Knowing that he could not live in such a world, Kolnai retreated alone to Vienna. Only twenty, he managed to eke out a living as an editor and a contributor to Hungarian- and German-­language publications. Having come under the spell of psychoanalysis while still in Budapest, he also found enough time to write, in German, a psychoanalytical critique of communism entitled Psychoanalyse und Soziologie: Zur Psychologie von Masse und Gesellschaft (1920, ‘Psychoanalysis and Sociology: On the Psychology of the Masses and Society’). When the book caused minor stirs in psychoanalytic circles and Soviet Russia, the London publishing house of George Allen & Unwin commissioned and quickly released an English translation. Such international attention might well have turned Kolnai’s head had he not been so intensely serious about life and work. However well read he was for someone his age, he recognised that there was much he did not know, particularly concerning ethics, a subject that had always preoccupied him. In the autumn of 1922, therefore, he enrolled as a student of philosophy at the University of Vienna. From the first, he was drawn to phenomenology, ‘that glorious movement of a new realism, the most important departure in philosophy since Socrates and Aristotle’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 126). He subscribed not so much to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl as that of Max Scheler, the tortured and brilliant thinker who essayed to establish the objective and absolute character of ethical values without having to adopt Kant’s formalism, and thereby miss the richness and diversity of the concrete, content-­filled, moral life. Like many of the German phenomenologists, Scheler was, before his apostasy, a Roman Catholic, and his work helped to awaken in Kolnai a profound respect for historic Christianity. In the end, however, the Hungarian was won over to Catholicism by Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s apologetical writings, which he read in the original after working to improve his English. Thanks to the remarkable English writer, himself a convert, Kolnai discovered that one could be a social reformer and a conservative Christian, indeed, that insistence upon what ought to be is meaningless unless it is based on a primal affirmation of what is; that there can be no pith in our criticism of realities unless we are ‘optimists’ about Reality; that we can only aim at a more perfect order if we first accept Order. (Kolnai, 1999, p. 114)

The War Against the West contextualised   117 Chesterton also alerted Kolnai to the possibility of being English and Catholic, and in that way he deepened the Hungarian’s ‘innate and incurable Anglomania’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 113). Was there not, Kolnai reflected, a ‘specific kinship between the English and the Catholic mind’, an affinity of the two with common sense (conscious, as such, of its own limits), tradition and manifoldly tempered wisdom; a certain carelessness about the appearance of inconsistency; the proper genius of every object, thing or tradition being regarded as more important than the show of systematic coherence; a taste for oddness and asymmetry, a patient appreciation of the concrete, the casual and the contingent. (Kolnai, 1999, p. 113) As if to place a seal on the close relationship Kolnai now discerned between the Christian and certain kinds of philosophic mind, he was received into the Church of Rome on the same day in 1926 that he graduated from the University of Vienna. Although he had demonstrated a talent for formal philosophy in his dissertation, subsequently published as Der Ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit (1927a; Ethical Value and Reality), he did not seek an academic appointment; he knew his chances were slim and that, in any case, a teaching career would yield no income for several years. Even more important, Kolnai could not persuade himself to withdraw into an ivory tower at a time when Europe was in the throes of a gathering spiritual and political crisis. Thus, he worked as a freelance editor and writer with a mission ‘to preserve and strengthen Christian civilization, with constitutional democracy as the régime proper to it’ – in part, by offering criticism of its principal enemies (Kolnai, 1952–5, pp. 33–4). Of those enemies, Kolnai devoted most of his critical attention to psychoanalysis – which he had repudiated completely – communism and Fascism. It is worth noting that until about 1934, he considered communism, an ideology that presented itself as the culmination of the progressive movement, to be the most dangerous. Because communism claimed to fix its eyes on a historically determined future and to embody the people’s will, it could justify a more encompassing tyranny. ‘In bolshevism’, Kolnai wrote in a 1926 number of Der deutsche Volkswirt, there is a great deal more nobility and positive good – but also more ominous malice and unlimited arrogance – than in fascism. It stands at once closer to God and to Satan. For that reason it is, despite many shared characteristics, a far more diabolical force and a more immediate danger for those who seek God. (Kolnai, 1926, p. 213) To be sure, Kolnai was referring to Italian Fascism and not German National Socialism. With, however, the coming of the Depression and Hitler’s consequent

118   Lee Congdon rise to power, he soon arrived at the conclusion that Nazism constituted an unrivalled danger to Christian – and democratic – Europe. ‘I grew forgetful’, he later recalled, ‘of the axiom that so long as a trace of Communist power existed it had to be regarded as the chief enemy’ (Kolnai, 1999, p.  144). Influenced by his close friend and mentor, Karl Polanyi, he flirted with the idea that the Soviet dictatorship might eventually evolve into a genuine democracy and that, in any case, it was ‘not the target on which the main weight of our enmity should be concentrated’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 133). ‘Anti-­Fascism’ had become Kolnai’s creed, and in its service he began work, in English, on a critical study of the National Socialist mind, The War Against the West. By the autumn of 1934, he had amassed an imposing collection of quotes from several dozen Nazi and counter-­revolutionary books, but he was still without a publisher. At a loss to know where to turn, he received word from Polanyi’s friend, Irene Grant, that Victor Gollancz had expressed an interest. Hurriedly, he forwarded a synopsis to Gollancz, who responded by saying that he would ‘immensely like to publish it’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 162). After submitting the first chapter, Kolnai received a contract early in 1935. Over the next year and a half, Kolnai wrote at a feverish pace, almost always in coffeehouses. With a nice irony, one was frequented by Austrian Nazis, who had, of course, no inkling of the Hungarian’s project. The manuscript was complete by July 1936; owing, however, to Gollancz’s justifiable irritation at its length and a linguistic overhauling in London, the book did not appear until two years later. By then, Kolnai had left his beloved Vienna for the West, the ‘Promised land’. Kolnai mistakenly believed that John Lewis, who was then putting his manuscript into shape, would not distort ‘any passage in my text into something more in tune with Marxist dogma or the Party line’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 168). By the time his visitor’s permit expired and he had to leave for Paris, Kolnai felt naively confident that his work was in good hands. In July 1938, Gollancz published The War Against the West. Whatever Left Book Club members thought of the book, they could not have found it easy going. Well over 700 pages in length, it was a compendium of citations, with commentary, from Nazi or counter-­revolutionary publications. Badly in need of editing, it was repetitious, unfocused and undiscriminating in its critical assault. Indeed, the book belongs to a genre that might best be called ‘From Luther to Hitler’, so inclusive is Kolnai’s list of Nazis and proto-­Nazis. ‘It is impossible’, he informed his readers, ‘thoroughly to understand the spirit of Nazi Germany in the light of the post-­war economic and moral crisis alone; the catastrophe of defeat and financial disaster may have provided the soil in which the germs could thrive, but the germs themselves can be traced back with certainty to pre-­war times.’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 33) In fact, according to Kolnai, National Socialism was deeply rooted in German history and expressive of the ‘German mind’. That being the case, scarcely any

The War Against the West contextualised   119 modern German thinker was free of the Nazi contagion. Luther did not lead a movement for reform, but one against Rome and the West; in practice, Hegel and Hitler were the same; Nietzsche and Stefan George contributed most to the rise of National Socialism; Max Scheler belonged ‘in the pastures of Nazi thought’; Eric Voegelin was a National Fascist; Karl Jaspers’s writing ‘exhales a spirit of deliberate barbarism’ (emphasis added); and, more justifiably but still one-­sidedly, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger were out-­and-out Nazis. With the latter, in fact, the German mind had returned quite consciously to its source: ‘Heidegger is to Luther what the stern totalitarian tyranny of Fascism is to monarchical absolutism strengthened by the Lutheran contempt for and secularization of pragmatic morality’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 14, 18, 128, 143, 209, 282, 315, 424, 566 in preceding paragraph). Years later, when he was writing his memoirs, Kolnai confessed that some of the theories he had condemned in The War Against the West were not only ingenious but only very remotely connected with National Socialism. Even in the Nietzschean, Stefan Georgian and Youth Movement protest against the dreary shallowness of liberal society and the spiritual destructiveness of industrialism, there was a sound core. (Kolnai, 1999, p. 144) And yet, ‘it was vitiated from the root by a fulsome pervert’s naturalism and vitalist paganism, and levelled not so much against the decay of civilization as against civilization en bloc’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 144, emphasis in original). It was, in fact, Kolnai’s recognition that the war against the West was in its essence ‘a religious war’, a war of paganism against Christianity, that lent genuine significance to his deeply flawed book. In citation after citation from Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazis, such as Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Stapel and Ernst Krieck, he laid bare the obsessive Nazi effort to replace Christianity with a crude and barbaric form of pagan religion, to twist the cross of Christ into a swastika. The tribal religion of the Germans was to supersede the faith that summoned all men and women, no matter to what nation they belonged, and thus to ‘liberate’ the Germans from the moral constraints imposed by the Judeo–Christian tradition. In their stead, the Nazis put ‘the morals of greatness, ruthlessness, naked strength and efficiency’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 293, 562). It was not, of course, this insight that impressed Gollancz and Lewis. They made The War Against the West a Left Book Club selection because they liked the Popular Front spirit that animated the text. Under the influence of Polanyi, Kolnai argued that Christianity, communism and democracy were brothers under the skin, members of the Western family. When confronted with Nazi Weltanschauung, therefore, ‘a Russian Bolshevik might almost feel tempted to sympathize with Roman Catholicism, a British Tory to discover the attractions of Russian Bolshevism, or even an English Left intellectual to acknowledge some acceptable characteristics in French Democracy’. Kolnai concluded that the

120   Lee Congdon West had to forge a union, however loose, with Soviet Russia (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 598, 679). Kolnai’s idol, Oszkár Jászi, did not agree, and in an otherwise flattering letter he said so: I was very pleased with your book. It is the best and most complete book on Nazism yet to appear. On every essential point I agree with your theses; but I think that you carefully avoided Marxism (beat around the bush, or perhaps Polanyi’s Christian communism exerted an influence on you). But Marxism bore the greatest responsibility for the destruction of the democratic, liberal doctrine – in a word, of the principles of Natural Law. Moreover, you were a little too eager to invite the Bolshies, fresh from their political mass murders, into the camp of the defenders of the democratic world order. (Jászi, 1997, p. 75) His criticism did not, Jászi concluded, diminish his admiration for the book, and he was pleased that the American Political Science Review had invited him to review it. The review was, indeed, full of praise, but Jászi repeated his objection to his younger friend’s ‘too hasty and unqualified invitation to the Bolsheviks to participate in the common defense of humanitarian values’ (Jászi, 1938, p. 1167). What was a weakness to Jászi was a strength to the pro-­communist Left. It was not surprising, then, that Lewis invited Kolnai to lecture at the third, and last, Left Book Club summer school in August 1939. The subject was ‘The Fascist Threat to Western Civilisation’. Surrounded by communists and communist sympathisers who suspected him of being ‘a reactionary, and an agent of “capitalist imperialism” ’ (Kolnai, 1939),2 Kolnai nevertheless enjoyed his stay and regretted that he had to return to Paris. On 25 November 1940, the Kolnais boarded an American ship bound for New York. They were to spend the next four and a half years in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. ‘I was’, Kolnai subsequently observed, ‘a misfit in America’, not least because of the distaste he felt for the American religion of Democracy. This came as something of a surprise to him, for he had long considered himself to be a democrat, even a social democrat. He came to recognise, however, that it was constitutional liberty, not equality, that he valued, and that democracy as egalitarianism tended ‘to react adversely on constitutionalism, in that it undermines the qualitative, intellectual, and moral foundations of rational and responsible citizenship, and thus invites demagogic tyranny and popular dictatorship’ (Kolnai, 1999, pp. 195–6, 203). After the war Kolnai remained preoccupied with events in Europe, in particular the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe. Nazism having been defeated, communism seemed clearly to present the greatest threat to whatever was left of Christian civilisation. Kolnai certainly knew that he was not alone in this recognition, but he was convinced that too many anti-­communists harboured mistaken

The War Against the West contextualised   121 ideas concerning the nature of the communist peril. Kolnai divided the anti-­ communist errors he had identified into four categories, the first of which he labelled ‘pragmatic or circumstantial’ (Kolnai, 1952, p.  27). Among these was the idea, advanced by Tibor Szamuely and others, that communism had continued the work begun by the tsars, and that tsarist and communist Russia were both forms of oriental despotism. There was an element of truth in that idea, Kolnai acknowledged, but it had the effect of obscuring the deeply subversive and universalist character of the communist doctrine (Kolnai, 1952, p. 27). A second category of anti-­communist error Kolnai called ‘progressive criticism’ (Kolnai, 1952, pp. 46–7). Like Arthur Koestler at the time of his resignation from the Party (and István Mészáros after 1956), some held that communism had failed to keep its promises, that it had instituted a new state capitalism even more exploitative and inegalitarian than the old private capitalism. Such a critique, Kolnai charged, reflected an acceptance of the communist ideal and a rejection only of the Soviet experiment; it left the essence, the vital core, of communism untouched. And so did the criticism according to which the Soviet regime was not a dictatorship of but over the proletariat. Kolnai wrote: Communism is not an execrable regime for being contrary to the ‘will of the people’, but because it is essentially a challenge flung at the sovereignty of God. Communism violates the divine order of nature not because it is an imperfect dictatorship of the proletariat but because it seeks to be a perfect one. (Kolnai, 1952, p. 63) As man’s rebellion against God, and hence against the natural (including the moral) order He had established, communism could not, Kolnai insisted, be interpreted in purely ‘naturalistic and pseudo-­scientific’ terms, that is as a mere response to poverty or social injustice. On the contrary, it was evil itself, intrin­ sic evil. There were some who recognised this but who then wondered aloud whether Western civilisation, with its idols of progress, prosperity, technology and the People, was worth defending. Kolnai acknowledged the force of that critique, but argued for recognition of an ‘order of urgency’ (Kolnai, 1978, p. 39). Communism was the world’s principal and most immediate evil; the critique of democracy could therefore await its defeat. Secure in his faith and satisfied that he had done what he could to combat communism, Kolnai devoted the years that remained to him primarily to working out a moral philosophy that while not narrowly ‘Catholic’ was broadly Christian, particularly in its insistence upon the existence of evil. Kolnai regarded the duty of ‘non-­maleficence’ as thematically – theoretically and existentially – primary (cf. Ross, [1933] 1988, p. 22). He did so because, as a phenomenologist, he concluded that moral experience was ‘in the first place an experience of evil and of the “sign-­posts,” “taboos” or “interdicts” which warn us of its presence’ (Kolnai, 1955, p.  27). The moral consciousness dwelt far more on an evil done than on a good left undone; it did not suffer loss of sleep

122   Lee Congdon because its possessor was not a saint, but it did endure pangs of conscience when its possessor broke a promise, betrayed a trust or uttered a lie. The need to emphasise moral intrinsicalism was brought home to Kolnai with special force by the 1960s vogue of ‘situation ethics’ and the substitution of ‘love’ for all moral imperatives. In an exchange of views with the situationist Joseph Fletcher, he warned against ‘the infantile fancy’ of man’s ‘all-­ goodness ensured by pressing the one magic button of Love’. The phrase ‘God is Love’, however biblical, he thought hyperbolic, but far worse was the subtle inversion – ‘Love is God’ – made by growing numbers of those who, by doing so, sought to set themselves ‘free’ from all responsibility to objective moral norms. Their individual conscience alone was to be morally sovereign (Kolnai, 1970, pp. 251–2, 255). Such a notion Kolnai could not but reject, but not because he failed to attach importance to conscience. On the contrary, he had profitably read Cardinal Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, in particular the sections relating to conscience. ‘The feeling of conscience’, Newman had written, and Kolnai agreed, ‘is a moral sense, and a sense of duty; a judgment of the reason and a magisterial dictate’ (Newman, 1947, p. 80). That it was ‘a judgment of the reason’ was especially important to the Hungarian; for him morality was not simply a matter of convention, much less of some vague ‘feeling’ (Kolnai, 1978, p. 148). As important as conscience was, however, Kolnai knew that acting or not acting in conformity with it could not be the only test of right or wrong behaviour. Conscience could err, and never more so than when it was ‘overlain’ by something, that is when it adapted itself to some non-­moral absolute such as communism. Genuine conscience, conscience as it ought to be, was always engaged in a dialogue with the moral consensus of mankind: That consensus is not accurately or exhaustively represented by a specified system, creed, person or collective. It is laid down in the universe of moral intuitions, traditions and codes, which are necessarily incomplete and fraught with ambiguities and inadequacies, and are therefore in need of being interpreted, supplemented, re-­stated and re-­emphasized by Conscience. (Kolnai, 1978, p. 19) Conscience had to work actively and critically within the moral consensus or tradition; only in that way could an individual discover a reliable guide to moral conduct. Now the first problem with which Kolnai had to concern himself was whether or not there was a moral consensus. Did not, as relativists claimed, different individuals embrace different moral values? His answer was that while, of course, some difference of moral judgement could be found, the vast majority of people, and not simply the best and brightest, recognised that, say, one ought not to prevaricate or to break one’s promises or to betray a trust. One ought to help those

The War Against the West contextualised   123 less fortunate than oneself rather than take advantage of them. The fact of moral failure, of not living up to moral standards, was irrelevant to the all-­but-universal recognition of their binding character. Nor did Kolnai restrict his gaze to the moral consensus of his own, Judeo– Christian, civilisation, at least not after he had read Edmund Husserl’s posthumous work, Experience and Judgment. With that work firmly in mind, he observed that it was vital for the philosopher ‘to be world-­conscious’, to think within the context of an always limited but ever-­expanding ‘horizon’ of relevant but inexplicit moral intuition (Kolnai, 1978, p.  149). In that way the philosopher’s moral consciousness could draw upon the collective wisdom of those outside his cultural orbit and thereby arrive at a still greater appreciation for moral objectivity. To be sure, different civilisations did, sometimes, present striking examples of departure from the moral consensus, but  the discordance between the factual beliefs of men, their religions, their para- or nonreligious outlooks, not to speak of their dominant individual and collective interests [is far greater than that] between their moral beliefs all over the world and along its history! (Kolnai, 1978, p. 158) Kolnai’s argument, in short, was that there existed far more intercultural agreement concerning moral norms, and hence more of an identity of moral consciousness, than relativists led people to believe. And that agreement was particularly obvious when one ignored bizarre and atypical moral claims and systems, and examined such important moral compendia as the Code of Hammurabi, the Decalogue, Egyptian ethical texts, the Koran and so forth. Having made the case for the existence of a moral consensus, Kolnai next considered whether it was absolute in the sense of being immutable, and concluded that it was not. He characterised it instead as ‘quasi absolute’ when he might better have written ‘authoritative’ (Kolnai, 1978, p. 154). Like conscience – with which, in persons of strong character, it was in permanent dialogue, it was always open to criticism and improvement. Moral norms were not, as Saint Thomas taught, ‘Natural Laws’ discoverable once and for all by reason, but crystallisations of the collective moral wisdom and insight of people in all times and places. New insights could and did produce modifications of the consensus, though in the majority of cases those modifications were such as to establish new responsibilities rather than new ‘freedoms’, and the burden of proof would always rest with those lobbying for change. Moreover, that proof would have to persuade more than a small group of bien pensant Westerners. There existed a great difference, Kolnai insisted, between objective moral consensus and a simple historical ethos such as ‘our own extravagant, destructive and stupidly dogmatic belief in all-­comprehensive Equality’ (Kolnai, 1978, pp. 154, 161). Kolnai’s moral philosophy, then, was predicated on his belief in intrinsic moral principles discovered by intuition that made constant reference to the

124   Lee Congdon collective moral wisdom of people everywhere. In any particular case, of course, one had to exercise one’s moral judgement within the context of the never-­ ending dialogue between one’s conscience and the moral consensus. That constituted, in his view, an ‘individualist conception of human community’ because it retained a place, within the human community, for the individual conscience. That is, it permitted, and even encouraged, a disciplined form of human liberty. Thus it located its political counterpart in the regime of constitutional liberalism (Kolnai, 1978, p. 138, emphasis in original).

In defence of Christian Europe According to Kolnai, Christian civilisation could be preserved and strengthened by raising some of its motifs, values or axioms to a higher level of consciousness, thus rendering their status more secure and invulnerable; and by providing an essential criticism of its inner and outer enemies, meant to strike at their very nerve, not merely their accidental and topical defects. (Kolnai, 1952–5, pp. 33–4) Criticism would prepare the way for preservation and renewal. With obvious and pained regret, Kolnai identified psychoanalysis as one of Christian Europe’s principal enemies. Kolnai entitled his critique of Freud, which appeared in the publication Volkswohl, ‘An Illusion of the Future’ (Kolnai, 1928b). His principal objection flowed naturally from his gradual conversion from psychoanalysis to phenomenology, from the unconscious to the conscious. Freud, he observed, was once again true to himself and the ‘science’ he invented when he reduced the healthy to the sick, higher values to the contemptible. Just why one should make that reduction was not clear. And if, Kolnai continued mischievously, mankind’s religious phase had been one of immaturity, it had produced wondrous ‘children’s games’ like Greek philosophy, Roman law, medieval cathedrals, and the theories of Newton and Descartes. He concluded that Freud’s way of thinking was but a modern version of that ancient illusion of men who thought they no longer needed God, the illusion symbolised by the Tower of Babel (Kolnai, 1928b, pp. 53–6). That such an illusion could produce dangerous consequences, Kolnai did not doubt. He was therefore disturbed when he encountered Thomas Mann’s celebrated essay, ‘Freud’s Position in the History of Modern Thought’ ([1929] 1994). In essence, Mann argued that Freud was the authentic heir of the nineteenth-­ century Romantics, the greatest contemporary explorer of the human heart’s darker regions. But that did not mean, Mann hastened to add, that the Austrian genius reprobated reason and enlightenment. Quite the contrary, for like his Romantic predecessors, Freud was a revolutionary who understood that genuine enlightenment could best be served by exposing to the light of reason those powers of darkness, those irrational instincts, that had to be recognised before they could be tamed.

The War Against the West contextualised   125 The ‘profoundest expertise [of psychoanalysis] in morbid states’, Mann wrote, is unmistakably at work not ultimately for the sake of disease and the depths, not, that is, with an interest hostile to reason; but first and last, armed with all the advantages that have accrued from exploring the dark abysses, in the interest of healing and redemption, of ‘enlightenment’ in the most humane sense of the word. (Mann, [1929] 1994, pp. 144–5) There was undoubtedly an element of truth in this idea, to which, as we recall, Mann had given fictional expression in The Magic Mountain. But Kolnai questioned whether a preoccupation with the darker side of human nature would in fact lead men and women to higher things. Deeper reflection would show, he believed, that immersion in the erotic experiences of childhood served only to divert attention from important questions, including those that pertained to society and political institutions. Despite Mann’s praise, Freud had not solved the complex problem of the relationship between instinct and morality, between the dark imprisonments of the soul and the luminous aims of the person. Catholic Christianity was alone in its ability to give all aspects of human nature their due without falling into the trap of subordinating the higher to the lower.3 The main reason that Mann failed to appreciate the dangers of psychoanalysis was that he, like Freud, retained an overall faith in progress. That faith blinded him to the problem of Bolshevism, an ideology that pretended to be the culmination of the progressive movement. In fact, Kolnai argued, it was more satanic and murderous than the Fascism Mann rightly feared precisely because it was more novel and less governed by the past. Kolnai’s comparison of Bolshevism and Fascism appeared in the journal Der deutsche Volkswirt (1926). He indicted the Bolsheviks for acting on the assumption that progress was mechanical and hence that they had created a better society by virtue of their recent appearance on the scene. Indeed, in their historical performance, Bolsheviks demonstrated that such a conception of progress could lead to barbarism. By subordinating men and women to an all-­ encompassing state masquerading as a Gemeinschaft, they had denied one of Christianity’s most important doctrines: that of the free spiritual personality and the communal order appropriate to it. It was evident from his anti-­Bolshevik broadsides that Kolnai regarded communism as the greatest long-­term threat to Christian Europe. It advanced a consistent ideology, appealed to men’s longing for community and presented itself as the historical heir of the progressive movement. Convinced of its own legitimacy, it had established in Russia, and in Hungary, brutal dictatorships that operated with clear consciences. Its ambition was nothing less than the creation of a communist Europe, indeed a communist world. Kolnai took that ambition seriously, but he also viewed with growing alarm the aims of those in Hungary, Austria and elsewhere in Europe who were working for the counter-­revolution. These activists presented a more immediate if less deeply rooted challenge to Christian Europe.

126   Lee Congdon Drawing upon his knowledge of the Horthy regime in Hungary, Kolnai recognised that counter-­revolution had at least as much in common with revolution as it had with traditional conservatism. For one thing, it never envisioned a restitution of the pre-­revolutionary period pure and simple, but sought instead to incorporate elements of the revolutionary order (Kolnai, 1931a, p. 172). Kolnai concluded, as the evidence showed, that the counter-­revolution could not be identified with any particular class; its appeal was to isolated, déclassé individuals (Kolnai, 1931a, pp. 187, 189). In this, of course, counter-­revolutionary regimes differed from revolutionary Bolshevism, which made of the proletariat the redemptive class. They differed also in that they lacked clear-­cut ideologies. They were churches founded upon many and contradictory heresies, despotisms of the will in search of legitimising ideas. Theorists, all of whom rejected liberal individualism and longed for a renewed sense of community, stood ready and able to provide such ideas. Kolnai was particularly concerned to take on Austrian proponents of the so-­called corporative state. The theory of corporatism harked back to the nineteenth-­century Romantics Adam Müller and Karl von Vogelsang, both of whom hoped to recreate what they took to be the harmonious social order of the Middle Ages, one uncontaminated by democracy and capitalism. After 1918, Othmar Spann, professor of economics and sociology at Vienna, updated and popularised Müller and Vogelsang’s ideas. He opposed democracy and capitalism because both were rooted in ‘individualism’. According to his ‘neoromantic universalism’, society was ‘a totality (Ganzheit) whose parts are not independent, but are members of this totality’ (quoted in Diamant, 1960, p.  132, emphasis in original). True individuality always presupposed a pairing (Gezweiung) of artist and public, mother and child, teacher and pupil. It developed only in relationship to another. Spann regarded that relationship as a model for the relationship between society as a totality and its members. Spann condemned capitalism as the economic system proper to individualism. It had emerged as a result of ‘the shattering of the corporative spirit, of the corporative harmony of the Middle Ages, as it found expression in guild, church, fief, cooperative and fraternal organs of all kinds’ (Diamant, 1960, p. 136). As the economic system proper to universalism, he recommended corporatism. His system was detailed and so complicated that he himself sometimes seemed unaware of its statist logic. The basic components of his new society were not to be individuals but Gemeinschaften called Stände (estates), which were organised hierarchically. Although the system was designed to be highly decentralised, a superior Stand could always issue binding orders to an inferior one. Thus, the political Stand, which could alone speak for the nation as a whole, would have effective control of the entire hierarchy of Stände. On a December evening in 1928, Kolnai attended a lecture that Spann delivered to an appreciative gathering of the Leo Society. Incensed by what he heard, he set down some reflections on the anti-­Catholic character of the famous sociologist’s ideas (Kolnai, 1929c, pp. 81–5, 126–31). He did not deny that there were points of convergence between Catholicism and Spann’s universalism,

The War Against the West contextualised   127 including a rejection of individual autonomy and a recognition of the importance of community. But he pointed out that Catholics could never sanction Spann’s deification of the social totality. From the church’s point of view, God was the ultimate reality to which the Gemeinschaften, as well as the individuals comprising them, were subordinate. To ignore that authority and discount the primary significance of persons, as Spann did, was to fall into the trap of a ‘universalism’ that was merely a euphemism for a centralised state tyranny. Kolnai obtained added ammunition for his Spann critique from Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft ([1930] 1975), which contained ‘the most devastating critique of Othmar Spann’s totalitarian Fascist philosophy of the state’ (Kolnai, 1933–4a, pp.  319–20), and from discussions with Polanyi, who devoted much of a 1930 essay on Fascism to a critical examination of Spann’s work. The counter-­revolutionary theorist was right, Kolnai’s friend argued, to attack individualism, but only that which was atheistic in inspiration. The individualism of Dostoevsky’s atheists – Kirilov, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov – recognised no responsibility to God or to men. It was the creed of Übermenschen who believed themselves to be fully autonomous – to be, in effect, gods (Polanyi, 1972, pp. 368–9). But, Polanyi observed, there was also a Christian understanding of individualism, and Spann was prepared to sacrifice that too on the altar of a coercive and dehumanising totality. According to the Christian view of individualism, a completely autonomous being – if such were conceivable – would not be a ‘person’. Personhood derived from a relationship with God and one’s fellow men; it was not real outside the community. ‘The reality of community’, according to Polanyi, ‘is the relationship of persons’. Any conception of community that undermined personhood in an effort to achieve an undifferentiated oneness was fundamentally anti-­Christian. ‘The battle is engaged’, he concluded, ‘between the representatives of the religion which has discovered the human person and those who have made the determination to abolish the idea of the person the centre of their new religion’ (Polanyi 1972, pp. 370, 390). Because he was not a Catholic, Polanyi was less angered than Kolnai about Austrian Catholicism’s growing attachment to the corporative scheme. The split within the Catholic camp between those who favoured Sozialpolitik – work for gradual change within the existing socio-­economic framework – and those who held out for Sozialreform – a radical reconstruction of society along corporative lines – continued to exist. But during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the balance shifted decisively away from the former towards the latter. There were a number of reasons for the shift, including long-­standing Catholic dissatisfaction with the modern state and capitalist economy. Most important, perhaps, was the publication in 1931 of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical letter Quadragesimo anno, subtitled ‘Reconstructing the Social Order and Perfecting It Conformably to the Precepts of the Gospel’. In it, the pontiff attempted to update Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, generally thought to have marked the victory of Sozialpolitik. Although he said much that could be interpreted as continued support for that position, he did advocate the reconstruction

128   Lee Congdon of the social order along corporative lines. Social harmony could best be assured, he proclaimed, by replacing classes with vocational groups, by ‘binding men together not according to the position they occupy in the labor market, but according to the diverse functions which they exercise in society’ (quoted in Diamant, 1960, p. 177). It was to be the state’s responsibility to implement that fundamental reform. Clearly, the Pope’s encyclical signalled the church’s reversion to the premises of Sozialreform. It was rumoured at the time that Ignaz Seipel, priest and former chancellor, had been one of the drafters of the document. In any event, there is no doubt that the Christian Social Party leader had abandoned his earlier Sozial­ politik position and begun to lobby for the corporative state. Indeed, soon after having resigned as chancellor in April 1929, Seipel had announced his support for the Heimwehr private army. At about the same time, he sought out Spann, about whom he had once had profoundly ambivalent feelings, and proposed an intellectual alliance (von Klemperer, 1972, p. 363). ‘We have before us’, Kolnai lamented, ‘the fascist interpretation of the papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno, – the adoption of Spann’s “doctrine of totality,” that pseudo-­Christian, pagan ideology of authority that wears the masks of science and Catholicism’ (Kolnai, 1932, p. 1102). In 1932 the diminutive Engelbert Dollfuss assumed the Austrian chancellorship. When, the following year, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, the Austrian Catholic Lager (camp) became even more impatient to draw up a new constitution that would create the ‘Quadragesimo anno State’. In March 1933, Dollfuss suspended parliament, and in September he spoke at a mass rally of the incipient Vaterländische Front: ‘The day of the capitalist system, the era of the capitalist-­liberal economic order is past’, he declared. ‘We demand a social, Christian, German Austria, on a corporative basis and under strong authoritarian leadership’ (quoted in Diamant, 1960, p. 194). Fearing the worst, Kolnai made an eleventh-­hour effort to alert Austrians to the impending danger. Corporatists, he said, used the catchword Stand in order to cloak their real intentions. Their talk of the Quadragesimo anno State was meaningless, for Pius XI had not prescribed a particular constitutional form; he had recommended an economic organisation. The vocational estates (Berufsstände) of which he spoke were to be organs of economic self-­ government, not administrative arms of the state; strictly speaking, a Ständestaat was a contradiction in terms. Quadragesimo anno could not, therefore, be reconciled with Spann’s theories, according to which the political estate (Herrschafts­ stand) was merely one of the vocational estates; its task was to direct affairs of state. In practice that would mean the Fascist party would exercise state power, while the other estates followed orders (Kolnai, 1934a, pp. 13–14, 21). Events soon demonstrated just how right Kolnai was. In February 1934, the socialists, with their backs to the wall, organised a general strike. Dollfuss was in Budapest at the time and Emil Fey, state secretary for security affairs, called upon the Heimwehr to do battle with the Schutzbund; the ensuing civil war was brief. Unequal to the task, the members of the Schutzbund barricaded themselves

The War Against the West contextualised   129 in the huge, fortress-­like tenements that the socialist government had constructed ten years earlier. There they held out for twenty-­four hours before surrendering. With the end of the civil war, Red Vienna passed into history.

Concrete conservatism As the Catholic hierarchy and the Christian Social Party embraced the corporative state, Kolnai gave in to ‘fits of anti-­clericalism’ and, late in 1930, transferred his allegiance to the Social Democratic Party (Kolnai, 1952–5, pp. 37–8). Yet he remained a convinced and practicing Catholic and maintained close relations with The League of Austrian Religious Socialists. The Religious Socialists organised a series of conferences in 1928, culminating with a two-­day ‘Convention for Christianity and Socialism’ in November. Kolnai was one of the 1,500 who attended in the hope of finding an answer to a question he had posed in Der österreichische Volkswirt: ‘Church and socialism, the only two hopes of our disillusioned age, are groping for each other. Who ought first to offer the hand of union?’ (Kolnai, 1925–6, p. 392). After the convention, he had his answer. Eager to spread the word, he filed an enthusiastic report for the Volkswirt. ‘The movement proceeds’, he wrote, from a denial of the alleged opposition between socialism and religion, particularly the Christian religion, and most especially the Catholic religion (Austria being a Catholic country); it endeavors to transcend the historically conditioned antithesis between the socialist workers’ movement and the Catholic Church, and to elucidate the ultimate mutuality of both’s ideals. (Kolnai, 1928–9, p. 190) Few Catholics were impressed. Most believed that the Religious Socialists’ conception of Christianity owed more to socialism than their conception of socialism owed to Christianity. But the League was undeterred. On Whit Saturday, 1930, Otto Bauer opened a conference in the small town of Berndorf with a charge to all members: We need for our conference an inner as well as an outer relationship to Whitsuntide. Something of the miracle of Gemeinschaft in the original pentecostal community must also be alive in us. We want to create the new social and economic order in the likeness of Gemeinschaft and for Gemeinschaft. (Quoted in Aussermair, 1979, p. 70, emphasis in original) With that in mind, the members of the conference drafted the League’s ‘Berndorf Programme’, which proclaimed that capitalism would be replaced by a new social and economic order informed by democratic principles. State ownership would be held to a minimum and cooperatives encouraged. Once in control of the means of production, workers would develop as persons and no longer be degraded into commodities.

130   Lee Congdon The programme’s drafters discouraged the formation of separatist parties and advocated work within the larger Socialist movement. At the same time, they counselled the Social Democratic Party to permit individual freedom in matters of Weltanschauung. The Party was to be a political and economic organisation of the working people, neutral with respect to ideology. In that way, freethinking and Christian Socialists could obey their conscience in cultural matters (cf. Aussermair, 1979, pp. 205, 207, 210–12, 214). Having studied the Berndorf Programme carefully, Kolnai joined the League. He was disappointed when he read Pius XI’s uncompromising declaration: ‘ “Religious Socialism,” “Christian Socialism” are expressions implying a contradiction in terms. No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist’ (quoted in Diamant, 1960, p. 181 f.n.). Publicly, he stressed that the Pope knew the difference between communism and social democracy and did not condemn socialism as a socio-­economic system. Anyway, he wrote in exasperation, ‘It is absolutely not obvious, even to a believing and ecclesiastically loyal Catholic, that one should decide the concrete questions of political and social-­economic order on the basis of papal encyclicals’ (Kolnai, 1934a, pp. 14, 20, 1931b, p. 892). Together with Polanyi, he continued to work for the League. In the pages of the Menschheitskämpfer, he maintained that only a socialism rooted in faith could defeat the political religion of Fascism. But time was running out. After Dollfuss assumed power, the government looked upon the journal with mounting disapproval. Officials confiscated the issue of October 1933 and soon thereafter forced the editors to cease publication and the League to disband. Unlike ‘the little’ Otto Bauer, who was more Socialist than Catholic, Kolnai placed his faith first. Even before his conversion, he had been impressed by Hilaire Belloc’s statement that ‘Europe will return to the Faith, or her civilization will fail’ (quoted in Kolnai, 1999, p. 88). As he put it in his memoirs, That Europe could only be herself, or even her best self, in her mediaeval shape seemed no more than an arbitrary paradox; but that her life was somehow bound up with the survival of her religious matrix, that her life-­ sap was ultimately Catholic and that her crisis had to do with her having departed too far from that religious basis seemed fairly reasonable suggestions. (Kolnai, 1982, p. 140) As a consequence of that conviction, Kolnai’s social theories were fundamentally conservative. In retrospect, he remembered the interwar years as a time when he fell short of anything like ‘essential conservatism’, but opined that his outlook ‘was not precisely un-­conservative’ (Kolnai, 1952–5, p. 37). By 1934, in fact, he had accepted the main outlines of what he characterised as ‘concrete conservatism’ (Kolnai, 1934b, p.  946). Conservatives, as well as thinkers on the Left, were alive to modern society’s loss of community and placed much of the blame on the atomising effects of capitalist economic arrangements.

The War Against the West contextualised   131 Exploitation, poverty, class hatred and the destruction of every Gemeinschaft were due, Kolnai believed, to the workings of economic liberalism. Thus, a religious and moral critique of capitalism was necessary. All the more so, according to Kolnai, because capitalism’s destruction of Gemeinschaft had produced revolutionary communism and counter-­revolutionary Fascism. What lent each its seductive attraction was the promise of Gemein­ schaft restored. Instead, each attempted to destroy the primacy of spiritual persons by forcing them into an impersonal and ersatz unity that refused to tolerate differences. Therein lay the source of a satanic dehumanisation. ‘As a matter of fact’, Kolnai wrote in his memoirs: the more I thought about the ‘final goal’ of Communism, the less I liked it; before long, I decided that the ‘love-­community’ of Communist society proper, which by supposition would be past all dictatorship and indeed all State compulsion, was even more execrable than the ‘transitional’ present reality of the Communist Terror State itself. Far from the end ‘justifying’ the means, the immorality of the end was what really accounted for, and surpassed, the immorality of the means. For the specific and gigantic evilness of Communism lay, not in the unrestrained use of violence as such, but in the negation of man’s individual personality – taken in its juridical, economic and intellectual distinctness from all ‘community’. (Kolnai, 1982, p. 136) In opposition to the all-­powerful state ‘communities’ of communism and Fascism, Kolnai defended the dignity of the human person and his self-­ determination within the context of hierarchically ordered small communities. ‘The path to freedom and self-­government’, he wrote, ‘leads through intimate communities. And that is the Christian, the Catholic principle: to defend the living community of familiar … spheres against the omnipotence of an Enlightened or other form of state absolutism, against the atomised isolation of individuals’ (Kolnai, 1925–6, p.  390). The contemporary political system most consistent with that principle, he argued, was democracy, understood in a decidedly conservative sense. The democracy that Kolnai defended was not that of Rousseau, in whose conception of the general will he espied the seed of tyranny and the certain destruction of Gemeinschaften intermediately situated between individuals and the state. Nor was it that of naive optimists, the believers in inevitable progress. Nor, finally, was it that of fanatical egalitarians. Equality means here equal right (not equal competency), equal human dignity (not equal social rank for all men); and insofar as a certain compromise with respect to position in life is demanded, this in no way means that all should think, act, and look alike, but that all should have an equal right and opportunity to be ‘unequal’ in conformity with their personal particularity. (Kolnai, 1929a, p. 364)4

132   Lee Congdon But if Kolnai’s programme of political democracy was largely one of preservation, that of economic democracy entailed fundamental changes. In his search for an alternative to large-­scale capitalism, he looked to guild socialism. ‘How inextricably intertwined’, he enthused, ‘are England’s guild socialist (functionalist) currents with Christian-­medieval ideas’ (Kolnai, 1925–6, p. 392). The guild socialists were endeavouring to recreate the communal atmosphere of the precapitalist era by replacing classes with vocational estates that would be self-­ governing Gemeinschaften. Kolnai knew that the plan could not be implemented overnight, but like Polanyi, he believed that society already contained elements, such as trade unions and cooperatives, that might lead to industrial self-­ government. Kolnai’s understanding of guild socialism was coloured and modified by Distributism, the socio-­economic theory championed by Chesterton and Belloc. In the latter’s The Servile State he read that a medieval guild was a society partly co-­operative, but in the main composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was self-­governing, and was designed to check competition between its members: to prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other. Above all, most jealously did the Guild safeguard the division of property, so that there should be formed within its ranks no proletariat upon the one side, and no monopolizing capitalist upon the other. (Belloc, 1946, p. 49) In the spirit of those guilds, Belloc recommended that a Distributive State replace the Capitalist State before the Collectivist/Socialist State instituted a new and more frightening form of servility. In the Distributive State, property and economic power would be widely distributed among citizens. Those who favoured such a state of affairs were ‘Conservatives or Traditionalists. They are men who respect and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of Christian European life’ (Belloc, 1946, pp.  105–6). Kolnai agreed that the restoration of widely distributed private property was more important than the mitigation of misery (Kolnai, 1928a, p. 117). Kolnai recognised the dogmatic and utopian aspects of Distributism. Belloc, he could not help but notice, was very vague when it came to explaining just how property would be redistributed. Nevertheless, the theory reminded him of Jászi’s pre-­war call for the partition of Hungary’s great estates (latifundia) and the creation of a free class of small proprietary farmers. It also evidenced a respect for the Christian idea of the free spiritual person. Unlike state socialism and the Ständestaat, it stood out as an improvement on monopolistic capitalism. Much later in his life, Kolnai still held ‘that a wholesome fabric of society requires the predominance of the peasant and, in general, the small-­owner type among its citizens’ (Kolnai, 1982, p.  137, emphasis in original). But what was to be done in an immediate and concrete way to overcome capitalism? In answer to that question, Kolnai praised Christian trade unions and

The War Against the West contextualised   133 insisted that a workers’ movement founded upon Christianity was superior to its secular rivals, for it is a better struggle that is born from love and not from hate; it is a better struggle for justice that is sustained not by blind faith in a ‘law’ of class struggle, but by faith in moral laws and the free will of men. (Kolnai, 1929b, p. 410) In the act of common struggle, Christian workers could transform themselves from members of a class into members of an estate (Stand). That would not mean the proletarianisation of all men, but the extension to workers of personal property. Only in that way could workers/owners create a new culture, but one still rooted in bourgeois values and Christian moral truths. Kolnai recognised that this conservative project faced almost insurmountable obstacles in the contemporary age. But, as a devout Catholic, he took comfort from his faith. ‘Always’, he wrote, ‘when one era is in decline, the Church appears to die; but the era withdraws from the world’s stage and the Church reappears. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” ’ (Kolnai, 1927b, p. 823).

Notes 1 The first part is reprinted from Lee Congdon, Seeing Red. Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism. Copyright © 2001 by Northern Illinois University Press. Reprinted by Permission. The chapter ‘In defence of Christian Europe’ is reprinted from Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intel­ lectuals in Germany and Austria 1919–1933. Copyright ©1991 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by Permission. 2 This letter is owned by Professor David Wiggins, who gave permission to quote from it. 3 Cf. Aurel Kolnai, ‘Thomas Mann, Freud und der Fortschritt’. Volkswohl 20, 9 (1929): 326–7. 4 Cf. Kolnai, 1928c, p. 855; and Kolnai 1933–4b, pp. 442–3.

References Aussermair, Josef (1979). Kirche und Sozialdemokratie: der Bund der religiösen Sozia­ listen, 1926–1934. Vienna: Europaverlag. Belloc, Hilaire (1946). The Servile State. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Diamant, Alfred (1960). Austrian Catholics and the First Republic: Democracy, Capit­ alism, and the Social Order, 1918–1934. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jászi, Oszkár (1938). ‘The War Against the West by Aurel Kolnai’. American Political Science Review 32, 6 (December): 1166–7. Jászi, Oszkár (1997). Letter to Kolnai, 10 Oct. 1938. Sorai ismét választ követelnek, Világosság 38, 5–6: 75. Klemperer, Klemens von (1972). Ignaz Seipel: Christian Statesman in a Time of Crisis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kolnai, Aurel (1920). Psychoanalyse und Soziologie. Zur Psychologie von Masse und Gesellschaft. Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.

134   Lee Congdon Kolnai, Aurel (1925–6). ‘Das Weihnachtsmanifest der österreichischen Bischöfe’. Der österreichische Volkswirt 18, 1: 390–2. Kolnai, Aurel (1926). ‘Fascismus und Bolschewismus’. Der deutsche Volkswirt 1, 7: 206–3. Kolnai, Aurel (1927a). Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit. Freiburg: Herder & Co. Kolnai, Aurel (1927b). ‘Chestertons Religionsphilosophie’. Das Neue Reich 9, 40: 821–3. Kolnai, Aurel (1928–9). ‘Religiöse Sozialisten’. Der österreichische Volkswirt 21, 1: 190. Kolnai, Aurel (1928a). ‘Bellocs Vision vom Sklavenstaat’. Schönere Zukunft 4 (4 November): 116–18. Kolnai, Aurel (1928b). ‘Eine Illusion der Zukunft’. Volkswohl 19, 2: 53–6. Kolnai, Aurel (1928c). ‘Tote und lebendige Demokratie’. Der deutsche Volkswirt 2, 26: 854–7. Kolnai, Aurel (1929a). ‘Autorität und Demokratie’. Volkswohl 20, 10: 364. Kolnai, Aurel (1929b). ‘Die christlichen Gewerkschaften im Kampfe gegen den Kapitalismus’. Volkswohl 20, 11: 405–15. Kolnai, Aurel (1929c). ‘Ist O. Spanns “Universalismus” mit katholischem Denken vereinbar?’ Volkswohl 20, 3: 81–5, 126–31. Kolnai, Aurel (1931a). ‘Gegenrevolution’. Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie 10, 2: 171–99. Kolnai, Aurel (1931b). ‘Quadragesimo anno’. Der österreichische Volkswirt 23, 2: 892. Kolnai, Aurel (1932). ‘Das Seipel-­Bild’. Der österreichische Volkswirt 24, 2: 1102. Kolnai, Aurel (1933–4a). ‘Katholizismus und Demokratie’. Der österreichische Volkswirt 26, 1: 318–21. Kolnai, Aurel (1933–4b). ‘Persönlichkeit und Massenherrschaft’. Der österreichische Volkswirt 26, 1: 442–3. Kolnai, Aurel (1934a). ‘Die Ideologie des Ständestaates’. Der Kampf 27, 1: 13–23. Kolnai, Aurel (1934b). ‘Die Aufgabe des Konservativismus’. Der österreichische Volkwirt 26, 2: 946. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Kolnai, Aurel (1939). Letter to Béla Menczer (4 September). Kolnai, Aurel (1952). Errores del anticommunismo, trans. Salvador Pons. Madrid: Rialp. Kolnai, Aurel (1952–5). Twentieth-­Century Memoirs, VII, Kings College London, Archives, MV29/8. Kolnai, Aurel (1955). ‘The Thematic Primacy of Moral Evil’. Philosophical Quarterly 6, 22: 27–42. Kolnai, Aurel (1970). ‘A Defence of Intrinsicalism against Situation Ethics’. In: Situa­ tionism and the New Morality, ed. Robert L. Cunningham. New York: Appleton-­ Century-Crofts. Kolnai, Aurel (1978). Ethics, Value and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai, eds Francis Dunlop and Brian Klug. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Kolnai, Aurel (1982). ‘Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from Aurel Kolnai’s Twentieth-­Century Memoirs’. The Chesterton Review 8, 2: 127–61. Kolnai, Aurel (1999). Political Memoirs, ed. Francesca Murphy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lewis, John (1970). The Left Book Club: An Historical Record. London: Victor Gollancz. Mann, Thomas ([1929] 1994). ‘Die Stellung Freuds in der modernen Geistesgeschichte’. In: Essays Band 3: Ein Appell an die Vernunft 1926–1933. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer: 122–54.

The War Against the West contextualised   135 Newman, John Henry Cardinal (1947). An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. Polanyi, Karl (1972). ‘The Essence of Fascism’. In: Christianity and the Social Revolution, eds John Lewis, Karl Polanyi and Donald K. Kitchin. Freeport, CT: Books for Libraries Press: 359–94. Ross, W. D. ([1933] 1988). The Right and the Good. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. von Hildebrand, Dietrich ([1930] 1975). Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft. Regensburg: Verlag Josef Habbel.

9 Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West Contours of a contemporary analysis and critique of National Socialism Wolfgang Bialas National Socialism as a threat of annihilation against the West In his book, Aurel Kolnai was not content merely to describe National Socialist policies and ideology, but also presented them in the context of a crisis in civil society and in the political humanism of its specific value system. As indicated by its title, the overriding theme in the book is the threat of annihilation posed by National Socialism against civil society and its values, and specifically against the religious foundations, ethical ideals and human values of liberal society. In other words, Kolnai already had his finger on the pulse at a point when the majority of Western states still believed that National Socialism would find its way back to the normalcy of civil politics, following a phase of radical rhetoric and temporary political excesses. His analysis and historical contextualisation of National Socialist ideology aims to stir Western society to resist National Socialism, which he views as a mortal threat to the foundations of Western civilisation and its ways of life. He emphasises the rational ethics and secularised politics of Western civilisation, as well as its Christian foundations, liberalism, universalised morality and upholding of human rights (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 24–6). Standing in opposition to this universalised morality and legal order is National Socialism. In Western civilisation Kolnai finds a rational order based on personal freedom and security, mutual respect, humanism and the balance between different ways of life, as well as a commitment to objective truth and impartial judgement, whereas National Socialism rejects plurality in society, individual personality and humanity, as it does any focus by man on God, objective truth and unconditional interpersonal and fraternal obligations (Kolnai, 2013, p. 89). National Socialism feels provoked by Christianity and the universalism of racially indifferent humanism – as well as by the human image derived from the Enlightenment, which accords all people the same human and civil rights – into adopting an aggressive counter-­concept of racially oriented attributions. At the same time, National Socialism blames bourgeois democracy for the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and rejects the Weimar Republic as a manifestation of this national humiliation.

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   137 Kolnai laments the self-­destruction of bourgeois idealism through the glorification of natural drives and instincts (Kolnai, 1938, p. 15; ‘Author’s Foreword’). For Kolnai, the dismantling of universal values through a scientifically based critique of ideology has paved the way for the uncritical glorification of natural instincts in Nazi ideology. Liberal society has thus released forces that National Socialism was able to utilise in order to undermine the very foundations of civil society and the liberal state. In Kolnai’s view, Nazism has reacted to the inner tensions and contradictions of Western civilisation in a way that makes National Socialism appear to be a solution to the latter’s problems and shortcomings (Kolnai, 1938, p. 32). As Kolnai sees it, the West is faced with the choice of either giving up its leading and exemplary role in the world and submitting to National Socialism or accepting the challenge of confronting it intellectually, socially and politically. The West can meet this challenge only through self-­critical reflection on its own conceptual foundations. Such critical self-­examination must be complemented by the unconditional willingness of the West to assert its own value systems in dealing with competing ideologies and political systems. For Kolnai, given this complex situation, shaped by the aggressive hegemonic policy of Nazism, the West needs to combine diplomacy and a willingness to compromise with the determination to resolve political conflicts and conflicts of interest with the threat or use of military force if necessary. From his perspective, there is, however, no hope of reaching an understanding with Nazi Germany, to which the very ideas of understanding, equality of dignity, legality and common humanity are foreign. Concessions will not eliminate the Nazi threat, but will only be perceived as a sign of Western weakness (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 676–7). Confrontation with Nazism is inevitable for the West. As there can be no understanding or compromise with National Socialism, the latter must be smashed and combatted on all levels. Kolnai warns the West against assuming that even Nazi Germany, despite all its aggressive ideological rhetoric, would be ultimately open to arguments of political reason. For him, National Socialism is neither a normal form of government like democracy nor the legitimate expression of the German people. To imply that even Nazi Germany does not basically differ from the political constitution of Western democracies would be tantamount to committing moral suicide (Kolnai, 1938, p. 680). Only simultaneous intellectual, political, ideological, moral, scientific, social, economic, diplomatic and, if necessary, military action by a militant democracy that considers all strategic options to be open can defeat National Socialism. It can only be destroyed by force, as it is founded on violence and understands no other language than that of force (Kolnai, 1938, p. 679). Territorial concessions to Nazi Germany and the moral recognition of its domestic policies will not secure peace, as the nation does not recognise any boundaries and will simply assert new claims with the passage of time. In Kolnai’s judgement, while war with Nazi Germany is not inevitable, it must not be ruled out in principle as an option.

138   Wolfgang Bialas

Analysis and criticism of National Socialist ideology In his analysis of National Socialism, Kolnai focuses on its ideological self-­ presentation and on its political attempts to make the ideology the basis of state policy. In doing so, he also discusses German demands for political expansion and hegemony. Besides giving a comprehensive account of the ideas underpinning National Socialism, the book also discusses developments that originated very early in German history, thereby undermining later arguments that viewed National Socialism as an accident of German history. In his diagnosis of a crisis in political humanism, Kolnai predicted that Germany would potentially have a key role in tackling this crisis, and thereby contributing to a spiritual and political rebirth in Europe. In this context of the ideological and political crisis of the West, which had de facto surrendered to the political challenge of National Socialism, Nazi ideology had positioned itself as a humanism of race and strength in opposition to the racially indifferent bourgeois humanism of weakness and doubt. For Kolnai, given the progressive paralysis wrought by the trauma of the First World War, democracy is no match for the National Socialist threat and must therefore renew itself. How it is to renew itself is left open by Kolnai, who, however, firmly believes that a resolute confrontation with National Socialism will lead to the renewal of Europe and political humanism. Of course, to this end Nazi Germany must first be politically overcome by the combined efforts of the Western democracies, with the participation of Soviet Russia and replaced by a militant democracy (Kolnai, 1938, p. 679). Kolnai perceives the threat to the West as emanating not only from National Socialism’s policies. He rather tries to identify a deep layer of National Socialism that, independent of the economic and strategic fluctuations in politics, has governed its followers’ self-­understanding and political actions. He locates this layer in the ideological patterns of thought and interpretative patterns of National Socialism, which follow a logic of their own that does not automatically collapse into absurdity under the weight of a contradictory reality. From the analysis of various elements of National Socialism, among which he emphasises the racial– biological view of human beings and attempts to politically enforce it, Kolnai tries to identify the most effective combination of quasi-­religious irrationality and technical rationality that, in his view, was an important reason for the political success of the Nazi movement. Kolnai warned of the danger of underestimating the intellectual aspect and political significance of National Socialism, even if its ideology is untenable and wrong to the core. He took Nazi ideology seriously in that it obviously contained elements that mobilised the movement’s followers in connection with Germans’ everyday problems and the political turmoil of the time. Those who supported National Socialism for reasons of ideology and world view were simultaneously pursuing their own interests. What had originally been the National Socialist substance of their convictions supported their interest-­driven opportunism. Kolnai’s criticism of National Socialism is based on a bourgeois humanism and liberalism that is aware of its Christian roots. His critique employs the great

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   139 concepts of bourgeois philosophy, such as reason, humanity, universal morality, personal responsibility and freedom – concepts and notions that National Socialism rejected as indifferent to racialist distinctions and replaced with racially oriented concepts. Kolnai supplements this general philosophical critique of National Socialism with an analysis of the political and strategic approach of the National Socialist movement, in which he seeks to identify these philosophical concepts and their National Socialist counterparts. This correspondence is also partly the source of the fascination Kolnai expresses in his book. Kolnai is not content with merely juxtaposing the two sets of ideas – the pathos of the higher values and ideas placed alongside the primitive, instinct-­ driven use of force or pseudo-­scientific, racialist concepts placed next to the humanities-­based rhetoric of German philosophy. In assuming that there was complementarity between advanced national culture and missionary political activism, he instead tries to demonstrate that one is reflected by the other, that the two mutually intensify and radicalise one another, and mutually justify and support one another, in short that they refer to one another in the common cause of asserting the higher value of German culture and German claims to domination. In Kolnai’s analysis, National Socialism opposes reason, ethics, law and culture, as well as common sense. The Nazi ethic of greatness and ruthlessness, of raw power and effectiveness, stands in direct opposition to the idea of universal responsibility and considerateness. Like nature itself, National Socialism knows no morality other than the right of the strong to prevail over the weak. Nazi racial ideology justifies social inequality through the natural inequality of people. Inspired by the friend versus enemy dichotomy of Carl Schmitt, the tribal imperialism of National Socialism declares racial struggle to be the decisive driving force in history. This doctrine recognises no moral or rational principle pertaining to humanity and rejects all individual civil and human rights (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 47–8, 114–15, 144–5). As Kolnai describes, National Socialism regards laws and ideals as the expression of historical power relationships, in order then to determine these relationships according to its ideologically based interests. Nevertheless, National Socialist Germany is a society charged with moral significances that, as a political movement, has its own moral value system governed by a racialist anthropology that biologically justifies the distinction between higher and lower races, on the basis of which it decides what qualifies as moral or immoral. The new paganism of the Nazis thus represents the decay of religion, while at the same time intensifying the quasi-­religious feeling of participating in something greater than oneself. For Kolnai this new paganism is indeed accelerating religious decline, while also imbuing society with a false and barbaric religiosity (Kolnai, 1938, p. 237). In his comparison of socialism and liberalism, Kolnai discusses the change in meaning of the political by working through the paradox that ‘All is political’ on the one hand and ‘Nothing is really political any more’ on the other. Members of liberal civil society are not really political, since they do commit

140   Wolfgang Bialas themselves to any decisions. Having replaced this citizenry is the greatest achievement of the nationalist revolution, so that commitment returns to the political sphere (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 172–3). As opposed to a pluralistic and tolerant liberal society’s lack of commitment to any particular values that it would be willing to assert in the face of relativisation and potential challenges, National Socialism imposes political conformity through a racial ideology that is elevated to an absolute status. In the total state, everything is political without exception, yet there are no political debates, parties, decisions or convictions apart from the sole approved ideology (Kolnai, 1938, p.  169). Social life is dominated by a single political current, whereas democracies afford a certain freedom in politics. The reasons people have for submitting to the existing conditions of domination are left up to them. Fanatical allegiance is just as possible as pragmatic consent based on the rational calculation of pursuing one’s own interests. What counts is people’s loyalty to the political system in the areas relevant to power politics. Even a totalitarian state will prefer to have its people’s internal consent to its world view and policies over merely external signs of submission. The fundamental commitment to National Socialism is to be supported by personal motivations. The person’s willingness to incorporate set pieces of the ideology in their own image of the world suffices. Kolnai stresses the political activism of the Nazi movement, which calls for self-­sacrifice and selflessness on the part of its members rather than altruism, self-­denial rather than restraint and self-­abandonment rather than self-­criticism (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  269–70). National Socialism claims to enforce the higher values and purposes of the community and race or even of the people and the nation. Germans are expected to subordinate themselves to these values and make them the maxims of their lives and actions. Their loyalty is to be displayed through their support of the political enforcement of this ideology. In National Socialist ideology, the term ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) refers to an organically developed social body, whereas ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) refers to a system of formal law: an association of people based on the rational calculation of interests and the decisions made by its members (Kolnai, 1938, p. 80). National Socialism places the interests of the community above demands made by individuals. For National Socialism, community is the universe of individuals without any control from a universal authority on values, standards and competencies. National Socialism exploits people’s willingness to surrender themselves and directs their energies in the wrong direction of collective selfishness. It suggests that only unconditional subordination to the community can give the individual’s life substance and meaning (Kolnai, 1938, p. 65). Kolnai sees the individual as faced with the challenge to maintain a neutral balance between the different demands of different communities. People can form a true community without being subjugated to it. Equal rights and human dignity are possible only on the basis of the recognition of human differences. He responds to the claim that there is an opposition between community and society by defining ‘society’ as a balanced system of communities in which there

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   141 is space for the development of individual personality with a common reference to all-­unifying humanity (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 91–2). The totalitarian Führer state of National Socialism does not despise the people (Volk), but rather the National Socialist ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) is esteemed as the epitome of unity, in which the people are to recognise their innermost selves in the Führer (Kolnai, 1934, pp. 422–44). The people are expected to do what history demands of them. Kolnai describes the ‘totalitarian state’ as  the very opposite of a state which contains a variety of parties.… The Totalitarian State is (1) a State which claims to enforce a unitarian and obligatory scale of values upon the whole of society, and to some extent on every individual belonging to it; and (2) a … One Party State.… (Kolnai, 1938, p. 160) Totalitarian politics is incompatible with universal religion and ethics, humanism and Christianity. For Kolnai, the totalitarian state of National Socialism does not solely bank on mass instincts and intolerant fanaticism, but also marks the return of tribalism in the industrial age, organised through the modern social techniques of the democratic state (Kolnai, 1938, p. 161). The contradictions and tensions between biological primitivism and political hyperactivity, supported by the incorporation of modern techniques of mass mobilisation, established the ideological power of National Socialism, which was further increased by the omnipotence of the Führer. He puts into the Germans’ minds rational motives for choosing National Socialism, a decision they are to make in line with their own interests. Besides identifying reasons for the success of National Socialism related to ideology or world view, power and world-­oriented politics, as well as philosophical and anthropological explanations, Kolnai also acknowledges Hitler’s own personal role in the outstanding success story of National Socialism. He does not treat Hitler as a caricature of a political leadership figure by whom the German people has been obviously damaged after incomprehensibly falling under his spell. On the contrary, Kolnai takes Hitler seriously and tries to establish the reasons behind his personal aura. In Hitler Kolnai sees a strategically capable political leader who has a particular appeal for his followers, who regard him as a virtually infallible, godlike leader. The takeover of power by Hitler and the National Socialist movement ended political chaos in Germany and instituted a new reliability, as evidenced by Hitler’s willingness, for example, to compromise and form temporary alliances in the pursuit of his objectives. Kolnai acknowledges the personal role of Hitler and his unquestionable political skills within the success of the Nazi movement, while of course rejecting their elevation to the position of being an incarnation of a quasi-­ divine power in the service of higher values. Kolnai concedes that Hitler possesses strategic abilities, which in combination with his charisma contributed

142   Wolfgang Bialas to his political success; this is a charisma that is only explicable to a limited extent, but is indubitably present. As Kolnai describes, the Führer’s demand for loyalty stems neither from his abilities and qualifications, as it would in a democracy where citizens make decisions and elect their leaders, nor from the dignity of his office, as it would in a conservative political system, but from the assumption that he mystically incarnates the inner essence of his followers (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 150–1). He convincingly behaves as if he knows better than people themselves what it is they long for in their innermost being. An emotional socialism of equiprimordial proximity to the Führer supplements the command hierarchies of political power, in which Hitler stands unchallenged at the top (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 402–3). As Kolnai expresses, for his fanatical followers, who are devoted to him in a quasi-­religious way, it seems as if God Himself has become real in Hitler, reminding one of a two-­legged proud beast not prepared to recognise any higher power (Kolnai, 1938, p.  232). This ironic comment on the Führer’s quasi-­religious sense of mission, who as the saviour of the German people promised no less than its resurgence from national humiliation to national greatness, strikes a balance between vexed bewilderment and principled scepticism.

National Socialism and race Kolnai finds the most important element of Nazi ideology to be the aggressive activism of racial politics: the exhorting of the Germans to feel morally obligated, as members of the Nordic race, to their own kind. National Socialism redirects the Christian ethic of charity to the political community of this race. Within this notion, only members of one’s own race are moral subjects deserving empathy and affection, which must be deliberately denied to members of other races and inferior elements generally. This ‘zoological racism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 469) of the biological redefinition of human values, and the differentiation of value according to the criteria of racial membership, is aimed at all sections of German society. Kolnai shows how National Socialist racial thinking asserts a natural law of social inequality that biologically justifies the establishment of a racial hierarchy and the inequality of human beings, for whom no moral unity obtains. The innate dispositions of human beings biologically define the scope of their possibilities for action. Consequently, a biologically based morality seeks to justify the inequality that exists between races and their differences in performance and value. As expressed by Kolnai, National Socialism views itself in accordance with the putative laws of life and nature that govern races, defining people’s racial membership and determining their lives as if by fate. The ethical justification of racial superiority and inferiority underscores the moral right of supposedly superior beings to oppress and destroy inferior ones. In contrast, the bourgeois morality of a racially indifferent universal humanism does not allow members of the Nordic race, who are supposedly predestined to rule, to correct

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   143 undesirable historical developments in good conscience by means of social hygiene and eugenics. National Socialist ideology tries to bring together nation, Volk and race within a single concept in order to justify the formation of a racially homogeneous national community (Volksgemeinschaft) as well as the nation’s expansionist urge to develop as an empire through a coordinated domestic and foreign policy. A future racial war will aim to enslave and exterminate the races that are stigmatised as inferior, while at the same time establishing an empire of the Nordic race. Kolnai stresses this relationship, while at this point in time still taking the focus of Nazi ideology on racial thinking as being indicative of the priority of forming a Volksgemeinschaft over the foreign policy ambitions of expansion and war. In Kolnai’s view, National Socialism will have to decide between the isolationism of creating a racial Volksgemeinschaft on the one hand and the imperialism of expanding the nation into an empire on the other (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 88–9, 415–16). The alternatives formulated by Kolnai here between a racial policy of isolationism and expansionist imperialism leaves it an open question as to which of these options National Socialism will follow. Here racial policy serves the function of creating a political community, that is securing and stabilising internal power relations. However, the formation of the nation into a functioning political unity implies that it also has the ability to act externally. As Kolnai puts it, racialist naturalism and vitalism stress the biological origin and destiny of a people and banks on the readiness to solve conflicts with violence. Racialist policies turn people into objects of breeding, racial hygiene and biological planning. Like other organisms, Volk and nation also go through biological life cycles and are susceptible to the equivalent diseases. Within such an ideology, the aim must also be to protect the Volk and nation from such diseases through social hygiene or to restore their health through eugenic measures. According to this notion, the tribal egoism of the German people must be fortified against any pseudo-­humanist resentment. The intention here is for the planned breeding of the Nordic race to support biological selection and ensure the superiority of a Nordic race, freed from contamination by foreign, diseased and weak elements. The related assumption is that the intermingling of superior and inferior races will lower the superior race’s physical and mental abilities. People who followed these ideas saw an opposition between the Nordic race and a Jewish counter-­race, the latter of which poses a mortal danger to the German race. The goal of National Socialism, which has declared the worker to be a political soldier antithetical in type to the urban, hedonistic man, is to create a racial elite as a function of biological racial qualities. Kolnai shows the National Socialist belief that the biological breeding of racially superior beings replaces an improvement of the social conditions of life and social relations in terms of justice and equality with a focus on the physical and mental health of people who have not even been born (Kolnai, 1938, p. 480). In lieu of improving the conditions of their existence, they offer the promise of

144   Wolfgang Bialas biologically perfecting racially superior people through eugenic measures (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  437–52). The idea is that new and biologically better-­ equipped people are to be produced. National Socialist racial anthropology aims to create beings who will be ready and capable of selflessly fitting into higher-­ order relationships and functioning on this level as part of a collective subject without any personal ambitions of their own. Pagan romantic vitalism and naturalism (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 193–4) attributed the entire weight of human existence to the shocks of being born and dying, on procreating and killing, and on sacrificing one’s own life for that of another or the survival of the tribe. As Kolnai describes, in opposition to this stress on struggle and sacrifice, existential shocks and death, the point is now to recall the actual magic of life, namely to deliberate calmly on how the interval between birth and death can best be laid out (Kolnai, 1938, p. 203). National Socialist ideology understands the superman (Übermensch) as a representative of a still nascent higher race to be shaped by the militaristic, anti-­humanist and ascetic re-­education of the Germans. This new man will fulfil the imperative of nature only in exclusive reference to himself, with no reference to the categories of humanity. Within such an ideology, Christianity with its ethos of unconditional brotherly love and the equality of all human beings is an obstacle to the development of a race of supermen. Its declaration of universal equality and brotherhood in a community of faith disregards all racial and class distinctions. Christian dogma, declaring Christ to be both God and man, and therefore the complete unity of divine and human nature in one person, guarantees the right of each person to fraternal love. It speaks of the incarnation of God in the body of a unique individual – Jesus Christ – and not the fortunate coincidence of divinity and a perfect body, from which National Socialism has, for Kolnai, derived a militaristic religion of bodily prowess (Kolnai, 1938, p. 190). As Kolnai puts it, the Nazis have degraded God to a tribal ethnic household god, a national god of the German people, who distinguishes right from wrong and true from false according to race and nation. Their pagan amorality serves the worship of power and self in a Christian guise. National Socialism replaces the weak and compassionate God of Christianity with a powerful, strict and merciless god (Kolnai, 1938, p. 237). National Socialism accuses Christianity of having imported the foreign principle of morality into Germanic natural religion. Kolnai shows how National Socialists view the law of charity as a Jewish doctrine (Kolnai, 1938, p.  252), which should therefore be replaced by a Germanic religion (Deutschreligion) that will discard morbid Christian ideas of human weakness, sin, penance and grace. After purging Christianity of its Jewish elements of racially indifferent altruism, National Socialism appeals to the mutual considerations and obligations of a free nature. National Socialism is a ‘pagan religion of Life and Death, of engendering and expanding Life, of inflicting and facing Death; a religion of Urge and Fear, of the Triumphant or else the Hunted Beast’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 208, in reference to Heidegger).

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   145 In addition to the replacement of Christian morality and the universalism of civil and human rights by a selective morality of race, it was in particular the civil legal system and its ideological conversion to an instrument of racial politics that Kolnai found to lie at the heart of Nazi power politics. Besides ethnic particularism, he refers to the importance of ‘sound popular judgment’ for National Socialist criminal law and its general ‘contempt for the rights of man’, which was notably shown by the anti-­Jewish laws that pursued German–Jewish marriages and sexual intercourse between Germans and Jews as criminal and immoral, stigmatising such relations as a ‘racial disgrace’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 308–9, 442). National Socialism replaces liberal and humanistic principles by national and racial principles of law and is therefore incompatible with the granting of equal rights to all. People no longer have any civil rights. In being directed against Christian ethics, as well as against the freedom and equality of people before the law, Nazi ideology puts a racial–biological legal instinct in the place of a universal morality (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  304–5), as is also shown by the National Socialist Täter-Strafrecht (criminal law that focuses on the perpetrator), which judges actions according to the racial identity of the victims and offenders. In the National Socialists’ understanding of law, the racial identity of the offender determines the political assessment of the act, and therefore whether and how it is to be prosecuted. The legalisation of popular feeling based on the racial instinct turns the law into a means for enforcing political interests and ideological values (Kolnai, 1938, p. 304). In the National Socialist state, the law is determined by political power interests, racial particularism and an aversion to the civil legal code. Law is intended to benefit those in power and not to protect citizens against oppression and harassment. The removal of judges’ independence turns the law into an instrument of the rulers, justifying arbitrariness and violence. National Socialist criminal law does not aim to classify actions as theft, assault, homicide and the like objectively, irrespective of the racial identities of victims and perpetrators, but instead to eliminate offenders identified as ‘antisocial parasites’ or ‘racially inferior’. National Socialism attributes criminal behaviour to an inferior hereditary disposition. Punishment of offenders, therefore, no longer has their rehabilitation as its aim, which is ruled out by assuming they have a racial predisposition to criminal behaviour, but at the elimination of inferior beings, since racial dispositions cannot be changed. Criminal law in this model is changed from the form of ‘lifeless “paragraphs” ’ to the legalisation of what is in principle an ‘unerring racial instinct’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 308). Man’s return to his nature discredits the adoption of common law, universal values and human solidarity regardless of racial identity as mere illusions of bourgeois morality. People are to be considered as exemplary types of an ‘experimenting Nature’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 178), instantiating the laws of natural selection and the struggle for existence. National Socialism promotes such experimentation through its policies on population and race, which also aim to improve human nature and purge it of unnatural elements, such as universal

146   Wolfgang Bialas morality and the recognition of human rights. In this understanding of things, politics intends to enable people to live in accordance with their nature; it is precisely such a harmonious relationship that is made impossible by the focus on equality, democracy, socialism and pacifism, which forces people to live contrary to their nature (Kolnai, 1938, p. 448). People’s lives, this line of racial–biological reasoning contends, cannot be improved in contradiction to their nature. According to this view, the indifference of bourgeois and Christian humanism to matters of race – that is, to human nature as determined by its biological basis – has alienated people from themselves and from their biological nature. Nazi ideology singles out democracy as a prime example of such politically imposed alienation from people’s own nature, which National Socialism intends to bring to an end as an unnatural and failed political experiment. In their racial Volksgemeinschaft Germans will no longer be forced to live against their nature. National Socialism thus presents itself as an emancipatory movement with the aim of ending the suppression of human nature and freeing Germans to embrace their racial nature. As instances of this oppression, National Socialism identifies Jewish-­contaminated Christianity, liberalism, the Enlightenment and all movements that reason and act on the basis of universal, racially indifferent concepts. At the same time, Kolnai finds it quite understandable that one can accept racial reasons for hierarchies of importance and value between different peoples and cultures, even if weighty counter-­arguments speak against such a view. By focusing on biological selection, National Socialist tribalism forestalls the rational and humanistic design of eugenics, which could indeed, Kolnai firmly believes, pursue socialist intentions (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 442–3; Hitler, 1943). He leaves it at that, without further pursuing the idea of a socialist eugenics. Kolnai concedes that Germans possess outstanding abilities that have rightly secured them a prominent role in the history of human culture and civilisation. However, this role as a leading nation in cultural terms does not entitle them to claim their racial superiority over other peoples and nations to assert their right to exert their power over the Slavs, for example, as an inferior race, since the historical importance of race and its importance in structuring social relationships has not been scientifically confirmed (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 443, 539–40, 584). Should Nazi Germany’s claim to racial superiority be warranted, then that claim would be all the more outrageous and menacing. The racial thinking and racial domination on which it is based are above all immoral in their aggressive declaration of biological superiority. What Kolnai finds remarkable is the ‘nebulous inexactitude and shiftiness of racial terms and definitions’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  585). Without any single or cogent concept of race having been developed or politically implemented, race has been simply declared the centre point of the völkisch State (Kolnai, 1938, p.  438), in which biological, cultural and anthro­pologico– philosophical conceptions of race compete with one another (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 440–1). The Nazi conception of race, in presuming the existence of superior and inferior races, rejects universal standards (Kolnai, 1938, p. 443). The fact that racial thinking is scientifically absurd, as Kolnai assumes, is of secondary importance to him. Science should not have the last word when it

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   147 comes to morality and humanity (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  311–12). The core of his argument is that the natural sciences cannot serve as the ultimate authority in decisions on what is right or wrong in affairs affecting how people live together. Even if racial thinking were scientifically sound, even if assertions of the superiority of the Nordic race and its right to rule were scientifically justifiable, they remain inhuman and immoral, and must therefore be rejected.

Kolnai’s analysis of National Socialism and the National Socialism of Germany: capitalism or socialism? Kolnai viewed National Socialism as producing a charismatic Führerstaat organised around a racial folk community (Volksgemeinschaft) that claimed to have resolved all German social and political contradictions and to have brought the people together within a community organised around Volk, nation and the Nordic race. As Kolnai describes, through a successful counter-­revolution, the National Socialists have dismantled a ‘surplus of revolutionary energy’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 107), with the irrationality of Nazi ideology not excluding rational political action. While Kolnai recognises political and economic circumstances that may have promoted the success of the National Socialist movement, he does not think this success can be explained by those circumstances alone, such as the economic and moral crisis of the post-­war period. Germany’s status of having been cut off from the West after the First World War did, however, contribute to the movement’s success. Hitler’s political mobilisation of the Germans also proved so effective because he understood how to exploit for political gain the humiliation of the German people after the defeat of their nation in the First World War, and the codification of this defeat in the ‘shameful peace’ (Schandfrieden) of the Treaty of Versailles, by promising national rebirth. The radical interrogation of the Treaty of Versailles and the European post-­war order enabled National Socialism to distinguish itself as a national movement and credible harbinger of political renewal in Germany. The denial to Germany after the First World War of equal membership among the Western nations meant, for Kolnai, that it had remained a foreign body in Western Europe (1938, pp. 200, 316). Hitler promised the Germans a future in which, as members of a respected and feared nation, they could again be proud to be German. Kolnai regards the conflict between the West and National Socialism as inseparable from the internal problems of Western society. The latter is incapable of dealing with social issues and related economic problems. According to Kolnai, Western democracy cannot assert itself without introducing socialist principles, such as equality, public control and social responsibility, into the organisation of production. Consequently, the labour movement must be supported in its struggle for social justice and solidarity, and against injustice and social inequality. National Socialism, on the other hand, promised to overcome social divisions in Germany, and thereby beat Marxism on its own turf, by resolving social

148   Wolfgang Bialas problems and organising workers and entrepreneurs into a single union: the German Labour Front. Through a strategically clever move, National Socialism in this way shattered the labour movement and integrated the workers into the Nazi political system at once. At the same time, Kolnai points out, German companies were protected as part of the national Volksgemeinschaft against the labour movement and were utilised for the political objectives of National Socialism (Kolnai, 1938, p. 391). National Socialism aims to ensure the smooth functioning of capitalism through the harmonisation of the relationship between the owners’ professional organisations and the workers’ unions, as well as through the suppression of free labour organisations and political parties. Class struggle is to be brought to an end by eliminating workers’ autonomy. In the Fascists’ unified trade union (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), the factory owner acts as a ‘leader’ (Betriebsführer) and the workers function as his ‘followers’ (Gefolgschaft). The workers have no organised representation vis-­à-vis their employers. At the same time, employers are obligated to avoid ‘unsocial behaviour’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 325). For Kolnai, Hitler succeeded in persuading German capitalists that political democracy is inseparable from a free labour movement, and therefore inevitably leads to government intervention in private assets to the disadvantage of German entrepreneurs (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 325, 391). To prevent this scenario, the internationalist and socialist left must indeed be prevented from seizing power, in Hitler’s view. Following this line of reasoning, the National Socialist movement can achieve the dismantling of the socialist left necessary for the survival of the German economy only under Hitler’s leadership, however a merely authoritarian and conservative regime would shy away from the complete destruction of the democratic constitution and political parties. To put it another way, without the National Socialist movement, capitalism in Germany would find itself in serious danger. Hitler succeeded in convincing German industry that it needed the National Socialist movement to defeat the socialist left and thereby ensure industrial survival. As Kolnai describes, Hitler knows that a world view cannot be defeated through force, but only by holding a superior world view. In the past, the struggle against Marxism had failed due to the absence of such a world view. Marxism can be defeated only by a young and energetic völkisch movement, such as National Socialism. Hitler blames the success of social democracy on the bourgeoisie, whose narrow-­minded rejection of social demands had driven the workers into the social democratic camp. In Hitler’s view, the bourgeois parties will never succeed in winning over the workers (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 329–30; Hitler, 1943, p. 172). In his book Kolnai finds that Hitler convincingly pointed out how the left-­ wing masses were still too numerous and too well organised to content themselves with the domination of a handful of officers, barons and industrialists. Only the National Socialist movement can, in Hitler’s view, disperse, render ineffective, dissolve and absorb the workers’ movement (Kolnai, 1938, p. 344). This dual strategy of destruction and integration of the labour movement is for

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   149 Kolnai the secret behind the Nazi movement’s success. No entrepreneur need fear this totalitarian pseudo-­socialism (Kolnai, 1938, p. 326), as Kolnai puts it. While capitalists first viewed the Nazi movement as the lesser evil, they quickly learned to appreciate it as a solution to their problems through the destruction of the labour movement and the bringing to an end of class struggle. As Kolnai shows, this deal with German industry based on mutual interest promises to relieve industrialists from the economically devastating and practically unpredictable turbulence of the labour movement and class struggle, while National Socialism for its part needs industry for the economic preparation for war. In return for protection against structural disruptions from labour disputes, revolutionary uprisings and the like, capitalist industry must endure the rule of the militant National Socialist movement. The structuring of society according to racial–ideological criteria replaced a social structure based on the membership of social classes, which were correctly identified as the basis of national division. This social division of Germany is to be overcome through the national unity of a racially defined Volksgemeinschaft. The successful overlaying of the state with the National Socialist Party and movement broke up the incrustations of state bureaucracy in Germany. Kolnai’s characterisation of National Socialism in terms of its stances on capitalism and socialism leads him to define it as a militarist, non-­egalitarian pseudo-­socialism that expressly affirms the capitalist economy. It replaces class struggle and class rule with the community of interests between employers and workers, in which the workers have no rights of their own. National Socialism builds up the worker as a political soldier in opposition to the urban, hedonistic man. People are  subject to compulsory work service on a military pattern! All grown men are no armed longer soldiers in the full sense, for a short period; but all people, men and women, adults and youths, are work-­soldiers under military command for life. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 379) National Socialism aims at the total militarisation of society. National Socialists reject workers’ socialism founded on equal rights. The Nazis’ German Socialism is not a party form of socialism that seeks enemies among its own people nor is it a class-­type of socialism that raises the issue of private property. It is rather the socialism of a people (Völkersozialismus). Nor is the National Socialist take on inequality a form of state socialism, state capitalism or conservative socialism. It is not concerned with the effective state control of industrial production and the distribution of goods. It is instead the case that a militaristic state apparatus both maintains and appropriates capitalism. As Kolnai states, ‘ “National Socialism” is not a compound of, or compromise between, Nationalism and Socialism; it means a complete subjection and subservience of society to Nationalism, the elevation of Nationalism to a social counter-­creed to Socialism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 324).

150   Wolfgang Bialas Socialism and capitalism, and militarism and nationalism are the coordinates with which Kolnai tries to capture what is particular about National Socialism. By militarising German society, National Socialism managed to force the merger of socialist and capitalist elements into a moderated unity. Within this model, capitalism functions smoothly, but at the price of submission to the dictates of military commands. State interventions in the economy are suggestive of state socialism, but one that does not strive towards state control of the economy. Workers’ interests are no longer represented vis-­à-vis their employers, who in turn are forced by the state to conform to norms of social behaviour that otherwise the workers would have imposed on them through class struggle. Kolnai’s conceptual analysis of National Socialism attempts to capture its paradoxical complexity. In covering its ideological and socio-­political elements, he works through a variety of possible definitions, all of which he ultimately rejects as one-­sided exaggerations of individual elements that neglect other equally important features of National Socialism. In this way he manages to draw out the special feature of National Socialism: the paradox of the strategic and ideological interconnection of what are actually incompatible elements, an interconnection that he identifies as the secret of its political success. In emphasising such different values as authority, organisation, community, discipline and social justice, the National Socialist movement has managed to bring together diverse aspects into a conglomerate, a paradoxical ideological unity. The following attempt to capture this paradox in a cogent definition perhaps reflects this approach best: National Socialist Germany is not a bourgeois, but rather a socialist state that prevents the workers from pursuing their own interests. Here there is no longer a capitalist economy in the classical sense, nor does the state any longer serve as an impartial authority and system of order. Economically and politically, we can identify the contours of unrestrained power for its own sake. As Kolnai recognises, economically National Socialism is headed towards a militaristic ‘revival of class rule’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  330–1): a restructuring of capitalism along the lines of National Socialism. National Socialism has secured the survival of a capitalist market economy governed by the profit principle by expanding state control and by militarising society, and it supports corporate capitalism in opposition to the egalitarian system of democracy (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  354–5). It safeguards capitalist class rule by incorporating segments of the working class into the Fascist state and the economically dominant class and by eliminating organised labour. Industry’s concern is to depress wages, modernise class rule and prevent a democratic society. The National Socialist state subjugates the economy to political power and compels it to accept the Führer state and national unity. Nevertheless, industry, which does need not to fear any form of expropriation or nationalisation, is still being organised according to the economic expertise of capitalists’ professional organisations and companies. At the same time, state planning, coercion and surveillance supplant the free play of economic forces for the purpose of systematically preparing for war (Kolnai, 1938, p.  367). The ruling system of National

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   151 Socialism needs charismatic political leaders as much as a traditional economic order to safeguard a highly industrialised form of Fascism. National Socialism is neither a nationalist form of socialism nor a moderate form of social liberalism or state socialism. The social questions of the relationship between capital and labour, economic equality and the just distribution of goods are not on its agenda. What remains of socialism is an extremely vague ideology of planning, discipline and dictatorial interventions by the state against freedom and economic liberalism. In the vague and indeterminate nature of National Socialist socialism Kolnai does not see a weakness, however, but a reason for the victory of Nazism over Marxist socialism. This indeterminateness leaves room for a range of different expectations and leaves it up to potential followers to establish the reasons for supporting National Socialism that they consider persuasive. Kolnai’s attempt to locate National Socialism on a politico-­economic spectrum between capitalism and socialism remains inconclusive, a fact that aptly reflects the mutations of Nazi politics, which through the political integration of the workers and entrepreneurs seeks to overcome class antagonisms, and thereby forge a national Volksgemeinschaft through racially oriented policies. In doing so, Nazi politics adopts the traditional demands of the labour movement and responds to them in a National Socialist form, by designating the first of May Labour Day, for example. Class struggle is declared resolved in the name of national unity and harmony. Workers are to be given neither the opportunity nor reason to question the economic domination of employers, who in turn are to be held responsible for instituting better working conditions and social benefits without fundamentally altering the existing power relations. In this model, preparation for war and the pursuit of imperialist expansion on the part of National Socialism are to serve as incentives for the economic expansion of companies and their quest for profits. It is not the companies’ international connections, but the territorial expansion of their business activities during the course of military expansion by the German Reich that will secure them new sources of profit. What began with the expropriation and transfer of Jewish property continues in the employment of foreign and Jewish forced labourers and the establishment of new dependences in the occupied territories.

National Socialism and war Kolnai asks whether Nazi Germany is likely to ignite a European, and indeed world, war, and in response combines geographical and foreign policy considerations based on the assumption that National Socialism is inherently bellicose, which will drive it to war regardless of any tactical or strategic deliberations. War is neither inevitable nor peace desirable at any price. As Kolnai sees it, should the Nazis start a war, the West must display its moral, legal, material and strategic strengths (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 677–8). Kolnai believes that the violent assimilation of foreign peoples is most likely not a political priority for National Socialism, especially as leading Nazis are

152   Wolfgang Bialas probably also keeping in mind that many young people in their own nation would die in a war and that a war could lead to their own demise (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 634–5). Nevertheless, National Socialism is attracted to war, hegemony and world domination, which makes it unpredictable and dangerous in geopolitical conflicts (Kolnai, 1938, p. 411). National Socialism sees war as an end in itself that, beyond the pursuit of strategic objectives, presses ahead with the struggle for existence and the prevalence of the strong, the annihilation of the weak and inferior, and the selection of a powerful ‘new man’ during the course of this struggle. It fatalistically accepts war as destiny and venerates it less as a means of securing advantages than as a way of life. For racial nationalism, the construction of the new society is more important than war. Its aim is not the violent conquest of foreign peoples, which is why it will not prematurely engage in conflicts. According to Kolnai, whether Germany will actually risk a new world war cannot be predicted with certainty. Everything points to the future occurrence of such a war, however, made all the more likely by Nazi Germany’s mental constitution. War could be prevented only by a series of bloodless conquests by Nazi Germany, which would, however, be necessarily limited in scope (Kolnai, 1938, p.  635). For Kolnai, the rearmament of Nazi Germany, its foreign policy plans, as well as its national and racial ideologies evidence its fundamental willingness to go to war: it is set on imperialist expansion. Kolnai does not stop at evoking the National Socialist menace, but attempts to reconstruct hypothetically strategic considerations on the part of the Nazi leadership, as he soberly weighs up their options, alternating between eastward and westward expansion. Here Kolnai takes into account both geostrategic calculations and the constellations of power politics, as well as the underlying layers of ideology and world view, the differentiation of which enables him to distinguish the short- and medium-­term priorities of National Socialist policy from historically far-­ranging, long-­term perspectives grounded in irreconcilable ideological conflicts. It is noteworthy here that he considers the opposition between National Socialist and Bolshevist world views less important than that between National Socialism and the bourgeois or Western world. While National Socialism is clearly an anti-­Western and immoral system, Kolnai concedes that the communism of the Soviet system programmatically aims at securing a universal moral order of humanity. National Socialism is more anti-­Western than Bolshevism, which is much more akin to bourgeois ideas. Similarly, left-­wing atheism has much more in common with Christian morality and its social implications than the Nazis’ form of paganism does (Kolnai, 1938, p.  22). As Kolnai describes, Bolshevism still presents and understands itself as humanism, in the tradition of the French Revolution and its militant concepts of freedom, equality and justice, but that reason does not qualify as humanistic in itself. By contrast, Kolnai asserts that Nazism has replaced the idea of humanity with its notions of race and vitality, thus taking leave of that idea (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 181, 222). For the West and civil society, Nazism is incomparable to Bolshevism in the threat it poses (Kolnai, 1938, p.  18). At a later point, Kolnai will regret

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   153 having underestimated communism as the far greater threat to the Western world in his analysis of National Socialism (Kolnai, 1999, p. 144). In his view at the time, however, Nazi Germany posed the greatest threat to Bolshevism and seemed to be initially planning an expansion towards the East, before attending to the destruction of the West, assessing as it did the strength of the Anglo-­French West to be greater than that of the Slavic East. At the same time, Kolnai believes, expansion to the East would offer much better prospects of territorial and economic gains, with the Nazis counting on the pacifist sentimentality of the capitalist West, which would rather hold back than intervene in an attack on Russia (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  560–1). However, the West is the true opponent of National Socialism, even if the latter were to attack Soviet Russia first of all for strategic reasons. The Nazis did indeed perceive Russian Bolshevism as both a threat and coveted prey to be suppressed and destroyed in order to bring Slavic Europe under German control. Nevertheless, Nazism seeks the destruction of the spiritual and moral values of the West and the overthrow of Western democracy. As Kolnai summarises, in any case the German people are being prepared for the demands of a future war. He goes on to say that even if Germany does not expressly want war, its leaders are still creating an atmosphere of war and preparing the country both technologically and psychologically for achieving their objectives through military force. This preparation also includes putting the economy on a war footing. In Kolnai’s view, should Nazi Germany begin a war then it would certainly not be done in order to divert attention from growing internal difficulties and economic hardship. National Socialism has enough enthusiastic followers and political experience to cope with any such internal problems. Germans are willing to endure hardships that would unsettle any democratic regime. The Nazis can also count on the discipline of the German people and on their readiness to make sacrifices. This Fascist dictatorship needs imperialist ventures not in order to placate a discontented population, but to satisfy its own supporters with a German global empire. Germany does not need to fear any uprisings from the opposition, but can rather expect the easing of tension within its elite. Fascism must engage in war in order to conceal its inner barrenness (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 636–7). This philosophical and metaphysical analysis of the internal dynamics of Nazism concludes that National Socialism means war, not as a consequence of domestic and foreign political constellations, but as the result of a bellicose anthropology that employs war as a vehicle for a global existential struggle. Social Darwinist anthropology such as this affirms the right of the fittest to demonstrate their superiority in dealing with other races and peoples. In their struggle, Germans are to overcome the humanitarian scruples instilled in them by bourgeois humanism and Christianity, and instead become socialised in handling their enemies in warfare directed exclusively towards victory, and also in the corresponding treatment of the racially inferior and weak. Germans are being brought to believe that waging war is essential to the master race, which is

154   Wolfgang Bialas presented in war with the opportunity to overcome the moral inhibitions of a bourgeois-­humanistic socialisation and return to its original racial nature, which grants them as members of the superior Nordic race the moral licence to enslave and exterminate inferior races. It is along these lines that Kolnai’s identification of a bellicose racial nature can be further elaborated as the anthropological core of Nazi racial ideology. At a time when racial ideology had become state doctrine, social life and political culture were undergoing permanent changes in Germany, and when the future racial war of annihilation and the destruction of the Jews in the Holocaust were not yet foreseeable, Kolnai had to come to a stop at this general analysis. His assertion of the inner emptiness of Fascism and National Socialism that could only be rectified through war is more questionably. Certainly, the Germans themselves did not feel an inner emptiness, whether they followed National Socialism out of conviction and enthusiasm or for opportunistic and pragmatic reasons. There was no shortage of populist offerings that had ideological meaningfulness: careers were pursued, property holdings increased, communal experiences afforded, and if nothing else the Nazi regime offered individuals ample opportunity to distinguish themselves politically and become candidates to achieve a higher station in life. Kolnai explains Germany’s expansionism, which sought the establishment of a global empire, and its assertion of hegemony though reference to the country’s geographically central location and delayed processes of nation-­building, but without justifying the German claim to have a special European status. Kolnai thinks that to understand German nationalism in terms of Germany’s particular geographical situation, we must take into account that Germany is the dominant nation in Central Europe. The area populated by Germans has no natural borders, and many Germans live to some extent scattered among other nations outside the borders of the Reich. Germany lacks the territorial scope of other Western nations. Its location is indeed central, but only in relation to the European continent. From the perspective of Western civilisation, it is rather peripheral. From a contemporary perspective, Germany, as a nation in the middle of Europe, styles itself as a primal and superior people destined to rule, but also as a people surrounded, despised, isolated and persecuted. As the natural leader of Europe, Germany regards itself as discriminated against by its enemies as posing a threat to Europe. Within the historical context, the German people had found their way to national unity only belatedly and incompletely. This could be the reason why the German idea of a nation is governed by claims of racial superiority and imperial uniqueness. In view of this complex situation, Kolnai considers it necessary to stress that none of the Germans’ religious or metaphysical characteristics can be derived from their specific geographical and historical context. He does recognise the geopolitically prominent status of Germany in the middle of Europe, but this is not one that justifies there being any special role for Germany to play, whereas National Socialism insists on German hegemony as a logical consequence of a race that is destined to rule (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 539–40).

Analysis and critique of National Socialism   155 Kolnai considers it possible that National Socialism, which had removed hardened dynastic federalism, will serve as a brutal assistant in the birth of Germany at the beginning of its development into a normal nation state of the Western type. Nevertheless, even then Germany would insist on occupying a prominent position among Western nations. In Kolnai’s view, it is consequently futile to hope for amicable diplomatic solutions to differences and conflicts with National Socialism. National Socialism will not be satisfied with the status of being a ‘normal’ German nation, but will strive to become an empire, with the German people at the centre of its hierarchical structure (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 610–11).

References Hitler, Adolf (1943). Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kolnai, Aurel (1934). ‘Persönlichkeit und Massenherrschaft’. Der österreichische Volkswirt 26, (10 February): 442–4. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Kolnai, Aurel (1999). Political Memoirs, ed. Francesca Murphy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kolnai, Aurel (2013). ‘Heidegger and National Socialism’. In: Aurel Kolnai, Politics, Values, and National Socialism, ed. Graham McAleer, trans. Francis Dunlop. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge: 85–90.

10 Nazi sexual politics Aurel Kolnai on the threat of re-­primitivism Graham J. McAleer

Political discussions are often reduced to name-­calling. There are lots of names to throw at political opponents: absolutist, Bonapartist, totalitarian, Stalinist, Caesarist, communist, Ayatollah, reactionary, papist, Falangist, even ultramontanist, but the two perennial favourites are undoubtedly Fascist and Nazi. For an interesting twist on this, I read a newspaper article in which ISIS fighters were described as ‘repressed Nazis’.1 Despite being so readily used, most people are unlikely to be able to easily identify the primary political attributes of a Fascist. Even related to the term Nazi, people are likely to have only vague ideas about the Gestapo, death camps, Brownshirts or, the word of the moment, the hate involved. Aurel Kolnai’s 1938 work The War Against the West (hereafter abbreviated to WAW) – described by the German theorist Axel Honneth as ‘groundbreaking’2 – is surely the most detailed, analytical documentation of the thought-­ world of Nazism by a philosopher. In some quarters today, there is a belief that the West is falling for Nazism once more. However, when reading WAW the overwhelming impression is how very strange Nazi thinking was. Put simply, today’s partisans of Left and Right are not so bizarre. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Nazi ideas about the erotic. Nazi sexual politics warped persons, family and community, and did so catastrophically.3 A thread running throughout all 700 pages of WAW is that Nazism celebrated vitalism independently from all ennobling values that control and elevate our drives. In what follows I bring together WAW and various essays by Kolnai, especially early ones that shaped WAW, such as his 1933 ‘The Total State and Civilisation’ and his 1934 ‘The Abuse of the Vital’ (both Kolnai, 2013). I also want to borrow from the logic of Edmund Burke – who influenced Kolnai – which helps us to read the philosophical structure of Kolnai’s book. Burke recommends that politics follow a ‘method of nature’, but this is quite different from Nazi ‘pagan romantic vitalism’ (Burke, 1999, p. 180). The Nazis wanted nothing to do with Burke’s effort to drape political passions in ‘the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion’ (Burke, 1999, p. 179).

Nazi sexual politics   157

Background Aurel Kolnai was born in 1900 in the twilight years of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. A native of Budapest, he was an eccentric philosopher and teacher. His eccentricities began at a young age. As a youth during the First World War, he sided with the Allies; he was a precocious child, an Anglophile who had already been influenced by English writers, especially G. K. Chesterton. His peculiarities increased when at age twenty-­six years he converted to Catholicism – he was born into a highly assimilated liberal Jewish family – and changed his name from Aurel Stein to Aurel Thomas Kolnai. He was never enamoured of German culture and thought its influence on the Austro-­Hungarian Empire to be a disaster. This distance helped him cast a clear-­sighted eye on the monster rising in Germany when so many others failed. Living in Austria at the time, and having already authored three philosophy books in German, Kolnai nonetheless wrote WAW directly in English.4 Kolnai wanted the Anglosphere to go to war against Hitler and thus wrote page after page to demonstrate just how weird and malign National Socialism was, and how thrilled by the catastrophic. In intellectual circles today, Kolnai is best known for his seminal contributions to conservative theory in the post-­war years. In 1938, however, he was a journalist attached to the Christian Left (Dunlop, 2002). Victor Gollancz, another member of the Christian Left, published the book in a somewhat austere volume put out by the Left Book Club (Kolnai, 1938). Though a man of the Left, in a remarkably balanced way, Kolnai is careful to parse political options on the Right; he distinguishes conservatism and reaction from Nazism, and Nazism from Fascism. Conservatism tries to protect still existing pockets of privilege from erosion by progressivism, while reaction tries to resuscitate eradicated privilege. Nazism, however, aims at a root-­and-branch remaking of society, comparable in ambition to the French Revolution. In 1938 war had not been declared, so what was the Nazi war against the West? Why was Nazism not merely a criticism of the West, a reform or revival of it even, as was thought in some quarters? At stake, Kolnai believed, was not simply the open combat to come but a revolutionary assault on the value structure of the West: its moral, political, metaphysical and cultural convictions and tendencies were all challenged by National Socialism (Kolnai, 1938, p. 311). As a revolutionary movement it was peculiar, however. Looking at contemporary Western politics, it is not outlandish to identify continuities with Mussolini’s formula for Fascism: ‘Liberty of real man: the liberty of the state and of man in the state’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 124, emphasis in original). As Kolnai points out, this chilling formulation was far outstripped by Nazism’s ‘weird idealism of tyranny’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 125). It is this fetishisation of tyranny, and its roots in vitalism, that marks out Nazism’s ambition for ‘the fall of the West’ and ‘the revival of spiritual barbarism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 23). The method of the book is very interesting. Kolnai selected broad topics dear to the Nazis, such as the desire for national greatness or the eroticism of military life, and then gathered dozens and dozens of quotes from Nazi writers under

158   Graham J. McAleer these headings; while interjecting with commentary, he mostly allowed the Nazis to speak for themselves. Kolnai literally collected Nazi literature as it was being handed out in the streets and cafes of Vienna. Although he mostly allows the Nazis to talk in their own language, WAW does express Kolnai’s leftist sensibility of the time. This is reflected in the book’s thesis: Nazism is more anti-­ Western than Bolshevism and ‘fundamentally opposed’ to liberalism (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 96–7), and it seeks to re-­primitivise a civilisation. The work has something of a prophetic air about it. As a convert to Catholicism, Kolnai was horrified to see Catholic intellectuals hold their noses and find common cause with Hitler (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 258–63); many welcomed National Socialism as an anti-­utilitarian, anti-­liberal and anti-­communist movement, believing that they could flush out its most poisonous aspects and ultimately redirect the movement to higher spiritual planes.5 Kolnai warns again and again how utterly foolish any compromise made by religious or political authorities with the Nazis will prove. It is not a revival movement, he contends, but a revolution bent on bringing down civilisation itself. Today we tend to think of the Second World War as a matter of moral clarity, but its heroes, people like de Gaulle and Churchill, it must be remembered, came to power as hardliners; they were thought to be suspect, as they were considered overly indifferent to a possible compromise with Hitler. Viscount Halifax and Neville Chamberlain continued to consider the possibility of compromise with Hitler even after the war began. In echoes of the contemporary moment, some thought more broadly that compromise and radical variety were built into the very meaning of democracy, a position Kolnai wholeheartedly rejected. By the end of war, Kolnai had morphed into a brilliant conservative theorist. His theoretically rich ‘Privilege and Liberty’ appeared in 1949, but it is his provocative 1950 work ‘Three Riders of the Apocalypse’ that most pointedly takes up the themes of WAW – only now his thesis has changed significantly (Kolnai, 1999). In 1950, Kolnai argues that the three modern mass regimes – Nazism, communism and Progressive Democracy – are a ‘three-­headed monster’ with a single body: ‘emancipated Man’. Each of these, albeit to different degrees, is infected ‘by the virus of subversive utopia bound for a totalitarian goal’6: Marxist– Leninism, though, offers ‘that most genuine and powerful brand of Totalitarianism’ (Kolnai, 1999, p.  105). Soviet totalitarianism, he thought, accepted the West’s values but callously betrayed them. Communism sought to use the West’s scientism to launch a pervasive, thoroughgoing transformation of nature. For this reason, Kolnai ultimately came to see Bolshevism as the more complete form of totalitarianism, concluding that the scientism of communism resulted in the fullness of the human being’s ‘self-­enslavement’, outstripping even Nazism’s spiritual barbarism (Kolnai, 1999, p. 106).

The core problem: vitalism The ‘emancipation of Man’ is the root doctrine of this three-­headed monster and a clue to the meaning of this phrase appears right at the beginning of WAW in

Nazi sexual politics   159 Kolnai’s arresting comment that ‘Klages is not far from Freud’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  15). Ludwig Klages, described by Kolnai as a highly admired Dionysian (Kolnai, 1938, p. 68), was a leading advocate of vitalism, and a recurring theme in WAW is the Nazi reduction of personality to vitality. The Nazis did not emerge from a vacuum, hence the mention of vitalists like Nietzsche and Freud (Kolnai, 1938, p. 14). Kolnai believed that Nietzsche’s description of the nobility as persons of ‘high temperature’ was utterly subversive. Klages took up this way of thinking in his biocentrism (Biozentrismus) – the folding of metaphysics into biology (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 198–201) – and this easily lent itself to exaggeration in the racial preoccupations of the Nazis and helped give them intellectual standing. They simply exploited patterns in contemporary German thought, contends Kolnai. A long and significant trend of Western thinking ends with Nazism: ‘Here the metaphysics of Fascist counter-­revolution are completed’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 181). Kolnai might not have been as precocious as David Hume, but by his early twenties he was a minor participant in the Vienna Circle, having authored his first book aged twenty-­two years, Psychoanalysis and Sociology. However, in 1925, and in the presence of Freud, he read a paper to the Circle, titled ‘Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido’. It is a definitive break with Freud, in which Kolnai argues that Freud’s preoccupation with a few elemental drives has undermined the deference that every civilisation needs to pay to the objective order of values. Crucial to all of Kolnai’s subsequent philosophy is a passage from the 1925 essay: But the phenomenological method, as its name already implies, approaches things from precisely the opposite direction from the psychoanalytical.… Rather than explaining, deciphering, deriving and reducing the phenomena to their common denominator, or establishing the laws of their occurrence and development, it tries to intuit and grasp their immediate ‘essences’ and to hold fast, through the most appropriate concepts and descriptions, all their varieties, together with their ideal, unvarying, ‘connections of meaning’. In the last analysis, the aim of this method is not to make possible the control and manipulation of the matter being investigated for the sake of healing, but to analyse it for the sake of understanding. (Kolnai, 2013, p. 1) Kolnai stands in a long line of moral thinkers committed to the objectivity of values. Among others, this tradition includes Plato, Aquinas, Anthony Ashley-­ Cooper, Burke and, most especially in Kolnai’s mind, Thomas Reid and Max Scheler (Kolnai, 1938, p. 421). Cooper speaks for them all when he writes that ‘there is a power in numbers, harmony, proportion and beauty of every kind, which naturally captivates the heart and raises the imagination to an opinion or conceit of something majestic and divine’ (Cooper, 2003).7 Civilisations exist, Kolnai believes, to ensure the refinement of human beings. Refinement requires deference to the range of moral, aesthetic and technical values acknowledged to

160   Graham J. McAleer be greater than us, not a fascination with vitalism (Kolnai, 2008). For Kolnai, Freud is philosophically confused: his fixations will only stunt personality: interestingly, Carl Jung concurs, stressing an array of symbols and archetypes as basic rather than a narrow focus on bodily drives (Jung, 1998). Civilisation makes human persons free, but civilisations tap into a complex and varied hierarchy of values: hedonic, vital, moral, intellectual and religious (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 210–13). Emancipation from this hierarchy is not freedom but barbarity. Burke provided Kolnai with a sexual politics. The Burkean method of nature is in ‘the spirit of philosophic analogy’ where nature and politics both exhibit a ‘family settlement’ (Burke, 1999). The guiding institutions of a nation change; they have a history, but they also have stable coordinates in space and time. Like a family, a political institution will have a past (history), present (place) and future (trajectory). In the natural world, creatures thrive by balancing inheritance, territory and reproduction, and, analogously, the soil of politics is family property; as a result, home and fertile marriage, and political deference is owed to the value clusters – moral, aesthetic and technical – of each of these supporting structures for life (Burke, 1999, p. 122). Consequently, Burke argued that a vigorous defence of rights depends on upholding establishment. Rights, he believed, were historically earned: there is no so-­called ‘natural’ right because rights are born through institutions of law. Revolution, he warned, was not a great drama to be celebrated, but a destruction of institutions that leave the people exposed to raw governmental power. If linked to an assault upon religion, revolution becomes monstrous. A divine lawgiver foreign to and greater than the state relativises the reach of the state. Remove divine law and state power becomes limitless, rooting out ‘family settlement’. For attacks on religion are inevitably also attacks on property. Church property is managed for the ages, a physical reminder to government that its power serves as a social bond transcending immediate pressures: a bond between the dead, living and yet-­to-be born.

Nazi sexual politics The Nazis rejected this sexual politics. The Nazi Männerbund is, says Kolnai, a bond ‘differing at the very outset both from the natural and traditional forms of community and allegiance, such as family, patriarchal kingship, or settled social customs – and from the rational and contractual type of association’, such as trade unions, social clubs and professional bodies (Kolnai, 1938, p. 75). Nazism is not built around analogy but celebrates univocity (‘tribal self-­enclosure’) and equivocity. It advocates a complete detachment from the inherited markers of Western civilisation, bent, as it was, on negating, in addition to liberalism,  Christian civilisation as such (the breeding ground of modernity and progress), as well as the faith that has informed it, along with some, if not most, of its subsoil in Greco-­Roman antiquity. In its quest for the ‘rejuvenation’ of anti-­modern traditions, it sought to grope back, across the Prussian glory

Nazi sexual politics   161 of yesteryear and the more brutal aspects of the German Middle Ages, towards the barbarous world of Teutonic heathendom – not without taking a side glance, in my opinion at any rate, at Hindu racialism and caste religion. (Kolnai, 1999, p. 111) This is what distinguishes Nazism from Fascism. Both are subversive, but Kolnai considers it essential to consider whether either offers any shelter to the abiding values of civilisation. He believed that compromise with Nazism was impossible, since Nazism saw nothing of value in the institutional foundation of the Enlightenment, the Christian Middle Ages or Europe’s Greco-­Roman heritage. In detaching itself from the establishment, it was striving to make a great leap back into the obscure bonds and practices of the Teutonic tribes. Universal principles of law, morality, science and the unity of the human species were all discarded. To the Nazi, Mussolini’s Fascistic formula – ‘liberty of the state and of man in the state’ – was nowhere near revolutionary enough. It still clung to the idea of distinguishable poles: persons and the state. But Nazism expressed a ‘weird idealism of tyranny’: the complete abolition of the autonomy of persons to the will of the state. And the state was no mere Roman bureaucracy managing otherwise self-­directed lives, but rather the very vital core of a race sprouting out of the gestures, voice and mien of the Führer (Kolnai, 1938, p.  550). Fascism still thinks in terms of distinction (Kolnai, 1938, p.  580), Nazism resolutely in terms of identity, ‘the motoric energies of a newly awakening Nationalism’ (Goebbels) (Kolnai, 1938, p. 395). However distorted, ordinary civilisational values find a degree of shelter in the narrow spaces still left to them in persons within Fascist politics. Having moved race to the absolute centre of its politics, however, Nazism reduces persons to elemental forces and rids them of will, thought, autonomy and eccentricity. Kolnai calls this the politics of ‘zoological perfectionism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 403), rooted in what Stapel refers to as ‘the exigencies of our national biology’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 288). As a consequence, the delicate encompassing of personal appetite and civilisational offerings was eliminated in Nazi Germany. Oswald Spengler speaks of ‘one circle, one type’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 48), Carl Schmitt the ‘manring’ and Wilhelm Stapel ‘our moral kinsmen’ and ‘our national biology’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 53, 288). ‘Tribal Egotism’ is, says Kolnai, ‘the new rebellion in the cause of bondage’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 56, 155), an ‘emancipation of tyranny’ wherein ‘the primary principles of civilized human existence appear reversed’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  121). Thus Nazi literature speaks of a circle of the Elect or Primaries: a corps or secret society of young unmarried men exhibiting a ‘swiftly reacting vitality’ who are recipients of the Führer’s ‘love-­spell’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 75, 77). This vitalistic circle gives rise to a peculiar breed of men, who are a law unto themselves, recipients of a privileged form of knowledge that is revealed to them, and engage in self-­idolisation (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  36, 60, 2013, p.  49). By contrast, the Secondaries are mere breeders and workers. Burke’s ‘family settlement’ is rejected in favour of univocity in the form of the League or Sect, a model preferred to the family (Kolnai, 1938,

162   Graham J. McAleer p. 75); consequently, it is not inheritance but ‘We’ who are ‘the lords of the ultimate decision’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 91). Kolnai points out that Nazis had a spectrum of religious beliefs. Just as there were some leftist Nazis – those who found Hitler’s labour policies attractive – so some Christians thought Nazism was an actual Christian revival. Kolnai does refer to National Socialism as a Christian heresy but devotes the most time to documenting the outright paganism of Nazis like Himmler and Rosenberg. With vitalism at its core, Kolnai identifies at least three peculiarities that separate National Socialism from Christianity. All flow from the font of youthful male vitalism that Kolnai terms Tribal Egotism. Larenz sets the tone: ‘All spirit not blood-­bound is but a sterile product of decay. Blood must dare to rouse the spirit; spirit must renew itself from blood’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 194). At its most lurid, Nazism fantasised about the soldiers of its ‘wild people’ being on the move, foraging for food good enough for them, ‘living rations of meat on foot’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 406, 426). Nazi racism meant that particularism suspended the rule of law (Kolnai, 1938, p. 272), generating a ‘rupture of species’ (see Rolf Zimmermann’s chapter in this volume) that rejected, in principle, a common morality and destiny for human beings (Kolnai, 1938, p. 279). Its race nationalism spelled a rejection of the West’s ethos, which reconfirmed its anti-­Semitism, as Athens and Rome are incomplete without Jerusalem (Kolnai, 1938, p.  233). Nazis claimed that government earned its legitimacy when it was an expression of tribal vitalism, and only one model of government can reflect this absolute unity: totalitarianism. Kolnai argues that National Socialism was an exaggeration of Luther’s already exaggerated valorisation of national secular authority (Kolnai, 1938, p. 268); this seam in German theology gifted the Nazis groups who would be readily obedient to the Führer, quite out of keeping with Christian scepticism of worldly government. Of course, Nazi anti-­Judaism also got a significant boost from Nazi crony capitalism. Jewish cosmopolitanism was said to be responsible for speculative financial markets, but German capitalism aimed to promote the national social good. The Bund has a different sexuality from the family. Kolnai points out the significance of homoerotism in Nazism. Hans Blüher is explicit in his statement that the family is not the model for the Bund, but it is rather ‘man-­to-man Eros’, exhibited by those belonging to a genuine anthropological species, the Typus inversus (Kolnai, 1938, p.  77): ‘Man is man’s relish’ (Bergmann, quoted in Kolnai, 1938, p. 247). This Eros is a ‘primitive force’, an ‘instinct of combination’ and an ‘Army metaphysical’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  257), contrasting with the sexual impulse that gives rise to births and family. Indeed, the life of the Bund is austere and chaste, a veneration of the male body with an admixture of ‘Doric harshness’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  78). This biocentrism explains the two tendencies of Nazism – its univocity and equivocity – and both are blended in Blüher’s thinking. The main forms of human society, Blüher argues, are rooted in ‘sexual, erotical, instinctual, irrational forces’, but this vitalism divides into two principal types: procreative Eros, which issues from the family, and the ‘inverted love’ of

Nazi sexual politics   163 man-­to-man Eros, the true origins of state-­building (Kolnai, 1938, p.  79). The Tribal Egotism of the Bund opposes the ‘banal society’ of procreative Eros. The adversary of the Männerbund is ‘the system of Urbanity: the femininity of commercial life and social thinness of business corporations opposed to soldiery as the prototype of community’ (see Kolnai, 1938, pp.  84, 89). There is also broad agreement about the Jesuits. Rosenburg warns that their flexible, mobile community life is no model for the Männerbund, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain sees in them an effort to stifle manly dignity and denounces them as the ‘bacilli of radical anti-­nationalism’ (see Kolnai, 1938, p. 567). Hitler accused the Left of seeking to turn the country into a ‘mere commercial firm registered as “Germany” ’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  518). The Nazi is no steward of property for ‘nothing is real but ecstasy and ruin, eruption and evanescence’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 209). The Bund flips from univocity to equivocity for ‘real heroic soldierliness can only subsist as a fundamental law of life in a thoroughly unbourgeois society’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 85, 214). There is no love of the good – whether of persons or fashionable goods – but only love of the hero: ‘The Teutons or the Night – is and remains our motto’ (Schemann, quoted in Kolnai, 1938, p. 582). Kolnai cites Hitler’s claim that the struggle for existence annuls ‘aesthetical obligations’ (1938, p. 173). Thus, for Rosenberg, ‘Great history is not made by suave people: it is made by strong men – who are strong because they are absolutely hard’ (quoted in Kolnai, 1938, p. 291).

Re-­primitivism Pursuing this equivocity between Nazism and the inheritance of Western civilisation, Bäumler identifies the enemy as the ‘educated private gentleman of property’ who ‘sets the fashion’ (quoted in Kolnai, 1938, p.  203), and Hielscher wants rid of bourgeois civilisation, dismissed as no more than a ‘cross-­ conjunction of mere surfaces’, and seeks to replace it with the authenticity of the Bund’s brotherhood. Thus Nazism rejects something it rather hilariously identifies as ‘the English spirit of Viking Liberalism’ (Spengler, quoted in Kolnai, 1938, p. 141). Kolnai arrestingly captures this flipping between tribal univocity and civilisational equivocity in the idea of Nazism as re-­primitivism. National Socialism is neither conservative nor capitalist, it is anti-­bourgeois (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  118, 623), totalitarianism as primitivism (Kolnai, 2013, p. 45). This is a trajectory that Soviet totalitarianism does not share, according to the 1938 Kolnai (Kolnai, 1938, p.  181). It is not Christian because for the Nazi soul and body are equivalent ‘realities’ (unicity) (Kolnai, 1938, p.  192), biocentrism culminating in Bäumler’s claim that ‘generation, life and murder are one’ (quoted in Kolnai, 1938, p. 592). Kolnai discusses at length a Goebbels speech that pulls together the vitalism and primitivism of Nazism. Kolnai glosses as follows: The original form in which Prussiandom existed is best described as a League (Bund) of militant Masters expanding into the Void, over barren

164   Graham J. McAleer plains inhabited by a strictly inferior conquered populace. This flat country is poor, but well adapted to the purpose of building up a large-­scale and mobile military organization. This Void invited swift and ruthless action.… Thus Prussiandom itself re-­introduces the state of Teutonic conquest throughout the sphere of Roman civilization. Its distinctive character is dynamic rather than conservative, aggressive rather than concentrated on mere organization. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 530, emphasis in original) This primitivism (Kolnai, 1938, p. 206) is, Kolnai argues, ‘a critical answer to an already existing civilization’ (Kolnai, 2013, p. 45). The tribe is a wilful dismissal and launch into ‘a dull, unawoken and prejudiced being, lacking the civilised traits of human autonomy, rationality, versatility and world-­openness’ (Kolnai, 2013, p. 45). Uniformisation (Kolnai, 2013, p. 51) is consciously opposed to two perceived complementary agents of universalism: the Catholic Church and humanitarianism (Kolnai, 1938, p. 97). Again, in 1938 when part of the Christian Left, Kolnai viewed humanitarianism as itself a Christian phenomenon (Kolnai, 1938, p.  103), but by 1944 he had adopted Max Scheler’s scepticism towards humanitarianism,8 and indeed by the time he published his 1960 essay ‘Human Dignity Today’, Kolnai regards humanitarianism’s implicit materialism, with its valorisation of the medical, psychiatric, technological and economic, as little more than a repeat of Fascist vitalism. Re-­primitivism is ‘a backward leap across the ages’ and ‘the creation of new things in the spirit of a total inversion of the general trend’ Kolnai, 1938, p. 122). It is, as he intriguingly says, the shedding of ‘the garments of civilization’ (Kolnai, 2013, p.  49). And not only that: it also shows contempt for the non-­ moral values ordinary life is built around (Kolnai, 1938, p. 139). This is the root of the Nazi rejection of democratic sensibility. There is a large scope for acts of daily living that, even if they do not beautify or perfect human life – reading the sports pages, say – certainly do not render it worthless either. Commonly enacted values of ordinary life, most of which are not properly moral, are nonetheless the indispensable condition for flights towards the higher, tone-­setting values of a richly articulated, elevated and moral culture. Real aristocratic character, rather than the specious Nazi variety, must give an egalitarian nod towards a sensibility where politeness, for example, can be refined into graciousness; where the cautious risk-­taking of a stolid propertied class can ultimately merge into the extravagance of the fashionable; and where common decency can grow into benevolence.9

Concluding remarks and contemporary significance Despite Kolnai’s shifting political allegiances, a permanent reflection on the subversion of civilisation endures throughout his work. His focus on re-­primitivism is theoretically very rich. As Kolnai points out, many value practices – for example, fashion, sexuality, policing and even war – are inherently morally

Nazi sexual politics   165 fraught and theorising them can quickly veer off in desperate directions. And the problem here is this: politics is precisely about these topics. At the time of writing, the news is discussing the fashionable mocking of the unfashionable Brexiters, a terrorist massacre at a gay club in Florida, the Freddie Gray police trials in my own city of Baltimore and the knotty Syrian war. Politics is always about these sorts of things. Kolnai writes 700 pages on some distinctly curious thinking but he never simply dismisses its peculiarities. And he tells us why: the Nazis were focused on serious questions. Do we approach the serious questions we face with his patience and maturity? An example: after the November 2015 Paris attacks, the French President François Hollande said that France was at war, having been attacked by ‘an army’. The United States President Barack Obama, by contrast, spoke only of ‘a network of killers’. The killings were a spillover from the war in Syria and, in the wake of the killings, Hilary Benn, Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, won acclaim for ‘one of the greatest speeches’ given in the UK Parliament (the compliment was given by Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond). For all the accolades, it is a curious speech. In his own parliamentary speeches, Oliver Cromwell liked to speak of England’s ‘natural enemy’, and Benn follows his lead. Not, as with Cromwell, Catholic Spain, of course. Seeking to rally his war-­averse centre–left party to the cause of military intervention in Syria against ISIS, Benn identified the natural enemy of his party and, more broadly, Britain, as Fascism. Echoing Cromwell, he first spoke of his party’s resistance to Fascist Spain under Franco, then Fascist Germany, and in reminding his party that they had always fought Fascists, he came to the point:  We are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this chamber tonight, and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. (Guardian, 2015) The speech is fine stuff, but does it actually make any sense? Are ISIS Fascists? Can their ideology really trace its origins to Franco’s Falangists? In espousing divine law as revealed to them, do they really have that much in common with Nazi vitalism? As has been pointed out by Scott Atran, ISIS are not tribalist: ISIS fighters are the most diverse volunteer force assembled since the Second World War (2015). Kolnai’s careful distinctions in WAW can do a lot of the heavy lifting for us, and in his norm of re-­primitivism we have a fit-­forpurpose yardstick with which to resolve our own most serious questions.

Notes 1 Rothwell, James, ‘Isil are a gang of cowardly “repressed Nazis”, says France’s leading philosopher as he urges Britain to back Peshmerga forces’. The New Telegraph (25 June 2016), www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/25/isil-­are-a-­gang-of-­cowardly-repressed-­ nazis-says-­frances-leading/, accessed 23 May 2016.

166   Graham J. McAleer 2 Private communication. 3 I discuss the ongoing significance of sexual politics in the West in my Veneration & Refinement: The Ethics of Fashion available at ethicsoffashion.com, most especially in Chapter 8 where I assess the work of Giorgio Agamben. 4 Under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Institute, Wolfgang Bialas, a German scholar of the Nazi period, translated this hefty book into German and chased down all the sources Kolnai used, which was published as Der Krieg gegen den Westen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015). Funded by the German government, it took Bialas 4 years to complete the translation; the Germans have a strong sense of the text’s worth, and it is a great shame that Kolnai’s book has not been in print in English since 1938. 5 For an interesting contemporary debate about this, see S. J. Aaron Pidel (2016), ‘Erich Przywara, S. J., and “Catholic Fascism”: A Response to Paul Silas Peterson’. Journal for the History of Modern Theology 23, 1: 27–55. 6 I discuss Kolnai’s observations about the totalitarian aspirations internal to humanitarianism in my 2005 monograph Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics, New York: Fordham University Press. 7 See Kolnai’s beautiful lines: ‘Children, though compelled to obey, are kings because they are enticed away, enchanted, into the fairyland of idealized mankind, into the innocent sphere of pure mathematics, into the abstract and leisurely world of eternal forms’ (1938, p. 318). 8 See the essay ‘The Humanitarian versus Religious Attitude’, essential Kolnai reading in my opinion. Aurel Kolnai, The Thomist 7, 4 (1944): 429–57. 9 For more on these points, see Kolnai’s magnificent late essay, ‘The Concept of Hierarchy’ (Kolnai, 2008).

References Atran, Scott (2015). ‘Why ISIS has the Potential to be a World-­Altering Revolution’. Aeon Essays. https://aeon.co/essays/why-­isis-has-­the-potential-­to-be-­a-world-­alteringrevolution, accessed 11 September 2016. Burke, Edmund (1999). Reflections on the Revolution in France. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Cooper, Anthony Ashley (2003). Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dunlop, Francis (2002). The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai. Aldershot: Ashgate. Guardian (2015). ‘Hilary Benn Speech in Full: “We Must Now Confront This Evil” ’ (3 December). www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/dec/03/hilary-­benn-airstrikes-­ vote-speech-­full-must-­confront-isis-­evil-video, accessed 28 September 2017. Jung, Carl (1998). Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Kolnai, Aurel (1999). Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kolnai, Aurel (2008). Ethics, Value, and Reality. London: Transaction Press. Kolnai, Aurel (2013). Politics, Values, and National Socialism. London: Transaction Press.

Part IV

Kolnai’s political and moral philosophy

11 Aurel Kolnai’s War against Carl Schmitt’s War The war of wars1 Zoltán Balázs

This chapter considers Kolnai’s most famous book within the context of Carl Schmitt’s theory of the political. Kolnai’s work is highly combative and highly political, being conceived as a weapon to be used in a real war. This raises the question of whether it fits within the Schmittian model. Kolnai sharply criticised and rejected this model earlier in his work, but not because of its immorality; he accepted the distinction Schmitt made between the spheres or themes of morality and those of politics. Thus, The War Against the West cannot merely be reduced to a declaration that Nazism is an enemy or a foe. Nor can its arguments and observations be treated as if they only contain a simple, existential, political message: they are just different. And it cannot be seen as yet another moral condemnation of the immorality of Nazism. For Kolnai, it is necessary to establish and justify a war against Nazism that is not only, nor even primarily, a moral duty but a deep political commitment to resist and overcome tyranny, the greatest and most well-­known political menace in Western civilisation.

Schmitt in The War Against the West In The War Against the West (hereafter WAW), Aurel Kolnai makes several references to Carl Schmitt and his theory of the political (Kolnai, 1938). As is the case for almost every author cited and discussed in the book, Schmitt, who was termed the ‘crown jurist of the Third Reich’ (‘Kronjurist des Dritten Reiches’), also appears as one of the evil spirits or demons of Nazi ideology. In his longest note in the book, Kolnai characterises Schmitt’s conception of politics as the celebration of enmity or hostility that ignores the regulative, conflict-­managing role of politics. If politics is inherently directed towards war, then the elimination of war inherent in the existence of a universal sovereign power, Kolnai continues in a rather sardonic tone, would entail that ‘the unfortunate people [who are] subjected to so degrading a rule would actually live in a stateless condition’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 144). In other words, even if a universal state were possible, politics would still exist, and therefore politics is not to be equated with the business of war. Kolnai is aware that Schmitt sharply distinguishes or intends to distinguish between private and public enmity, but his comment on this point is but a brief derogatory remark.

170   Zoltán Balázs Another Schmittian idea is the supposition that there are different spheres or provinces of life that are governed by idiosyncratic dual values. Kolnai also discusses this at some length (Kolnai, 1938, p. 145). Kolnai seems to be fair in presenting the essence of the concept, namely that politics in itself is not a discrete or distinct sphere but rather it arises from the various conflicts prevalent in these different areas of life. The emergence of politics is, however, a distinct event, not reducible to the conflicts themselves. Or, to phrase it more accurately, it is an act, a decision to declare someone (‘the other’) to be a foe. Kolnai’s other relevant citations from Schmitt include: a brief reference to his contention that Führertum (leadership) and similarity in mindset between leader and people constitute the foundation of Nazi law (Kolnai, 1938, p. 156); another to the organic unity between state, movement and people that stands in contrast to liberal oppositions, such as those between people and state or private and public (Kolnai, 1938, p. 167); another concerning the degradation of the people as the subject of politics (Kolnai, 1938, p. 171); and another about the Nazi political order, which exceeds not only the liberal idea of the rule of norms and laws, but also the rule of political leaders (1938, p. 176). This means, to paraphrase the famous Lincolnian sentence, that Nazi political leadership is not just for the people, but also by and of the people too (Kolnai, 1938, p. 302). Clearly, these and some other sparse references to Schmitt do not qualify as either a serious discussion or profound criticism of his theory or even, as a matter of fact, of his ever-­shifting views. But they are more than illustrations. There can be hardly any doubt that Kolnai would have never flirted with the idea of taking, for instance, Alfred Rosenberg or Joseph Goebbels seriously as thinkers. But Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hans Blüher, Othmar Spann, Friedrich Gogarten and also Schmitt are for Kolnai deplorable yet serious opponents. As I have stated, Schmitt, in particular, provided Kolnai with the occasion to outline his own understanding of politics. Why is all this interesting in the context of WAW or, more significantly, in the context in which it was written? The answer is straightforward: Kolnai’s book is meant to be a political weapon, a means to fight a war that he considered to be inevitable and certainly existential. What was at stake, in Kolnai’s eyes, was the very survival of the West. The war to defend this space was bound to be lethal, given the utter resolution of the Nazis to destroy the old Europe. As much as their determination was all-­encompassing, the book was also meant to be comprehensive, providing an unsparing and complete exposition of a monster whose very identity constituted a denial of the West’s essence, at least in Kolnai’s view. It appears, therefore, that since Kolnai’s book was a gigantic intellectual bombshell, intended to destroy the enemy, it was written in the exact same spirit of Schmitt, whose theory of enmity as the essence of politics constitutes one of the main targets of WAW.2 Is there not a contradiction here? Before answering this question, it is worth recalling how Kolnai’s Political Memoirs recall and reconstruct his attitude to the Great War. At that time, he was a teenager who lacked the proper philosophical concepts to define and express this attitude. With those means and concepts at his disposal some fifty

The war of wars   171 years later, he writes that, despite the very strong nationalist sentiments displayed and shared by most people in Hungary and Budapest during that period – other countries and capitals were hardly different in this respect, of course – he identified himself increasingly emphatically with the Entente cause, rather than with the position of the Central Powers. In a nutshell, his main reason for holding this non-­conformist attitude was his perception of a difference between having a ‘cause’ and having a ‘position’. A cause is a moral and civilisation-­ related issue worth defending and justifiable before mankind, whereas a political position is a much less valuable thing. The Central Powers, he argues, clearly lacked a universal cause and merely advanced grievances (though partly justified ones) and, still worse, were suffused with a more intrinsically violent and power­centred vision of politics than their opponents (Kolnai, 1999, p.  29).3 Admittedly, this has hardly ever been given – either then or now – as a common justificatory reason for the war, not even on the Allied side, despite the propagation of German barbarism. Kolnai’s subtle feelings and incipient instincts about the deeply political nature of the conflict, which turned into a war worth fighting for the sake of a political order, prefigured his attitude to the next world war and the events that preceded it. In one sense then, the seeds of Schmitt’s and Kolnai’s conceptions of politics were sown in their respective and different experiences of the war, and the personal and political identities that they discovered within them. Differences notwithstanding, neither of them thought that war was an absolute evil and both found that it cuts to the root of one’s political identity and persuasion. This looks like a very congenial approach. Bearing this in mind, we can better appreciate the conceptual differences that developed between them. In order to reveal them, I shall rely on some additional writings by Kolnai, in particular his positive conception of politics as developed in ‘Der Inhalt der Politik’ (1933, in English ‘What is Politics About?’, 2004), as well as his later article on ‘The Moral Theme in Political Division’ (1960) and a few unpublished writings, including his book titled ‘The Fallacies of Pacifism’ (n.d.a). These works offer further valuable insights into his thinking that, I maintain, presents a constant, though often latent, dialogue and even struggle with Schmitt’s theory.4

The concept of practice Kolnai’s response to Schmitt’s revolutionary work The Concept of the Political (Schmitt, 1976) was very swift and dismissive. In ‘What is Politics About?’, Kolnai had offered a relatively favourable overall assessment of Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen, calling it an ‘unusually profound and spirited work’ (Kolnai, 2004, p. 17). He did add, however, in what is in some senses an adumbration of what he was later to say in WAW, that Schmitt belongs ‘among [those] German-­speaking intellectuals … who can be briefly described as “irrationalists of life and power” ’ (Kolnai, 2004, p. 18; emphasis in the original). The irrationalism of the Schmittian conception lies, in Kolnai’s view, in its ultimate denial

172   Zoltán Balázs of the presence of substance behind wars and, by implication, behind politics. Hence in WAW, Kolnai’s general verdict on Schmitt is that ‘there is a marginal element of sound truth and a central element of obvious perversity’ in him (Kolnai, 1938, p.  146). As I have just argued, this is too terse a statement, although it is understandable within the context of the book. In taking him seriously as a political theorist, Schmitt is not so easy to dismiss. To appreciate his most fundamental and critical point about Nazism in general and Schmitt in particular, it should be noted here that in his long career as a moral and political philosopher, Kolnai became increasingly concerned with all sorts of philosophical and ideological reductionisms. He returned to the critique of reductionism from various perspectives and repeated his main arguments in different ways, always restating the essential point. In ‘The Fallacies of Pacifism’ he fought against holism and monism, and elsewhere and at a later point he attacked subjectivism and naturalism; he identified the former types of reductionism with Nazism and the latter ones with communism in the world of political ideologies. These opposing ideological/philosophical positions or tendencies had one thing in common: the refusal to acknowledge the sovereignty of the object, as Kolnai phrased it, and, regarding the human condition, the refusal to acknowledge the objective pluralism of life. Holism and subjectivism deny this, whereas monism and naturalism reduce the pluralism of life to a single aspect. Although Kolnai truly excels in his criticisms of reductionism, in a more constructive vein he has a good deal to say about how the life of human beings is best conceived. Broadly defined, for Kolnai life is made up of various practices, ambitions, activities, concerns and relationships that reflect an objectively established order of values. In this sense, life itself is a practice that cannot and should not be reduced to any single aspect, including morality: ‘practice is concerned with the agent’s attainment or non-­attainment of his purposes, whatever they are, whereas morality is concerned precisely with the quality of his purposes’ (Kolnai, 1977a, p. 64). The multifocal world of aims, values and various types of activity has a generally very positive aspect, inasmuch as individuals normally live or at least wish to live their private and social lives in an appreciative, affirming and positive way. Everyone wants to lead a good life where ‘goodness’ is primarily personal and subjective. However, it does not follow that goodness is merely an internal condition, unrelated to the objective world of ‘goods’. What most people normally want are concrete, though not only or entirely, material goods whose goodness inheres in their objective qualities. This is similar to George Edward Moore’s well-­known concept of intrinsic good(ness). In practice, we encounter various goods that we strive and long for, and the goodness of these things is a very basic experience that no form of morality can simply deny. Morality is, therefore, in an essential way distinguished from practice, although it grows out of it: The rise of the Moral Emphasis takes place, schematically speaking, in a non-­moral practical world to which it adds a new note of a peculiar kind. Life and its manifold concerns, including aesthetical, intellectual and (in the

The war of wars   173 widest sense) political interests, would be quite imaginable without the intervention of morality, whereas morality is quite inconceivable without the background of life with its confederate and competitive concerns. (Kolnai, 1977b, p. 101)5 The moral ‘theme’, in Kolnai’s words, is practically reflected in our proclivity for rejecting, distorting, faking and exterminating true good. Therefore, it appears mostly in the negative terms of prohibition and condemnation (rejection, distortion and so on of what is good). In other words, what morality tells us at the most general level is that we are not to destroy what is good or do what is wrong, but rather than that we are to promote a particular form of good or follow a particular way of acting in the right way. Practice encompasses the pluralist world in which there are many kinds of good and diverse situations. Morality is the code of rules that helps us distinguish between what is good and bad, when we are confronted with such situations, and between what is the right and wrong thing to do, when we are required to make a decision. It does not create or sanction good and nor is it identical with it (as it the case, for instance, in a Kantian type of ethical theory where both the sense and acting out of duty is the only good). This is how Kolnai sums this up, using his own phraseology (which I think is intelligible without further explanation): What matters in the present context is the secondariness of evil by reference to a framework of life somehow presumed ‘good’ … and attached to it the thematic primacy of evil by reference to a distinct moral consciousness, to moral legislation and to conscience.… (Kolnai, 1977a, p. 85; emphasis in original) Therefore nothing, not even morality, has a complete ability to guide human action, to give a final shape to the totality of human concerns, activities and interests. Its main role is to confirm the goodness and value of life in its manifold and pluralist reality and to contain evil by prohibitions and counsels: the thematic primacy of evil cannot justify any moral theory of good life. Consequently, any attempt to reduce the plurality of practice to a single aspect – even if this may be the (presumed) moral aspect, which is perhaps most frequently evidenced in the form of a simple rule declared universally valid and always applicable – is illicit both philosophically and morally. The rich reality of practice renders conflicts unavoidable. Conflict and power are thus normal features of human life. As Kolnai puts it, what we call ‘spheres of power’ are not provinces separated by neat boundaries like states or administrative bodies; they overlap and penetrate each another because power and power positions belong to the normal fabric of national and international life. They are linked to the existence of the values that a community cherishes and to the possibility of averting the evils it fears (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 187). Politics, when tied to power, arises from the conflict-­ridden nature of human existence, and it is both a solution to and an expression of it. It is an expression

174   Zoltán Balázs of such an existence because, as Kolnai writes, ‘power politics’, in this sense, cannot be detached from politics as such, nor from reality, life and society as such (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 189). But it is also a solution to it, since, as he goes on to say, ‘as far as power is suffused with and subservient to “good,” it renders that “good” not only more capable of being asserted and secured but also more capable of being understood, conceived, formulated, and sought for’ (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 190). Politics is hence both about conflicts and the process of overcoming them. It is neither possible to make sense of conflicts nor manage them, however, without appreciating the fact that these conflicts, serious as they may be, always concern something that is rooted in everyday life. Politics is irrational only insofar as there is no scientific or procedurally fixed way of telling in advance what conflicts will evolve, and how and why.6 However, according to Kolnai, conflicts are not irrational in the sense that they are simply an expression of a pure act of will, an emotion or a life instinct. Politics is possible because conflicts have an objective core, whether a philosophical or religious disagreement, an economic clash of interests or even a moral issue. Without such an objective core, conflicts would indeed become irrational. Such a potential irrational turn does not, however, herald the emergence or appearance of the political, it rather announces the end of the political. Political existence entails being concerned with particular issues that affect one’s life as a member of a community, rather than merely focusing on survival, some obscure animal or racial instincts that are only thinly covered by issues of morality, culture, economy or religion. For Kolnai, politics is consequently a part of practical life: it is one of our concerns but it also overcomes it. However, it does not function in the same way that morality does. Politics is part of practical life because it is concerned with the objective realities of human society and human communities. Moreover, as Kolnai admits, we may also speak of peculiarly ‘political values’. They include success, significance, forcefulness, ingenuity, creativity, and the timing of political conduct – values, which are in general independent of any political tendency and can characterise conservative just as much as revolutionary politics.  (Kolnai, 2004, pp. 38–9) For this reason, politics is partly a practice within Practice writ large, a game within the world of games. But politics partly transcends the myriad games of life, insofar as its aim is order, an integration of all the games of life: The theory of political order … will recognise, between the pure category of subjective success in battle and extra-­political value foundations, an intermediate sphere of those genuinely political values which will correspond not simply to the victory of the better over the worse, and not simply to the victory of the one over the others, but to the right and lasting harmonisation

The war of wars   175 of the elements of a social unit of reference, albeit certainly from the preferred standpoint of these elements. (Kolnai, 2004, p. 39; emphasis in original) Thus, overcoming conflict needs to be understood as a question of power, not just deliberations in the often-­vain hope of reaching consensus. But power is a means and never an end; whatever the decision, it must be justified (Kolnai, n.d.b).7 In a sense, therefore, Kolnai’s vision of political decision-­making is reminiscent of court proceedings (Kolnai, n.d.b). This presupposes an already existing institutional arrangement. Apparently, Kolnai was not concerned with how institutions evolve and whether their construction is itself part of the business of politics.8 Without any such references, we should simply accept Kolnai’s implicit position that politics is a normal function of social cooperation. For him, unlike other activities, it has a special legitimacy to make decisions for the whole commonwealth – if necessary but only if necessary – through coercive power. Morality, for Kolnai, is a different aspect of social life. In its negative universalism – namely its simple prohibitions (against murder, theft, unjustified cruelty) that most people deem to be universally valid (unlike more particular forms of the good life) – morality permits a more general framework of thinking and acting than politics, which is inherently partial and particular, as far as its aims and scope of thought are concerned. Politics is, as Kolnai argues elsewhere, universal only in the sense of living in and according to various practice(s), because the aspects of goodness in practical concerns and goals are objective, comparable, briefly and universally intelligible (Kolnai, n.d.c). We may not wish to subject ourselves, for example, to the good of the family to the extent that people in some other cultures do. However, values related to family and, more generally, community are not unfamiliar and inappreciable to us either. It follows that although all political conflicts and their resolutions are particular, in that they are tied to some context, situation, set of concerns or interests, the very material of which they are composed is nevertheless by necessity objective or objectively established. Thus, morality is both superior and inferior to politics. It is superior in the sense that, since it has its own special kind of authority over practical life, this authority must also be in control of politics. What sound morality prohibits is prohibited universally. Yet, interestingly, insofar as morality is also bound up with particular forms of good, moral concerns and the complexities of situations, politics is superior to morality in a positive sense. To use a simple example again, while torturing people for the sake of public entertainment is absolutely forbidden, although it can be potentially politically beneficial, it is the business of politics to decide whether justice, equality or security should be given precedent in a particular situation. If certain ethical theories suggest that politics ought to follow a particular moral code, a set of exclusive moral precepts or a single moral principle, they are bound to fail. This is the business of politics, which, however, does not imply that anything is permissible. Morality retains its

176   Zoltán Balázs authority through its prohibitive force and, so we may argue, in its general affirmation of the goodness of life, including social life, for which politics is responsible.

Practice and wars The dilemma However, we may now offer an objection, since there can be very serious disagreements about certain weighty issues, such as the shape culture and civilisation should take, even within a political community. Should one really be ready to lay down one’s life for liberalism or conservatism, for Germany in a certain form, for a certain ideal of Englishness or a bourgeois form of life? Or is it even possible to do so? Or should we say that the willingness to die for such things, or for some morally laudable issue such as the abolition of slavery, is simply beyond the political? In other words, we must ask whether wars are still part of the normal political realm outlined previously or whether they in fact represent a sequence of events in and during which things take an irrevocably irrational, non-­political turn and proceed outside the control of politics. It is indeed relatively easy to refute Schmitt’s notion on the basis of normal politics, but how can we account for wars in political terms, as well as in terms of political theory? It has to be said in all honesty that Kolnai’s various works present inconsistent arguments on this count. In ‘The Fallacies of Pacifism’, he includes a remark that wars include an aspect of ‘value and dignity of persons and communities’ (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 26). There is something naive or naively chivalrous about this. It is hard to imagine a war that does not involve a vast amount of barbarity. We may criticise an error, resist what is evil and reject another way of life, but it is questionable whether any of these negative attitudes can justify the intention and action of killing another. Kolnai seems to be almost desperately trying to maintain the idea that  to stand for a thing does not necessarily or usually imply violence and massacre for its own sake … yet it implies a ‘personal presence’ with a background of readiness to suffer and even to inflict suffering, of resolution to sacrifice and even to acting on an elemental plane of decision. (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 68, emphasis in original) ‘Personal presence’ and ‘elemental plane of decision’ are curious choices of words because they are not so far away from the Nazi understanding of how to be within the world. One should be strong and self-­assertive, up to the point of being ready to die. Is this an appropriate political justification for war? Hardly, as Kolnai’s more thoughtful essay on political theory demonstrates. In ‘What Is Politics About?’, he contends that normal politics ends with war: ‘the essential mark of the political sphere is not the relation between friend and foe but the coexistence of opponents on the basis of a social unit of reference’ (Kolnai, 2004, p.  34;

The war of wars   177 emphasis in original). Losing an election may be a very painful experience inflicted by an opponent on the loser, yet such suffering is in not comparable to the suffering of war in a meaningful way, however ‘mild’ it may be. Yet if a ‘social unit of reference’ is a prerequisite for all politics, then we must conclude that wars – including civil wars fought over some morally justifiable cause, such as the abolition of slavery in the American Civil War – are beyond politics after all. War is not a continuation of politics but its antithesis, as it is essentially incompatible with the maintenance of the social unit of reference, the common ground of all politics. It is true that many wars in human history have not been fought in the Schmittian existential sense, that is, with the aim of literally exterminating the other. Ever since the Greek–Persian wars, however, the idea of wars that were fought for some cause with the aim of annihilating the other (for a moral cause, political ideal, religion or way of being) has become the most justifiable kind of war, as mere feuds or wars waged for simple material reasons have become more and more unacceptable. Even if wars such as these do not aim to kill the other (whether a people or population), they supersede normal political oppositions. Such wars are not a continuation of politics, according to Kolnai’s theory of the political, but its termination, since the common ground of understanding has been lost. If such wars are not a part of politics, then WAW, which was intended as a weapon in this type of war, cannot be a political tool. Kolnai may be quite right to criticise Schmitt for his complete ignorance of domestic politics as an intrinsically issue-­bound business, but then he also has to admit that defending the West against Nazi Germany falls outside politics, in the same way that there is no such thing as racial politics (either in the Nazi model or any other form) insofar as both rest on a complete rejection of the other. An Endlösung is not a policy. But can it really be true that if racial politics thus understood is beyond politics proper, then the war against a regime that claims to pursue such a thing as racial politics is in itself also beyond politics? Is it nothing other than the Schmittian rejection of the other for their status of being other, however repugnant and vicious this looks? Kolnai would not accept this conclusion. The conflict that WAW envisions and discusses is evidently about the objective goodness or value of one side and its rejection of the other side on account of its fundamental evilness. It is not an existential disagreement about who should dominate Europe or, to put it more crudely, it is not a pure power struggle that lacks an objective basis other than the simple desire to remain the only politically capable agent on the European stage. The thematic and topical richness of the book would not be clear unless we agree that it is crucial to understand how the Nazis think and what they want. The task is, therefore, to maintain the stance that politics is not intrinsically combative, although it is conflict-­oriented, and to find a way to argue that at least certain wars are intrinsically political. In other words, it must be convincingly demonstrated that the war, championed by Kolnai, against ‘the war against the West’ is not a proof of the Schmittian theory of the political based on the relationship between friend and foe, although it is a war that is justifiable in terms of a sound conception of the political.

178   Zoltán Balázs A purely moral justification of war The statement that we need to justify war politically implies that certain wars are relatively easy to justify in exclusively moral terms. Pure self-­defence is an obvious example. To most people it is beyond question that once aggression begins there is a moral justification for resistance, since aggression for its own sake (or for the sake of simply conquering, subjugating or plundering another people, or even of seeking glory) is a moral evil, and self-­preservation is both a moral good and a moral imperative. Resisting aggression is not just an instinctive reaction but an action supported by universal morality: people and communities have a right to protect and defend themselves, if necessary by force. Serious conflicts would then justify war only in the case that the issue at stake was clearly moral, that is if one of the belligerent parties committed or is about to commit a gravely immoral act, such as attacking the other without a morally justified reason, for instance, for simply being other or different, as Schmitt seems to suggest. Justification of war would then be a purely moral issue. Only theories of just war fall within this theoretical framework. Politics cannot sanction the resolution of any conflict by means of (military) force. Wars are beyond politics and they are prohibited unless some universal moral principle permits them.9 In Kolnai’s view, as I have argued, morality has a distinct relationship to practical life. It is essentially about prohibition rather than prescription. It follows from his conception of practical and moral life that the thematic primacy of evil, which underlies moral prohibitions, can clearly justify self-­defence. The application of such prohibitions is, however, an easier task in everyday moral life than in complex social and international situations. It is not easy to identify what qualifies as aggression or a deadly threat, especially in cases where the putative aggressors have some serious moral arguments behind them, such as to regain what was once rightfully theirs: the revision of the Treaty of Versailles was considered morally right even by some people outside Germany. It may be similarly difficult to name the aggressor: is it another government, people, class, culture or civilisation? Thus, the application of even universally valid moral prohibitions (military aggression is forbidden) and its moral consequences (it is morally right and a duty to resist aggression) is often a very complicated issue, the evaluation of which forces us to return to the rich world of practical judgements where morality is but one aspect. Such problems will, we may argue, provoke a moral discussion that goes beyond the simple and straightforward application of a moral rule. For instance, even if Germany is morally right to demand the revision of the Treaty (on account of its injustices), granting this raises concerns about the possible moral effects of such a revision on Germany’s future behaviour (will the country be greedier or more aggressive?) and on the balance of power in Europe, which is morally good only in the very general sense of being a precondition for peace. Besides these general considerations, a host of further questions arise, making the evaluation of such complex issues a matter of practical and political reason.

The war of wars   179 Discussions and conflicts such as these, where moral intuitions and appraisals clash, highlight exactly why politics is necessary. There may be conflicts that have strong moral aspects but that cannot be resolved in purely moral terms or according to one or two moral principles. The clash of moral intuitions and principles is a serious issue that calls for a political solution in the most general sense. Such a solution cannot, however, be a mere decision, an arbitrary act of will: sic volo, sic iubeo. This would be the Schmittian position, which Kolnai roundly rejects. Arguments and reasons must be offered that go much farther and deeper than, for instance, those given in a debate between conservatives and liberals about the best way to govern. They must be serious enough to justify war and the suffering and death it brings about. Morality as a two-­edged weapon For Kolnai’s solution, we need to consult his ‘The Fallacies of Pacifism’. The unpublished book was obviously intended as a sequel to WAW. It was written during the war with the intention of persuading those who appeared to have had their determination and conviction to fight Nazi Germany shaken, particularly due to mounting losses on the battlefields and the no less alarming civilian casualties. Bertrand Russell and like-­minded public figures were not moral objectors on religious but on humanist grounds, and their influence was not inconsiderable. Although Kolnai’s book was never published, it remains important for interpreting WAW and its relationship to his political theory. Its relevance in this context is that even innocent-­sounding or partly valid moral arguments can be or become spurious political theories and positions that threaten tyranny. In realising this, one should be prepared to fight such positions with the utmost determination. This can lead to a war that is supported by the positive cause of defending goodness in its diverse and pluralist wholeness, that is, without reducing it to a single value, however comprehensive such a value may appear to be. The cults of ‘life’, ‘nation’ or its ‘health’ are self-­evidently complex ideas, but pursuing them maniacally, in a state of constant excitement that makes sense of everything in terms of these concepts, reduces pluralism and diversity to a single element. Accordingly, Kolnai distinguishes between negative or false pacifism and realist pacifism. He criticises and rejects its first form and defends its second one. His basic point is that absolutisation is abhorrent and should be rejected. Negative or false pacifism, the moral ideal of ‘no war, ever, anywhere’, is an absolutist refusal of war, a maniacal pursuit of peace, and in that sense quite similar to the celebration and embracing of war for its own sake. It is in the imposition of this moral ideal on practice that the simple moral prohibition of aggression prevails. As Kolnai puts it quite bluntly, false pacifism is as ‘naturalist’ (reductionist) and therefore as barbarous, as the religion of militarism: the former believes in replacing a bellicose nature with a peaceful nature rather than in severe rational control and the rich variety of emotions that can be used to counterbalance oppressive instincts (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 33).

180   Zoltán Balázs Kolnai’s view is that conflicts among human beings are unavoidable and even desirable. They are not caused by inherent contradictions between principles and values but mostly by differences in their evaluation that, however serious they may be, need not inevitably lead to war. Fears of such a possibility may lead one to seek the complete and final elimination of war according to an exclusivist moral ideal. But, as Kolnai argues, a solution such as this demands a utopian political order where the emergence of conflicts, including moral ones, is rendered impossible from the very beginning. To achieve such a morally perfect solution one needs political power. In this case, we are in fact already dealing less with a moral than a political response to the moral plurality of life, which is quite totalitarian: Everything in ethics is a matter of proportioning every attempt to an ‘absolute’ responsibility for the results of our actions leads to an entire destruction of responsibility. Whereas relative pacifism means a maximum of moral order, absolute pacifism means absolute anarchy. (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 138) False or negative pacifism is nothing other than a war fought against conflict under the banner of morality. In such a war, complete victory amounts to tyranny because, as Kolnai repeatedly stresses, the absolutisation of any value or moral principle is dangerous. The most ethical value, whether love or respect, to give a couple of examples, may become an idol; Kolnai talks about ‘magical moralism’, which demands submission and honour, and justifies war against its enemies. Here, one is reminded of another Schmittian thesis about the tyranny of values, which is partly but not entirely different from Kolnai’s idea (Schmitt, 1979).10 For Kolnai, it is not in values themselves nor in their representation but in our response to them that the mistake is made. It is a perennial temptation to idolise values, a temptation to which Nazism – in this respect it is one among many totalitarian ideologies – succumbed with unprecedented fervour. Idolisation begins with the unification of all values, a reduction of everything into a single element. In Kolnai’s words: In the magic outlook, ‘unity’ is assumed as a given ‘identity of some’ which makes the actual order of mankind a secondary if not a negligible thing. In the realistic – or, as I should say, the properly moral – outlook, ‘unity’ is conceived as a potentiality of understanding, and of a rational coordination of aims, and on the realization of this potentiality in the actual order of mankind everything depends. (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 85) At first sight, Nazi ideology is an easier target than (false) pacifism. The latter claims to be backed by universal morality (wrongly, as Kolnai argues), which makes it attractive to well-­intentioned people, whereas Nazi morality is self-­ consciously particularist and exclusivist, abhorrent to decent people. However, what appears to be a denial of morality as a universally valid way of

The war of wars   181 distinguishing between good and bad and right and wrong does or did not lack a moral idea, however paradoxical (or was, at least in the pre-­war period of Nazism). The idea emphasises the inherent ‘goodness’ of the lifeworld as it is experienced by individuals and communities. For as we saw in the discussion of Kolnai’s ethical thinking, there is nothing wrong with an emphatic affirmation of the various concrete ways of life that do not violate moral prohibitions. The problem is the subjective moralisation of the ‘good’: ‘We must be good as whole beings, good by nature, in order that good thoughts and intentions may surge from our minds’. Thus the question of what is right and wrong is dismissed. Why should we devise models of goodness if we can be sure that we have ‘living’ goodness inside us? (Kolnai, 1938, p. 280, emphasis in original) Kolnai admits that goodness comes in many forms and is a broader concept than rightness, as well as not being identical with morality, yet the very concept of the good implies some moral affirmation. Furthermore, in its extensive use, rather than continual abuse, of the concept of goodness, Nazi philosophy quite effectively connects ethics based on subjective goodness with power. Violations of moral prohibitions begin to look justified since they appear necessary for securing and achieving what is ‘good’ or supremely good. For instance, ‘Germanhood’ is a subjective good (the subject here being the German people, nation or spirit, and so on), but it has a universal significance and strong moral affirmation inasmuch as it pretends to be, and is partly in fact, a convincing philosophical outlook, a compelling conception of human nature, history, ethics and a lot more, which is the very topic of WAW. As such, it seems like a morally justifiable view – who would not desire ‘living goodness’ inside one’s heart? – although it is, at the same time, emphatically a philosophy of exclusion, rejection and ultimately the extermination of certain individuals and groups of people. Kolnai quotes Wilhelm Stapel: ‘We Germans do not like conscience made into formulas’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  285, emphasis in original). This is itself a concise formula that expresses the rejection of a certain type of formalist moral thinking, which may be a valid point. Nevertheless, it does so by declaring this type of thinking simply unattractive to and, perhaps even more sickeningly, inappropriate for Germans, although it leaves open the possibility for others to join ‘German’ moral thought. Within Nazi moral thinking, the universal moral principle of human equality is rejected not for its reductionism – rejecting it for this reason would gain Kolnai’s approval – but for its alienness. The idea of human equality is interpreted as a menace, a moral evil that threatens the ‘moral’ right of the German people to live in a way that embodies a higher and incommunicable type of goodness. Thus, even though a particular form of moralism or moral particularism are morally justifiable views, this is distorted in Nazi thinking to a degree that the individual conscience is absolutely subjected to an authority that is exclusively capable of defining or merely communicating a higher sense of goodness. This, ultimately, is nothing but immoralism.11

182   Zoltán Balázs Between the extremes of the tyranny of universal moralism and the tyranny of particular moralism, Kolnai recommends a middle path that he briefly sums up in WAW: Certainly one moral code, identical in every detail, cannot prevail all over the world; nations, at their different stages of evolution, as well as different social circles in general, must have their preferences and make particular inflections in the moral order of values. But the crux of the matter is whether … such diversities are merely meant to be different modes of grasping the objective order of truth and values supposed to be one and universal, or whether the order of truths and values itself is seen as a vital product, a ‘flower’ of tribal temperament and national interests. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 287) Particularism in ethical theory and in practice is inevitable and even laudable inasmuch as it testifies to the complexity and pluralism of the world of objective values. Be that as it may, the absolutisation of particularism leads to relativism which, within moral theory and moral practice, ends up imposing a particular moral ideal or value (such as strength or glory) on the whole of practical life. Whereas in ‘The Fallacies of Pacifism’ Kolnai fights against the tyranny of universal moralism, WAW was partly a philosophical war against moral particularism, which culminated in the tyranny of outright immoralism. By ‘tyrannical force’, Kolnai means clear political danger. Hence, for Kolnai, both Nazism and false pacifism are but two extremes whose very extremity and inherent relation, as two sides of the same coin, are revealed only to the politically informed eye. As I argued earlier, Kolnai’s remarks on life as a pluralistic relation of values and human concerns suggests that morality should be contained to the extent that it can become a political tool in both its extreme manifestations, namely false universalism and false particularism: the imposition of one value/principle or a particular way of understanding goodness on practice as a whole. It is here that the peculiarly political nature of both books is revealed. It is essentially peculiar because it is political – the most fundamentally political conflict conceivable, that of the good life and morality – yet it cannot be subsumed under the rubric of routine and normal political conflicts.

Resisting tyranny as the political justification for war How can we, then, construct a conception of politics that, first, avoids moralism? Such a conception would consequently be able to justify war as a last political resort, at least on an international level since, domestically, war destroys politics, although there may be a moral duty to do this. How can this conception, second, steer clear of the Schmittian lure of defining politics merely in terms of a readiness to fight for one’s existence without any substantial justification? In searching for a sound conception, we are well advised to keep in mind Kolnai’s summary of the Nazi – totalitarian – conception of politics:

The war of wars   183 In the Total State, everything relates to politics, and yet politics are in a sense … abolished. … [For] where there are no parties, there is, as it were, no conviction at all.… The subject of One-­Party totality is a pan-­political and at the same time an un-­political being, in the same way that a man whose conduct is regulated … by a rigorous and comprehensive moral code, but who possesses nothing in the way of a moral conscience, would be totally moral and yet un-­moral. (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 169–70, emphasis in original) Although Kolnai draws on a variety of authors in the chapter of WAW in which he discusses the political nature of Nazism on the basis on his other writing on the subject, as I have argued and demonstrated, it is Schmitt whom he takes most seriously. The quotation is best understood against the backdrop of Schmitt’s theory. It is a fairly straightforward claim from The Concept of the Political that there is an ontological difference between private and public enemies, where the latter constitute the basis of the political. A Nazi neighbour can be honest and kind, or so we may assume; equally, a communist colleague can be helpful and decent. One can have good friends among foreigners. As political opponents, however, they are potential enemies where the term ‘enemy’ indicates the possibility of killing the other. A very sharp and inexplicable turn takes place here. The political aspect emerges from nothing and is tied solely to a decision. It appears because there is no other reason to fight the enemy, save their status of being other than we are (‘where there are no parties, there is … no conviction at all’). The political existence and reality of the enemy is entirely relational. Consequently, individual human existence in society is entirely dependent on the existence and life of the collective (the pan-­political aspect), yet without having any personal, practical or objective possibility of relating oneself to the community in the form of various associations, interest groups, churches, professions and so on (the unpolitical aspect). Nothing could be more hollow and horrific to Kolnai. His own conception of ‘the political’ grows out of the manifold concerns and conflicts of human life, which are not identical with a world of subjective forms of good, revealed preferences, expressions of emotion and sovereign choices made according to incommunicable visions and inner states of individual and collective ‘soul’. Consequently, for Kolnai, there are no free-­floating relations, such as the friend and foe distinction. Enemies, including political enemies at the international level, must be recognisable and discernible entities to whom we have a relative existence in a meaningful and mature way.12 From a Kolnaian perspective, full personal maturity presupposes a kind of moral consciousness that acknowledges the sovereignty of the object, or in Kolnai’s words quoted earlier, ‘the objective order of truth and values’. Collective entities, especially political communities that are generally supposed to be primarily important for the well-­being of individuals and responsible for upholding the most fundamental moral norms, must similarly acknowledge this consciousness and be prepared to defend it against complete subjection in any form – in other words, against tyranny.

184   Zoltán Balázs Tyranny is a concept fundamentally at odds with the Schmittian conception of politics or the concept of ‘the political’. For Schmitt, tyranny is a clumsy notion, at best synonymous with the public enemy, nothing but the will of the enemy to dominate us. There is no need to explain why and how tyranny emerges and in what sense it is antithetical to freedom, order, the rule of law, and similar principles and values. Tyranny is not, therefore, a term that denotes anything different from political otherness. The ‘rightful’ ruler, the individual with the power and will to identify the enemy for the political community, cannot be a tyrant. Schmitt’s support for Hitler was a quite logical consequence of his conception of politics. But, from a Kolnaian perspective, the concept of tyranny is very much tied to the old and time-­honoured political tradition of upholding and defending particular values that are considered dear to the commonwealth. Resisting tyranny, so conceived, is not an arbitrary decision to identify the tyrant – or the enemy. Without a clear and mature mindset, grasping the moral and political evil that tyranny represents is impossible. And with such a mindset, the menace posed by tyranny and the identity of the tyrant are indeed clearly discernible. It is not the other, but an evil force with a human face, will and intelligence. It seems, then, that Kolnai’s conception of the political, present in WAW but inferable from his ethical and other political writings, offers a method to justify a war politically, on the familiar but (at least in modern times) neglected basis of resisting tyranny and tyrants. Nazism is not primarily an enemy that threatens the West existentially – this would be close to accepting Schmitt’s conception of the political as a life-­and-death struggle between friends and enemies – but an evil edifice that has been effectively constructed philosophically, culturally, morally and even emotionally, which must be meticulously described, argued with and refuted. If we focus on the other side of the Schmittian dichotomy, the notion of the friend, we can draw similar conclusions. It is an old Aristotelian idea that friendship may serve as the basis of politics. This view may have been somewhat naive and aristocratic, but it is a reflection of a political experience rooted in the multifaceted world of human relations. We do not need to idealise political life by assuming that even rivals are ultimately just partners in a game, but an appreciation of the opponent’s point of view, as an expression of legitimate concerns within the whole polity, does represent an aspect of social intimacy, reminiscent of the ideal of friendship, even within modern politics. Moreover, although friendship in the Aristotelian sense thrives on individuality, it is not only about intimacy but also distance, a respect for my friend’s autonomy, their sincere convictions and perspectives about life that may be different from mine. This conception of friendship can be contrasted with what Kolnai calls ‘the mysterious Bund’, which ‘has no proper equivalent in the English, much less in the Latin of French, tongues’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  74). Kolnai offers a very interesting and complex phenomenological description of the term that cannot be simply summarised (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 74–83); most interestingly, he completely omits the concept of friendship as a category that could help us understand what a Bund is.

The war of wars   185 This may be attributable to the highly communal nature of the Bund, which excludes personality, individuality and distance. Yet intimacy, masculinity, and the high moral ideals of loyalty and serving the other do form bündisch bonds that resemble friendship and Kolnai could, perhaps even should, have related his analysis of the Bund to friendship. For the portentous consequence of their similarity is that the Aristotelian conception of political friendship, or friendship-­ based politics, may easily be replaced by a fundamentally different Schmittian conception of being a ‘friend’. Once more, Kolnai does not mention Schmitt in this part of WAW and nor does Schmitt use the notion of Bund in his exposition of the political (the friend–foe relation). However, there is an important link between a distorted understanding of political friendship (the Bund) and the Schmittian idea of the political. This link is provided by the ideal of Führertum, a concept no less mysterious than the Bund. As a matter of fact, Kolnai identifies this as one of the constitutive features of the Bund, when he says that ‘the Bund does not subserve an abstract idea, nor an administrative or professional delimitation; it crystallizes around the living centre of a worshipped Führer’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 77, emphasis in original). Within the concept of Führertum we can find the supreme form of friendship, a bond that unites leader and people in a mystic and ecstatic wholeness. Though there can be, and in most cases probably are, differences between friends in terms of degrees of dominance, friendship in the Aristotelian sense can serve as an imperfect but meaningful model of politics because it is defined in a strong sense by equality and autonomy. In the Bund, the mystic unity of leader and subject pushes intimacy to the extreme, whereby equality and autonomy lose their meaning altogether. Kolnai quotes Schmitt who says that ‘Leadership … and affinity … are basic terms of the National Socialist right’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 156). If we take ‘affinity’ to be a proxy for friendship and intimacy, it is perverted through being conceptually tied to leadership within the specific German or Nazi concept of Führertum, which makes friendship via the idea of the Bund an excessive and tyrannical ‘political’ relation. In the Schmittian conception, the enemy can be anybody; the ‘friend’ is, we may now argue, the Führer, in whose person the whole community is absorbed and united. The tradition-­honoured, Aristotelian-­inspired conception of friendship, as I have argued, offers us at least a meaningful counterpart to the Führer–Bund vision of politics, which is, again, both pan-­political (everyone has an intimate relation to the Führer) and unpolitical (nothing remains of the autonomy, individuality and pluralism of people and their concerns that constitutes the stuff of politics). In itself, the Führer–Bund conception of politics does not justify a war against it. But it is crucial for understanding why and how politics can be eliminated and how a political community can end up transforming into a totalitarian regime, which is arguably the most extreme example of tyrannical rule. Although more implicitly than explicitly, in WAW Kolnai forces Schmitt to show his hand concerning how he thinks about the political bonds between citizens. In effect, then, what constitutes the political justification of war, in this case the war against the West, at least from a Kolnaian perspective, is the idea that

186   Zoltán Balázs tyranny should be resisted because it is an attack not only on a number of moral truths and moral principles, but it is a revolt against human life, against morality as it works in individual and collective conscience and against politics as a mode of joint reflection on values and facts, and conflicts between them. A simple moral resistance against Nazism is insufficient. What is required is a comprehensive political and moral effort to fight it, not because it is different, other or an existential or external threat, but because it reflects our failure. Nazi ideology is monstrous, grows out of our history, our philosophical traditions and even – if Kolnai is right – our common Christian roots. It may be a distortion and disfiguration of grand ideas but, as Prospero says to Caliban in the final scene of The Tempest, ‘this thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine’ (Shakespeare, 1611, Act V, scene 1, lines 2349–50). By exposing Nazi thinking in WAW with the utmost care and an unmistakable interest, Kolnai partly acknowledged that while it may not be ‘his’ thinking, it is still painfully deeply embedded in European intellectual, political and religious history. Thereby, he could avoid the Schmittian position of simply rejecting evil as the other with whom we have nothing in common. Evil is within us and fighting it may require and justify the ultimate sacrifice. The war against Nazism is, thus, a traditional war fought against tyranny. But it is more than that: it is also a war for the restoration of order. It is not just a negative war, mere resistance, but a powerful affirmation of the right moral and political order, the good side of humanity. Kolnai’s more succinct and eloquent words can also serve as an apt conclusion to this chapter: A conduct is evil as far as it interferes, either in the sense of effective causation, or in the sense of symbolic expression, with the personal, dignified, well-­ordered, materially secured life of human beings united in the community and solidarity of mankind. (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 180)

Notes   1 Research for this chapter was supported by a grant of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund of Hungary.   2 This is not the proper place to assess the particular merits and limitations of Kolnai’s book, both in terms of its methods and its ‘truth’. The following points seem reasonable to claim without room for much argument: first, Kolnai wanted to awaken and inspire anti-­Nazi sentiments and political determination; second, that he deliberately made use of, rather than simply commenting on, various Nazi, proto-­Nazi and quasi-­ Nazi thinkers. The idea seems to have been that intellectual truth is better served through this method, which is often unfair while never being untruthful about individual authors, Schmitt included. This is because Nazi ideology, in its fullness or totality, is an intellectual, political and moral phenomenon, a ‘thing’ or an object, the description of which requires a multilevel and multifaceted approach. It is worth recalling that Kolnai was and considered himself to be a philosophical phenomenologist in the objectivist sense. His major strengths were description, illumination, discovery and beginning with an acceptance of facts – perhaps because

The war of wars   187

  3

Nazism was to him an object that was ‘interesting’ in itself (he makes a few remarks in praise of his object of study, namely its vast and complex reality in which its seductive force hides). In this sense, Kolnai’s interest in and preoccupation with Nazism is similar to Edmund Burke’s fascination with the French Revolution, which did not lessen, but rather substantiated his moral and political rejection of it. The original meaning of the Allied cause could be described as a ‘conservative’ one: the Allies represented an older and more solidly established civilization threatened by a comparatively ‘new’, rising and expansive Power. They stood for peaceful order and equipose, in danger of being subverted by an upsurge of crude force and unruly vitality.  (Kolnai, 1999, p. 29)

  4 Thanks to a generous grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, I had the opportunity to study Kolnai’s unpublished papers and writings at the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at St Andrews University in 2015. I am especially grateful to Professor John Haldane and to the staff and colleagues at the Moral Philosophy Department for their help and support. These papers and various manuscripts are now well organised. For an overview of the archive, see Chris Bessemans (2012). References to these sources are listed in the following way: ‘Title’, KA (Kolnai Archive), MS (manuscript), number (of the respective box) and title (of the folder).   5 Earlier, Kolnai argues that morality is rooted in but not identical with practice: that … morality can be thought of in the context of practice is even more evident, for, while spontaneous natural life as underlying practice concerns morality no more than in part indirectly and in part extrinsically …, all practice and nothing but practice is directly subjected to moral judgment, and choice is the focal seat of both the moral attitude and practical perspective. (Kolnai, 1977a, pp. 89–90)   6 ‘Various material factors dictate whether, how far and when social affairs become politicised and become the subject matter of political discussion and pressure-­group formation’ (Kolnai, 2004, p. 37; emphasis in original).   7 It needs to be added that this text was written much later than ‘What is Politics About?’. However, Kolnai’s overall approach to what constitutes the political did not change.   8 On a personal level, however, Kolnai was interested in this because of a certain pastime: he created an imaginary monarchy and populated it with various parties and politicians, fictionalised its history, recorded its parliamentary votes and so on.   9 When WAW was written, there was peace in Europe. True, the Nazis were intent on intimidating old Europe and many European countries, having openly threatened some of them with aggression; they mostly justified their cause as redressing the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and, more generally, the Treaties of Paris. As aggressive as their international politics was, it was not entirely immoral. In 1935–6, no one would have taken a war against France, Britain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Yugoslavia and the United States seriously, that is against half the world. WAW was clearly not intended to inspire resistance against ongoing or imminent military aggression; it does not analyse the moral right to resist Germany through, say, preventive military action. Nor did it grow out of a simple moral concern about serious violations of human rights (though it was clear that gravely evil laws had already been adopted by the Reich) or a moral dilemma, such as a possible conflict between personal or political loyalties. It was written with the quintessentially political purpose of defending a civilisation, a tradition and a culture, in short, a particular identity that grew out of practical life but that, at the same time, was only able to make manifest and articulate the very concept of practical life.

188   Zoltán Balázs 10 Schmitt laments what he perceived as a dangerous legal philosophical development, namely the direct enactment of values and their use in jurisprudence as ‘trump’ arguments. 11 It is in commenting on Wilhelm Stapel’s views in WAW that Kolnai makes this constructive point. 12 Ironically, Schmitt’s exaltation of the ability to make decisions in politics about who is friend or foe is only meaningful if an identity is ascribed to these categories. Schmitt argues that ‘the morally evil, aesthetically ugly, or economically profitable need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word’ (Schmitt, 1976, p.  27). However, the political reality is that one must explain why the other is the enemy. In other words, in reality the enemy must be demonstrably morally evil, aesthetically ugly, a heretic or a pervert, for example. It is most probably a deeper political desire to seek and find reasons for hating the enemy than a case of choosing the enemy for having become politically conscious. Explaining these reasons entails one’s exposure to communication, concepts, arguments and reasons, and it is here that the location and motivation of practical life, with its manifold ways of being good and worth living, de facto triumphs over politics taken in Schmitt’s sense.

References Bessemans, Chris (2012). ‘A Glimpse of the Aurel Kolnai Nachlass’. Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica 1: 153–73. Kolnai, Aurel (n.d.a). ‘The Fallacies of Pacifism’, KA, MS, Box 3. Kolnai, Aurel (n.d.b). ‘Political and Non-­Political Interests’, KA, MS, Box 11, Political Thought. Kolnai, Aurel (n.d.c). ‘Universality and Political Attitudes’, KA, MS Box 1, Political Thought. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Kolnai, Aurel (1960). ‘The Moral Theme in Political Division’, Philosophy, 134: 234–54. Kolnai, Aurel (1977a). ‘Morality and Practice I’. In: Ethics, Value and Reality. Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai, eds Francis Dunlop and Brian Klug. London: Athlone: 63–94. Kolnai, Aurel (1977b). ‘Morality and Practice II’. In: Ethics, Value and Reality. Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai, eds Francis Dunlop and Brian Klug. London: Athlone: 95–122. Kolnai, Aurel (1999). Political Memoirs, ed. Francesca Murphy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kolnai, Aurel (2004). ‘What Is Politics About?’ In: Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai, eds Francis Dunlop and Zoltán Balázs. Budapest/New York: The CEU Press: 17–44; originally appeared in German: ‘Der Inhalt der Politik’. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 94, 1 (1933): 1–38. Schmitt, Carl (1976). The Concept of the Political, trans. and ed. George Schwab. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl (1979). Die Tyrannei der Werte. Hamburg: Lutherisches Verlagshaus. Shakespeare, William (1611). The Tempest. Open Source Shakespeare: www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=tempest&Act=5&Scene=1&Sco pe=scene, accessed 28 September 17.

12 The viability of Kolnai’s moral phenomenology Moral awareness and anti-­Utopianism Chris Bessemans

Recovering the ‘human world’ Kolnai’s political philosophy is essentially characterised by a subtle ‘conservative attitude’. Kolnai refuted both modern democracy and totalitarianism because of their identity-­based creed and the way they miss out on appropriating the Good or ‘values’ of the world in a proper way, namely by acknowledging the human condition and the importance of participation and ‘privilege’. Put in a different way, Kolnai rejected the delusion of strict egalitarianism and harmonious identity. Of course, while totalitarianism is not conducive to ordinary human life as we know and appreciate it, modern liberal democracy shares its ideas of identity and the self-­ affirmation of man which, according to Kolnai, inevitably result in man’s self-­ enslavement and, at the very least, a distortion of the human condition. For the problem is totalitarianism’s disrespect of plurality or the fact that true political liberty must be grounded in an understanding of participating in a world that is already given and, thus, of which man is not the absolute master (cf. Kolnai, 1999, p.  14). Although Kolnai was certainly not anti-­democratic, he suspected modern democracy of being prone to identitarian egalitarianism and thereby liable to breed a utopian belief in all-­encompassing identity and the overcoming of tension, hetero­ geneity and plurality. This obscuring of the ‘human world’ was the deplorable feature in many, not to say most, philosophical theories of the time. Hence Kolnai’s emphasis, in his political as well as moral philosophy, is on the restoration of common-­sense evaluation and thinking. There is, however, one remark that should be made here: although Kolnai’s political–philosophical views are interesting and can be put to use in developing contemporary accounts of democracy and conservatism, Kolnai’s thoughts and reflections were strongly shaped by the time and context in which he lived. The intimate link between Kolnai’s political–philosophical and ethical writings can be found in his focus on recovering the ordinary, human world and common sense, and restoring it to its proper place in philosophical reflection (Mahoney, 1999, pp. 3–4). It is undeniable that Kolnai’s political philosophy is inspired by and builds on that recovery, and thus on his ethical views. This already suggests why Kolnai often understood or framed politics and political philosophy also in moral terms.

190   Chris Bessemans

The utopian mentality This concern is characteristic of and present in Kolnai’s anti-­utopian writings, which, consequently, might be advanced as the best point of entry into understanding the link between Kolnai’s political and ethical writings. While utopianism springs from a distorted belief in all-­pervading perfection and the delusive idea that the human condition can be cleansed of its frequent association with conflict, tension and imperfection, it originates in a permanent human temptation: the natural tendency or desire to try to avoid and eradicate tension in ordinary, practical life and improve on what we consider to be important or in need of perfecting. This tendency is liable to adopt the utopian attitude, as it may easily lead to the idea that we must overcome our human condition, which is essentially characterised by tension and conflict. In Kolnai’s account, it becomes clear that the problem is the utopian mentality or ‘the utopian mind’ itself, a certain idea, conception or attitude that we are all susceptible to but which we cannot develop fully or coherently in the mind. This incoherence stems from the impossibility for the utopian to conceive of or really attain the identity in which Value and Reality coincide that he proclaims to strive for; after all, it is impossible to overcome our condition and to install a new mode of reality. Hence, the utopian only possessed the utopian will as a manifestation of being en route to the ideal good, which means that all imperfections and tensions, and thus heterogeneity, must be cleansed away. Terror and the infliction of great evil is, therefore, the sign of utopian craving. Herein lies the utopian contradiction: the attainment of an ideal non-­alienating state of being necessitates revolutionary total alienation and disruption. Kolnai presented a conceptual and phenomenological study in which he scrutinised the utopian mentality, which therefore had no need for historical exposition and locally rooted meaning. His anti-­utopianism is at the same time a kind of moral anthropology. It discloses the roots of distorting and self-­destructive human temptations, which are led by a delusive belief in overcoming alienation and attaining complete perfection and identity in which Value and Reality are one. And it serves as a warning about and brilliantly insightful description of the mechanisms that lie at the root of totalitarianism. All too briefly stated, Kolnai identified utopianism as a delusive belief in the possibility of overcoming the conflicted and troublesome human condition, of attaining an identity between Value and Reality. At the same time, this belief is taken to be the sole guide for action, leading to grave distortions and types of infliction, which would never be permitted by common sense but are promulgated as transitional measures in order to obtain the ‘ideal good’.

Kolnai’s ethical phenomenology Kolnai combined his interest in realist phenomenology and common-­sense philosophy, or intuitionism, to develop a viewpoint that was mainly concerned with arguing for the philosophical relevance and importance of ordinary moral experience and the phenomenological description of and reflection on ethically relevant

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   191 phenomena. In this way, he offered a distinctive perspective and, to give one example, a good basis for setting up a particular kind of moral cognitivism and contextualism that has important implications for moral realism and the objectivity and universalisability of moral judgements, as I have argued elsewhere (Bessemans 2011, pp. 563–87, 2013, pp. 203–32). Kolnai rejected all rationalist or reductionist tendencies in ethical theory and advanced the idea that, instead of trying to explain away moral phenomena, ethicists should try to account for them adequately. For this reason, Kolnai was convinced that ethical theory had to begin with the moral plane as it already existed in reality and thus that phenomenology was the only justifiable method to engage in ethical theory. Moreover, reflection about ordinary morality led him to the conviction that ‘value’ was the unit of currency for ethics. According to Kolnai, ethical phenomenology revealed that we have a ‘value consciousness’ or a ‘value awareness’, meaning that we are susceptible to what is of value in a pre-­moral sense, implying that we are endowed with a ‘moral awareness’ or sensibility. Morality relates to this pre-­ moral value awareness and forms, in its mode of emphasis, a protection against the disruption of value and good, and thus against evil, although it is based on primordial positive values. This moral awareness is what Kolnai referred to as ‘moral emphasis’; he uses it in the sense that we are receptive to and conscious of what is valuable to us in the practice of life, and we are also receptive to the moral emphasis. The moral emphasis is thus a general term to grasp whatever appears to us to be morally relevant or significant. It is neither a simple psychic epiphenomenon nor a simple feature of some object. Instead, the moral emphasis attaches itself to an object (or statement of fact or circumstance) and expresses a relation between a state of affairs (object) and a subject. The subject is conscious of the moral relevance of what their actions or conduct involve or entail, that is what can or will be involved. This awareness is induced by one or more values –or, in general, what the agent thinks to be of importance – which the agent becomes aware of either when present in the situation at hand or in relation to the possible courses of conduct and their consequences. Again, it is clear that Kolnai took the acknowledgement of what is already established within us, and what we can come to understand through ordinary thinking, as the source of truth. In summary, Kolnai developed an ‘analytical ethic based on the phenomenology of value consciousness’ (Wiggins and Williams, 1977, p. xxii).

Nazi ideology and moral nihilism In ‘The Pivotal Principles of National Socialist Ideology’ (Kolnai, n.d.a), which was probably written in 1939, Kolnai identified National Socialist ideology as the background to or the soil of the official party programme. In this essay, Kolnai argues against the idea that Nazism does not have a philosophy since this particular ideology contains the feature of (moral) nihilism within it: the Nazi ideology repudiates all moral standards and replaces them with a dynamic built upon the racial stratification of human society. It offers a type of anthropology fraught with the idea of value, while it is indifferent to the

192   Chris Bessemans true standards of ethics, namely the objective, universalisable judgements placed on actions, behaviour and policy. The appeal to objective validity in human community is replaced by what is valid or true according to the particular community, thus what is labelled ‘ours’ and therefore ‘better’. However, essential to this development is the rule of total power; it supplies certainty and guidance when any other form of validity is denied and offers an identity, although fictional, that is affirmed by the absolute ruler and their will, which embody the soul of the community. Be that as it may, and here the relation to utopia becomes even clearer, the goal of realising a ‘new beginning for humankind and a new civilization’ cannot be attained, implying that striving for political hegemony and power, dynamism or mobilisation, is the act that is most likely to attain its aims. The evil inflicted is presented as a transitional measure and, worse still, as Kolnai writes, in its ‘one-­sided determination to wage war, Nazi power proves that a higher sacredness, a supra-­ moral justification … are on its side’ (Kolnai, n.d.a, p. 9). The contradiction inherent in this total creed for progress is, as Kolnai summarises in his work ‘Progress and Reaction’, ‘the impossible aim or rather, the intrinsically unrealizable concept of Man setting himself up as his own principle of being, immediately and absolutely per se good, with no higher measure beyond his will’ (Kolnai, n.d.b, pp.  4–5). In other words, the essential problem of this creed is the discontinuity between what we are and long for and the totally different dynamic we bring about. Again, there is no possibility for us to condition this future state of being in which we are no longer present; there is no ‘point in preparing a future in discontinuity with the present’ (Kolnai, n.d.b, pp.  4–5). Additionally, there is no way to measure whether any progress is achieved. In the same essay, Kolnai sketches out why the Right or conservatism has an initial advantage over the Left. While the Left requires some kind of ‘natural law’ or ‘history’, in which ‘continuity’ and ‘change’ play an important role, the Right is much more concerned with what is of value, and primarily focuses on possible threats or disturbances. Leftist progressivism tends to be much more monist and totalitarian because of its appeal to a unitary consciousness, which has to be awakened in order to strive for the total homogenous identity and unity of men. Of course, the Right is inferior in some other respects – it may result in traditionalism or acquiescence to correction and may be susceptible to arbitrarily favouring a particular group, community, time or culture. According to Kolnai, the only solution exists in acknowledging the plurality and primacy of objective values and to strive for piecemeal improvements.

Moral awareness Kolnai’s philosophical and ethical convictions remained the same throughout his life. Kolnai’s ethical reflections begin with his insistence that every philosophical study of morality should comply with the phenomenological method and thus advance descriptions of ethical phenomena. In order to be sufficient for

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   193 and true to morality, ethical reflection has to take account of moral experience and ‘the Good that exists’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 11, emphasis in original). Only by ‘discover[ing] its points of departure in living reality’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 12) is it possible for the moral philosopher to gain an understanding of morality. Kolnai observed that this starting point might be the fact that life itself and its constituent elements have pre-­moral value. This suggestion seems quite plausible. For we do not only value being alive, but also value what our lives are made up of: relationships with others, our aims and projects, the things we enjoy and so on. In addition, there seems to be a kind of natural approval of benevolence and disapproval of or a natural aversion towards barefaced evil or malice. Kolnai put this first observation, in one example, as follows: If all production of value starts from given values of reality, as is clearly the case in general, and even more obvious in the ethical sphere, it must be acknowledged that Being or the Given as such, possesses a certain foundational value of its own.… That on which we act must already be good fundamentally.… (Kolnai, 2002, p. 39, emphasis in original) This means that ‘the practice of life is a priori good … in a pre-­moral, a virtually moral sense’ (Kolnai, 1977, p.  104, emphasis in original) or that human reality is already experienced and consequently presupposed to be a ‘morally valuable mode of existence’ (Kolnai, 1977, p. 105). This of course implies that we take an evaluative stance towards the constituent elements of life and that we are sensitive or receptive to value or the valuable. But, according to Kolnai, this is also what ethical phenomenology reveals. The observation that life and its constituent elements have pre-­moral value to us reveals that human beings are conscious of what is of value and, thus, what is actually good, as well as that they have an evaluative stance towards these things. Kolnai does not, however, provide a justification that departs from a phenomenological description of this value consciousness and experience. Although he did specify the ‘primal data of ethics’ in his dissertation (Kolnai, 2002, pp.  17–18), and provided further phenomenological descriptions of ordinary morality throughout his later ethical writings, he remained convinced that ‘the phenomenological approach has proved the most fruitful, and it can hardly be doubted that the concept of moral value should be regarded as the currency unit of ethics’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 20), and he even explicitly denied the need for a non­phenomenological justification. According to Kolnai, such questions about the validity of some phenomenological claims, such as the existence of value in reality, could only be answered through phenomenological description itself and additionally relied on engagement with metaphysics; pure ethics must content itself with assuming it, just as logic refrains from asserting the existence of truth and falsity, let alone proving it, but simply sets forth what can be established on this

194   Chris Bessemans assumption. It is hard to see how we can properly engage in ethics unless our experience of good and evil and the conflict between them is deeply felt and beyond doubt.… (Kolnai, 2002, p. 17) Kolnai insisted on the indispensability of the phenomenological method for gaining an understanding of morality, and thus on the necessity of beginning any form of philosophical reflection from relevant descriptions of ethical phenomena. As the search for such descriptions and phenomenology in general is all too often disregarded by contemporary moral philosophy, Kolnai offers a worthwhile alternative for adequately explaining moral phenomena and attaining an improved understanding of these phenomena by description and reflection, while also respecting ordinary moral experience. In a Kolnaian account, the experience of value, or the Good, and valuation thus seem to be embedded in ordinary life. In a pre-­moral sense, value experience and valuation are not at all alien to us. Therefore, life can be said to be morally pregnant. This observation about pre-­moral value awareness plays a prominent role throughout Kolnai’s moral philosophy. Nonetheless, on its own it would fail to explain morality, although it explained the pre-­moral concerns we have. Kolnai, however, made an additional observation: morality is particularly concerned with the preservation, protection and improvement of this ‘good order’, through which it also becomes more apparent why ‘in fact the Good proclaims itself as reality already present on the one hand, and on the other as absent, defective, reality’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 13). Kolnai further insisted on the fact that ‘moral experience requires in the first place a certain keenness in the experience of evil and resistance to it’ (Kolnai, 2002, p.  18, emphasis in original). For ‘moral evil takes place within the “framework of life” ’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 126) and, for that reason, ‘strikes us with a more concentrated emphasis than Good precisely because it is less bound up with the shaping of life as such’ (Kolnai, 2002, p.  125), and, worse still, it ‘works against it’ (Kolnai, 2002, p.  126). Therefore, emphatic moral experience begins with protection from evil, that is preventing, avoiding or excluding the bad, as it distorts or even (partially) destroys the good order. It is this protective attitude that is partially responsible for the relation between pre-­morally existing good, our awareness of it and morality. It is noteworthy that, according to Kolnai, actions replete with value would also be considered direct experiences of moral value. But, at the same time, as they are once again in line with the good order, they are never in the same way emphatically moral, as they cannot have the kind of urgency and demanding force that attaches to an experience of negative value (or ‘exclusion’, as Kolnai calls this in his dissertation). Additionally, the starting point for morality exists in the experience of good or positive values, and not in the emphatic experience of exclusion, which is thematically prior to these values. In his work ‘Morality and Practice’ (Kolnai, 1977, pp.  63–122), Kolnai explicitly articulated these observations:

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   195 [There is] a pre-­moral order bearing a general sign of good, and further defined and characterized by the reaction of moral pressure from the part of that order and the loyalties it commands. What matters in the present context is the secondariness of evil by reference to a framework of life somehow presumed ‘good’ (not an epitome of moral virtue and splendour but a matrix of satisfactions, mutual sustenance and things and modes of being worthy of appreciation; an order inviting assent) [i.e. the ontological primacy of the Good], and attached to it the thematic primacy of evil by reference to a distinct moral consciousness.… (Kolnai, 1977, p. 85, emphasis in original) We (pre-­morally) value what is good and do not ascribe value to what is bad. Morality, then, arrives with an awareness of whether our actions are in accordance with the Good or work against it and, thus, tells us whether we are doing right or wrong. Moral consciousness or conscience informs us about our conduct and its moral relevance, that is its relation to and impact upon what is of value.1 But now we can see that it is only against the already existent value of the good life, ‘only in that frame of reference, against that background, that we come to contrast good and bad at all’ (Kolnai, 1977, p. 83). The standard of the Good is the already existent mode of the life we lead. While there seems to be some kind of congruence between the practice of life, its normal regular order and that which is morally good, there is a discontinuity between ordinary life and that which is morally bad. The latter statement amounts to Kolnai’s explanation. The valuable insight that morality in its primal mode is a kind of protection of the normal and the good order plausibly explains the insistence on the abstention from wrongdoing, which is so characteristic of morality. This also strengthens the former observation, about the pre-­moral good of life and the explanation Kolnai offers. For what troubles us are discontinuities in our lives, such as sickness, adversity, disasters and wrongdoing. It is, then, as if (moral) evil corrupts, destroys and negates the existent and valuable good order of life. It is because we already value the practice of life itself and come to value moral as well as non-­moral values, which are already present in reality, that we keenly experience them when they are in need of protection. The pre-­moral value of life is thus presupposed and needed to understand moral evil. If one has no understanding of the value of earthly life, one does not conceive of immorality as putting an end to all values, as if it casts a shadow over them. While it is therefore wrong to think that moral values can be deduced from natural concerns (see Kolnai, 1956, p.  27), this does not mean ‘that they cannot be interpreted in the context of life and its non-­moral primary concerns’, as he argues in his 1958 essay ‘A Note on the Meaning of Right and Wrong’ (Kolnai, 2004, p. 53). Kolnai describes two elements of primal phenomenal data. The first is that the moral intuitions present in every society and the frequency of moral evaluations and moral judgements can be seen as an indication or ‘evidence’ of the universal character of the ‘moral need’ (das ethische Bedürfnis) (Kolnai, 1927, p.  7),

196   Chris Bessemans which is defined as ‘a striving for ethical self-­assertion and direction on the basis of habitual if unconscious thinking in ethical categories’ (Kolnai, 2002, pp. 17, 18 [notes]). The latter has to be understood as the fact that reality, what is given and happens to us or what we want to achieve, is often understood in moral terms. Thus, indeed, it seems correct that we should already value our reality and that morality is related to this pre-­moral value or the already existing good. The second element he paid attention to is the precise fact that ethical phenomenology reveals that human beings are ‘morally aware’ (Kolnai, 1977, p.  96). The role of this moral sensibility or moral awareness with which human beings are endowed – or, put differently, the importance of moral consciousness or conscience – cannot be underestimated. Moral consciousness is a specific form of value consciousness in its precise focus on how human actions and conduct relate to the values and good of which we already have pre-­moral awareness. This moral awareness,2 this distinct moral consciousness, falls under the category of what we call conscience in everyday language. It is this awareness of the relevance in terms of value of what is presented to the agent – either as being the case, as entailed by their actions or as absent, defective reality – that amounts to a confrontation with value. Kolnai describes conscience more extensively: Conscience primarily and properly means, not moral convictions but moral awareness and self-­criticism – remorse, warning, acquittal or approbation – in reference to one’s own conduct: past, present or tentatively planned. Conscience means, further, moral judgement in the shaping of one’s conduct. It is the office of my conscience, not only to enforce my concrete obligations under a permanent and universal body of moral laws it apprehends as binding upon me, but to apply, to specify and to supplement them so as to fit the moral aspect of any actual situation I find myself in; in other words, not only to represent my general knowledge of right and wrong on the one hand and to prod me to do right and to shun wrong on the other, but to tell me what is right or wrong here and now, and thus to inform the morality of my actual conduct. (Kolnai, 1977, p. 4) The normativity of morality thus stems from the fact that we already give life and its constituent elements pre-­moral value. Because morality concerns the protection of what we already value, we have to act morally, and should even be aware of the moral relevance of our actions and conduct. Kolnai also rightly stresses that moral consciousness informs us about our conduct and how this relates to the situation in which we find ourselves. In other words, it tells us about whether we are doing right or wrong and thus whether our actions are in accordance with the Good or are working against it. But even conscience remains a moral judgement and thus, as is the case for all judgements, can be mistaken. At the same time, all judgement is characterised by striving to get things right and to judge matters correctly, that is in agreement with how things

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   197 are – hence once more Kolnai’s adherence to moral realism. It is indeed part of our conscience to doubt and to strive for truth and correctness and to fear being erroneous, which is exactly what Kolnai expressed: Conscience that cannot hope to be correct, and accordingly cannot fear to be erroneous, is not Conscience in the established and dignified sense of moral self-­criticism, judgement and belief – which essentially aspires to truth and tries to escape from error, and in fact expresses the agent’s endeavour to ponder and argue his decisions in universally valid terms and to make his conduct justifiable in the open court of objective morality. (Kolnai, 1977, p. 7) For the precise reason of moral justification, it is part of conscience to tell us ‘we ought to have the right kind of conscience’ (Kolnai, 1977, p. 6), since following an erroneous conscience will not suffice as a justification for our decisions. This is again strengthened by the observation that our own conscience not only judges and criticises our past conduct and conscience but also that others, or in general we, expect a man to behave rightly, rather than either merely appraise rightly or merely behave according to his appraisal, and thus we consider ‘sinning against the light’ essentially guilty but also attach a moral disvalue to a person’s following his errant lights. (Kolnai, 1977, p. 1) The right course of action is thus expected to stem from consciously choosing what is right. In addition, we expect an individual to have the right conscience and do not praise them for following their erroneous conscience. This consequently explains why moral conflicts will also tell us something about the moral character of the agent involved and almost inevitably have as a consequence the blaming or praise of the agent.3 This moral awareness is triggered by the ‘moral emphasis’, which has to be understood … in terms of … devotion to value, of exalting claims of value …, of feeling the presence of values in one’s own action, or some moment of it. The feeling can issue, or express itself, in a variety of evaluative stances, recognitions, decisions or projects – in feeling the value of the objects or ends one has in mind, in feeling obliged to do something, in feeling the urgency of some matter, and so on. All ethical phenomena of this kind have a common source in the fundamental fact of emphasis. (Kolnai, 1977, pp. 63–4) In the monograph Morality and Practice, Kolnai described this type of emphasis as ‘the peculiar, sharply characterized tone attaching to every experience of what strikes us as morally relevant, a tone of warning, urging, vetoing and

198   Chris Bessemans commanding with an “absolute” and “unconditional” ring of ultimate gravity about it’ (Kolnai, 1977, p. 100). The moral emphasis thus articulates the relation between the objective existence of values and the subject’s sensibility. The subject’s receptiveness to (or state of being conscious of ) the moral relevance of what is presented before them means the agent is confronted with value, which presents itself irrespective of the agent’s will or mastery. Moreover, a human being is expected to be a morally responsible agent and thus to be struck by the presence or absence of value or by something morally relevant that has a kind of intensity or, when this is absent, to feel discontent or unease. At the same time, however, Kolnai acknowledged the difficulty and even impossibility of fully describing or making explicit the moral emphasis and value experience. But he rightly stressed that the pitfall to be avoided is the assumption, or postulate, that a unitary constructive concept of ethics may supersede our direct apprehension of the data of moral experience and our receptiveness to moral emphasis in its various dimensions. The endeavour to render moral consciousness intelligible is justified so long as it does not degenerate into explaining moral intuitions away in order to get rid of their residual obscurity.… Indeed … a feature of resistant opacity actually belongs to the essence of moral emphasis.… (Kolnai, 1977, p. 119) Put differently, these phenomena, around which Kolnai developed his philosophy, cannot be articulated or made fully explicit. It seems that, in the end, moral sensibility is dependent on the human constitution: it is because of the kind of beings we are that we are sensitive to value and aware of the relation of our actions to what is of value, and thus we are morally attuned or aware. The phenomenological method reveals that both value consciousness and the manifoldness of values are not fictional concepts but correspond to what is truly part of ordinary, human practice. Consequently, every attempt to evade the manifoldness of values and the way it is experienced and investigated, by ‘introducing “more manageable” concepts [such as utility, law or pleasure] which are supposed to replace the direct grasp of ethical values’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 19), should be rejected. Put briefly, Kolnai’s moral philosophy develops around this pre-­moral concern for an already existing valuable and good order. After writing his dissertation, which contained in embryo almost all of his subsequent thinking (Dunlop, 2002, p.  xviii)4 within moral philosophy, this phenomenological conviction would reappear explicitly in Morality and Practice, ‘The Thematic Primacy of Moral Evil’ (1956),5 ‘A Note on the Meaning of Right and Wrong’ (1958) and in his anti-­utopian work (1995). It would continue to be a clear presence throughout his ethical writings. It is worth noting, however, that Kolnai also described implicit and positive categories of morality, and thus did not reduce morality to negative or thematic categorisations.

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   199

Meta-­ethics It follows, then, from the manifoldness of values and morally relevant concerns that, when faced with a practical decision in a value-­laden situation, an agent has to choose between the different values and concerns at stake. These different values and concerns urge the agent to act in different ways. But not all the emphases that attach to these concerns are of equal strength. The strength of an emphasis or, in other words, the relevance of certain values and concerns at stake differs depending on the respective circumstances. All this belongs to the phenomenon of ‘gradation’, which stems from Kolnai’s value pluralism and forms another important theme in his ethics. Gradation means that, within a particular situation, moral reasoning or deliberation is susceptible to an objective hierarchical order of values and other (non-) moral concerns. Some values and concerns are objectively ‘higher’ or ‘stronger’ than others and, thus, demand priority over other values and concerns, but only in contextual terms. The sensible agent is aware of this hierarchical ordering because of the more demanding, more urgent or stronger emphases of some of the values and concerns involved. Kolnai thus explains the hierarchical order of values by making use of the moral emphasis and his objectivism-­cumcontextualism. In particular, as Dunlop wrote, ‘Kolnai takes up Scheler’s claim that values are given in an order of values, graded according to value-­height, and transforms this into an order of values graded according to moral emphasis, in response to reality’ (Dunlop, 2004, pp. 271–2). The strength of a consideration is dependent on its emphasis, which itself is dependent on the persons involved and affected, the circumstances and so on. As a result, the dynamic, hierarchical gradation of values means that what one should do is determined by the strength of the moral emphases involved. This again means that deliberation about what one should do is informed by the agent’s thorough discernment of what matters and to what extent. One could say that the moral emphasis encompasses the kind of emphasis that a moral value or morally relevant fact brings to us; the moral emphasis is the compelling appeal of a moral value or something that is morally relevant, while the degree of influence of this value or morally relevant fact is dependent on the given circumstances. For instance, in one situation it may be more important to refrain from telling the plain truth in order to protect someone. But arriving at this conclusion is dependent on the different characters of the persons involved, the consequences of telling or not telling the truth and so on. In such a case, the value emphasis of care is higher than that of truthfulness or veracity. The explanation for this, however, is to be found in the circumstances. Hence the circumstances or the contextual embeddedness of values define the strength of the value emphases. Again, the strength of an emphasis is nothing other than the circumstantial relevance of this consideration or the weight given to the reason it establishes. One might object here to the metaphorical use of qualifications such as strength, height and weight, but given ordinary moral reasoning, Kolnai’s account allows us to demystify these metaphors, since the extent to which

200   Chris Bessemans something is a good or trumping reason is objectively assessable on the basis of the relevant circumstances. One might again object that it is impossible to assess what the relevant circumstances are, but this runs against ordinary experience, as in most cases agents and bystanders are capable of assessing what matters and to what extent and, on the basis thereof, they justify their actions and judgements. Moral reasoning and deliberation essentially entail reflection about what matters and to what extent. Of course, there is a degree of contestability in moral issues, but if we thoroughly and conscientiously reflect on a certain situation, we can arrive at a true or correct judgement and even convergence. This contestability does mean that every moral judgement can be questioned, contested or discussed, but it does not mean that no judgement or discussion can arrive at truth or correctness. However, the phenomenon of gradation is even more complex. I have explained that the importance of a value or other concern, and thus its influence on the sensible agent’s deliberation, depends on the strength it achieves within a specific context. Following from this plurality and contextual dependence, a hierarchical but dynamic order of values arises, which in fact simply means that some values and concerns are contextually found to be more important, demanding or urgent than others, although less important values and concerns are still relevant. The phenomenon is more complex due to the existence of ‘relations of gradation’ or ‘gradation lines’, as Kolnai calls them, between values themselves. This means that some values and their relative strength influence the emphases of other values and thus their role in deliberation. For instance, justice may have honesty as a value by-­product, which of course does not mean that honesty is always less important than justice. Kolnai clearly emphasised that this is certainly not the case: there is no single scale of value. By insisting on the phenomenon of gradation, Kolnai stresses that different arrangements of reality evoke different constituent values, invoke the highest and lowest elements of value through different gradations, thanks to differences of value functions. The question of which emphases are thus called into play, however, does not [solely] depend on reality-­ factors but on mutual relations between the values. (Kolnai, 2002, p. 71) But the complexity of gradation, or Kolnai’s ethical contextualism, increases further as his objectivism and contextualism also include the person involved. It is precisely the agent who is responsible for his selective focus and for acknowledging the different roles and importance that different values and morally relevant concerns objectively possess. It is the agent’s responsibility to engage in reflection and reason concerning which considerations come into play and to what extent. But the difficulty – and what Kolnai also wants to acknowledge here – is that this selection can validly or justifiably depend on the moral agent themselves:

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   201 This is where the importance of the moral agent himself comes into its own; for value emphasis is none other than his ‘right’ devotion to values, itself in objective conformity to value, but still his devotion. There is then a correlation between subject and object.… Objectivism does not imply that the subject is left out, but that account is taken of his situation when he turns to the object. (Kolnai, 2002, pp. 71–2, emphasis in original) Thus, when judging whether an agent’s action was morally right, the bystander has to take the objective situation into account. It means that the bystander, who judges the agent’s decision and action, has to take into consideration the objectively relevant values and concerns that belong to the situation and the way those different values and concerns relate to each other. In other words, the bystander has to make sure that they are relevantly situated. Being relevantly situated – in Kolnai’s account – does not only mean considering the relevant features of the situation, but also the features, attachments or values related to the agent that are objectively relevant to the particular situation. Put differently, it means that the bystander, in judging the rightness or wrongness of another agent’s decision and action, has to consider the relevant considerations as if they were that agent and thus might have to think about considerations and reasons that they themselves would not have considered if they were in that situation. Whether the bystander has to consider the agent-­relative considerations depends, however, on their objective – so circumstantial or contextual – relevance and justifiability. Again, Kolnai’s contextualism, which has a personalist quality, means that any bystander or judge has to take account of the agent’s nature to the extent this objectively and justifiably affects the nature of the situation. Thus, to summarise, being relevantly situated means that only those considerations that are objectively and justifiably relevant to the situation (irrespective of whether they stem from the situation or the agent) are considerations that a bystander has to take into account when judging the agent’s decision and course of action.6 Kolnai’s ethics contains a form of moral realism or objectivism-­cum-subjectivism.7 For him, values exist independently and objectively but, at the same time, need a sensitive perceiver to make them additionally relevant to reality, and they, importantly, cannot be known or experienced, irrespective of the sensitive subject’s constitution and necessary involvement with values. His viewpoint also includes pluralism and presents a form of contextualism, which implies that the configuration of facts, the situation itself, the objectively valid8 ‘personal’ values and concerns of the agent and other non-­moral but morally relevant concerns (such as efficacy or expected outcomes) have to be accounted for to arrive at a morally valid judgement about the situation and the agent’s decision.9 Within a Kolnaian framework, valuational judgements are factual in that they are about the configuration of facts and thus about objectively existent values. Whatever is valued is valued in virtue of something, or, as he argues in ‘Are There Degrees of Ethical Universality?’, ‘in other words, moral judgement cannot but imply a reference to universal concepts in virtue of its being

202   Chris Bessemans judgement: that is, of asserting (predicating) something of its object rather than merely expressing the appraiser’s smiling or frowning mood’ (Kolnai, 2004, p. 83). Again, he states that I cannot ‘approve of ’ or ‘disapprove of ’ something except in virtue of some objective quality of it, nor mean anything by ‘commending’ or ‘condemning’ some conduct morally … except by reference to this or that commendable or condemnable descriptive feature or features of it. Rightness and wrongness … [are] attributed to action … but the unitary ‘pro’ or ‘con’ attitude herein expressed is of logical necessity closely tied to known and describ­ able qualities inherent in the act (conduct, etc.).… (Kolnai, 1970, p. 246, emphasis in original) To many philosophers a judgement about what ‘is’ says nothing about what one ‘ought’ to do – the is–ought distinction. But what is valued or morally relevant provides a reason to act in accordance with that element. Consequently, such considerations have an influence on what the agent should do, and consequently on their deliberations. Moreover, valuational and moral judgements are only correct if they correspond to the truth, namely the way things are. Deliberative judgements, then, are also true or false, but their truth should rather be understood as correctness or rightness. They only indirectly relate to the way things are and are, in this sense, derivative of value judgements. Claims about value are claims about the world. But claims about what we have to do are not claims about the world as such but about what we have to do in light of how the world is or what the impact of our actions will be on the world. If awareness of value and morally relevant facts influences our deliberations and tells us what a moral agent should do, the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ is not fully upheld in moral reasoning. Put differently, evaluation informs deliberation. Deliberation is then true or correct through making reference to the configuration of facts established in the evaluation of the situation by the agent. As Kolnai emphasises,10 values are only considered established facts as values in reality, which means any value is always circumstantially established, and it is precisely the circumstances and context that define the strength of the value emphases (in other words, the importance of a value with regard to the specific situation in which it appears or is ‘at work’). Consequently, it becomes clear that Kolnai’s value-­ethics is not only pluralistic, contextualist and objectivist, but also personalist in that it takes account of the ‘agent as person’ and how this role influences the situation, as well as the judgement placed on the agent’s actions. However, Kolnai emphasises that not all personal values or attachments are perceived to be valid. Hence we arrive at the problem of moral freedom and limitation. Kolnai’s emphasis on the morally relevant facts and on the agent’s moral responsibility to scrutinise the situation and to consider whatever they find to be morally relevant has important implications for the objectivity of moral judgements.

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   203 The distinctive feature of Kolnai’s ethics is his insistence on and acknowledgement of the importance of our moral awareness, commonly referred to as conscience. The distinctiveness of Kolnai’s moral philosophy lies in his axiological-­cum-phenomenological perspective. Being aware of value or what is valuable, and consequently what is morally relevant, establishes the starting point of morality. In order to be a moral agent, one needs to morally aware, that is one needs to experience the value of the good order and resistance against evil, which may threaten that real existence of that which is Good and valuable. As such, David Wiggins and Bernard Williams rightly described Kolnai’s moral philosophy as ‘an analytical ethic based on the phenomenology of value consciousness’ (Kolnai, 1977, p. xxii). Kolnai acknowledges the possibility that personal attachments and values can be objectively relevant to the situation, which means that bystanders have to take account of these concerns when judging whether the agent has done right or wrong. Provided that we have an understanding of values and particular attachments, we are able to relevantly situate and confront ourselves with the question of whether the agent deliberated sufficiently and decided correctly. We can understand someone’s appeal to a certain value; we understand why such an appeal in this particular instance and whether it is justifiable, namely whether the value can be perceived as valid or applicable to the situation, and thus whether this value can form a relevant consideration in light of the circumstances. We can also assess the relative strength or importance of the value and the motivation it establishes; consequently, we can decide whether, according to the circumstances and morally relevant considerations, the agent acted rightly or wrongly. What Kolnai’s viewpoint makes clear is that it is possible to argue that circumstantially relevant agential differences can lead to differences in judgement, which still lay claim to universalisability. Moral judgements are still universalisable because the relevant agential differences are taken as part of the respective circumstances. As such, reaching a judgement in circumstances that are so exactly alike that any other person would have acted similarly means that any agent would have to do the same. Thus, the Kolnaian account makes it possible for bystanders to assess and judge whether, considering all the relevant circumstances, the agent has done the right thing, which suggests by implication that the bystander would have done the same. Kolnai believes that the person and his particular attachments belong to the possibly relevant circumstances that have to be assessed. Consequently, aiming ‘to get things right’ and aspiring to correctness and universalisability does not mean that we cannot allow for relevant personal or perspectival differences.11

Moral conflicts Kolnai’s approach, by focusing on the moral awareness of moral agents, might result in an understanding of moral conflicts as moments of moral choice rather than anomalies of moral theory.12 This approach would offer a more satisfactory understanding of moral conflicts, while accounting for the moral remainder and

204   Chris Bessemans without rejecting moral realism. In a dilemmatic case, it is natural to feel distressed about the choice one has made because one needs reasons to justify one’s course of action, but there are none to be provided; this in contrast to a non-­ dilemmatic conflict in which the agent is also still aware of what has been lost but does not suffer from additional doubt or distress because he has reasons to justify his decision. In a genuine dilemma, the agent feels distress because there are an absence of justifying reasons that offer a certain degree of cognitive security and moral or psychological comfort. When an agent can morally justify his course of action, the conflict is practically, and to a certain extent morally, soluble, which means that, on the level of practice, the agent knows what to do and is relatively secure. To the extent that it becomes more and more difficult to judge whether any trumping reasons are available, the conflict becomes dilemmatic and, to the extent it does, moral judgement about the agent and his course of action attaches itself more and more closely to the quality of the agent’s deliberation and on whether he thoroughly and conscientiously reflected on the different considerations and concerns at stake, rather than on the outcome of his decision. Moral judgement thus focuses on the agent’s moral sensibility and awareness rather than on his practical decision. The problem of limitation refers to the fact that any action, and in particular any moral action, is limited. Our actions are limited by the reasons motivating our actions and those we consider to be counterbalances for acting a certain way: our intention, the probable costs and consequences, the plausibility and efficacy of achieving our ends and so on. But these limitations also involve conflicting values and concerns. Ultimately, these limitations set out what is morally legitimate or justified. It is worth noting that, although an agent’s particular attachments can influence the different value emphases and concerns involved, it cannot make what is irrelevant relevant and vice versa. This illustrates Kolnai’s additional emphasis on the plurality of value and the conflicting character of ordinary practice. Again, all this gives further substance to Kolnai’s contextualism. In deliberating over what to do, and in order to act in a morally right way, the agent has to take account of all the morally relevant elements of the situation, such as the probable costs and effects, the possibility and plausibility of the goal, the agent’s intention, the conflicting moral and non-­moral values and the practical considerations. This means that whether an agent has reasoned and decided upon what is morally right depends on his attentive and reflective scrutiny of the given circumstances. The agent has to scrutinise what matters and to what extent attentively and consequently decide how to act based upon this assessment of the considerations they have before them. Consequently, while the agent is in principle free to reach a decision and to act, the morality of their course of action, and indirectly what kind of moral agent they choose to be, is objectively determined by what is morally relevant and how the agent deals with it. Now by ‘limitation’ Kolnai wants to refer to all these morally

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   205 relevant features of a situation that determine whether the agent acts in a morally right way or not and, thereby, limit the agent’s ‘moral freedom’. While this theme played an important role in Kolnai’s dissertation – which, before its publication, carried the preliminary title ‘Die Begrenzung und die Abstufung der Ethik’ (‘Limitation and Gradation in Ethics’) (Dunlop, 2002, p. xix, 2004, p. 269) – he erased this theoretical notion from his later ethical works. Nevertheless, the idea that our ethical actions are limited by what is morally relevant within a given situation still plays a role in his later ethical writings. In his dissertation, Kolnai focuses on the limits of the ethical aim and presents us with a formal classification of emphases that captures the different limitations, or the different morally relevant considerations, that may arise in ethical deliberations. In what follows, I shall explain why these limitations establish criteria for the morality of actions. A moral agent is aware of what is morally relevant and is conscious of the values and other concerns at stake. When deliberating over what to do, an agent has to decide what to strive for, possibly at the cost of some other goal they also value. In short, through the process of deliberation the agent has to decide how to act and, thus, has to set their goal. If an action is done without intentional directness or a sense of volition or choice, the agent is not acting in the full sense of agency and may be irresponsibly negligent and thus blameworthy. Kolnai introduces and acknowledges the criterion of ‘the end’ as an important aspect of (moral) agency. Since any action involves intention, this criterion is essential to it. Its importance comes from the fact that it is not only a requirement of reality but also of the integrity of moral action, as the questions we ask ourselves in moral deliberation are precisely concerned with what action is possible and legitimate, or morally justified, given the circumstances and what ends are the most (morally) desirable and justifiable. Thus, in order to act morally our choices and actions are subjected to moral restraints. Kolnai emphasises the ‘world-­importance’ of all actions, since all actions relate to and affect the world we live in. Therefore, moral judgement has to take into account the expected outcomes to assess the action, and ethical theory has to acknowledge the importance of an action’s results. As such, we have arrived at our first criterion or restraint: the realisability of the goal and the action’s consequences. Taking this into account,  the adoption of an ethical end is only permissible or reasonable when its author can produce well-­founded evidence to show that the changes he envisages in the complex slice of life in question are both possible and, with regard to the envisioned end, value-­charged. (Kolnai, 2002, p. 33) The acknowledgement of this limitation, however, does not mean that the consequences of actions should receive the exclusive attention they are sometimes granted by certain ethical theorists. Nevertheless, it remains true that

206   Chris Bessemans deliberation about what to do, without due concern for the consequences of an action, is unworldly and even negligent. For this reason, we find in Kolnai that the probability and realisability of an action are criteria for assessing whether the action is justified and thus whether it is morally right. Kolnai, however, continues with the qualification that while ‘the question whether a state of affairs is worth striving for is bound up with that of its realisability’, it does not mean that there will be a ‘simple relation between this and the ease of realisation’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 33). So, while the value and justification of an action are dependent on the plausibility of its success, it does not mean that any end that is practically difficult to attain is not worth striving for. Anticipated difficulties do not add moral wrongness to an end, but rather the consideration that one should not actually strive for it. The more difficulties there are to realise a certain end, the more numerous or weightier the considerations that speak against it become, although it does not necessarily mean that the end itself is wrong. The plausibility of success, or a reasonable chance of success, and some evidence of the goal’s realisability do need, however, to be present.13 In the ethical realm ‘all activity and change has its own cosmic and unrepeatable importance’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 34), and it is quite difficult to assess all consequences and the probable success of actions exactly. Therefore, although there can be no place for experiment in the ethical realm, as no actions are removed from moral responsibility,14 failure and error must be taken into account. Infallibility does not belong to morality, and therefore no agent can be absolutely sure of the realisation of a more valuable state of affairs, although it should always be his intention. One other important limitation is the occurrence of conflicting values and other emphases that bring forth ‘counter-­gradation’. These different values and emphases are of course not strict limitations of ethical action, but they may operate in the same way. We have already seen that the strength of a moral emphasis depends on the value’s relevance within a certain situation. It can be the case that a certain action, in accordance with a certain value, is particularly important in the circumstances but that the action goes against something else of importance. This other emphasis then forms a counter-­gradation; it counts against one course of action and sets up another possibility, implying that different by-­product values and considerations might be addressed.15 The aspects that are responsible for counter-­gradation or for establishing reasons (not) to act in a certain way are, as we have just seen, not only values. In his dissertation, Kolnai presents us with a formal classification of four emphases, which represent the possible morally relevant considerations. The classification is ordered as follows: (1) ethically emphatic variants or the ‘bearers of “pointed emphasis” ’; (2) ethically unemphatic variants or ‘the “ballast” of the ethical action’; (3) ethically emphatic constants or ‘the bearers of “background emphasis” ’; and (4) ethically unemphatic constants or ‘the “natural” limits of change’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 40). The emphatic variants (1) are what we aim for (we want, for example, to be honest, to care for a family member, to improve an unjust situation and so on).

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   207 Since these values are the focal point of what we strive for at a given moment, and thus are essential to our intention, they have a certain initial priority or importance over other considerations. As such, there need to be good reasons not to perform the action we engaged in with this moral intention. As the objects we strive for differ, it is evident that these emphases are variable and depend on what we take to be our aim, which again depends upon what has confronted us in reality. The unemphatic variants (2) and the unemphatic constants (4) are what we could call non-­moral, practical considerations. While we could interpret the unemphatic constants as the physical, natural limits or ‘natural “givens” ’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 57) of our actions, namely what is factually possible or not, we can understand variants as being the larger contexts in which an action is situated. For instance, a certain moral action may be good in all respects but one, such as that it will have economically bad results, which is important when the action is situated within the economic sphere. Or, alternatively, friendship plays a role within social relations but loses some of its force in, for instance, the juridical sphere in which it is difficult to hold on to a lie in order to protect your friend when you know they are guilty. Again, the same lie may be told in a conversation between friends for the reason that you would prefer to discuss it in private with your friend first. The unemphatic variants thus form the larger framework in which our actions take place and which can or cannot establish a morally relevant consideration or reason to act in one way or another. These frameworks, specifically the particular context of an action and its consequences, can be of importance in assessing the morality of an action. The unemphatic constants are of course morally relevant but have no value of their own and are unalterable. Ethically emphatic constants (3) are those considerations that are always morally relevant. Examples here are persons, social entities, other values, moral rules and so on. These elements within our reality cannot be neglected and always have some value and thus are entitled to respect. These aspects of reality fill the context of our actions with values and emphases that remain present in the background but which demand attention as soon as a conflict arises between them and the end of the action itself; they demand concern and respect, first unemphatically, but then emphatically once they are threatened.

Conclusion Kolnai’s fundamental belief in our ordinary experiences and our ability to understand them, as well as the adoption of the phenomenological attitude, are crucial to the study of morality, and thus crucial to the study of Kolnai. The contextualist idea, and the importance of the different morally relevant considerations or emphases, are present throughout his writings. In general, Kolnai’s moral philosophy develops around our moral awareness and emphasises the importance of value consciousness and the phenomenological method. The merit of Kolnai’s phenomenological and axiological view is that it suggests how and in what ways contemporary moral philosophy, which all too often disregards phenomenology

208   Chris Bessemans and the search for relevant descriptions of ethical phenomena, may fall short. Kolnai’s particular life experiences, his eclecticism, as expressed in the constant overlap between his ethical and political views, and his talent for phenomenological description and reflection all suggest the depth and wealth of his insights that should be given more attention, although previously modest interest in Kolnai’s writings is now on the rise.

Notes   1 Note that in Kolnai’s view there is a clear distinction between what is right or wrong (or morally evil) and what is good or bad. Consider, for instance, the difference between what is good for a particular person, what is right for him (to do) and the person’s goodness (cf. Kolnai, 1977, pp. 67–9). The experience a person has of their own sense of good or what is ‘good for him’ is something different than his goodness. The latter depends on an evaluation of what the person does, his intention or motivation and whether he acts in a morally right or wrong way and is deserving of blame or praise. But, additionally, there is a difference between the agent’s motivation or intention (referring to his character or goodness) and whether an action is right or wrong: the action can be wrong even though the agent’s intentions were good or vice versa. See also Kolnai’s Morality and Practice and his ‘Deliberation is of Ends’ (both Kolnai, 1977) with regard to his emphasis on not conflating morality and practice (in which ‘practice’ stands for ordinary practice or ordinary life).   2 This section (until note 3) is taken from Bessemans, 2011.   3 Though, we will see that when a conflict is very difficult to settle or involves a dilemma, moral judgement focuses on the awareness and deliberation of the agent rather than on his decision and the outcome.   4 Dunlop’s personal communication with Kolnai’s wife Elisabeth.   5 A section on Kolnai’s anti-­utopian work had to be omitted from this chapter, as it involved extensive digression on certain concepts and ‘mechanisms’ that Kolnai describes and identifies in order to explain the utopian mentality and how it comes into existence. A section on this topic would have resulted in a separate chapter which, I hope, will be made available at a future occasion. Kolnai’s moral views – and especially the primacy of evil as well as his insistence on the worthiness but also conflictual character of the human condition – are closely linked to his anti-­utopian writings. Gaining an understanding of the latter would certainly provide the reader with a fuller understanding of Kolnai’s ethical views, but, as I have said, I cannot provide it here.   6 Note also that Kolnai’s view does not imply relativism or subjectivism. His personalism means that the agent’s nature (that is their personal values, concerns and so on), when objectively affecting the nature of the situation, has to be considered as a part of the objective and relevant features of the situation at hand.   7 The following paragraphs (until the paragraph that includes note 10) are taken from Bessemans, 2011.   8 ‘Objectively valid’ means that not all personal values and concerns can play a valid role in the agent’s deliberation. The validity of values is objectively determined and justified through reference to the situation. Note that Kolnai’s contextualism may also account for the universalisability and objectivity of moral judgements as differences in the judgement of agents about a particular action and what they themselves would have done.   9 For an indication of Kolnai’s cognitivism, see his essays ‘Are there Degrees of Ethical Universality?’ (Kolnai, 2004, pp.  83–93) and ‘Moral Consensus’ (Kolnai, 1977, pp. 144–64).

Kolnai’s moral phenomenology   209 10 For example, when he states that Not only is the existence of a value itself a value; it is only its existence that gives the value its validity.… This means that the way a value is realised or encountered is not a circumstance of marginal importance for its nature, … but inseparable from the phenomenon of the value itself. (Kolnai, 2002, p. 20) 11 I elaborated on this in Bessemans, 2012. 12 I argued this in detail in Bessemans, 2011. 13 In this way, Kolnai expresses his concern for the unlimited striving towards an end proclaimed as good, valuable and highly important. Kolnai clearly has an objection to utopian aspirations for a goal that is too far-­fetched in mind here, which forms a theme in his later anti-­utopian work. 14 Kolnai, however, emphasises that, although all actions can (ultimately) be morally relevant, not all our everyday actions are (see, for example, Kolnai, 1977, pp. 64, 100). 15 It may also be the case that different values are served by a single action; in such a case Kolnai speaks of ‘multipolar emphasis’ (Kolnai, 2002, p. 87).

References Bessemans, Chris (2011). ‘Moral Conflicts and Moral Awareness’. Philosophy 86, 4: 563–87. Bessemans, Chris (2012). ‘Universalizability in Moral Judgments: Winch’s Ambiguity’. International Philosophical Quarterly 52, 4: 397–404. Bessemans, Chris (2013). ‘A Short Introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s Moral Philosophy’. Journal of Philosophical Research 38: 203–32. Dunlop, Francis (2002). ‘Translator’s Introduction’. In: Aurel Kolnai, Early Ethical Writings of Aurel Kolnai, ed. Francis Dunlop. Aldershot: Ashgate: vii–xxviii. Dunlop, Francis (2004). ‘Kolnai’s Dissertation Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit: A “Completion” of Scheler’s Value-­Ethics’. In: Aurel Kolnai, Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai, eds Francis Dunlop and Zoltán Balázs. Budapest, New York: The CEU Press: 267–80. Kolnai, Aurel (n.d.a). ‘The Pivotal Principles of National Socialist Ideology’. Kolnai Archives, CEPPA, University of St Andrews, Box 1, Folder: Political Thought. Kolnai, Aurel (n.d.b). ‘Progress and Reaction’. Kolnai Archives, CEPPA, University of St. Andrews, Box 1, Folder: Political Thought. Kolnai, Aurel (1927). Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit. Freiburg: Herder & Co. Kolnai, Aurel (1956). ‘The Thematic Primacy of Moral Evil’. The Philosophical Quarterly 22, 6: 27–42. Kolnai, Aurel (1958). ‘A Note on the Meaning of Right and Wrong’. Scientiis Artisbusque, Rome: Herder & Co., 1958 (for the Hungarian Catholic Academy of Science and Art in exile). Republished in: Aurel Kolnai, Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai, eds Francis Dunlop and Zoltán Balázs. Budapest, New York: The CEU Press 45–57. Kolnai, Aurel (1970). ‘A Defense of Intrinsicalism against “Situation Ethics” ’. In: Situationism and the New Morality, ed. Robert L. Cunningham. New York: Appleton-­ Century-Crofts: 232–71. Kolnai, Aurel (1977). Ethics, Value and Reality, eds Francis Dunlop and Brian Klug. London: Athlone.

210   Chris Bessemans Kolnai, Aurel (1995). The Utopian Mind and Other Papers: A Critical Study in Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Francis Dunlop. London: Athlone. Kolnai, Aurel (1999). Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. Daniel Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kolnai, Aurel (2002). Early Ethical Writings of Aurel Kolnai, ed. Francis Dunlop. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kolnai, Aurel (2004). Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai, eds Francis Dunlop and Zoltán Balázs. Budapest, New York: The CEU Press. Mahoney, Daniel J. (1999). ‘The Recovery of the Common World: An Introduction to the Moral and Political Reflection of Aurel Kolnai’. In: Aurel Kolnai, Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. Daniel Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books: 1–16. Wiggins, David and Bernard Williams (1977). ‘Aurel Thomas Kolnai (1900–1973)’. In: Aurel Kolnai, Ethics, Value and Reality, eds Francis Dunlop and Brian Klug. London: Athlone:, ix–xxv.

13 The War Against the West and Kolnai’s post-­war moral and political philosophy Andrew S. Cunningham

Introduction It has never been easy to get the full measure of Aurel Kolnai. His five decades of philosophical essays and journal articles are often hidden in obscure or defunct publications and may be written in English, French or German (and occasionally Hungarian or Spanish). While the posthumous republication of some key writings has given us better access to Kolnai’s work, another fundamental problem remains, namely that few of us alive today are familiar with all of the cultural and intellectual milieus in which the peripatetic Kolnai lived and worked.1 These ranged from his Jewish upbringing in Budapest, to his student years in the Vienna of the Freudians and the Wiener Kreis, to the world of Chestertonian Anglo-­Catholicism that he embraced (albeit from afar) as a young man, to the Nazi café in which he wrote much of The War Against the West, to London and then Paris and (once war was underway) a government propaganda office in New York City, to the traditionalist Catholicism of Quebec’s Laval University and finally to the modern, analytically oriented, philosophy department of the University of London in the 1960s and early 1970s. My intention in this discussion is to illuminate some of the doctrinal continuities between The War Against the West and Kolnai’s Canadian and British periods, paying particular attention to his moral psychology and to a number of little-­known journal articles. While the results are interesting and significant, this is necessarily only a partial and imperfect introduction to a topic that would easily justify dissertation-­length treatment.

The moral theory of The War Against the West The rejection of universality Let us begin, then, by reviewing the sections of The War Against the West in which Kolnai’s understanding of National Socialist moral theory is set out. The sixth chapter – ‘Morals, Law and Culture’ – formed the core of Kolnai’s discussion. There Kolnai argued, in effect, that the philosophers of Hitler’s movement rejected ethics, in all of its traditional forms, in favour of ethos. In other words,

212   Andrew S. Cunningham the standard by which they judged human conduct was not what Kolnai described as ‘a higher code both of thinking and feeling over and above both emotional egoism and calculating selfishness’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 278), but rather a distillation of a communal or national spirit, which in a Teutonic context meant the ‘points of view of a powerful and racially constituted Germanic Empire’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  279). As this implies, the idea of the moral universal was rejected, typically (as in the specific examples of Friedrich Gogarten and Martin Heidegger) on the basis of a ‘reactionary resignation’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 284) that took the (supposed) fact of man’s inability to satisfy universal moral standards as evidence – proof, even – that they were the wrong standards. If the ‘good of man’ were to have any meaning, it had to be something within man’s reach.2 Thus, the fundamental moral proposition of National Socialism was not Immanuel Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ – which was, of course, universalistic par excellence – but (instead) any of a number of ethnocentric subjectivist principles, none more audacious than Richard Walther Darré’s contorted version of Kant: ‘As a German, always act so that your German co-­nationals could make you their paragon’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 279).3 The amoralism of despair One of the most important insights of The War Against the West was that, contrary to what has since become ‘common wisdom’, Nazi ‘morality’ was not grounded in a belief in Germanic superiority – or, at any rate, not in the sense that Germans had been endowed with qualities that somehow uniquely suited them to be ‘active and unique trustees of a universal cause of mankind’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  279). Instead, the essential tenet of National Socialist ‘ethics’ was its denial of the very existence of moral universals and (as a consequence) of the possibility of any ‘higher law which mankind in its divers bodies should reasonably obey’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 279). This ‘Lutheran amoralism of despair’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 282), with respect to the impossibility of finding morality in the external world, had led the philosophy’s adherents to retreat to a moral standard that emerged from within – namely conformity to one’s ‘essence’ and (in particular) to one’s instinct for survival. Out of this arose the identification of the standard of conduct (or ‘goodness’) with the exercise of power in the interest of subjective realisation of one’s own ‘disposition’ (in Darré’s formulation; Kolnai, 1938, p.  279). Kolnai referred to this as an ethic of ‘irrational particularity’, observing that it is ‘absolutely impossible to state … in terms of humanity’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 279). In other words, ‘we’ are the best of men, not in virtue of exhibiting objective moral excellence to a greater degree than others, but rather – having rejected the very possibility of any universal moral standard – simply because we are who we are. The amoralism of despair was the product of an absolutist mindset that abhorred the suggestion, implicit in traditional ethics, that conduct perfectly in keeping with the demands of the world of ‘ought’ is an unattainable ideal, in the face of which the best that one can do is to follow a set of rules that does

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   213 not flow naturally from one’s nature, but which instead (and humiliatingly) restricts and frustrates it (Kolnai, 1938, p.  283). Such ‘pragmatic morality’ was condemned by the likes of Heidegger and Gogarten as ‘the sphere of superficiality, paltriness and illusion’, as a ‘specious construction’ and as nothing but mere ‘technical by-­laws’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp.  282–3). The only form of perfection available to a man is to be, in Kolnai’s construction of the Heideggerian view, ‘absolutely your true self; which you are inasmuch as you are living and acting purely on behalf of the community of existence to which you belong’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 282–3). Inevitably, this virtuous authenticity4 was contrasted with the ‘Jewish’ notion of justice, ‘individualistic, nomistic, casuistic’, with the latter being resolutely rejected. One thinks, for example, of Wilhelm Stapel’s haughty declaration: ‘We Germans do not like conscience made into formulas’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  285). Instead, ‘order rooted in the blood, is the law of man’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 321, endnote 3 to Chapter 6).5 In the same spirit, the English proto-­Nazi H. S. Chamberlain was said by Kolnai to have considered positive law ‘distasteful’ because of its association with arbitrary will, as emphasised (to its great discredit!) ‘in Jewish and Roman rather than in Germanic thought’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 34).6 The heresy of moralism and the primacy of race Indeed, in the National Socialist writings to which Kolnai referred, ‘moralism’ took on the character of a heresy: ‘The Teuton knew no “duty” in this sense.… All heroes of Teutonic history acted out of an inner drive: Ich will!’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 322, endnote 3 to Chapter 6).7 This is why Kolnai characterised the Nazi project as requiring the ‘expropriation of ethics’.8 The philosophers of National Socialism aimed to slaughter conventional morality, appropriating its normative force for their own ethos of ‘radical bondage’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  283),9 while leaving behind (as if to rot in the field) its heart and lifeblood – universality – and the sinew of its tense and often frustrating relationship with ‘natural’ human impulses. Those impulses were, in turn, believed by the National Socialists to be the product of a racially determined nature, with the consequence that, as Kolnai described, ‘goodness is not attached to definable types of conduct but to given types of blood’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 281). Indeed, knowledge in all its forms ‘must be considered and guided from a Völkisch point of view’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 280). According to Stapel, ‘sound ethics do not consist in logical firmness but in the appositeness of the rules of conduct to the biological conditions of the community, as determined by its vital inheritance and evolution’ (quoted in Kolnai, 1938, p. 287).10 If there is any doubt about the subjectivism and extravagant anti­universalism of Nazi moral philosophy, it can be dispelled by quoting the words of Alfred Rosenberg, the ‘official high priest of National Socialist party lore’: The spirit of the race realizes its own ability to assimilate everything racially and spiritually akin, and, at the same time, the iron need to eliminate and

214   Andrew S. Cunningham suppress everything foreign. Not because it is ‘false’ or ‘bad’ in itself, but precisely because it is out of tune with our kind and violates the inner construction of our being. (Quoted from Kolnai, 1938, p. 35; emphasis added) Moral universality is no match, in this view, for the imperatives created by the brute instinct to promote the flourishing of one’s own race. According to Kolnai’s reading of Rosenberg, ‘the building up of “Nordic cells of soul” is the paramount task of our generation’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 35). The tendency of an action to promote (or fail to promote) the survival and success of one’s community (or race) thus constitutes the National Socialist standard for right and wrong action. It follows that the road to goodness (in this debased form) is to accept and accentuate one’s bondage by being incorporated into ‘the community of animal heroism’, consisting in ‘naked existence’ in which ‘being’ and ‘being good’ are two faces of one coin (Kolnai, 1938, p. 284). The despair that flows from our inevitable failure to meet the standards of conventional morality (in all of its ‘sham idealism’) will be no more, and all traces will be lost of the ‘destructive principle of the craving for moral perfection’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 284) – ‘destructive’ because it leaves ‘moralists, like empirical Utilitarians … helpless when faced by the reality of war’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 281) and ‘bound to go to pieces when clashing with the “unintelligible powers of the world” ’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 284). To return to Kolnai’s central contention, the National Socialists made no claim of moral superiority as such. Instead, they advanced the more disturbing and dangerous proposition that there simply are no universal standards and that, in essence, might makes right (given that ‘right’ is determined with reference to the promotion of national survival and ‘might’ is the most direct means to that end). Once such amoralism is implanted in the minds of a race of men, there is no hope of adjusting or correcting the ‘moral’ value that it assigns to those outside the race, because any attempt at such a valuation would be invalid, essentially a ‘category mistake’, in Gilbert Ryle’s famous expression (1949). This would not be the case were racial moral superiority to be claimed from a standpoint that recognised the universality of moral categories; such a moral claim, however crude or bigoted, would at least be amenable to correction on its own terms.11 The vitality and impatience of a youthful philosophy As Kolnai argued in a section of The War Against the West titled ‘The Menace and the Lure’, National Socialist absolutism is not without a perverse type of appeal. For there is ‘a type of man, chiefly to be found among radical intellectuals, who cannot help feeling “impressed” by Nazi “totality”, “vitality”, “finality”, “unconditionality”, etc.’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 22). Nor – to be fair – is it especially difficult to understand the attraction of a philosophy that declares the following, in the words of Jacob Hommes: ‘We must be good as whole beings, good by

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   215 nature, in order that good thoughts and intentions may surge from our minds’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 280).12 Kolnai observed that such ideas may lead some to redefine ‘good’ as whatever it is that most easily surges from ‘our’ minds (which is inevitably some amalgam of self-­interest and group interest, rather than traditional universalisable ethics). Thus, Stapel enthused, ‘do such deeds as spell glory’, while Werner Best formulated the ‘one law’ of the National Socialist state even more succinctly, as ‘Be strong!’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 293). In Chapter 3 of The War Against the West, Kolnai explained how this view extended from the moral to the political sphere. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s anti-­Bolshevist injunction that ‘not classes but types divide humanity’, which Kolnai called ‘one of the great mottoes of Naziism’, was said by him to imply (‘at bottom’) that history is swayed by the tragic and eternal irrationality of racial struggle; that the struggle can have no content of justice and progress; that conflicts are not caused by evils generally acknowledgeable and remediable according to any moral evidence; that the breach in human society which induces struggle is not founded in moral wrong or insufficient thought, and allows for no redress before a supreme tribunal of human consciousness. Not a struggle for the interpretation and shaping of social order, but a turmoil of tribal life-­forces beyond discussion and persuasion, beyond the possibility of solution! (Kolnai, 1938, p. 114, emphasis in original) It is a sense of a desire for a ‘solution’ to ongoing social tensions that drove National Socialist enmity towards bourgeois society; the latter’s preference for awkward balances, Solomonic compromises and a ‘spirit of mutual arrangement’ made it ‘odious in the eyes of Moeller-­Bruck and his partisans’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 116).13 Reading this, one cannot but reflect that the name of the most infamous of the Third Reich’s crimes – the ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem’ – recalls in its rhetorical tone (undoubtedly the least of its objectionable qualities, but none the less significantly for our purposes) the characteristic impatience of the youthful mindset that shaped the philosophy that Kolnai described. Conclusion: life gone mad Kolnai’s own philosophy, as elaborated in the essays and journal articles to which we will shortly turn, is evidenced in his conclusion to this part of his discussion of Moeller van den Bruck’s adolescent dissatisfaction with liberalism, which the latter had expressed in bons mots whose witty cynicism recalls H. L. Mencken – for example, as ‘the liberty of having no principles and the claim that this is a principle in itself ’ or as the ‘liberty for everybody to be a mediocre man’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 116).14 (In other words, the sheer tediousness of ‘liberal’ life, with its tiresome compromises and fussy checks and balances, was a significant source of National Socialist thinkers’ hostility towards it.) Kolnai, with his usual

216   Andrew S. Cunningham perceptiveness, saw rival and incompatible attitudes to the improvement of the ‘plain man’15 as evidence of a significant distinction between liberal and Fascist thought: For here once more we find ourselves in the heart of the great spiritual battle.… In any case, we must put up with the average nature and existence of man; the great point of disjunction is whether we prefer to inject as much liberty as possible into that very average life of everybody or decide to ‘ennoble’ average lives by ordaining them to become absorbed in the service of the ‘exceptional’ lives of their masters. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 116) Kolnai characterised the resulting dilemma16 as follows: In the first [sc. liberal] case, we uphold the liberty of men, notwithstanding all limitations perforce entailed in that liberty; in the second [sc. fascist] case we deny liberty to men but grant them the bliss of participating (as servants) in a liberty not their own, but admittedly far less limited than theirs ever could be. Instead of inuring them to liberty, we make them amenable to slavery, which, too, is a possible, maybe an easier course. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 116) As Kolnai memorably stated at the outset of The War Against the West, he was setting himself ‘the task of proving, not of disproving, that National Socialism is a thing of grandeur’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  22). The appeal of this philosophy, he showed, could be attributed in considerable measure to its responsiveness to the genuine human longing for a vital and meaningful existence. Now, Nazism was indeed full of ‘reckless aggressiveness’ and could boast a ‘magnificent élan’, but this was ‘vitality’ (Kolnai believed) only in the destructive sense that might apply to a fast-­growing cancerous tumour (Kolnai, 1938, p. 23). It was therefore imperative, if European society were to be returned to health, that philosophers take up the unfashionable and unromantic cause of the commonplace, of compromise solutions and of all the other mundane building blocks of liberal society.17 This is what Kolnai took it upon himself to do – to argue for the value of unresolved tensions and for the multiplicity of values and value categories and (above all else) to champion the cause of ‘homely values’18 against all grand schemes – for he understood that ‘life gone mad, though it may afford a splendid pageant for a time, is bound for death’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 23; emphasis added).

Themes of Kolnai’s later moral and political works Introduction: commonalities and continuities The purpose of the preceding summary of Kolnai’s exposition of National Socialist moral theory has been to establish the existence of certain themes in

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   217 The War Against the West that correspond to ideas found in many of his post-­ war writings. While it might also be of value to compare The War Against the West to Kolnai’s earlier writings – searching, perhaps, for psychoanalytic roots of his focus on the youth-­centeredness19 (and also, on occasion, the homosexual aspects20) of Nazi philosophy – that is a task for someone with a better knowledge of the history of psychoanalysis than the present author. In any case, there is more than enough in Kolnai’s works of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s to keep us occupied. The reference to ‘commonalities and continuities’ is intended as an acknowledgement of the critical significance of two related but distinct points: (1) that, as Kolnai’s focus shifted in the post-­war years to socialism proper (that is, from the defunct threat of National Socialism), he found much in common between these two utopian creeds; and (2) that, as his intellectual path shifted from polemicist to academic philosopher, many of the themes of The War Against the West persisted in Kolnai’s post-­war works, even if those less polemical works may have treated them in a more rigorous and dispassionate manner.21 The asymmetry of morality According to Kolnai, ‘the very ideal of Nazi morals’ that lionise ‘historical greatness’ over ‘moral greatness’22 represents the unfolding of ‘our’ qualities and energies, grand, pure, and effective, is bound to prove the ‘best’ thing that can happen, irrespective of any ‘abstract’ code of ethics which would unnaturally force ‘good’ human substance down to the level of mongrels and degenerates. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 291) Such ‘idolatry of historical greatness’ – according to which ‘it is essential that we should “trouble much water”, and determine the course of history by our strongly unique character’ – is itself, Kolnai noted, an offspring of the National Socialist ‘vitalism’ discussed earlier. (Kolnai, 1938, p. 291).23 Kolnai’s disagreement with vitalist ethics, National Socialist or otherwise, is constantly in evidence in his post-­war philosophical writings. One of his finest essays in moral theory, ‘The Thematic Primacy of Moral Evil’, published in The Philosophical Quarterly in 1956, contended, in opposition to the vitalist view, that morality exists in tension with, and as a regulator of, vital practice. He found evidence for this in the fact that morality is at its most powerful when it intrudes into human affairs in one of its negative forms, for example as a critic (in the form of conscience) or as a bearer of punishments: If to-­day I have murdered, stolen or lied, that makes a moral event fit to be commented upon and to disturb my conscience; whereas I am unlikely to be praised for having to-­day been displeased with a man without killing him on the spot or for having abstained from pocketing another’s full purse well

218   Andrew S. Cunningham within my reach, nor shall I feel proud in the evening to have made a dozen or more communications during the day and told the truth each time. (Kolnai, 1956, p. 29) Additional proof of the asymmetry between evil and moral goodness included criminal courts convicting wrongdoers or, at best, acquitting them, while never declaring acquitted defendants faultless or morally pure. Moreover, courts are not ‘balanced’, at an institutional level, by corresponding tribunals of rewards (Kolnai, 1956, p.  30). Furthermore, in many languages the most negative or condemnatory moral terms, such as ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ in English, tend to be reserved exclusively for moral situations, unlike many positive or laudatory moral terms, which tend to be more readily transferrable to non-­moral evaluational contexts (Kolnai, 1956, p.  34). For example, a well-­painted picture might be called a ‘good painting’ from an aesthetic point of view, but a poorly painted one is not aesthetically ‘evil’. Kolnai proceeded to argue that the same phenomenon is observable in other linguistic contexts, right up to what might be thought of as the ultimate moral pairing: ‘God’ and ‘the devil’. The former, he observed, is known and loved for his moral goodness, but also for other manifestations of perfection, while the latter is known and despised for his wickedness alone (Kolnai, 1956, p. 35). Life is not ‘made of morality’ We do not need to review the other evidence that Kolnai believed to point in the same direction – the strong influence of taboos, the proscriptive nature of the Decalogue and so on – as, for present purposes, Kolnai’s view that morality is pre-­eminently negative is sufficiently clear. It is time to turn to the relationship between this view and the vitalism that Kolnai associated not only with the National Socialists – who, as he had noted in The War Against the West, were guilty of the ‘over-­accentuation’ of the ‘positive’ versus the ‘merely prohibitive’ aspect of morality (Kolnai, 1938, p. 296) – but also more broadly with utopian thinkers generally. The bridge between these two propositions – that is, of the thematic primacy of moral evil and the rejection of vitalism – is that the first entails that the realms of morality and practice (or, perhaps, of the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’24) are not coextensive. To put it differently, Kolnai believed that the part morality plays in human life is important, but also importantly limited; this is not in the sense that there is a ‘moral sphere’ of existence in which human activity is directed to a moral purpose, while in other spheres morality plays no part, but rather in the sense that morality, while exercising its influence in every area of human practice, is never the very substance of life. This point was expressed most memorably in the essay ‘Moral Consensus’, where Kolnai bluntly stated that ‘Life is not, thank God, made of morality’. In his alternative view, morality is (metaphorically) a set of signposts, ‘spread over the landscape of practice’, that

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   219 do not actually map the geography of practice but indicate one supremely important network of orientations pervading that geography. Rather than supplying the traveller with information about the site of places he may wish to avoid, they warn him of areas of danger (this or that kind of danger) he should avoid, and press on his attention places of excellence (however significantly different among them) which he should visit in urgent preference to all else. (Kolnai, 1978, p. 122) Such, then, is the function of morality – to tell us certain things to avoid in the field of practice as we pursue the non-­moral ends that are the substance of life. ‘Being moral’ is not itself the ‘thing that we do’; morality is neither our goal nor a form of activity, but a constraint on our non-­moral pursuits. When we disagree about what, in a given situation, is the ‘right’ course of action, that disagreement arises within the ‘landscape of practice’, in which we have motivations other than mere rule-­following. A good analogy would be the activity of driving an automobile. Obeying traffic signals is an important and necessary element of that effort, and yet, all the same, the activity of driving is concerned with something over and above such obedience, and may include internal doubt and interpersonal conflict over routes and destinations that cannot be resolved through reference to the rules of the road. The Aristotelian equivocation In this model, then, morality stands in tension with vital practice, guiding and constraining it but not determining its destinations. From Kolnai’s pluralistic liberal perspective, a man’s ‘good’ – the ‘good of man’, the thing for which he strives – is entirely a matter for his own determination, provided that in pursuing it he heeds the moral signposts he encounters. It is in recognising the ‘primacy of moral emphasis’ in the landscape of practice that one may become a ‘good person’ (Kolnai, 1999a, p.  3). Kolnai was critical of those who confused the ‘good of man’ (humankind’s proper ‘end’ or ‘goal’) with the ‘goodness of man’ (the thing that makes a particular individual morally praiseworthy), a mistake that he called ‘the Aristotelian equivocation’ (Kolnai, 1978, p. 66):25 ‘To force [the concepts goodness of man and good of man] into a conceptual frame of short-­circuited unity cannot but result in a distorted vision both of morality and of human wanting, “happiness”, and practice’ (Kolnai, 1978, p. 66).26 Only the perversity of philosophers, Kolnai concluded, could ‘undertake to conjure the agent’s moral goodness out of his pursuit of his good’ (Kolnai, 1978, p. 69).27 The National Socialist ethos is an example of a moral (or quasi-­moral) philosophy that does exactly this. It defines the ‘good man’ in terms of his seeking a certain end or the ‘good of man’, namely racial flourishing. It is precisely because Nazi thinkers could see no tension between morality and practice that, in their view, we are justified in unleashing our personalities on the world with ‘reckless aggressiveness’.28 Instead of striking a balance between the ‘ought’ and

220   Andrew S. Cunningham the ‘is’, the National Socialist philosophers denied the reality of the ethical ‘ought’, while expropriating morality’s traditional prestige and rhetorical force in the name of the ‘is’.29 Right and Left: the utopias of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ One contrast between The War Against the West and Kolnai’s post-­war writings is that, in the latter, he was principally concerned with arguments against socialism and leftist utopianism. It is very interesting, therefore, to observe that he found in leftist thought a foundational defect similar to what he had found in National Socialism – a failure to comprehend the negative, corrective nature of morality as it relates to the field of practice. Where the leftist described in Kolnai’s later works departs from the rightist of The War Against the West is in his faith in the possibility of what the darkly pessimistic Nazi thinkers had rejected, namely the attainability of moral perfection (which implied acceptance of the universality of moral truth and other consequences that, at least in the 1930s, had made traditional socialism less viciously illiberal than National Socialism in Kolnai’s eyes).30 Kolnai wrote of this commonality in The Utopian Mind. The utopian socialist, not unlike the National Socialist, has failed to comprehend the dynamic relationship between morality and existence: […] perfection-­emphasis differs from value-­emphasis firstly in virtue of its reference to self-­contained completeness of being, which is conceivable independently of appreciation, and secondly to the idea of being coincident with value – this last implying a decisive modification of our primary experience of value as inherent in but in no wise identical with being, inscribed in the texture of reality but neither an expression nor the constitutive principle of that texture. (Kolnai, 1995, pp. 59–60) One of the essential differences between the National Socialist and the leftist utopian socialist is, therefore, that having collapsed the is–ought distinction, the former exhibits a monomania about the ‘is’ while the latter is equally an enthusiast of the ‘ought’ (that is, of the moral category of value).31 In each case, the vital tension between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ is lost, and it is the neglect of that tension that makes leftist utopianism not only practically undesirable but intrinsically absurd – a ‘hankering after some tensionless union of value and being’, as Kolnai described it in The Utopian Mind (Kolnai, 1995, p. 70). A recurring theme of Kolnai’s works, both pre- and post-­war, was that the capacity to recognise and accept (and even to celebrate) the is–ought tension is virtually a prerequisite for a happy, liberal and humane existence. Indeed, he argued, it is only in the ‘context of reality’ – that is, of the very imperfect ‘is’, with all its internal contradictions – that moral ‘perfection’ can be a meaningful term at all:

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   221 We have nothing like a standard, measure, model or applicable definition of ‘perfection’ except in the context of reality, with its manifoldness of good and bad, more and less perfect, thriving and failing things. If we get out of that context, the very idea of perfection becomes as meaningless as, for example, the idea of a ‘perfect food’, neither meat nor fruit nor corn, uniting the mutually inconsistent advantages of all these but free of all their drawbacks. (Kolnai, 1995, p. 29, emphasis in original) In the internal world of the self, that tension is experienced as conscience, the importance of which is a constant theme in Kolnai’s writings. Among the philosophers of The War Against the West, it appears in a weakened form, demanding only that we pursue ‘genuine existence’ and initiating no inner dialogue (Kolnai, 1938, p.  282),32 while among the leftists there is an emphasis on devising a ‘morally pleasing’ social organisation to carry the moral weight of society, while ‘ensur[ing] the fitting and salutary behaviour of men automatically’ – and, Kolnai added, ‘without engaging personal conscience’ (Kolnai, 1960, p. 246). In their different ways, then, both National Socialism and utopian socialism tend to downplay, and even to denigrate, conscience, personality and individuality. The importance of recognising the essential separateness of morality and practice, as emphasised in Kolnai’s writings, had been essential to the development of liberal society during the Enlightenment. As I have written elsewhere, in discussing the moral and economic thought of the Scottish philosophers David Hume and Francis Hutcheson, it does not seem an exaggeration to say that the opening or broadening of the space between virtue and vice played an obstetrical part in the ‘birth of the modern’, permitting choices to be made, interests pursued, and individuality expressed without fear of moral sanction. This neutral space, containing what Hutcheson had called actions of ‘a middle nature,’ was, according to a view widely held in the eighteenth century, the realm of commerce. (Cunningham, 2005, p. 244) Such insights of the Enlightenment had, in Kolnai’s view, been rejected by modern utopian socialists. In taking the perfection of man as their political imperative, communists and their ‘activist’ allies had identified moral value with a form of ideal being. They threatened the existence of individuality by moralising the entire field of practice and insisting that all human activity can be justified only to the extent that it contributes to a single, common and unitary good of man. As Kolnai observed, the desire ‘to make life henceforth a priori coincident with morality, is not only a utopian idea but lies at the very core of utopian thought as such’ (Kolnai, 1956, p.  28, emphasis in original).33 At risk was the pluralism of values and pursuits that the Enlightenment permitted, within the constraints of Kolnai’s ‘negative’ morality.

222   Andrew S. Cunningham Common men and plain men In two long journal articles from his Quebec period,34 Kolnai described the difference between the ‘plain man’ of English moral philosophy35 and the ‘common man’, whose social ascension was promoted by communists. The plain man is not ‘group conscious quâ “plain man” ’, ‘does not pretend to … incarnate the fullness of humanity’ and, in short, is not ‘his own paramount theme’ (Kolnai, 1949a, p.  307); the communists’ common man is ‘a plain man gone mad’, who ‘by exaggerating and puffing up his plainness, aspires to embody the fullness of human perfection and to achieve self-­sufficiency in the sense not of renunciation but of all-­round abundance’ (Kolnai, 1949a, pp.  310–11). Kolnai continued: Unlike the ‘plain man’ whose centre of gravity lies in his practical concerns but who is attached by firm, if somewhat elastic, ties to things ‘higher than himself ’, the ‘common man’ cares about nothing but his ‘welfare’ in the strictest sense of the term and that of the universe in the most comprehensive. Indeed, for him the two coincide.… He would subordinate his concrete ‘self ’, with incomparably greater ‘generosity’ than the ‘plain man’ is likely to display, to any imperative of ‘progressive idealism’.… Utterly irreverent to anything that carries the pretension of being ‘above him’, he is boundlessly pliant to, and indeed craves to obey, any power that orders him about in his own name or in the name of any ‘progressive’ purpose that reflects or flatters his aspiration to be everything. Averse to all constraint, tension, and subordination, he is yet most willing to endure the heaviest chains that can plausibly be made to appear of his own making. (Kolnai, 1949a, pp. 310–11) The values of the communists’ idealised common man are necessarily – as a matter of definition – identical with the values inherent in society, generating what Kolnai considered the paradox that the common man is exalted as embodying all possible value while still being powerless in the face of the communal state – that is to say, he cannot (even conceivably) possess any valuable characteristic that would make him an independent locus of power who might, on occasion, stand in opposition to the society that surrounds him. This doctrine of ‘identitarianism’ – in which each element of society (each citizen) precisely replicates the values of society as a whole, as if in miniature – stood in stark contrast with what Kolnai saw as the key advantage of liberal social orders in their ideal form. In such societies, he argued, ‘privilege’ (a concept defined at length in Kolnai’s 1949 essay ‘Privilege and Liberty’) serves as a bulwark of freedom by virtue of promoting the preservation of nodes of power existing outside, and often in axiological tension with, the power of the state: It is because ‘rich men’, relatively independent centres of capital and authors of ‘private initiative’, exist that ‘I’, a ‘poor man’, may have a dignity of my own

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   223 and in certain matters and certain situations set myself apart from the collective and withstand the pressure of dominant forces as though I were rich myself. (Kolnai, 1949b, p. 94) For Kolnai, the value of nobility and privilege in society lay not in any real superiority of such people – Kolnai’s ‘plain man’ was wise to the weaknesses of the nobles, being prone to say things like, ‘I knows a gentleman when I sees him!’ – but rather in the possibility that their existence stood for the specific possibility of challenging the power and accepted wisdom of the collectivity. Abhorrence of personality in utopianism Having described, if only in a very condensed manner, some of the groundwork of Kolnai’s critique of utopian socialism, we may now return to the matter of personality. As Kolnai wrote: Let us sum up the idea of equalist identitarianism in the following formula. Man will no longer mean a multiplicity of persons united by an objective order of common relations, reciprocal obligations and solidarity; man will be the one single subject of human action and human destiny. Individual people will be like portraits of the collective man, expressions of him, all alike except for diversified functions determined by biological specifications. (Kolnai, 1951, pp. 20–1)36 In ‘Privilege and Liberty’, Kolnai argued that, to the common man, ‘every human face in which he does not recognize his own reflexion as in a mirror appears crazy, uncanny, in some way impure’ (Kolnai, 1949b, p. 76). Personality is a threat to the common man because it suggests divergence from the norm and the possession of characteristics (or the holding of values) that fail to ‘fit’ with the characteristics and values of the common man himself, and which therefore stand outside him, as a taunting challenge to the plenitude of his own being and to the socialist’s dream of human perfectibility. A similar criticism is also made, with respect to National Socialism, in The War Against the West. Abhorrence of personality was a theme of German thinking that Kolnai traced to Friedrich Schelling and especially to G. W. F. Hegel, whose ‘infatuation for the state’ cannot be understood, Kolnai wrote, ‘unless one is aware of the underlying contempt for reason and human personality’ (Kolnai, 1938, p.  128). He provided ample evidence that this contempt was carried forward into National Socialist thinking: Thou are nothing: the ‘Volk’ is everything. (Ernst Bergmann) (Kolnai, 1938, p. 89) There is a super-­individual Something to which man is to sacrifice himself … the concrete idea that appears in the group. (Werner Sombart) (Kolnai, 1938, p. 66)

224   Andrew S. Cunningham Personality (Person) and Universal Nature (All) are hostile antipodes: one must eliminate the former to realize the latter. (Ludwig Klages) (Kolnai, 1938, p. 69) As Kolnai noted in discussing Franz Haiser, the ‘fascist mind’ is incapable of conceiving society as a system of mutual relations entered into by free and independent individuals, invariably insisting on viewing it as ‘a living body, a vital unit, with its members as “organs in function” ’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 98). The denigration both of personality, which Kolnai thought of as ‘the irreducible core of human existence’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 65), and of any tension between individual and society is a distinguishing feature of many, and likely all, forms of utopianism. In Kolnai’s view, it was one of the doctrines by which Nazism surpassed and transcended the ordinary forms of conservatism and reactionary ethnocentrism with which it is sometimes associated: ‘Fascist radicalism is seen to supersede mere conservative caution or reactionary mistrust. Man is denied, not franchise or personal self-­control beyond certain boundaries, but his moral standing as a personality’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 71). Interestingness as a mode of value experience That Kolnai should have discovered the essence of utopian political philosophies in the denigration of personality is not surprising; his autobiographical writings show that he had a keen appreciation of the moral contours and axiological complexity of particular human characters. A typical example concerns a certain Viennese relation about whom Kolnai recalled the following: Uncle Leopold, though not virtuous, was the happiest man I ever knew on earth. He drank with moderation, practised wenching with circumspection, escaped all responsibilities and all worries steadfastly, never bore ill will to anybody, and never was ill until his death from old age. He even times his death as would a perfect artist for life, for it was a few days before the Germans marched into Vienna. I do hope his childlike meekness and inoffensiveness have earned him the mercy of Heaven. (Kolnai, 1999a, pp. 3–4) Once he had finally secured an academic position as a philosopher,37 Kolnai’s fascination with the complexity of human character was manifested in a number of essays on what might be called the ‘phenomenology of value experience’, for example on the relationship between goodness and the good (as discussed earlier),38 between the moral and the aesthetic (see ‘Aesthetic and Moral Experience’, Kolnai, 1978), on dignity as a category of value (Kolnai, 1976) and on the feeling of disgust (Kolnai, 2004).39 One of Kolnai’s finest papers on value experience (and, in my view, one of the keys to understanding his thought) was published in 1964 in the British Journal of Aesthetics. It concerned a value category that had not before (and has

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   225 not since) attracted the attention of very many philosophers, namely ‘interestingness’. In this paper, Kolnai argued that judgements about what is ‘interesting’ and ‘uninteresting’ are not reducible to – and are therefore axiologically distinct from – aesthetic judgements (with which they are often conflated). He illustrated the distinction between the evaluational categories of the beautiful and the interesting by means of examples such as the following: Gogol’s Dead Souls is a great novel and supremely interesting, but owing to its crude structural imperfections and the clumsiness of some of its techniques it is far from being an unequivocally good novel; Goncharov’s Oblomov, also a great novel, is a much finer work of art and on the whole a better novel, though comparatively tedious. Nothing Tolstoy ever wrote is even remotely as interesting as most of what Dostoievsky wrote; but very possibly War and Peace is a novel superior in its artistic grandeur to any novel by Dostoievsky. (Kolnai, 1964, p. 23) The elements of interestingness that Kolnai identified – eccentricity, exoticness, mystery, movement, manifoldness and originality – are rather reminiscent, in their broad outlines, of Rudolf Otto’s ‘noumenous’ trinity – mysterium, tremendum, fascinans – which had been introduced in that author’s most famous book, The Idea of the Holy, in 1923. Whether Kolnai perceived the elements of the interesting in Catholicism, and whether such a perception might have played a part in his adult conversion to Christianity, would be an interesting question to consider. Motion and straying Among the elements of the interesting, ‘movement’ bears some additional consideration in the present context. That is because, as we have seen, action and activity are hallmarks of Nazi vitalism and also of the corresponding phenomenon among the socialist utopians (which might be called ‘activism’). In light of this, we must ask whether Kolnai’s views may not, after all, have been so distant from rightist and leftist utopianism. But this is clearly not the case: in ‘On the Concept of the Interesting’, Kolnai distinguished the activist/vitalist sense of ‘movement’ – ‘a utopian, an ecstatic, or a self-­reformatory transposition or conversion’ – from the contrary sense that formed one of the elements of interestingness. That second sense of movement was not ecstatic but rather an ‘adventurous “straying into” an unexplored district which thrusts itself upon our attention’ (Kolnai, 1964, p.  32). The word ‘straying’ was carefully chosen. In Kolnai’s view, the interest of the strange and exotic depends on the relationship that they bear to the familiar: the more developed (and philosophic) mind is less responsive than the more immature to blatant newness and strangeness; it is more attracted by

226   Andrew S. Cunningham recurrences of familiarity in the changed medium itself, expects it to shed a ‘new light’ on the world as a whole, and is aware of every worth-­while journey’s being in some sense … a ‘homeward’ journey. Anyhow mobility seen in the perspective of the interesting means the maintenance of a tension rather than the snapping of a chord; not a leap into disconnected alienness but the embodiment of [the] interplay of familiarity and unfamiliarity.… (Kolnai, 1964, p. 33, emphasis added) Motion, in the sense of ‘straying’, is an element of the interesting because it carries us across the connections that, however unsteadily, hold our complex, manifold and apparently self-­contradictory world together, shifting us back and forth between perspectives that might have been thought mutually incompatible had we moved too rapidly and lost all sense of the route (indirect, tension-­filled and problematic though it may be) that does in fact join them. That too-­rapid, ‘leaping’, ‘chord snapping’ motion is, of course, the ‘movement’ of the utopians.40 A further, and quite extraordinary, passage elegantly made a case for interestingness as a fundamental mode of value experience (alongside beauty and moral goodness) and also hinted at the foundation of this viewpoint in the personality of Kolnai himself (a subject to which we will return): It is not the crude and cusséd impermeability of individual things or persons in itself that is interesting; rather it is the changed light in which the world may appear in virtue of their irruption into its texture and of the discovery that our ordinary conceptual apparatuses are not wholly equal to dealing with them.… I would submit that nothing is interesting in its isolated selfhood and total lack of interchangeability and that the individual, the original, the eccentric or the irreducible is interesting as a feature of the world: in that it presents the world as an interesting place, indissoluble in a ready-­ made schematism of concepts and categories, and abounding in hidden adits to unfamiliar chambers. Strange singularities are interesting inasmuch as they remind us that we live in a world familiar yet unexhausted, shot through with the transparency and lure of its out-­of-the-­way modifications towards which its own laws and pressures may convey us: an ambit rather than a Parmenidean spherical orbit. (Kolnai, 1964, pp. 34–5, emphasis in original) Interestingness, Kolnai concluded, attends our experience of the fact that ‘this world is so made as to render it possible for us to look beyond it’ (Kolnai, 1964, p. 36)41 or, as he expressed it in ‘Privilege and Liberty’, ‘that in man which points beyond man’ takes shape in ‘a few or rather, very many men [who] in different ways transcend the “common level” of mankind’ (Kolnai, 1949, p. 69).42 In summary, interestingness as a category of evaluation disturbs the utopian socialist because, as an aspect of our value experience, it signifies the existence of knowledge, experiences and perspectives that lie outside of us, disproving our claims, as (supposedly) ‘common men’, not only to plenitude but (perhaps also)

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   227 to identity and even equality. From the absence of identity and equality arise tensions and stubbornly persistent disagreement between men of equal merit, and – depressingly, from the utopian perspective – a sense of the hopelessness of creating a perfect common man embodying all possible forms of virtue. Conversely, insofar as perfection is the aim of the utopian (or any other) political creed, it can be established only by doing violence to human nature and (what almost inevitably follows from this) violence against human beings. ‘Terror’, Kolnai observed, ‘is not the means but the meaning of the “direct” and “actual” rule of “The People” ’ (Kolnai, 1949a, p. 330). In The War Against the West, this principle was established with respect to National Socialist totalitarianism. In ‘Privilege and Liberty’, ‘The Meaning of the “Common Man” ’ and other post-­ war works, Kolnai’s focus shifted to socialism and communism.

Kolnai’s thought in the context of twentieth-­century conservatism Introduction Kolnai’s views were distinct in some important respects from those of other politically conservative philosophers of his era. Among these, particularly noteworthy are two nearly exact contemporaries: Sir Karl Popper (1902–94) and Michael Oakeshott (1901–90). Sir Karl Popper Kolnai’s attitude towards perfectionism is expressed in a way that clearly recognises Popper’s famous insight that falsifiability is a criterion of ‘scientific’ theorising. In Kolnai’s view, utopian perfectionism is an attitude that, from a psychological perspective, is maintained most successfully with respect to the most general and abstract views that the subject holds concerning value – that is, at a level so general as rarely to come into contact with facts or data of any sort. In a distinctly Popperian vein, he argued as follows in The Utopian Mind: A scientific hypothesis, or any assumption relative to facts, can be convincingly falsified by experience, observation or testimony; value-­problems of a concrete, circumscribed and comparatively technical kind are largely dependent on factual connections subject to straightforward intellectual tests, and on standard valuations unlikely to be called in question and thus assuming in some way the status of ‘facts’. But the general outlook on value is not as such confrontable with stubborn facts of experience or committed to established axioms of valuation, like the basic Don’ts of ordinary Morality. It is capable of endless formalization and evasive reinterpretation. Thus the perfectionist fallacy may soar above any detailed tests, and the perfectionist attitude may thrive upon itself. (Kolnai, 1995, p. 83, emphasis in original)

228   Andrew S. Cunningham Popper himself had grasped the importance of falsifiability to the legitimacy of scientific theories as the result of his own brief and disillusioning association with ‘scientific’ Marxism around the end of the First World War.43 To that point of agreement we may add evidence of the references to Kolnai in Popper’s published writings. Popper professed his indebtedness to The War Against the West in his later work, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper, 1962, vol.  1, p. 230, vol. 2, p. 315), and made a point of referring again to it (as an ‘excellent book’) in his autobiography, Unended Quest (Popper, 1976, p. 105). Despite the remarkable biographical parallels between Popper and Kolnai – Christianised sons of the Jewish middle classes of Austria–Hungary, driven by Hitler into ‘exile’ in the British dominions and, finally, in each case, to the University of London – there is little doubt that they were political conservatives of markedly different stripes. Pierre Manent made just this point in his introduction to The Utopian Mind. Kolnai, in Manent’s opinion,  thinks that Popper’s conservatism is too exclusively epistemological, too much concentrated in the value of a traditional frame of reference for the progress of knowledge and the appraisal of reforms: that Popper is not sensible enough of the intrinsic merits, both moral and vital, of a conservative attitude.  (Kolnai, 1995, pp. xxii–iii) (Perhaps this is why Kolnai referred to Popper as a ‘non-­millenarian leftist’, a category that also included Julien Benda and Reinhold Niebuhr (Kolnai, 1960, p. 252, n. 2, emphasis in original)).44 This very brief discussion of Popper allows us to stress the importance Kolnai attached to what Manent referred to as the ‘intrinsic merits’ of conservatism as a psychological attitude. In Kolnai’s view, such merits consisted in the psychological rewards of possessing (or adopting) the distinctively conservative attitude of acceptance and acknowledgement of the inherent and unavoidable complexity of human existence. In a passage from his autobiography, he expressed the view that, at least when left to its own devices, the operation of the mind leads us naturally towards just such an acknowledgement: Man’s mental life is at the same time an unceasing process of integration, concentration, hardening and crystallizing out on the one hand, of tempering, mellowing, softening down on the other. The business of confronting and co-­ordinating leads the mind in stages toward a higher state of equilibrium in which the true dominants assert themselves more clearly and with less of accidental alloy. This brings greater awareness of the limits of integration, more tolerance of one’s own many-­sidedness even though it evokes the suspicion of contradiction, and reconciliation to the fragmentary nature of life and its values. (Kolnai, 1999a, p. 25; emphasis added)

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   229 The capacity to experience the world through the mode of interestingness helps us to perform this integration by drawing our attention to a variety of perspectives, which reveal the world in ways that are difficult to reconcile and lead us to suspect contradiction. In contrast, the utopian mind (whether of the Right or Left), in its impatience with all such imperfections and apparent conflicts, attempts to craft a ‘new and improved’ human personality characterised by certainty and moral (or amoral) clarity, whether that clarity is attained by embracing the moral nihilism of the Right or by pursuing the moral infinitude of the Left. Kolnai saw extremism of either type as diverting us from the real and achievable task of reconciling ourselves to, and even coming to admire, the complexity, contradictions and tensions that we find within ourselves, between ourselves and our fellow human beings (and other living creatures) and more broadly in the moral, social and political reality in which we all exist.45 Michael Oakeshott In 1965, Kolnai reviewed Michael Oakeshott’s seminal collection, Rationalism in Politics, for the prestigious British academic journal Philosophy. Oakeshott had argued that rationalist social utopians who imagined that they could devise an ideal social order from a ‘clean slate’, solely through the operation of reason, were overlooking the role that tradition and habit play in constructing and stabilising the social order. Furthermore, Oakeshott maintained, in spite of the passionate intensity and single-­mindedness of the rationalists’ devotion to reason, the influence of tradition and habit could be detected in almost every detail of their ‘rational’ social schemes.46 While expressing admiration for many of the themes of Rationalism in Politics, Kolnai nevertheless detected ‘a seamy side’ in Oakeshott’s thinking that (in his words) ‘cannot be passed over in silence’ (Kolnai, 1965, p. 68). In particular, he stated: Professor Oakeshott is liable to overshoot the mark and attribute to habit, routine, tradition, casual expedients, the ‘skill’ and ‘know-­how’ of the experienced and the ‘self-­propelling’ virtue of activity once engaged in, both a larger space in human life and a more independent status than they really possess. Even more significantly for our present purposes, he continued by saying: In a way somewhat reminiscent of the various irrationalist currents rampant in Europe especially between the two wars, though indeed without any trace of a morbid delight in barbarism, [Oakeshott] would trust ‘Life’ as its own test and is inclined to underestimate the inherent spiritual stature of man and the intellectual claims it implies.… He explains brilliantly that there is no such thing as an empty ‘mind’ which ‘then’ comes to be filled by discovered truths; that thought never starts from nothing but always draws on a stock of

230   Andrew S. Cunningham presuppositions, ‘prejudices’ in a literal sense, which however, he makes no attempt – and that would be the next and most necessary thing to do – to distinguish between prejudice in that broader sense in which it is useful, stimulating, truth-­conveying, the initial and provisional substance of knowledge as it were, and prejudice in the stricter sense in which it obviates cognition, bars the mind’s access to reality, perverts judgement and misleads thought into illusory constructions. (Kolnai, 1965, p. 69)47 Kolnai clearly saw in Oakeshott’s work at least a shadow of the vitalistic impulse that had been emphasised with such belligerence by the philosophers of National Socialism. While it was not expressed in the same crude manner, or put to the same vicious ends, Oakeshott’s elevation of activity to a position antecedent to ends (in his view, the activity engendered its own ends) bore a clear family resemblance to the ‘romance of activity’ that Kolnai had criticised in The War Against the West. Oakeshott’s book also prompted Kolnai to call into question the very coherence of conservatism as a ‘political position’, asking ‘How far is it possible to be a conservative while being nothing else (or, for the matter of that, a revolutionary and nothing else)?’ (Kolnai, 1965, p. 71). Understood in the manner that Kolnai understood it, as a characteristic of human psychology, conservatism is an attitude rather than a political programme – an attitude grounded in an appreciation of, and even a certain fondness for, the is–ought tension. As he wrote in ‘The Moral Theme in Political Division’, Right and Left differ … not so much in their moral evaluations … as by the contrasting attitudes they take to the tension between ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’. The rightist attitude accepts that tension as ineliminable.… The leftist attitude, on the contrary, tends to over-­emphasize the disjunction of Is and Ought, experiencing their tension as intolerable and always in need of urgent redress. (Kolnai, 1960, p. 252, emphasis in original) Kolnai agreed with Oakeshott to the extent that the latter defended an ‘enlightened, tolerant, pragmatic and flexible conservatism’ for which ‘ruling is a specific and limited activity: that of an umpire rather than of a leader or manager’ and under which ‘the energies of the community are not to be made subservient to a central purpose’ (Kolnai, 1965, p. 70). In short, what matters in our world, obsessed with Progress as a supreme and unquestioned end in itself, is to keep awake and consciously cultivate the conservative state of mind, to ensure its continued presence and to give scope to its sobering action. (Kolnai, 1965, p. 70)

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   231 That is far from pure traditionalism, which, as he observed in The Utopian Mind,48 ‘may be prone to idealize the given state of things as a kind of sacrosanct quasi-­perfection already attained’, and thus be even more utopian than the visions of a reformist (Kolnai, 1995, p. 42). Similarly, Kolnai’s contribution to the study of utopian Leftism was to understand it as a phenomenon of psychology (compare with the title The Utopian Mind) and not as something that should lead us to reject, in their entirety, the concrete aspects of the programmatic politics that utopian minds tend to favour: Revolutionary utopianism is not an unflagging zeal for long-­overdue reforms, tightening of rules or watchful insistence on the proper execution of public duties. Rather, its background and entelechy is the vision of an unworldly world without imperfection, friction and creaking joints. (Kolnai, 1995, p. 70)

Conclusion Kolnai understood the twentieth-­century battle between utopians (of the Right or Left) and non-­utopians essentially as a battle of psychologies – a clash of attitudes. In his view, the ‘utopian mind’ is possessed of certain characteristic attitudes that non-­utopian admirers of tensions and imperfections, such as himself, did not share. In The Utopian Mind, Kolnai, in his honest way, acknowledged that understanding this disagreement as a clash of attitudes raises difficult problems of objectivity and proof: I certainly cannot, without further ado, ‘disprove’ moods, attitudes, likes and dislikes, and choices or pursuits at variance with my own predilection for the finite and limited, for the fragmentary and the imperfect – loved with a critical reserve – and for pluralistic and balanced perspectives – in a word, for consciousness of tension. (Kolnai, 1995, p. 78) Nevertheless, he continued, a diagnosis of utopianism (of the Left or Right) as a set of doctrines flowing from the perfectionist state of mind readily, and much more objectively, reveals its intellectual fallaciousness. The root of the fallacy is that the perfectionist,49 desperate to discover certainty in the realm of value (including that of ethics), tends to construct his views about right action from value statements that are vague, general and tautologous, not because they tell him anything very useful about value, but because they give him the confidence that comes from founding one’s philosophy on self-­evident propositions (however ‘trivially true’ they might be). To take an example, ‘good should be promoted, and evil discouraged’ is a statement that, while vacuous and lacking in content, sounds like a self-­evident truth. The perfectionist seizes on it, smitten with its ‘certainty’, and proceeds to ‘stretch this line of self-­evidence … to excessive lengths’ (Kolnai, 1995, p. 80):

232   Andrew S. Cunningham If moral good should be promoted and evil curbed, why not envision a state of man in which good motives alone are at work, and evil impulses (deprived of whatever fostering-­ground may breed them) no longer occur at all? The utopian moralist satisfied as to the ‘evidence’ of such a goal will perhaps approve of the use of utterly evil means to secure, in the future and ‘finally’, so sweeping a regeneration of man.… (Kolnai, 1995, p. 81)50 This single-­minded focus on the general, abstract and unworldly means that morality-­obsessed utopians (paradoxically) frequently exhibit ‘poor and superficial’ insight into ‘actual moral problems’, one reason for this being that ‘so long as evil exists, a trifle more or less of it may not seem worthy of passionate attention and patient assessment’ (Kolnai, 1995, p. 81). In other words, when one is focused on actualising a world in which evil is totally eradicated – wherein ‘nothing whatsoever may be allowed to stand in the way of the Absolute’ (Kolnai, 1999, p. 149) – why concern oneself with small or merely ‘incremental’ distinctions between, for example, a ‘white’ lie and a fraudulent misrepresentation or a slap on the wrist and a violent assault? The result is that the utopian tends to overlook the actual moral struggles that dominate real lives. This brings us back to the National Socialist, whom Kolnai believed to be motivated, psychologically, by impatience with the fussy and complicated world of traditional morality, whose endless compromises seemed to favour the petty interests of mediocre men at the expense of the development and flourishing of (supposedly) superior types. In Rosenberg’s view, as set out by Kolnai, this was all to the detriment of true virtue, which ‘by definition, can only blossom from the profound genius of the particular group’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 60). Similarly, there is Kolnai’s lively account of Moeller van den Bruck’s vitalist thinking: ‘Youth’ repudiates democracy, and it does so even more on account of democratic ‘banality’ than of democratic ‘corruption’. A most significant order of precedence! The paramount factor is not moral discontent but a thirst for more intense experience; not the blots on liberty but the checks to the display of power. It is far less the absence or threadbareness of rules and obligations than the presence of balance and poise, of domestication and the spirit of mutual arrangement, which makes liberalism so odious in the eyes of Moeller-­Bruck and his partisans. The most appalling charge against liberalism is its preference for ‘mediocrity’ and ‘middle-­class principles’.… (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 115–16) In closing, we can say that Kolnai’s extensive study of Nazi writings led him to believe that the ‘war against the west’ represented a clash of attitudes as much as (or possibly even more than) a rational disagreement over matters of fact. In the first half of the 1930s, in preparation for writing The War Against the West, he

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   233 gathered together the evidence of those attitudes in the writings of the Nazis, their sympathisers and their predecessors, and began the process of analysing and characterising them. In his post-­war works, he broadened these insights into a wider-­ranging analysis of the differences between utopian and non-­utopian political viewpoints, including their psychological and attitudinal foundations. One might speculate, as we have here, that his deeply ‘personal’ writing style, with its charming anecdotes, recollections and observations, was adopted in part out of a recognition that because attitudinal differences are unlikely to be susceptible of rational resolution, the way to draw the reader to one’s side is to present him or her with a vision of one’s world view that compels sympathy, admiration and emulation. In other words, the many anecdotal references in Kolnai’s philosophical works to personal experiences and tastes are not stylistic ornamentation, but an essential part of the substance of his philosophy. As for the success of this endeavour, we can only say that, while Kolnai’s intellectual following has never been large, he appears to have clearly and deservingly succeeded in convincing a great many of his students and readers of the wisdom of a ‘predilection for the finite and limited … the fragmentary and the imperfect – loved with a critical reserve’ (Kolnai, 1995, p. 78).

Notes   1 As John D. Beach wrote of Kolnai in a 1981 article, ‘he lacked, by choice and by chance, an enduring group identity – doctrinal, ideological, cultural, and national’ (Beach, 1981, p. 132).   2 The influence of Kant’s famous ‘ought implies can’ dictum might be detected here, even as it leads in an unanticipated direction. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and eds Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), A548/B576.   3 In the same vein, Kolnai quoted Alfred Rosenberg: ‘National Socialism, however, knows no equality between souls, no equality between men, no “right” in itself, no object except a German nation of strong men’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 295).   4 Kolnai discussed authenticity in his essay ‘Existence and Ethics’ (Kolnai, 1978, pp. 123–43).   5 The reference that Kolnai gives here is to the Hitler Youth’s bi-­weekly journal Wille und Macht, 1 December 1936. Evidently those who named the journal had absorbed the philosophy Kolnai was describing.   6 Here Kolnai quotes Chamberlain, who stated with apparent disapproval that ‘arbitrariness in place of instinct as a principle of relationship between men is called law’.   7 Here Kolnai (1938, p. 281) refers to an article by Georg Halbe in the edition of Wille und Macht referred to in note 15.   8 See, for example, Kolnai, 1938, pp. 278, 279, 281. In a short section of the introduction titled ‘Notes on Certain Unusual Words’, Kolnai suggested that his concept of expropriation be defined as ‘taking away from a principle or idea that which properly belongs to it while at the same time retaining the outward form for its ornamental value, so to speak’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 28).   9 This is an expression Kolnai glossed in terms of man’s ‘incorporation into concrete and commanding community’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 283). 10 Kolnai’s distaste for ‘evolutionary ethics’ in the style of Herbert Spencer is noted by David Wiggins and Bernard Williams in their introduction to Ethics, Value and Reality (Kolnai, 1938, p. x).

234   Andrew S. Cunningham 11 Thus, as Kolnai noted with respect to communism,  the most virulent form of Bolshevism is still infinitely more akin to the civilian (bürgerlich) idea than is Nazi Anti-­Liberalism; the most extreme Left Atheism has infinitely more in common with Christian morality and its social implications than has Nazi Paganism.  (Kolnai, 1938, p. 22, cf. pp. 278–9) Thus Kolnai believed that ‘National Socialism is at bottom incomparably more anti-­ Western than Bolshevism’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 18). 12 As is frequently true of quotations in The War Against the West, the source of these words is not entirely clear, but it appears in a paragraph that is generally devoted to Hommes. 13 ‘Moeller-­Bruck’ is a variant of the name Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876–1925), the influential author of Das Dritte Reich (1923). 14 This is perhaps not entirely accidental, as Mencken, the American journalist and social critic, had in 1907 published the first book-­length study of Nietzsche in the English language. 15 This can also be termed the ‘common man’; the difference is a crucial one, as we shall shortly see (see p. 222). 16 At any rate, a prima facie dilemma, as from a practical perspective he clearly did not find it difficult to choose between the two alternatives. 17 Kolnai stated in his autobiography that his mindset while writing The War Against the West was to imagine himself as ‘a spiritual agent of the West on a special mission in Vienna’ (Kolnai, 1999a, p. 159). 18 See ‘Existence and Ethics’, Kolnai, 1978, p. 129. 19 For example, in his early work Psychoanalysis and Sociology (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), the twenty-­one-year-­old Kolnai observed that ‘the esoteric character of anarchism vividly recalls the clan of the brethren and the secret societies of savages’ (p.  122). Although that work was primarily an attempt to psychoanalyse anarchist communism, The War Against the West’s consideration of the National Socialists takes a similar tone in places. 20 For example, in his reference to Stefan George, whom Kolnai reviled as ‘one of the Augustines of the new paganism, … the Kants of immoralism’ and so forth in the foreword to The War Against the West (1938, p. 14). See also Kolnai, 1938, pp. 74–9, with respect to Hans Blüher’s conception of the Bund. 21 Despite the best of intentions, certain unfortunate realities of time and space have dictated that direct discussion of point (1) in the following is more limited than the author would have wished! 22 This is a distinction that he credited to the British philosophers Samuel Alexander and William de Burgh (Kolnai, 1938, p. 291). 23 For other historical connotations of the term ‘vitalism’ in Western medicine and philosophy, see Andrew S. Cunningham, ‘Hume’s Vitalism and its Implications’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15 (2007): pp. 59–73. 24 Where ‘ought’ is restricted to a moral ‘ought’, in keeping with Kolnai’s broader theory of value in which the multiplicity of modes of value experience is recognised, including many that give rise to non-­moral evaluations (such as aesthetic evaluations and evaluations in terms of interestingness). See ‘Morality and Practice II: The Moral Emphasis’ (Kolnai, 1978, pp.  95–122), where he notes that moral qualities possess what is merely one ‘kind of evaluative and imperative emphasis’ (p. 118), presumably among many, and ‘Aesthetic and Moral Experience’ (Kolnai, 1978, pp.  187–210): ‘there are many, perhaps I should say countless, forms of value experience other than either aesthetical or moral’ (p. 187). 25 This was likely in reference to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in: The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross and ed. Richard McKeon, pp. 927–1112 (New York:

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   235 Random House, 1941), Book I, Chapter 7, pp. 1097b22–1098a17. Cf. Peter Glassen, ‘A Fallacy in Aristotle’s Argument About the Good’, Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1957): 319–22, for a more detailed discussion of the same idea (p. 320). 26 Cf. Kolnai, 1995, p. 124, with respect to this ‘philosophical confusion’. 27 Indeed, as was argued by Glassen (another Hungarian émigré philosopher, whose moral theory had much in common with Kolnai’s), ‘the good’ is not even an essentially moral term. It is a value term, but that is a very different thing. For example, one would not be making a category mistake, and in fact would be making quite a plausible argument, in asserting that beauty is ‘the good’. There is no logical connection between the good and morality as opposed to other modes of value experience (the aesthetic, the ‘interesting’ and so on). See Peter Glassen, ‘The Classes of Moral Terms’, Methodos 11 (1959): 233–44. 28 See p. 216 of this chapter. 29 See endnote 8. 30 Cf. Kolnai (1938, p. 293) where Nazism is described as comparable to Bolshevism, but without the latter’s acceptance of justice and rationality. In his autobiography, he is clear that Nazism is a unique evil, without even the comprehensibility of the communist doctrines about the fate of the bourgeoisie, which might, for all its viciousness, at least be understood ‘as the consummation of a trend in history’. The rise of the National Socialists, he wrote, ‘defies my imagination to the point of lifelong bewilderment’ (Kolnai, 1999a, p. 147). 31 Cf. his statement in ‘The Moral Theme in Political Division’ that ‘whereas the Left would “realize the ideal”, the Right “idealizes reality” ’, from which he draws a number of problematic consequences for both sides (such as, ‘the Right will easily lapse into hypocrisy, the Left into attitudes of moral nihilism’) (Kolnai, 1960, p. 242). 32 Heidegger, whom Kolnai later characterised as an ‘incomplete and disillusioned Nazi’, is the philosopher with whom Kolnai most strongly associated this toothless type of conscience. See ‘Existence and Ethics’, in Kolnai, 1978, p. 125. 33 He was particularly critical of existentialists such as Heidegger and Jean-­Paul Sartre for what he saw as the process of turning small insights about hypocrisy and self-­deception into an excuse to denigrate ‘the whole treasure of decencies and loyalties’ as being ‘no better than a homogeneous fabric of sham’ (‘Existence and Ethics’, Kolnai, 1978, p. 129). 34 The two papers were ‘The Meaning of the “Common Man” ’ (Kolnai, 1949a) and ‘Privilege and Liberty’ (Kolnai, 1949), the latter reprinted in French as ‘Privilège et Liberté’, Contrepoint 21 (1976): 63–111. Both papers were reprinted posthumously in Kolnai, 1999b. 35 This term refers to, more or less, ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’, the simple but sturdy ‘everyman’ figure regularly referred to by twentieth-­century English moral philosophers in virtue of his common-­sense intuitions that served as trustworthy indications of the correct answers to normative quandaries. 36 This is an English translation of a 1947 article that originally appeared in French in Laval Théologique et Philosophique. 37 As he recounted, philosophy was a somewhat unintended specialisation that resulted mainly from the fact that Laval University did not have any open positions in what then seemed to him to be more suitable departments. See, Kolnai, 1999a, p. 215. 38 See p. 219 of this chapter. 39 This book is a reprint, with scholarly notes, of two of Kolnai’s essays on the subject. 40 While there is not sufficient space to discuss each of the elements of interestingness separately, we might just note the following remarkable passage on the subject of ‘manifoldness’, in which Kolnai’s attitude to certain philosophers and philosophical traditions is shown to be connected to his admiration for the interesting:  The quest for monistic simplification … is utterly antagonistic to interestingness. The same frigid boredom emanates from Spinoza’s conceptual pantheism,

236   Andrew S. Cunningham Parmenides’s construction of a single and undivided Reality in the shape of a Perfect Sphere, and similar monsters of philosopher’s inanity including Aristotle’s ‘God’, the self-­contemplating ‘Cause’ (likewise ‘unmoved’) as well as its Scholastic elaboration, modern irreligious materialism in its various dressings, and the Perfection-­nightmares of Utopian speculation. (Kolnai, 1964, pp. 33–4) 41 Cf. his account of dreams as ‘taunting’ their subject (as a waking person aware of having dreamed) with the conceivability, by one degree more credible than when shown by mere imagination, of a world differently structured and articulated, differently arranged in regard to Time and Identity, from the world of actual reality. (Aurel Kolnai, ‘The Dream as Artist’, British Journal of Aesthetics 12 (1972): 158–62) 42 In a 1944 paper written while Kolnai was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he wrote in a more religious vein than one finds in his later works that, in denying God, the humanitarian has ‘ignored and maimed and stifled’ the greatest need of men ‘for a meaning of his life which points decisively and majestically beyond the range of “his needs” ’ (p. 457). Aurel Kolnai, ‘The Humanitarian versus the Religious Attitude’, The Thomist 4 (1944): 429–57. A more complete treatment of Kolnai’s intellectual path would need to account for the decline of such open religiosity in his post-­1940s writings, which could simply reflect the nature of the opportunities that presented themselves but might also, for example, be the result of a change in his views on religion after his experience of the Catholic traditionalism of Laval University. Compare with too his autobiographical hint of a diminished appreciation for the intellectual idol of his youth, G. K. Chesterton (Kolnai, 1999a, p. 109). 43 As Popper wrote in his autobiography, I had been shocked by the fact that the Marxists (whose central claim was that they were social scientists) and the psychoanalysts of all schools were able to interpret any conceivable event as a verification of their theories. This … led me to the view that only attempted refutations which did not succeed qua refutations should count as ‘verifications’. (Popper, 1976, p. 42) Cf. Kolnai’s description of his disillusionment – dating from as early as 1920 – with psychoanalysis. His observation was that Freud and his followers were ‘proving too much to prove anything at all’ (Kolnai, 1999a, p. 78). 44 Cf. Kolnai, 1995, p. 9. 45 As Manent wrote in his introduction to Privilege and Liberty (Kolnai, 1999b), Kolnai saw it as ‘our duty, as well as a principal component of our happiness, to discover the Good in ambiguous reality’ (p. vii). 46 This is most memorably illustrated by Oakeshott’s humorous consideration, in the essay ‘Rational Conduct’, of the Victorian ‘rational dress’ movement, which envisaged a redesign of human clothing on purely rational grounds. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism and Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1991), pp. 99–131. 47 Cf. the criticism, in The Utopian Mind, of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘We Are Getting to the End’ (c.1925–8): ‘We are getting to the end of visioning/The impossible within this universe,/Such that better whiles may follow worse,/And that our race may mend by reasoning’ (quoted in Kolnai, 1995, p. 68). Kolnai shared Hardy’s anti-­utopianism, but not the overblown anti-­rationalism of the last two verses: ‘Why should better whiles not follow worse’, at least sometimes? And, in particular, ‘why decree that

Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy   237 [reason] cannot contribute to advancements of civilization, or bring about some mending of our race?’ (Kolnai, 1995, p. 68). 48 It is possibly not a coincidence that the manuscript of this book, unpublished in his lifetime, was begun in 1956, when the decade he spent on the faculty of Laval University had only recently come to an end. In his autobiography, Kolnai recollected his naive view, on arriving in Quebec in 1945, that the university’s well-­known traditionalism meant only that it maintained a respect for the past: ‘Of its aspects of counter-­ revolutionary aggressiveness and smug pretentiousness, I had no inkling yet’ (Kolnai, 1999a, p. 216). 49 ‘Perfectionism’ being a term that Kolnai associated equally with the leftist revolutionary and the extreme rightist (Kolnai, 1999b, p. 149). Aurel Kolnai, ‘Conservative and Revolutionary Ethos’ (Kolnai, 1999b, pp. 135–66). 50 See, for example Kolnai’s account of the Nazi’s overreaction to his discovery of certain inherent weaknesses of liberal democracy, which prompts him not merely to make adjustments but to overthrow the entire system in favour of National Socialism, telling men to ‘put darkness before light, to hug the chains of life as though they were Paradise, to construct glorious ideas out of the experience of dire necessity’ (Kolnai, 1938, pp. 121–2).

References Beach, John D. (1981). ‘The Ethical Theories of Aurel Kolnai’. The Thomist 45, 1: 132–43. Cunningham, Andrew S. (2005). ‘David Hume’s Account of Luxury’. Journal of the History of Economic Thought 27, 3: 231–50. Kolnai, Aurel (1938). The War Against the West, with preface by Wickham Steed. London: Victor Gollancz. Kolnai, Aurel (1949a). ‘The Meaning of the “Common Man” ’. The Thomist 12, 3: 272–335. Kolnai, Aurel (1949b). ‘Privilege and Liberty’. Laval Théologique et Philosophique 5, 1: 66–110. Kolnai, Aurel (1951). ‘The Cult of the Common Man and the Glory of the Humble’. Integrity 6, 2: 3–43. Kolnai, Aurel (1956). ‘The Thematic Primacy of Moral Evil’. Philosophical Quarterly 6, 22: 27–42. Kolnai, Aurel (1960). ‘The Moral Theme in Political Division’. Philosophy 35, 134: 234–54. Kolnai, Aurel (1964). ‘On the Concept of the Interesting’. British Journal of Aesthetics 4, 1: 22–39. Kolnai, Aurel (1965). Review of Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics. Philosophy 40, 151: 68–71. Kolnai, Aurel (1976). ‘Dignity’. Philosophy 51, 197: 251–71. Kolnai, Aurel (1978). Ethics, Value and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai, eds Francis Dunlop and Brian Klug. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Kolnai, Aurel (1995). The Utopian Mind and Other Papers, ed. Francis Dunlop. London: Athlone Press. Kolnai, Aurel (1999a). Political Memoirs, ed. Francesca Murphy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kolnai, Aurel (1999b). Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. Daniel J. Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

238   Andrew S. Cunningham Kolnai, Aurel (2004). On Disgust, eds Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer. Chicago: Open Court Press. Popper, Karl (1962). The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Popper, Karl (1976). Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. Glasgow: William Collins & Sons. Ryle, Gilbert (1949). The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Index

Adorno, Theodor W. 9–10, 60–4 Aquinas, Thomas 159 Arendt, Hannah 44, 53, 63, 234n25, 236n40 Aristotle 83, 116 Atran, Scott 165 Bäumler, Alfred 103, 163 Bahr, Hermann 61 Bartlett, Vernon 77, 81n17 Bauer, Otto 18, 129–30 Beach, John D. 233n1 Belloc, Hilaire 27, 32n29, 70, 81n21, 84, 130, 132 Benda, Julien 228 Benn, Hilary 165 Bergmann, Ernst 162, 223 Best, Werner 215 Blüher, Hans 58, 162, 170, 234n20 Borkenau, Franz 69, 71–3, 77, 81n18, 81n22 Bormann, Martin 52 Bry, Carl Christian 22, 30n16 Buch, Walter 52 Burke, Edmund 156, 159, 160–1, 187 Burleigh, Michael 52 Cassirer, Ernst 3 Chamberlain, Houston Steward 42, 163, 170, 213, 233n6 Chamberlain, Neville 158 Chappel, James 21, 42–4 Charlemagne 45 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 27–8, 32n30, 81n21, 84, 116–17, 132, 157, 211, 236n42 Churchill, Winston 70, 158 Cole, George Douglas Howard 78 Collingwood, Robin George 69, 72

Connelly, John 37–8 Constantine I 41 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard 61 Cromwell, Oliver 165 Cruz, Ted 41 Darré, Richard Walther 102–3, 212 de Gaulle, Charles 158 Dell, Robert Edward 77, 81n17, 95 Descartes, René 124 Dinter, Artur 46–7, 53n4, 57 Dollfuß [Dollfuss], Engelbert 17, 28, 43, 128, 130 Dostoevsky [Dostoievsky], Fjodor Michailowitsch 127, 225 Dubnow, Simon 61 Duhamel, George 24 Dunlop, Francis 80n4, 98n3, 13, 99n25, 199, 208n4 Durant, Will 93 Ebert, Friedrich 25, 80n10 Ehrenburg, Ilya 23–4 Fey, Emil 128 Fletcher, Joseph 122 Forsthoff, Ernst 20 Freisler, Roland 104 Freud, Sigmund 25, 60–2, 64, 124–5, 159–60, 236n43 Friedländer, Elfriede 26 Friedrich, Carl Joachim 9, 44, 90–1 Frederick the Great 41 Gard, Roger Martin du 24 George, Stefan 10, 39, 71, 119, 234n20 Gide, André 23–5, 31n21 Glassen, Peter 235n27

240   Index Goebbels, Joseph 36, 47–8, 102, 119, 163, 170 Göring, Hermann 47–8, 54n6, 108 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 58, 63 Gogarten, Friedrich 41, 170, 212–13 Gogol, Nikolai 225 Gollancz, Victor 1, 22, 28, 69–70, 76, 78–9, 80n4, 115, 118–19, 157 Goncharov, Ivan 225 Graetz, Heinrich 61 Grant, Irene 70, 79n3, 80n4, 118 Guenther, Hans F.K. 57 Gunther, John 88 Gurian, Waldemar 21, 30n13, 31n26, 44 Haffner, Sebastian 69, 77 Haiser, Franz 224 Halbe, Georg 233n7 Haldane, John 187n4 Halifax, Edward Wood 1. Earl of 158 Hammond, Philip 165 Hammurabi I. 123 Hannington, Wal 78 Hardy, Thomas 236n47 Hayek, Friedrich von 79 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 20, 119, 223 Heidegger, Martin 81n19, 97, 119, 144, 212–13, 235n32, 235n33 Heiden, Konrad 76 Heindel, R.J. 9 Hielscher, Friedrich 163 Hilberg, Raul 109 Hildebrand, Dietrich von 28, 44, 127 Hilferding, Rudolf 107 Himmler, Heinrich 44–5, 47, 162 Hindenburg, Paul von 128 Hitler, Adolf 7, 24, 28, 35–6, 40–2, 44–53, 53n3, 56–7, 59, 70, 74, 76–7, 88–9, 91–4, 96, 98n11, 102, 104–5, 109, 117–19, 128, 141–2, 147–8, 157–8, 162–3, 184, 221, 228, 233n5 Hobbes, Thomas 107–8 Hollande, François 165 Hommes, Jacob 214, 234n12 Honneth, Axel 30n2, 156 Hoover, Calvin B. 20, 30n7 Hoover, Herbert 94 Horkheimer, Max 9–10, 60–4 Horthy, Miklós 126 Huber, Ernst Rudolf 20 Hume, David 159, 221 Husserl, Edmund 28, 116, 123 Hutcheson, Francis 221

Jászi, Oszkár [Oscar] 9, 30n11, 98n14, 116, 120, 132 Jaspers, Karl 119 Jünger, Ernst 10, 56, 102 Jung, Carl Gustav 160 Kant, Immanuel 103, 116, 173, 212, 233n2, 234n20 Kallen, Horace M. 87, 92 Kaltenborn, Hans V. 89 Klages, Ludwig 64, 71, 159, 224 Koch, Erich 50 Kohn, Hans 44, 90 Kolnai, Elisabeth 208n4 Kolzow, Michail 24 Koestler, Arthur 121 Kulka, Otto Dov 76 Krieck, Ernst 119 Kun, Béla 25, 116 Landsberg, Paul Ludwig 62 Larenz, Karl 162 Laski, Harold Joseph 70, 79n2 Lenin, Wladimir Iljitsch 21, 25 Leo XIII. 127 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 20 Löwenthal, Leo 61 Lorimer, Emily Overend 69, 76, 80n12 Ludendorff, Erich 46 Lukács, Georg 3 Luther, Martin 36, 39, 41–2, 46, 52–3, 71, 77, 118–19, 162 Manent, Pierre 228, 236n45 Mann, Thomas 124–5 Marcuse, Herbert 44, 64 Maritain, Jacques 44, 84–5 Marx, Karl 60 Masaryk, Tomáš G. 18 Massing, Paul 61 Mauriac, François 24 Mencken, Henry Louis 215, 234n14 Mészáros, István 121 Mifflin, Houghton 88 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur [MoellerBruck] 102, 215, 232, 234n13 Moore, George Edward 172 Mowrer, Edgar A. 87–8, 99n16 Müller, Adam 126 Murphy, Francesca 97, 99n27 Mussolini, Benito 42, 157, 161 Nazareth, Jesus von 80 Negrín, Juan 24

Index   241 Neumann, Franz 9, 11, 102, 105–10 Newman, John Henry 122 Newton, Isaac 124 Niebuhr, Reinhold 99n21, 228 Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 39, 58, 71, 102, 119, 159, 234n14 Noske, Gustav 25 Oakeshott, Michael 12, 227, 229–30, 236n46 Obama, Barack 165 Oesterreicher, John 38 Orel, Anton 59 Orwell, George 31n22, 70, 73 Otto, Rudolf 225 Palacios, Leopoldo 64 Parmenides 236n40 Paz, Octavio 25 Pius XI 37, 127–8, 130 Pius XII 37 Plato 20, 159 Plessner, Helmuth 3–4 Polanyi, Karl 21, 27, 118–20, 127, 130, 132 Popper, Karl R. 12, 21, 30n10, 227–8, 236n43 Rauschning, Hermann 70, 76 Reid, Thomas 159 Reventlow, Ernst Count 58 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 11, 85, 88, 90–6, 99n16, 17, 22, 26 Rose, W.J. 8 Rosenberg, Alfred 36, 38, 42, 44–5, 47–8, 58, 102, 119, 162–3, 170, 213–14, 232, 233n3 Roth, Joseph 63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 20, 131 Russel, Bertrand 179 Ryle, Gilbert 214 Sartre, Jean-Paul 97, 235n33 Scheidemann, Philipp 25 Scheler, Max 110n1, 116, 119, 159, 164, 199 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 223 Schemm, Hans 50–1, 54n6 Schmitt, Carl 1, 12, 20, 28, 104, 106, 110, 119, 139, 161, 169–72, 176–8, 183–5, 186n2, 188n10, 188n12 Schuschnigg, Kurt 17 Schwarzschild, Leopold 77 Scruton, Richard 53

Seipel, Ignaz 128 Sellon, Hugh 77, 80n14 Sender, Toni 84, 91 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper 3. Earl of 159 Shakespeare, William 80n10 Shirer, William L. 88, 99n16 Simmel, Georg 63 Socrates 116 Sombart, Werner 223 Spann, Othmar 28, 126–8, 170 Speer, Albert 45 Spencer, Herbert 233n10 Spengler, Oswald 71, 161, 163 Spinoza, Baruch de 235n40 Stalin, Josef 17, 28 Stapel, Wilhelm 35, 119, 161, 181, 188n11, 213, 215 Steed, Henry Wickham 18, 91 Stolper, Gustav 26 Strachey, John 70, 78, 79n2 Strasser, Gregor 47, 53n4 Sturzo, Luigi 21–2, 27 Szamuely, Tibor 121 Taft, Robert 94 Talmon, Jacob L. 20 Theweleit, Klaus 39 Thompson, Dorothy 88, 92 Thyssen, Fritz 70 Tolstoy, Alexei 25, 225 Trotsky, Leo 25 Vansittart, Robert Lord 90, 99n16 Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid 63 Voegelin, Eric 43, 119 Vogelsang, Karl von 126 Voigt, Frederic 22, 31n17, 31n19 Wagner, Richard 41 Wallace, Henry A. 93, 99n20 Warburg, Gustav 76 Weber, Max 105, 109 Weikart, Richard 44, 53n1 Widukind 45 Wiggins, David 133n2, 203, 233n10 Williams, Bernard 32n31, 203, 233n10 Wolf, Erik 104 Wolters, Rudolf 36 Wolzogen, Ernst von 39 Zehnpfennig, Barbara 104 Ziegler, Heinz Otto 20 Zimmermann, Rolf 11, 162