John Adalbert Lukacs (;"John Lukacs 'Popular Tides and the Ship of State Hungarian: Lukács János Albert; January 31, 1924 – May 6, 2019) was a Hungarian-born American historian and author of more than thirty books. Lukacs described himself as a reactionary.
Life and career Lukacs was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Magdaléna Glück and Pál Lukács (born Löwinger), a physician. His parents, Jewish converts to Roman Catholicism,Lee Congdon. The Reactionary Loyalties of John Lukacs, The Imaginative Conservative, Summer 2014.John Wilson. John Lukacs's Valediction, The American Conservative, October 25, 2013. were divorced before World War II. Lukacs attended a classical , had an English language tutor, and spent two summers at a private school in England. He studied history at the University of Budapest.John Lukacs. Surrounded by Books. Chronicles: A magazine of American Culture, November 2, 2017. Archived
During the Second World War, when German troops occupied Hungary (Operation Margarethe) in 1944, Lukacs was forced to serve in a Hungarian labour battalion for Jews. By the end of 1944, he had deserted from the battalion and was hiding in a cellar until the end of the war, evading deportation to death camps and surviving the siege of Budapest. According to his son, Lukacs never saw his parents again. After the war, Lukacs worked as the Secretary of the Hungarian-American Society.James W. Tuttleton. The Faith of a Catholic Intellectual. Review of Confessions of an Original Sinner by John Lukacs, Modern Age: A Conservative Review, Spring 1993, Vol. 35, No. 3. ArchiveMark Imre Major. American Hungarian Relations 1918-194. Chapter YII. Danubian Press, 1974. Note: Formed in 1921 at Budapest, the Hungarian-American Society aimed at promoting good relations between the two nations. In 1946, he received his doctorate from the University of Budapest.Directory of American Scholars, 6th ed. (Bowker, 1974), Vol. I, p. 389.
On 22 July 1946, as it was becoming clear that Hungary would become a Communist state, Lukacs fled to the United States. He found employment as a part-time assistant lecturer at Columbia University in New York City. He then relocated to Philadelphia, where in 1947 he began work as a history professor at Chestnut Hill College, a women's college at the time. Lukacs was a professor of history there until 1994 and chaired the history department from 1947 to 1974. He served as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Princeton University, La Salle University, Regent College in British Columbia, the University of Budapest, and Hanover College. He was a president of the American Catholic Historical Association and a member of both the Royal Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society.
Views
Being an ardent anti-communist, Lukacs nevertheless wrote in the early 1950s several articles in Commonweal criticizing the approach taken by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he described as a vulgar demagogue. Lukacs saw populism as the primary threat to modern civilization. By his own description, he considered himself a reactionary. He identified populism as the essence of both Nazism and communism, denying the existence of generic fascism and asserted that the differences between the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were greater than their similarities.Lukacs, John The Hitler of History New York: Vintage Books, 1997, 1998 page 118
A major theme in Lukacs's writing is his agreement with the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville that aristocratic elites have been replaced by democratic elites, which obtain power via an appeal to the masses. In his 2002 book, At the End of an Age, Lukacs argued that the modern/bourgeois age, which began around the time of the Renaissance, is coming to an end.Lukacs, John At the End of An Age Yale University Press, 2003 page 3 The rise of populism and the decline of elitism is the theme of his experimental work, A Thread of Years (1998), a series of vignettes set in each year of the 20th century from 1900 to 1998, tracing the abandonment of gentlemanly conduct and the rise of vulgarity in American culture. Lukacs defends traditional Western civilization against what he sees as the leveling and debasing effects of mass culture.
An Anglophile, Lukacs gives the highest historical importance to Winston Churchill. He considered Churchill to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century, the savior not only of Great Britain but also of Western civilization itself. A recurring theme in his writing is the duel between Churchill and Adolf Hitler for mastery of the world. Their moral struggle, which Lukacs sees as a conflict between the archetypical reactionary and the archetypical revolutionary, is the major theme of The Last European War (1976), The Duel (1991), Five Days in London (1999) and 2008's Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, a book which features Churchill's first major speech as Prime Minister. Lukacs argues that Great Britain and by extension the British Empire could not defeat Germany by itself, and that winning required the entry of the United States and the Soviet Union. He observes that by inspiring the British people to resist German air attacks and to "never surrender" during the Battle of Britain in 1940, Churchill laid the groundwork for the subsequent victory of the Allies.
Lukacs had strong isolationist beliefs and unusually for an anti-communist émigré also had "surprisingly critical views of the Cold War from a unique conservative perspective",Stromberg, Joseph (February 7, 2005), "[https://original.antiwar.com/joseph-stromberg/2005/02/07/an-anti-imperialists-reading-list-part-two-2/ An Anti-Imperialist's Reading List: Part Two]". Antiwar.com. Retrieved January 6, 2025. being described as one of "anti-anticommunists among conservatives and their fellow travelers". Lukacs argued that the Soviet Union was a feeble power on the verge of collapse and thus contended that the Cold War was an unnecessary waste of American treasure and life. Likewise, Lukacs was critical of Foreign interventions by the United States,Gerald J. Russello. What You Need to Know About John Lukacs, Front Porch Republic, October 14, 2013. and also condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In his book George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946 (1997), a collection of letters exchanged between Lukacs and his close friend George F. Kennan during 1994–1995, Lukacs and Kennan criticized the claim of the New Left that the Cold War was caused by the United States; however, Lukacs argued that while Joseph Stalin was largely responsible for the beginning of the Cold War, the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower missed a chance for ending the Cold War in 1953 after Stalin's death, which kept it on for many more decades.
The Hitler of History From around 1977 onwards, Lukacs became one of the leading critics of the British author David Irving, whom Lukacs accused of engaging in unscholarly practices and having neo-Nazi sympathies. In a review of Irving's Hitler's War in 1977, Lukacs commented that as a "right-wing revisionist" who had admired some of Irving's early works, he initially had high hopes for Hitler's War, but he found the book to be "appalling".Lukacs, John "Caveat Lector" pages 946-950 from National Review, Volume XXIX, Issue # 32, August 19, 1977, pages 946-947 Lukacs commented that Irving had uncritically used personal remembrances by those who knew Adolf Hitler to present him in the most favorable light possible.Lukacs, John "Caveat Lector" pages 946-950 from National Review, Volume XXIX, Issue # 32, August 19, 1977, page 946 In his review, Lukacs argued that although World War II ended with Eastern Europe being left under Soviet domination, a victory that left only half of Europe to Stalin was much better than a defeat that left all of Europe to Hitler.Lukacs, John "Caveat Lector" pages 946-950 from National Review, Volume XXIX, Issue # 32, August 19, 1977, pages 949-950
Lukacs's book The Hitler of History (1997), a prosopography of the historians who have written biographies of Hitler, is in part a critique of Irving's work. Lukacs considered Irving to be sympathetic to the Nazis. In turn, Irving has engaged in what many consider to be antisemitic and racist attacks against Lukacs. Because Lukacs' mother was Jewish, Irving disparagingly refers to him as "a Jewish historian". In letters of 25 October and 28 October 1997, Irving threatened to sue Lukacs for libel if he published his book (The Hitler of History) without removing certain passages which were highly critical of Irving's work.Evans, Richard J (2001). Lying About Hitler. p. 27. The American edition of The Hitler of History was published in 1997 with the passages included, but because of Irving's legal threats no British edition of The Hitler of History was published until 2001. As a result of Irving's threat of legal action under British libel laws, when the British edition was finally published the passages containing the criticism of Irving's historical methods were expunged by the publisher.
In The Hitler of History, inspired by the example of Pieter Geyl's book, Napoleon For and Against, Lukacs examines the state of Hitler scholarship and offers his own observations about Hitler. In Lukacs's view, Hitler was a racist, nationalist, revolutionary, and populist.Lukacs, John The Hitler of History, New York: Vintage Books, 1997, 1998 pages 218-219 Lukacs criticizes Marxist and liberal historians who argue that the German working class were strongly anti-Nazi, and instead he argues that the exact opposite was the case. Each chapter of The Hitler of History is devoted to a particular topic, such as whether Hitler was a reactionary or revolutionary; a nationalist or a racist; and he examines the roots of Hitler's ideology. Lukacs denies that Hitler developed a belief in racial purity during his time in Vienna (1907–1913) under the Habsburg monarchy. Instead, Lukacs dates Hitler's turn to antisemitism to 1919 in post-World War I Munich, in particular to the events surrounding the Bavarian Soviet Republic and its defeat by the right-wing . Much influenced by Rainer Zitelmann's work, Lukacs describes Hitler as a self-conscious, modernizing revolutionary. Citing the critique of national socialism developed by German conservative historians such as Hans Rothfels and Gerhard Ritter, Lukacs describes the Nazi movement as the culmination of the dark forces which lurk within modern civilization.