If you click here you will get to a Scotsman obituary for the Hungarian historian John Lukacs. Perhaps his most famous work was his tribute to Winston Churchill – “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat”. I always remember him for being one of the first to call out David Irving.
He is perhaps most interesting to us, because he prided himself on his intellectual independence, as the extract below reflects. Whether you agree with his views or not, this rejection of the consensus was clearly a healthy thing for a historian.
“He considered himself a “reactionary,” a mourner for the “civilisation and culture of the past 500 years, European and Western.” He saw decline in the worship of technological progress, the elevation of science to religion, and the rise of materialism. Drawing openly upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings about a “tyranny of the majority”, Lukacs was especially wary of populism and was quoted by other historians as Donald Trump rose to the presidency. Lukacs feared that the public was too easily manipulated into committing terrible crimes.
“The kind of populist nationalism that Hitler incarnated has been and continues to be the most deadly of modern plagues,” he once wrote. He belonged to few academic or political organizations and was unafraid to challenge his peers, whether Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, Hannah Arendt or British historian David Irving. In The Hitler of History, published in 1997, Lukacs alleged that Irving was sympathetic to the Nazis, leading to threats of legal action from Irving and the removal of passages from the book in England. In recent years, Irving has been widely condemned because of his ties to Holocaust deniers.”
Have a read and see what you think.
Mr Kydd.
