John Lukacs

John Adalbert Lukacs (Hungarian: Lukács János Albert; 31 January 1924 – 6 May 2019) was a Hungarian-born American historian and author of more than thirty books.

Lukacs described himself as a reactionary.

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, were divorced before World War II.

Lukacs attended a classical gymnasium, had an English language tutor, and spent two summers at a private school in England.

He studied history at the University of Budapest.

He points out 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".

Lukacs claimed that the Soviet Union was a feeble power on the verge of collapse and contended that the Cold War was an unnecessary waste of American treasure and life.

During the Second World War, when German troops occupied Hungary 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.

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.

In 1946, he received his doctorate from the University of Budapest.

On 22 July 1946, as it was becoming clear that Hungary would become a Communist state, he 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 commented that Irving had uncritically used personal remembrances by those who knew Hitler to present him in the most favorable light possible.

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.

He was a professor of history at Chestnut Hill College 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 and the University of Budapest and Hanover College.

He was a president of the American Catholic Historical Association and member of both the Royal Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society.

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.

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.

Likewise, Lukacs was critical of American intervention abroad and also condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq.