The Duelist
Lukacs, John
BOOKS IN REVIEW The Duelist JOHN LUKACS IS ONE of our prize men of letters. Now in his ninth decade, Lukacs has for about 15 years enjoyed popular success for his histories of "The Duel"...
...Determinate, yes...
...Still, Lukacs, with Tocqueville, "can not not believe...
...Lukacs reports that many of Toc queville's more discordant predic tions have come true: above all, that public opinion is far less variegated and independent than we presume...
...According to Lukacs, quantitative history, psycho-history, Marxist history, positivist history searching for exact causes and "factors" behind events, neo-Whiggish history-all fail to grasp the great lesson of early 20th-century science: namely, that a subject under study irretrievably changes in the process of observation...
...his article and review bibliography runs 47 pages...
...He feels he has found two such places: Budapest at 1900 and Philadelphia before 1950, both, according to Lukacs, stunning examples of civilizational success...
...Lukacs writes of the lands east of his native Hungary: "[the] high Middle Ages, cathedrals, Cistercians, a whiff of the Renaissance, its Reformation, its CounterReformation, its Baroque, its Enlightenment-thehistorical ages that made Europe, [these] entire historical ages...
...In scathing portraits of presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan throughout Remembered Past and in the two books from Yale, Lukacs rues the "national security state" that constructed highways at the expense of civilized railroads and engorged governmental bureaucracy and an already huge standing military...
...If democracy is a millennial movement of all peoples of the world, there must be a good reason for it-though Lukacs cannot specify what this reason is...
...Tell that to the Marines...
...BOOKS I N R E V I E W The Duelist JOHN LUKACS IS ONE of our prize men of letters...
...Lukacs's histories also amply reveal their historian...
...It was attractive only to disaffected intellectuals...
...But by contrast, the non-Slavic Germans were-and are-for Lukacs, very much capable of directing history: "And what if Hitler had won...
...It cannot be said that historians at large have taken up Lukacs's challenge...
...It is essential for Lukacs that historians absorb for themselves science's "revolutionary theorem about the inevitability of human preconceptions...
...Communism had no traction among the masses of any country...
...In fact, the sheer amount of good writing and number of profound insights in this collection-which is at once a capital intellectual event and an indictment of the intellectual priorities of the "American Century"-poses an effective question: why does it have to exist...
...That Lukacs, as historiographer, has thought remarkably deeply about the practice of writing history, modern history in particular, and that he stands in the first ranks of the philosophers of history is made abundantly clear in this volume...
...did not exist in Russia or in Rumania, Moldavia, Oltenia, Wallachia, Bessarabia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Thrace, Greece, the Ukraine...
...So close the book on the 20th cen tury...
...He is particularly interested in those cities that revealed the possibility of living the bourgeois life in an intellectually, socially, and morally superlative fashion...
...Among other projects, he is working on a book about the German philosopher of history Karl Lowith...
...How many today, Lukacs wonders, actually desire a truly civilized national life...
...Such writings would represent civiliza tional achievements of a high order...
...In 1993, he wrote of something being "as rare today as finding a Jane Austen addict in a singles bar...
...Lukacs can get things wrong, however...
...And fruitful perspective from Simone Weil, the religious humanist who "rejected Marx and Comte and Darwin and Freud and Einstein" and is the subject of the most beautiful essay in this volume...
...Lukacs strives to read contemporary America as Tocqueville would have...
...The same may be said of Lukacs himself, as he surveys history, historians, the West, and its destiny in these three important books...
...America could just have easily waited for Soviet communism to expire, as indeed it did...
...Lukacs gives absolutely no credit to Communism or its bearers, the Russians...
...Lukacs does not self-promote, though, because he has learned perspectivism from Heisenberg...
...For all the hamhanded efforts by historians to sneak their own biases into their work, it is refreshing-it is exhilarating-to discern the fascinating, cultured, and humorous (did I say opinionated...
...This impressive work, two central chapters ofwhich are thankfully reproduced in this volume, is perhaps the greatest in the philosophy of history written in the English language since 1945...
...Moreover, for Lukacs, the Russians were, and are, incapable of directing the course of world events...
...Historical Consciousness calls for a new "historianship" (a favorite coinage) of an explicitly "postmodern" type, but of course Lukacs had to drop that April 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 BOOKS I N R E V I E W J°gin Luk.e;s adjective when it became irredeemably corrupt in the 1970s, What Lukacs has in mind is a history written by persons who have taken great care to be cultivated and who have learned the craft of reading historical sources (a repeated aphorism in Remembered Past is from Burckhardt: Bisogna saper leggere: "You must know how to read...
...Hence each of Lukacs's worksparticularly those of his later years-has an elegiac tone...
...Lukacs always ends on a high note...
...He would have been unbeatable...
...Lukacs wrote of his own Hungarian language that it has "the constant presence of a minor key within the basic key of a major...
...He also has published books with the major NewYork houses...
...We have not, sufficient evidence being that Lukacs's theoretical magnum opus, Historical Consciousness (1968), is virtually unknown...
...For its part, Historical Consciousness is not kind to academic historians...
...despotism...
...In fact, one wishes Remembered Past, at about 900 pages, were still longer so it could incorporate more of A Thread of Years, perhaps Lukacs's masterwork...
...For "even in science," as Heisenberg says in The Physicist's Conception of Nature, "the object of research is no longer nature itself, but man's investigation of nature...
...And from his mordant wit...
...It was owing to two entirely unrelated things that Hitler failed to win the war when he had the chance...
...Rather, his tories would illuminate persons and events for a reader, who thus would apprehend them, begin to under stand them, and await the richer explanations of other histories...
...And it is hard not to follow his lead...
...Had Hitler captured Moscow and defeated Stalin in 1941," Lukacs writes, "communism and Communists would have vanished from Europe...
...Here, again, man confronts himself alone...
...intellectual persona that lies behind every one of Lukacs's works...
...Lukacs argues that the first reason was Churchill's resolution to fight, especially through the imponderablydifficult months of The Blitz...
...His works are models of narrative illuminating the personal decisions from which flow the events of history: Lukacs certainly knows how to read...
...And a society that cares truly and deeply about history has a "determi nation to live...
...The book argues that essentially all present trends in the writing of history are woefully time bound, indeed still toeing the line of 19th-century progressivism...
...Despite the passing of the Cold War, Lukacs is not optimistic about the United States...
...And he has written occasional pieces in the hundreds...
...Lukacs, in full Historical-Consciousness mode, is not certain that the grand diplomatic events of the century are the things worth remembering about the last one hundred years...
...Lukacs then draws a startling conclusion-the Cold War was wholly unnecessary...
...In another complete line of historical inquiry amply represented in Remembered Past, Lukacs has dedicated himself to describing distinctive places of 20th-century life...
...in history from Harvard and teaches at Slippery Rock University...
...but never final, and ever provisional...
...Democracy and Populism-which is an unremitting critique of America's political culturecloses with a poignant reflection on the impressiveness of the civil rights movement...
...Histories-in the plural-con structed along these lines would not yield definitive answers to what happened in the past, much less information about "trends" that may apply in the future...
...Yet historians and other social "scientists" caught up in the cult of expertise at mid-century felt content to hold that "progress" is possible when inquiring into human affairs...
...Lukacs writes: We cannot avoid the condition of our participation...
...Lukacs feels that the old discredited category of "national character" should he judiciously revived in the case of the Russians, if not the Slavs generally, to show that they are at best civilizational followers, at worst "unkempt" oafs, as Lukacs, in a moment of unfortunate spite, describes Dostoevsky...
...But Lukacs himself has left us a full and rounded body of work (still growing) that serves to indicate the profit that accrues to one's taking Historical Consciousness seriously...
...Because America too was gripped by a 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 2005 BOOKS I N R E V I E W variety of populism not entirely different from that which propelled Hitler to power...
...Have we not already Brian Domitrovic holds a Ph.D...
...Einstein, Godel, Heisenberg, and every big name of 20th-century science agreed that conclusions must never be definitive...
...With Hitler gone, Lukacs argues, America's defeat of inherently feeble, now-exhausted Russia should not have been essentially more difficult than "lifting a feather" (to borrow Lenin's phrase about his own seizure of power in Russia...
...Academic historians have criminally overlooked Historical Consciousness: the book has almost never been cited...
...In a brilliant chapter, "History and Physics," Lukacs urges history to catch up to the times...
...Yet on or about 1994, singles bars groaned with Austen nuts, and Emma became the most popular girl's name in the land...
...Lukacs finds Francis Fukuyama stating that the family is the only form of association Americans know...
...And in many works-such as the remarkable Hitler of History (1997)-Lukacs has shown that Hitler, contrary to common belief, drew upon a deep vein of populism that was itself the most ubiquitous and powerful "isnl" in Europe and America and nearly conquered the former as a result...
...Yale University Press, which has just published two Lukacs titles, seems keen to publish him at every turn...
...In the 1980s, Lukacs even Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge: A Reader edited with an introduction by Mark G. Malvasi and Jeffrey 0. Nelson (ISI BOOKS, 935 PAGES, $30 HARDCOVER, $18 PAPERBACK) Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (YALE, 252 PAGES, $25) by John Lukacs A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (YALE, 468 PAGES, $19.95 PAPERBACK) by John Lukacs Reviewed by Brian Domitrovic appeared in the New Yorker...
...Lukacs views a populist-nationalist impulse in America that alternatively took the form of isolationism in the 1930s and anti-Communism in the 1950s as simply a less virulent strain of the demotic nationalism preached by Hitler...
...Lukacs crafts loving portraits of the places that have moved him and says that they are most significant-because they are significant to him...
...obviated the need for a proper introduction to Lukacs, by long ago dedicating ourselves to reading him...
...That is the clear message of two books from Yale, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred and A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, a revised edition of Outgrowing Democracy (1984...
...Yet we are all our own persons, with our own historical consciousness, and Lukacs knows this...
...Lukacs speaks lyri cally about the prospective historical consciousness he saw in the offing, "this new child which, out of the ancient marriage of realism and idealism, may yet become Europe's greatest gift to mankind...
...Lukacs's most recognizable contributions have come in diplomatic history, specifically the etiology of World War II...
...Now in his ninth decade, Lukacs has for about 15 years enjoyed popular success for his histories of "The Duel" (his term) between Churchill and Hitler...
...But despite his lauded achievements, Lukacs is also under-appreciated...
...There is much to learn from Lukacs and his sharp opinions, but one profits most from absorbing his humanism and his wisdom...
...I suspect that Lukacs's firm anti-anti-Communism-more on this later-as opposed to his indisputable literary gifts, moved that tired magazine to print him...
...Here is the origin of Lukacs's fervent and consistent anti-anti-Communism...
...Or to the Mafia...
...A Hitler victorious over the Continent and England-here is the origin of Lukacs's enduring gratitude toward Churchill-would have found willing admirers throughout the West and could not have been stopped...
...The second was bad luck for the Germans: they could just not encircle the Red Army before the terrible winter of 1941 set in...
...Elsewhere I have tried to draw attention to the personal and moral and historical implications of this recognition, that instead of the cold and falsely aseptic remoteness of observation we need the warmth and the penetration of personal interest: but this is no longer the solitary longing of a humanist, a poetic exhortation...
...Why then did the United States insist on prosecuting the Cold War...
...Someday critics will concede that A Thread of Years (1998), a sort of cultural gazetteer of the 20th century, wherein Lukacs portrays, among other places, his two favored cities, is one of the most trenchant and innovative books of our time...
...ANEW REPIJBIC L lolls Was April 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61...
...A new collection from ISI Books of Lukacs's decades of writing on history rectifies the problem...
...No, we have barely begun...
...that God has for several centuries been pushing million[s of] men toward [equality] just to make them wind up under...
Vol. 38 • April 2005 • No. 3
