By Nathan Beacom
Monday, January 19, 2026
In the 1920s, the liberal consensus was shattering across
Europe. In the wake of the Great War, Bolshevism was on its murderous march
across the East and rightist ideologies like Italy’s Fascismo and
Germany’s National Socialism were duking it out with communists. A young
philosopher in his 20s had already experienced the whole gamut of extremism:
Aurel Kolnai was a Hungarian Jew, and by early adulthood he had lived through
the Bolshevik revolution and the violent dictatorship of Béla Kun. And he was
ultimately forced to flee Hungary to escape right-wing violence against Jews.
Kolnai arrived in Vienna in 1920, a time of intellectual
ferment. Already tutored by the depredations of political radicalism, he was
immediately disgusted by the emerging Nazism in Germany and Austria. His essays
against the Nazi regime were some of the very earliest published, and he
carried on a sustained critique for roughly the next 15 years, including after
his escape to North America. In the 1920s and ’30s, as a convert to
Catholicism, he published under the name Van Helsing, after the scholarly Catholic
vampire hunter from Dracula.
The 1920s were an era in which everything seemed up for
grabs. Critics left and right declared the liberal consensus dead. But Aurel
Kolnai stood in the center, not falling to the right or to the left of
extremism. As certain voices today sing tunes from the hymnals of a century
back, it is worth looking at this forgotten philosopher, who fought for human
dignity in the face of ideology. The fascists and communists of the 1920s were
not all crazed lunatics; many of them were simply conservatives or progressives
who took the wrong road, who, step-by-step, were desensitized to their own
radicalization. Kolnai shows us how we can retain our balance.
***
In the years leading up to the Second World War, a
thrilling new air was blowing across central Europe. The vanquished powers of
World War I had spent more than a decade in defeat and shame. An incompetent
liberal regime ruled postwar Germany, and Germans were ready for something new.
Thus came a movement born from the minds of philosophers and poets: National
Socialism.
The coalition that began to gather around this label was
a diverse one. It contained neo-pagans, followers of the philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche, quasi-monarchists, and conservative Christians. They were united,
above all, by hatred of the liberal world order.
In 1938, Kolnai wrote the first real critical study of
Nazi ideology: The War Against the West, published in English through a
London press. The book investigated the Nazi ideas of the common good,
the state, and the human person, and Kolnai began with Nazi philosophers’
critique of liberal individualism. Not unlike postliberals
today,
“The philosophers and prophets of Nazism are more assiduous in heaping their
obloquies on ‘individualism’ than on any other feature of the West,” Kolnai
wrote. He quoted the Catholic Nazi theologian Michael Schmaus as an example of
this view: “In Liberal society, men did not stand by one another as an
existential community: they were so many individuals, equal, of equal rights,
and self-subsistent who—rather like stones in a heap, not like the members of a
body—formed unions by free decision and contract.”
The Nazi motto, as printed at the head of the original
party platform, was “common good before individual good,” and this was to be
heard on the lips of Hitler’s brownshirts across Germany. The liberal idea of
“rights” was, for them, a harmful fiction that supposed the individual subject
had personal claims that trumped those of the nation as a whole. Liberalism, by
placing a priority on individual liberty, had created a society of conniving,
greedy businessmen. It served “The odious ‘money-lenders’ and ‘international
men of finance.’” (One can hear the subtle antisemitism here, but the bogeyman
is sufficiently vague, Kolnai points out, to serve as a universal culprit.) All
of this trouble grew from the stem of the liberal philosophy that “all men are
created free and equal”—the very sentiment at the heart of the American form of
government.
The rejection of liberal democratic norms and
institutions felt transgressive and exciting. The idea of struggle, combat, and
of dedicating oneself to a great national cause proved attractive to new
fascists. “Fascism,” wrote Kolnai, “has a keen consciousness of opening out a
‘new era,’ and of closing the ‘outworn epoch of liberalism’ … it glories in the
paradoxical attitude of shaking off liberty as though it were shaking off
oppressive fetters. A new youth is breaking the bonds of dried-up formulas and
hoary ideas.” For Kolnai, however, what attracted the young to fascism was not
so much any real practical concern, nor any really coherent philosophy. It was,
rather, a kind of boredom with the peace and orderliness of liberal times.
Distinctly lacking in liberal societies is the kind of enmity, battle,
conflict, and esprit de corps that a conquering master-nation can provide.
Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist, argued that all political life was based on this kind of struggle. A
nation only exists, he thought, to the extent that it can identify a clear and
distinct enemy and unify itself against it. Explaining Schmitt, Kolnai wrote,
“The first and original factor of public life is to be found, not in the need
for an authoritative regulation of the questions and conflicts arising from the
contact and interpenetration of human lives in society, but simply in the
phenomenon of collective systems of power hostile to one another.” A great
leader will identify such an enemy, and, by declaring a state of emergency,
claim for himself the power to destroy it. This was the framework Schmitt
concocted to legally justify Hitler’s rise to power.
This idea is linked by Kolnai to ethnic hatred. He quotes
the academic Gerhard Gunther, who he identifies as a follower of Schmitt: “The
foreigner—the stranger—is not a fellow-man for the Horde, the Tribe, he is a
cause for superstitious shudder and abhorrence…. It is this mystical feeling of
the exclusive right of one’s own tribe to live, combined with the abhorrence of
the stranger—with whom neither reconciliation nor fusion is permissible—which
lies at the root of the powerful feeling that we rediscover to-day in the shape
of national honour.”
Perhaps, at this point, you can see how the pieces are
falling together. For fascists, there are no inalienable human rights that
belong by nature to all persons. For fascists, equal moral consideration is not
given to both those who belong to the national community and those who do not.
For fascists, the interests of the individual always come after the interests
of the nation. Meaning and purpose are to be found in the loss of the
individual in a national struggle against a common enemy.
The élan, in short, of fascism comes from this idea of
national greatness, of noble struggle, of togetherness in a great whole, and of
a rejection of the boring, bland world of liberalism. But we do know
where all that led. The clear and distinct national enemy was the liberal West,
yes, but domestically it was above all the Jew. Why the Jew? Because it was he
who had preached the ideas of universal liberalism. It was he who promoted
these ideas in order to enrich himself through capitalist exploitation. And
above all, he was an outsider and he did not belong. These, at least, were the
types of tropes expressed in the influential propaganda The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, which purported to outline the details of a worldwide
liberal, capitalist, and Jewish conspiracy.
In the 1920s and early 30s, few postliberals saw the end
to which all of this would lead. Michael Schmaus, the Nazi theologian,
eventually left the party as things worsened. Many of the early Nazis never
expected anything like the Holocaust. But in their eagerness to reject the
liberal world order, they collaborated with, promoted, and supported a regime
that, even in its earliest days, was vicious, violent, and racist.
One might justly wonder how a Christian could subscribe
to the Nazi creed. After all, Christianity is a system of universal love and
mercy, and the core thinkers of Nazism and fascism more generally were not
religious. But Schmaus was not at all alone. Theologians like Jakob Hommes,
Karl Adam, and the influential Lutheran Friedrich Gogarten were excited by the
fascist rejection of liberalism and the return of the “strong
gods” of community and nation against globalism. Franz von Papen, the
conservative Catholic chancellor, played a crucial role in bringing Hitler to
power. And German Evangelicals created the German Christian Movement, a new
denomination that fully embraced Nazi ideology.
In the 1920s, “fascist” was not yet a “bad word.” Fascism
was a live option; just the name of another political movement. If we look back
and merely see monsters, we miss the point that many fascists—and
communists—were simply ordinary people who were mistaken. They did not think of
themselves as monsters; they thought of themselves as people who had seen
through the lies of liberalism. They could not see the whole picture. This
includes those many Christians who swallowed the Nazi line.
Aurel Kolnai was remarkable because in 1938, and even
earlier, he did see what was happening and what was to come. Kolnai, at a very
young age, experienced a nation shaped by violent dictatorship. As an ethnic
Jew, he had known persecution for his race. As a Catholic, he took seriously
the Scriptural teaching that God came into the world for the sake of all men,
including the weak and the marginalized. This gave him clarity in a time that
was very morally muddy—and without the knowledge we now have, that both of
these ideologies, communism and fascism, end again and again in murder,
injustice, and pain.
***
Aurel Kolnai was not naive about the problems of the
liberal West, and he worried about the reduction of liberalism to mere
libertinism. Nonetheless, he argued that it is precisely within the context of
freedom and mutual reasoning that we must approach whatever problems we face.
For Kolnai, the essential liberal idea is this: that government must take place
by means of the free exchange of reasons between equals. Such a commitment is
skeptical of utopia and skeptical of any man or party who professes to bring it
about. It shuns overweening state power, because it knows the risk of tyranny,
and, above all, it commits to the inviolability of every human person. For
Kolnai, these are deeply traditional, even Christian ideas.
Liberalism, for him, referred not to some pie-in-the-sky
secular humanism. In the 1920s, among the great liberal powers were America and England. These were not ideological
utopias. They were, in reality, mixed regimes that were home to a constant
dialectical back-and-forth between interests, ideals, and goals. In their
legislatures, socialists, conservatives, and libertarians could argue and come
to some kind of workable compromise. Sometimes conservatives won, sometimes
progressives.
Ironically, liberal governments—despite the charge that
liberalism leads to toxic individualism—did often prioritize the common good
over individual good. In the 1920s, liberal governments like America’s and
England’s did this all the time. The courts, the common law tradition, economic
regulations, and much else was undertaken not for an individual’s interest, but
to promote the common goods of justice and peace. Of course the state
prioritizes the common good. The difference between Kolnai and the Nazis was
that, for the former, the common good was not the good of some organic whole
called “the nation” but indeed the shared good of a multitude of unique individuals,
none of whom were disposable.
Kolnai’s was the liberalism of Edmund Burke and Alexis de
Tocqueville, one which embraced freedom in the context of tradition. Like de
Tocqueville, Kolnai warned against democracy as an all-encompassing ideology,
as “a certain anarchical spirit of mass democracy which proclaims the sanctity
of the People’s will irrespective of any objective consideration as to moral or
spiritual standards.”
Put another way, Kolnai did believe in the essential
importance of tradition, religion, and community. But he also believed that the
liberal form of government is part of our tradition. Liberalism works
best, as in the vision of de Tocqueville, when supported by a robust life of
faith and with a rejection of moral relativism.
This can be confusing. Conservatives, because they value
loyalty, family, patriotism, tradition, and the common good, can be swindled
and misled by the language of fascism. Liberals, because they are afraid of
fascism, might be swindled into rejecting the normal, healthy, and essential
place of tradition, loyalty, and religious life. But, just as communism takes
the notion of equality to a murderous and anti-human extreme, so fascism takes
the idea of authority, nation, and order to a violent and destructive end.
Kolnai knew how to keep the balance.
***
For Kolnai, fascism and communism alike embodied a deep
immaturity. Ideologues of both stripes failed to understand the complexity of
human life. Each of them became obsessed with certain values at the expense of
others. They divided humanity into friends and enemies. They believed that if
only they were in charge, everything would be perfect.
By contrast, Kolnai described his own politics as focused
on “civilization.” Differing from the Nazi conception of civilization as the
manifestation of a tribal “life force,” Kolnai’s conception of the word was
warmer, more wide-ranging.
This more pregnant and ambitious
idea of civilization covers a vast field of facts and tendencies, of axioms and
habits such as the respect for personal freedom and security, the belief in
argument and discussion, the humanitarian standards of conduct, the
appreciation of a well-divided and well-balanced system of the amenities of
life, the reverence for objective truth and impartial judgment, the sense of
proportion which comes under the general heading “sanity,” or the consciousness
of human limitations and frailties (as measured by the generally valid standard
of human dignity), which is sometimes called a sense of humour.
Civilization involves, then, a respect for reasoned
discourse. If barbarism settles disputes by means of arms, civilization solves
them through discussion, debate, and courts of law. If barbarism is about the
assertion of power and will against enemies, civilization holds the notions of
impartiality and objectivity sacred, though we may never perfectly achieve
them. Modern barbarism obsesses over a single idea, like equality, strength, or
the nation. But a civilized sense of proportion recognizes that equality must
exist alongside freedom, justice alongside mercy, strength alongside care for
the weak, liberty alongside order.
If one wishes not to be a fascist or, indeed, a
communist, Kolnai’s markers of civilization are helpful guideposts. If we are
unhappy with the state of society, we must eschew extreme, utopian visions in
favor of the messy and imperfect work of human community. If we value equality,
we must work to bring it about with respect to other human values and in a
spirit of collaboration. If we value faith and tradition, we must build them
up, likewise, through responsible, human means, and not through coercion or force.
An ideologue is someone who sees the world through one, all-encompassing idea.
A civilized man sees the world according to the totality of factors at play.
Aurel Kolnai stands as a counterexample to the failures
of the 20th century. He held on to a measured, sane, and reasonable vision of
civilization. We would do well to read his work today. If we hold on to the
principle Kolnai called “the solidarity of man as such,” we shall be safe from
making the mistakes of our fathers, left and right.
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