John Lukacs, a
maverick historian, prolific author and self-professed reactionary whose views
on politics, populism and pop culture departed from those of doctrinaire
liberals and conservatives alike, died on Monday at his home in Phoenixville,
Pa. He was 95.
The cause was heart
failure, his daughter, Annemarie L. Cochrane, said.
Mr. Lukacs
(pronounced LOO-kuss) was a chronicler of modern Europe, a commentator on
semantics and current events, and a romantic who lamented the vanished charm of
the bourgeoisie. He lionized Winston Churchill (about whom he wrote an
acclaimed study), and, while he unsurprisingly loathed Stalin and Hitler, he
said, after tempering his characterization with the appropriate caveats, that
the Führer “may have been the most popular revolutionary leader in the history
of the modern world.”
A Hungarian refugee
from Nazism and Soviet Communism, Mr. Lukacs ultimately found refuge at Chestnut
Hill College, a small Roman Catholic institution, originally just
for women, in a bucolic corner of Philadelphia. He taught there for 47 years.
John Wilson, a professor emeritus at Hillsdale College in
Michigan, wrote in The
American Conservative in 2013 that through 35 books and
countless articles, essays and reviews, Mr. Lukacs “influenced and inspired
(and sometimes infuriated) three generations of accomplished historians despite
never having taught at prestigious universities, where he could sequester
graduate students and make disciples of them.”
He added, “John
Lukacs is well known not so much for speaking truth to power as speaking truth
to audiences he senses have settled into safe and unexamined opinions.”
Mr. Lukacs’s erudite
and elegant arguments reverberated with recurring themes: that history is
determined by human nature and free will; that degenerating morality has
delivered society to the brink of a new Dark Age; and that the Cold War was
misconstrued as an ideological conflict between democracy and communism.
“Nationalism, not Communism, was the main
political force in the 20th century, and so it is now,” he wrote in The American Conservative in
2008.
As much scribe as
scholar, Mr. Lukacs would invoke vivid imagery to prove his points.
“When the Third Reich
collapsed in 1945, perhaps as many as 10,000 Germans killed themselves, and not
all of these had been Nazis,” he wrote. “When the Soviet Union and Communist
rule in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989, I do not know of a single Communist,
whether in Russia or elsewhere, who committed suicide.”
Frequently quoting Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning against
the “tyranny of the majority,” he defined populist nationalism as the bedrock
of Communism, Nazism and Fascism in the 20th century and the greatest threat to
civilization today.
Yet in Mr. Lukacs’s
provocative view, as expressed in his book “The Hitler of History” (1997), the
increasingly prevalent combination of nationalism and the welfare state in
recent decades means “we are all national socialists now.”
He insisted that he
was neither a cynic nor a “categorical pessimist.” But he wrote in his
“Confessions of an Original Sinner” (1990), “Because of the goodness of God, I
have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one.”
In 1966, when the
world was halfway between the year George Orwell finished writing his visionary
novel “1984” and the actual arrival of that year, Mr. Lukacs envisioned a
dystopia very different from the one Orwell foresaw but equally oppressive. His
version of the future, he wrote in The New York Times Magazine,
was already visible in two Pennsylvania structures not far from Philadelphia:
the King of Prussia shopping mall and General Electric’s Valley Forge space
complex.
He saw these vast,
impersonal edifices as the products of “planners, experts and faraway powerful
agencies” who disregarded the will of the people — “our voices, our votes, our
appeals.”
“It is a sickening
inward feeling,” he wrote, “that the essence of self-government is becoming
more and more meaningless at the very time when the outward and legal forms of
democracy are still kept up.”
Mr. Lukacs’s most notable books include his 2002 study of Churchill and “A Short History of the Twentieth Century,” published in 2013.
What he feared most, he added, was that “Booming Technology”
was having a deadening effect, leaving people with “a sense of impersonality
together with a sense of powerlessness.”
“Orwell,” he reminded his readers, “was not so
much concerned with the degeneration of justice as with the degeneration of
truth.”
Janos Adalbert Lukacs
was born on Jan. 31, 1924, in Budapest to Paul Lukacs, a doctor, who was Roman
Catholic, and Magda (Gluck) Lukacs, who was Jewish.
He had an
English-language tutor and spent two summers at a boarding school in Britain
before earning an advanced degree in history from the University of Budapest.
Although Mr. Lukacs
became a practicing Catholic, he was considered Jewish enough to be conscripted
into an army labor battalion when the Nazis occupied Hungary. He deserted in
late 1944, before the Germans were eventually routed.
But his hopes that
life would prosper in Hungary under Soviet occupation and a Communist
government faded fast. Leaving his parents, he fled illegally to the United
States in July 1946 and landed in New York.
He was soon hired as
a part-time lecturer in history at Columbia University to accommodate an influx
of returning veterans. Chestnut Hill College hired him to teach full time in
1947.
He retired in 1994. The ground-floor library of his home in
Phoenixville, in Chester County, held some 20,000 books.
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In 1954 he married
Helen Schofield. She died in 1971. In addition to their daughter, he is
survived by their son, Paul, and a granddaughter. His second wife, Stephanie
Harvey, died in 2003. He is also survived by three stepchildren, Charles and
Peter Segal and Hilary Segal Felton, and four step-grandchildren. A third
marriage, to Pamela Hall, ended in divorce.
Mr. Lukacs’s most
notable books include “A Short History of the Twentieth Century” (2013) and
“Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian.” (2002). In “George Kennan: A
Study of Character” (2007), he profiled the diplomat and scholar who was best
known for his analysis of the Cold War (the Soviets were a manageable threat,
not an evil empire). The two men exchanged hundreds of letters over the
decades.
Mr. Lukacs devoted
much of his career to analyzing World War II and its impact. In books like “The
Last European War” (1976) and “The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between
Churchill and Hitler” (1991), he viewed Nazism as a populist convergence of the
sinister impulses of modern civilization that can erupt from the left or the
right. And in “The Hitler of History,” he argued that Hitler’s genocidal policy
toward the Jews ultimately had the unintended effect of making anti-Semitism no
longer acceptable.
Mr. Lukacs proclaimed
his passions and pet peeves with equal fervor.
He hailed Churchill’s
stubborn refusal to negotiate with Hitler. He scoffed at Mayor Rudolph W.
Giuliani’s reference to the Blitz, as described in Mr. Lukacs’s book “Five Days
in London” (1999), as comparable to the 2001 World Trade Center attack. (Mr.
Lukacs said the Blitz was worse.) And he criticized Ronald Reagan for
contributing to “the militarization of popular imagination,” even blaming his
aggrandizement of the military role of American presidents for contributing to
the United States’ intervention in Iraq in 2003.
Mr. Lukacs summed up
his view of time and history in “A Student’s Guide to the Study of History”
(2000): “The past is the only thing we know. The present is no more than an
illusion, a moment that is already past in an instant (or, rather, a moment in
which past and future slot into each other). And what we know about the future
is nothing else than the projection of our past knowledge into it.”
He was not
particularly hopeful about that future. A decade after he had declared himself
happily unhappy, he wrote a new coda, in “At the End of an Age” (2003): “My
conviction hardened further, into an unquestioning belief not only that the
entire age, and the civilization to which I have belonged, were passing, but
that we are living through — if not already beyond — its very end.”
“I am not a survivor,” he wrote in Chronicles magazine
in 2017. “I am a crumbling remnant. A remnant of the very end of the Bourgeois
Age and a remnant of the Age of Books.”
A version of this article appears in print
on May 9, 2019, on Page B12 of the New York edition with
the headline: John Lukacs, 95, Dies; Iconoclastic Historian Sought to
Rouse Dulled Senses.
