[close] John Adalbert Lukacs (born 31 January 1924 in Budapest; in Hungary his name spelled Lukács) is a Hungarian-born American historian who has written more than twenty-five books, including Five Days in London, May 1940 and A New Republic. He was a professor of history at Chestnut Hill College (where he succeeded Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn) from 1947 to 1994, and the chair of that history department from 1947 to 1974. He has served as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Princeton University, La Salle University, and at the Eötvös Loránd University.

Lukacs was born to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother. His parents divorced before World War II. Although Lukacs was raised Catholic, he was forced to serve in a Hungarian labor battalion for converted Jews during the war. He evaded deportation to the death camps in 1944-45 and survived the Siege of Budapest. In 1946, he fled Hungary for the United States. In the early 1950s, Lukacs wrote several articles in Commonweal criticizing Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he described as a vulgar demagogue.

Lukacs sees populism as the greatest threat to civilization. By his own description, Lukacs considers himself to be a reactionary. In Lukacs's view, the essence of both National Socialism and Socialism was populism. Lukacs does not believe in generic fascism, in his opinion the differences between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were far greater than the similarities. Lukacs sees himself as the defender of the traditional values of Western civilization against what he regards as the debasing leveling effects of modern mass civilization, and above the institution that Lukacs sees as the supreme guardian of Western values, namely the Roman Catholic Church.

Lukacs has argued that the best form of government is that of an enlightened elite, preferably a Catholic elite. A major theme of Lukacs's writing has concerned an assertion by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century that all states, whether monarchies or republics, had been dominated by aristocratic elites, and the age of aristocratic elites was drawing to a close and the age of democratic elites reflecting the interests and concerns of the masses was dawning. Much of Lukacs's writings are concerned with what he regards as this transition from aristocratic to democratic elites and its consequences, especially towards historiography.

By his own admission an intense Anglophile, Lukacs’s favorite historical figure is Winston Churchill, whom Lukacs considers the greatest statesman of the 20th century and the savior of not only Great Britain, but also of Western civilization. Lukacs holds strong neo-isolationist beliefs, and perhaps unusually for an anti-Communist Hungarian émigré, was strongly opposed to the Cold War. Lukacs often argued his belief 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. Likewise, Lukacs is strongly critical of the administration of George W. Bush and has condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In his 1997 book, George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946, a collection of letters between Lukacs and his close friend George F. Kennan; both Lukacs and Kennan criticized the New Left interpretation of the Cold War being caused by the United States. Lukacs argued that though Joseph Stalin was largely responsible for the beginning of the Cold War, it was the administration of Dwight Eisenhower which missed the chance for ending the Cold War in 1953, and thus unnecessarily allowed the Cold War to go on for decades more.


[edit] The Hitler of History
From about 1977 on, Lukacs has been one of the leading critics of the British historian David Irving, whom Lukacs has often accused of engaging in unscholarly practices and of having neo-Nazi sympathies. In part, Lukacs’s 1997 book, The Hitler of History, a Prosopography of the [close]