The Decline of the Intellectual

by Thomas Steven Molnar (Editor)

In perhaps his most famous book, The Decline of the Intellectual, Thomas Molnar launches into a fundamental critique of the intellectual class. He sees it as a group that had lost its way, collapsing a sense of vision into political activism, social engineering, and culture manipulation, and abandoning the writing, philosophizing, and scholarship that had occupied their predecessors. Universities began to produce factory-like, faceless citizens, as the job market became the arbiter of education and culture. Today's professors are recruited from this group of job seekers, and hence, have a shared indifference toward learning.

Molnar likens present-day intellectuals to the earlier Marxists who elaborated their Utopian model in the Communist party. The campus intellectuals' objective is to transform the university into a replica and a laboratory of the ideal society. Colleges and universities thus become sources of propaganda of various political, financial, cultural, and ideological trends, not only among students, but professors as well. The thirty years separating editions have done nothing to weaken such a critical appraisal.

In his new introduction, Molnar writes that the decline of intellectuals has extended outside of the campus to the arts, the public discourse, and the robotization caused by technology. On the initial publication of this work, Frank S. Meyer wrote in Modern Age, "Thomas Molnar's book is not only true; it is intellectually exciting and it will remain a necessary handbook for anyone interested in the decisive problem of the 20th century." The Decline of the Intellectual is essential reading for sociologists, political scientists, educators, and university officials. It is the basis of present-day critiques of the academic world.

Genres: Philosophy

390 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Thomas Steven Molnar (Hungarian: Molnár Tamás) was a Catholic philosopher, historian and political theorist.

Molnar completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Brussels in Belgium and received his Ph.D. in philosophy and history from Columbia University in New York City.

He was visiting professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Budapest. As author of over forty books in French and English he published on a variety of subjects including religion, politics, and education. He emigrated to the United States, where he taught for many years at Brooklyn College. Molnar said he was inspired by Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind . Like Kirk, he wrote a good deal for the magazine National Review. In addition, Kirk and Molnar were founding board members of Una Voce America.

Molnar admired Charles Maurras and wrote that French failure to honor Maurras' conservative values was a component of the "agony of France".

He died at the age of 89 on Tuesday 20 July 2010.

Among the awards Molnar received was the Széchenyi Prize, from the President of the Republic of Hungary.

Reviews

[Michael David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had intended to finish this book before New Year arrived, because it is highly unusual for me to take months in reading one book (except if the book is medical in nature). I no longer remember when I started reading this book, but I must have had a streak of masochism during that time.

The book is difficult to read. It's not difficult in the sense that it utilizes complex literary techniques to deliver its points, but it is difficult because it is extremely dense. Thomas Molnar wrote a comprehensive survey of the major types of intellectuals situated across history, from the reactionary to the Marxist. In the later part of the book, he posits arguments as to why the intellectual had declined in vogue: the social engineer, from what I understood, replaces him because the social engineer is more efficient and timely. Ideals nowadays are perverted and downgraded, because pragmatism is more expedient and relevant in this world, and the social engineer fits this world more than the intellectual.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's impossible for me to summarize this book because it tackles so much in its 350 pages (which actually belie its length, since there are copious footnotes throughout the text). I'll just end by saying it's a great panorama of the evolution of the idea as to what an intellectual is. It's definitely for people seeking cerebral dissection of philosophies as well as ethics: I only completed the book in between card games with my family members. It's an exhausting and enervating treatise, but nevertheless a rewarding one.

It's not a fun read, however. (I did like Molnar's contrast between Malraux and Camus.)

[Dave Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Born in Budapest in 1921 to Catholic parents, Thomas Molnar began his undergraduate studies in Brussels in 1940, where he quickly became a leader in the Catholic student resistance movement. He drew the attention of the Nazi authorities, resulting in his removal to the concentration camp in Dachau, Germany, in 1944. Upon his release at the end of World War II, he returned briefly to Hungary, in time to witness its occupation by Soviet forces. He was lucky enough to emigrate to the U.S., where he completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia in 1950.

For some years, Molnar taught French and European literature at Brooklyn College, followed by a professorship at Long Island University. During this time, he met and married his wife, Ildiko—a widow of Hungarian birth—and began to publish in several conservative journals, including National Review, Commonweal, Modern Age, and Triumph. It was also during this period that he was befriended by Russell Kirk. In the late 1960s, he and his family settled in Richmond, Virginia. After the fall of the Communist regime in Hungary in 1989, Molnar taught for a part of each year at the University of Budapest.

The influence of the French reactionary tradition is markedly evident in Molnar’s 1976 book “Authority and its Enemies.” In that book, he argued forcefully that the principle of authority in society must always be subordinated to a higher law, specifically natural law, and must be mediated by strong institutions. These institutions should be controlled by an elite class thoroughly schooled in the limits of its authority. Lacking such institutions, he wrote:

“The words and acts of officials (magistrates) are not mediated to society with sufficient clarity and persuasion. The situation is, then, one of anarchy as we see it around us today, or despotism when the officials use naked power, scorning the mediation role of institutions.”

In this text, he frequently argued that the authority to which the social, legal, and political order is subordinate must be one that “appeals to the moral intelligence.” Such authority must be wielded with the “right moral perception and the political will to translate it into solid institutions.” But right moral perceptions, he asserted, have in Western societies been systematically blunted, and the anarchistic strain, especially in America, has become more pronounced.

“In The Decline of the Intellectual,” a text that became one of Molnar’s best-known works among American conservatives, he argued that as the social cohesiveness of the European Middle Ages began to wane, a new class of men acquired pervasive influence. They were humanists and political advisors to kings, men who in an earlier age might have been philosophers or scholars but who were now wedded to the centers of power and sought the “transformation of society.”

The boldest among these were, like Niccolo Machiavelli, advocates of an autonomous role for the state, but that goal depended upon the ultimate subordination of the Church to the secular order. Others, like Francis Bacon, Tommaso Campanella, or the fictitious character Raphael Hythloday from Thomas More’s Utopia, dreamed of ideal models of society. These aspirations would, at their apotheosis, give birth to the murderous Marxist utopias of the 20th century. In one of Molnar’s later books, “Utopia: The Perennial Heresy,” an analysis of the chiliastic thought tradition, that is still very much with us, simmers in the ambitions of Progressivism.

If the Marquis de Condorcet might be said to have invented the “religion of progress” in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), his predecessor Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, Molnar noted, its “prophet.” Embarking upon a project of investigating “what is the nature of government which would form the most virtuous, enlightened, wise and best citizens …” (from Rousseau’s Confessions, 1756), he eventually proposed, in the Social Contract (1762), the momentous concept of the General Will, an attempt to restore to human society the lost unanimity that Rousseau traced back to the rise of civilization itself. Industrial-technological society … has constructed around us a world of conventions, rational and self-justifying without a transcendent reference. We have thus become more receptive to other purely rational systems, juridical, moral, and political.

In the most important chapter of “Twin Powers,” “The Restoration of the Sacred,” Molnar surveyed our present predicament. After successive waves of desacralization over the centuries, we have become increasingly aware of our spiritual poverty and the necessity of some form of the sacred—in our lives as individuals and our political arrangements. Serious thinkers are not thrilled by the one-dimensional “second reality” proposed by the social engineers, and they recognize well enough that the schemes of the utopians have been catastrophic. But most are not yet prepared to call for a return to the old sacred order, to recognize that power, when stripped of its sacred aura, cannot guarantee a unified social order, much less moral consensus.