The european war5/6/2023 Lukacs argues that Great Britain (and by extension the British Empire) could not defeat Germany by itself, winning required the entry of the United States and the Soviet Union, but he contends that Churchill, by ensuring that Germany failed to win the war in 1940, laid the groundwork for an Allied victory. The struggle between them, whom Lukacs sees as the archetypical reactionary and the archetypical revolutionary, is the major theme of The Last European War (1976), The Duel (1991), Five Days in London (1999) and 2008's Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, a book about Churchill’s first major speech as Prime Minister. A recurring theme in his writing is the duel between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler for mastery of the world. Lukacs defends traditional Western civilization against what he sees as the leveling and debasing effects of mass culture.īy his own admission a dedicated Anglophile, Lukacs’s favorite historical figure is Winston Churchill, whom he considers to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century, and the savior of not only Great Britain, but also of Western civilization. The rise of populism and the decline of elitism is the theme of his experimental work, A Thread of Years (1998), a series of vignettes set in each year of the 20th century from 1900 to 1998, tracing the abandonment of gentlemanly conduct and the rise of vulgarity in American culture. In his 2002 book, At the End of an Age, Lukacs argued that the modern/bourgeois age, which began around the time of the Renaissance, is coming to an end. He denies that there is such a thing as generic fascism, noting for example that the differences between the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are greater than their similarities.Ī major theme in Lukacs's writing is his agreement with the assertion by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville that aristocratic elites have been replaced by democratic elites, which obtain power via an appeal to the masses. He claims that populism is the essence of both National Socialism and Communism. By his own description, he considers himself to be a reactionary. Lukacs sees populism as the greatest threat to civilization. In the early 1950s however, Lukacs wrote several articles in Commonweal criticizing the approach taken by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he described as a vulgar demagogue. In 1946, as it became clear that Hungary was going to be a repressive Communist regime, he fled to the United States. During the German occupation of Hungary in 1944-45 he evaded deportation to the death camps, and survived the siege of Budapest. During the Second World War he was forced to serve in a Hungarian labour battalion for Jews. His parents divorced before the Second World War. Lukacs was born in Budapest to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother. “Deserves to be widely read, seriously considered, and vigorously debated.”-Gordon Wright, American Historical Review grasp of emotional as well as intellectual history is commanding.”- New Yorker “A brilliant, original study of what this era meant-socially, politically, artistically, intellectually-in the lives of the peoples of Europe. It is a major contribution to historical scholarship.”-Joseph G. It makes both fascinating and extraordinarily valuable reading. “An excellent, valuable, and highly readable book. “This dispassionate, humorous, serious, and brilliantly written book marks an important step forward in our understanding of a past that is still within living memory.”- Economist “Lukacs’s book is consistently interesting, surprising, and provocative.”-James Joll, New York Times Book Review Eminent historian John Lukacs presents an extraordinary narrative of these two years, followed by a detailed sequential analysis of the lives of the peoples and then of the political, military, and intellectual relations and events. This absorbing study of the first-and decisive-phase of World War II tells not only how events happened but why they happened as they did.
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