John Lukacs's 'History and the Human Condition'

John Lukacs, who lives in Chester County, is by any standard the best-known historian in Pennsylvania, and one of the few historians with a national and international reputation beyond narrow academic circles. For this offense, narrow academic circles cannot forgive him.

When, after a long career at Chestnut Hill College, Lukacs was invited to step up to Penn as a visiting lecturer, he found himself persona non grata. As he puts it in his new, retrospective book, History and the Human Condition, Penn's History Department "consisted of 45 professors, of whom I knew two. Soon it became obvious that none of the others desired to meet me." The association was soon terminated.

Lukacs emigrated from his native Hungary after World War II and took what work he could find. He lacked a prestigious sinecure at his back, like Hugh Trevor-Roper at Oxford or Simon Schama at Columbia, to name two academic historians who branched out successfully into popular careers.

From the first, Lukacs was interested in Big Subjects, such as (to quote one of his many titles) the Decline and Rise of Europe: A Study in Recent History, with Particular Emphasis on the Development of a European Consciousness. There was also a book called Historical Consciousness, or, the Remembered Past. Well . . . didn't Professor Lukacs realize there wasn't such a thing as "consciousness" any more (such a 19th-Century idea), but only mentalités, a word of course to be used only in the French? No wonder the profession couldn't take him seriously.

Churchill as hero

Actually, Lukacs did write close studies, of which the best known is Five Days in May, his riveting account of Churchill's assumption of power in 1940 and the rejection of a negotiated settlement with Hitler. Even here, though, Lukacs committed two unpardonable sins: First, he made no attempt to hide his admiration for Churchill and his belief that the decision to resist a negotiated peace with Germany was a critical moment in Western history; and second, he wrote clearly and well.

Historians do, of course, hold opinions, but they are trained to hide them behind an assumed mask of detachment. But this endless deferral of judgment takes its toll on a writer's style, as does the bland neutrality enforced by the historian's desire to appear "scientific" in approach.

A fundamental issue confronts us here— namely, whether history should consider itself a branch of literature or strive for the status of a discipline akin to the natural sciences. The so-called social sciences aspired to such status in decades past, and historians— whose work was viewed with skepticism in every camp— were particularly eager to rise from the swamps where Gibbon, Tocqueville, Burckhardt and other classic historians had left them.

Transgender prisoners?

Lukacs, in what he announces is almost certainly his last book (he is now 89), comes down firmly on this question in his opening essay, "History as Literature." It's a good thing, he says, that historians have moved beyond political narrative and discovered the whole social world that underlies it; it's not a good thing, however, that the profession now produces work such as "The Foreign Policy of the Calorie" or "The Discomforts of Drag: (Trans) Gender Performance Among Prisoners of War in Russia."

Historians shouldn't ape the worst of sociology, nor should they produce jargon instead of prose. We don't all need to know about mice, but all of us need to know about ourselves, and that is the subject history addresses.

It is therefore incumbent— morally incumbent, Lukacs argues— on historians to make themselves accessible to a general audience, not by writing down to it, but by expressing themselves with as much clarity as possible. And this is a task, above all else, of literary expression.

Inside Hitler's head

Literature is also a matter of weighing perspectives, which isn't the same as objective reportage. Dostoevsky puts you into the mind of Stavrogin in The Possessed, but he leaves you in no doubt that he's depicting a very dangerous character.

The historian can do the same with, say, Hitler— not that I know of any Dostoevskys among my colleagues. Lukacs wants us to understand Hitler without admiring him, and his point is that the tools of the novelist can serve us to this end, and are in some sense indispensable to it. This historian agrees.

The other mostly miscellaneous essays in History and the Human Condition re-argue the questions— political and historiographical— bequeathed by World War II and its long aftermath, which we call the Cold War. These may be broken down into two principal issues: Did World War II need to be fought? And was the Cold War inevitable?

Pat Buchanan's thesis

The first question really boils down to asking whether Britain and France should have resisted Hitler's ambitions in Eastern Europe, and whether the U.S. needed to join them. Lukacs litigates it by means of a review of Patrick Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.

Buchanan contended that Nazi Germany was less of a threat to Western culture than Soviet Russia, and that that the lesser of two evils should have been allowed to seek victory over the greater. Hitler had little use for the French, but he did respect England as a fellow Aryan nation and made conciliatory gestures toward it.

The British, Buchanan contends, could have served as a counterweight to what turned out to be the worst excesses of Nazism; war meant pushing them to the extreme, and ultimately empowering Russia. The U.S., wisely led, could have stayed out of the whole affair and been spared the destructive burden of empire.

Stalin's needs

Churchill is Buchanan's villain. Without him, Britain would almost certainly have sought terms with Hitler, especially after the fall of France in 1940. Of course, Churchill was there, and the English people turned to him. They had an alternative— if not Neville Chamberlain, then someone like Lord Halifax. But they chose their warrior, and Churchill is Lukacs's great hero.

Lukacs argues that Churchill foresaw, and preferred, a temporary division of Europe between Russia and an Anglo-American alliance to a more protracted German domination of the entire Continent. As Lukacs sees it, the collapse of Communism after less than half a century of rule over Eastern Europe demonstrates Churchill's perspicacity.

Was the Cold War, then, the price of Hitler's defeat? Lukacs takes the point up in an essay titled, "The Origins of the Cold War." His answer is a qualified yes: Stalin, and perhaps any Soviet leader, would have insisted on control of a large buffer territory against a German resurgence, and that would have created lasting tension with the U.S.

American self-righteousness

What was unnecessary, Lukacs believes, was the rabid anti-Communism that converted a manageable geopolitical standoff into a crusade against evil. This posture produced two highly adverse consequences: It brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear confrontation on more than one occasion, and it fed the sense of American exceptionalism— or self-righteousness, if you prefer— that has led the U.S. repeatedly into military adventurism abroad and a surveillance state at home.

So, Lukacs emerges as a pragmatic Cold Warrior, willing to adopt George Kennan's non-ideological vision of containment (Kennan and Lukacs eventually became friends and correspondents) without demonizing the other side.

I rather wonder whether politics can be rendered so bloodlessly abstract. Lukacs obviously made his personal preferences clear. He chose to live in the U.S., not Communist-dominated Hungary; and, as he writes, "My mind is concerned with this, my adopted country, and with its history." He's also concerned with his adopted language, English, which he writes with singular grace and precision.

Fears without solutions

Lukacs worries now about America, both on the local level— where a sense of community, still robust a couple of generations ago, has in his view largely disappeared— and on the national stage, where an imperial mindset that he sees primarily as a legacy of the Cold War has reinforced our worst instincts.

"It could be worse," he writes, "but very good it is not." His view is that of the enlightened conservative— Tocqueville and Burckhardt, both of whom worried about the pitfalls of democracy, are lodestars for him. But, like them, he offers no easy answers nor any hope that traditional values can be reclaimed.

Some of us think that America's problems go back a good deal further than World War II, and that imperialism was in its grain from the beginning. But Lukacs, agree with him or not, does represent a tradition that deserves more honor than it receives nowadays: the historian as someone who writes not merely for his peers but his fellow citizens, and challenges them to think about the issues and values of a shared past.