I wish he didn’t change his mind.
In the Libertarian Forum July 1974
I apologize for the formatting of my re-print of the entire text here.It’s difficult to alter into a well structure body of text.
Emboldings are mine.
An important part of the process of transforming the American right
into an imitation of old-line European conservatism (a transformation
which Murray Rothbard in particular has described very well in a
number of places) has been the seeping into American rightist thinking of
the philosophy of history that sees the germs of modern “decay” and
“chaos” in the various critical movements of the past few centuries,
especially the Enlightenment, but going back even to the Reformation
and, beyond that, to certain medieval “heresies.” All modern ideologies
are seen as anti-theologies, and God forbid that any significant historical
change should be interpreted as the result of earthly, economic interests.
The incorporation of elements of this Weltanschauung has given current
American conservatism an air of profundity, old-world wisdom and
downright “class” which is the main product retailed, for instance, by
the “Intercollegiate Studies Institute” and by Modern Age, as well as by
National Review in its more “philosophical” moments. When carried
through by a genuine scholar like Eric Voegelin, this approach has a
certain interest. The present work is an example of the approach at its
very worst. So, with an eye to the possible impact of Leftism in
reinforcing a fundamentally reactionary and anti-libertarian
interpretation of the course of modern history among American rightists,
I beg the reader’s indulgence to venture a lengthy and what could be
termed spirited attempt at nipping that impact in the bud.
A comment is in order concerning Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s scholarliness:
there is no doubt in my mind that the greater part of his reknown within
the American right is due to the circumstance that (as he says of himself
in the Preface) he reads twenty languages and speaks eight. This, and the
fact that he travels to interesting places, rather than his mediocre and
derivative books or his remarkably uninformative column in National
Review on continental affairs, account, I think, for what reputation he
has in this country. Now, Leftism is filled with close to two hundred pages
of back-of-the-book notes, demonstrating his knowledge of languages and
his wide reading, and these are evident also in the text. (Some of the
apercus that are supposed to be the fruit of this rich learning, though, I
find ridiculous: to the pensee, for instance, that "socialism and the
Jewish mind do not easily mix," my reaction would be: Someone ought to
tell them about it! ) But the quality of K-L’s thought is so low, his power of
reasoning so dim, that the rest just does not matter very much. Take a
look at this try at linguistic fireworks, at the beginning of the chapter on
“Right and Left”:
Right and left have been used in Western civilization from
times immemorial with certain meanings: right (German
rechts) had a positive, left a negative connotation. 111 all
European languages (including the Slavic idioms and
Hungarian) right is connected with “right” (ius), rightly,
rightful, in German gerecht (just), the Russian pravo
(law), pravda (truth), whereas in French gauche also
means “awkward, clumsy,” (in Bulgar: levitsharstvo). The
Italian sinistro can mean left, unfortunate or calamitous.
.The English sinister can mean left or dark. The Hungarian
word for “right” is jobb which also means “better,” while
ha1 (left) is used in composite nouns in a negative sense:
balsors is misfortune.
How this stuff is conceivably connected with the political terms “left”
and “right” -which stem from the accident that radicals were seated to
the left in the French National Assembly of 1789 and reactionaries to the
right - will perhaps be made clear to us in the hereafter, when we no
longer see as through a glass darkly. Meanwhile, I submit that we have
here to do with an author whose sense of judgment is fundamentally
spoiled and who is not above trying to show off (as another example of his
corrupt judgment, there is the fact that he mentions Tom Paine four
times in the book, never discussing his political ideas, but twice
mentioning that he was the hero of a play by a certain Nazi playwright
named Hanns Johst). All in all, I cannot recall ever coming across a case
such as K-L’s, where a scholarly apparatus of similar magnitude was put
to the service of such a low-grade intellectual effort. A few preliminary
examples: the author is discussing the criminal code of the Soviet Union;
he suggests that the very existence of punishment there contradicts the
regime’s official philosophy: "since materialism rejects the notion of
free will, why should there be punishment for anything?" This is all he
says on the subject, so we are left to wonder: What does it profit a writer
on social questions to read twenty languages and yet never to have heard
of the deterrentist theory of punishment? In another place, K-L advances
the claims of the neo-liberals, like Roepke, as against older liberals such
as Mises, stating that the former "admitted curbs on mammothism and
colossalism to preserve competition. They thought that the state had a
right and then a duty to correct possible abuses of economic freedom -
just as we give a mature person a driving license and the right to travel
wherever he wants but still make him submit to traffic laws." With
grade-school stuff like this, just whom does K-L think he is writing for?
Moreover, there are little gaps in his reading which tend to disqualify him
from writing on the subjects he does: note fifty-two on page 482 shows
that he probably has not even heard of the Clapham-Ashton-Hartwell
view on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the British workingclass
or at least certainly has no idea of its significance.
K-L’s languages and life of reading allow him to make disdainful
comments (justifiable, I suppose) about all kinds of ignorant, man-in-thestreet
Americans (it’s part of his indictment of democracy, you see) ; but,
judged by the standards of the better sort of academic thinking prevalent
here, he doesn’t begin to qualify as a serious intellectual.
In coming to grips with Leftism, we can leave aside the completely
superficial discussions of key concepts in social thought, such as
“liberty,” “equality,” “democracy,” etc., contained in the first few
sections; the book is clearly no treatise on political philosophy. We ought
to note, however, K-L’s petty sniping at such “leftist” concepts as
equality before the law - as well as his sneaky rationalizations, sprinkle
through the book, of such oppressive institutions as European serfdom
and even Negro slavery ("In many cases the blacks could have been
grateful to have ended as house slaves in Virginia rather than as human
sacrifices in bloodcurdling ceremonies such as the Zenanyana, the 'Evil
Night’ in Dahomey"). And in his continuing attack on democracy,
childish touches are not lacking: rape is referred to as "sexual
democracy" and cannibalism as “nutritional democracy” (why not
“aristocracy”?). On this level of analysis of concepts, however, his
definitions of “right” and “left” deserve some examination, since they
help determine the structure of the book. It is here that the mishmash
begins in earnest.
How, the reader might wonder, does Hitler wind up on the left? The
answer is simple: everything evil is identified with the left in K-L’s mind,
just as everything good is identified with the right. Get these as unbiased
definitions, meant to help us organize modern political ideas and
developments: "The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of
thinking, a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are
true values), a balanced view of the nature of man . . . but the left is the
advocate of the opposite principles." So that Hitler - even if he hadn’t
been a believer in democracy (K-L’s interpretation) was necessarily a
leftist. All methods of political repression are leftist, according to our
author - for instance, censorship (hasn’t K-L ever heard of the Index of
Probited Books? - or was this a “leftist” element in the Church of the
Counter-Reformation?). For this reason, he claims that even
Metternich’s system was partially leftist: "it assumed authoritarian
features and aspects which must be called leftist, as for instance the
elaborate police system based on espionage, informers, censorship and
controls in every direction." My own scholarship is, alas, quite modest;
but even I have come across the fact that, among the penalties imposed
on the Arians at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) was that all copies of
Arius’s books had to be surrendered under pain of death; so that the
history of the thin hand of the Church guiding the strong arm of the State
m smashing heretics and intellectual deviants goes back at least as far as
that. Informers were used by the various Inquisitions, of course, and part
of the instroment of recantation which Galileo was forced to sign under
threat of torture compelled him to inform on other Copernicans.
(Naturally, the ecclesiastical powers have not been able to do much along
these lines in more recent centuries, but then it has been a long while
slnce the world belonged to them.) Guess for yourself the value and
integrity of a work that starts with this fundamental distinction: "If we
identify, in a rough way, the right with freedom, personality, and variety,
and the left with slavery, collectivism, and uniformity, we are employing
semantics that make sense." Thus, the implication is that a sensible
terminology would classify the Roinanovs as leftists; and Jefferson and
Pame, who are termed “mild leftists,” would have to be moderate
supporters of collectivism.
The heart (and bulk) of this much too long book is constituted of a
history - a history of “leftist” ideas in the modern period and of their
working out in political developments. K-L’s presentation of key episodes
in this continuing story is completely tendentious and largely worthless.
To take one example in connection with early modern history: he cites
the Anabaptist excesses at Muenster, but not the preceding attempts by
both Lutherans and Catholics to annihilate, by the most brutal methods
imaginable, peaceful Anabaptists who asked only for the right to ignore
the State. His chapter on the French Revolution is a joke. He finds
himself able to discuss the taking of the Bastille (and to conclude that the
Marquis de Sade inspired the whole incident, as well as the brutality that
accompanied it), without any reference to the fact that the activity in
Paris was a response to a military coup put afoot by the Court. He
describes in absurd detail varlous horrors committed during the Reign of
Terror, but does not even mention the war going on at the time against
most of Europe, nor does he inform the reader that the French perhaps
had cause for panic in the circumstance that the King and Queen had
betrayed them to an enemy who had publicly threatened to give the city
of Paris over to military execution. Very significant is that K-L
scrupulously ignores the rather well-known thesis of Tocqueville, that the
Revolution (and Napoleon) basically simply continued the statist and
centralizing tendencies of the monarchy: this is an interpretation which
he, with his uncritical adulalion of European monarchism and his hatred
of the great Revolution of 1789 (a hatred which is nothing but Taine shorn
of every shred of intelligence, or, better, Gaxotte shorn of all esprit and
style), could not afford to consider.
The lengthy descriptions of leftist atrocities is a favorite pastime of KL’s
in this book. Meanwhile, massacres committed under the auspices of
monarchy, imperialism, rightist regimes or especially his own Church
are either sloughed off with an adjective such as “harsh” or consigned to
utter oblivion. Thus, we look in vain for gory details when it is a question
of the expulsion of the Spanish Jews in 1492, the activities of Franco’s
Moorish troops during the Civil War, or the atrocities of Leopold 11’s
agents in the Congo (K-L foolishly talks about the Congo’s brutal
exploitation by “private companies” -trying slyly to shift the debit from
the side of imperialism and monarchism to the side of capitalism, by
passing over the fact that these “private companies” were set up and
largely owned by the King of the Belgians). As for any number of rivers
of blood shed by the political and religious powers legitimized through
tradition or by regimes defending the status quo there is not a word: not a
word, for example, of what the Crusaders did when they captured
Jerusalem in 1099, of what those who responded to Innocent 111’s call did
to the Albigensians, of what French Catholics did to the Huguenots on St.
Bartholomew’s Day, of what the Versailles soldiers did to the
Communards in 1871 (they killed about twice as many people as were
killed during the Re~gn of Terror). Since K-L is into dwelling on the
interesting little physiological facets of political 1-illings, he might have
shared with his readers an example or two of how the kings of Europe for
centuries put to death those they judged to be felons. A very good
example would be Damiens, executed in 1759 for attempting to
assassinate Louis XV. (The description is in Iwan Bloch’s biography of de
Sade, which K-L cites.) It is possible that no other human being in the
history of our race ever suffered as much in one day as did Damiens.
The snide remarks K-L permits himself in regard to leftists are totally
inexcusable and shameful. “Demolition,” he asserts, "delights all
leftists, fills them with diabolic glee" (including Kautsky, Bernstein and
Jean Jaures? - or were these perhaps men of the right?). He refers to
“the great leftist delight, i.e., the defiling of cemeteries” (look - I
personally know two or three leftists who, I am morally certain, do not
delight in defiling cemeteries!). This garbage is repeated again and
again: "One should never forget: Sadism is the outstanding
characteristic of the entire left." He terms FDR “nearly insane” and
says that "he could not be held morally responsible for many of his
utterances and actions" (but the most he says about Hitler along these
silly psychiatric lines is that he was “neurotic”). He piggishly calls
American student demonstrators "screaming and shouting bearded
spooks." For the following, the reader (unless he or she has a copy of the
book handy) must take my word that it appears in Leftism: "Nicolas
Calas exhorted leftists with the words, ‘Comrades, be cruel!’ Hitler
followed the call. Not in vain have we been told by Charles Fourier,
grandfather of socialism, in his Theorie de l’unite universelle: 'The office
of the butcher is held in high esteem in Harmony.’ " Just take in for a
moment this thoroughly dishonest juxtaposition of statements! K-L is
obviously making a desperate gamble on the ignorance of his readers, on
their not being aware of what is probably the single best known of
Fourier’s ideas: namely, that he wanted to make all socially-necessary
work enjoyable; one method was through raising the social esteem of
indispensable but dirty jobs, such as the butcher’s. To use this concept of
Fourier’s in order to associate him somehow with political atrocities and
Hitler is really as simple and direct a case of intellectual knavery as I
have ever seen in print in my lifetime.
The section on Marx is filled with all sorts of personal nonsense about
the great socialist. K-L writes of Marx’s “mad ambitions” as a young
man, i.e., to make a name for himself as a poet (surely, every young man
who had ideas of that kind must be mentally unbalanced! ), and states
that: "The non-fulfillment of his (artistic) dreams made him a
revolutionary, and here we have a strong analogy with Hitler." (Really,
instead of irrelevantly footnoting articles in Hungarian in Munich
reviews on the non-existence of serfdom in medieval Hungary, such an
assertion as this one might be thought to require some substantiation -
but none is furnished.) We have petty shots: "There is no doubt that
Marx, initially at least, loved his wife and daughters dearly . . ."
(emphasis added), as well as large-scale silliness: "the dominant
characteristic of Marx: self-hatred" (actually, his dominant
characteristic was rebellion). K-L’s plain lack of intelligence comes out
in his comment on Engels in his relationship to Marx: "This wealthy
manufacturer from the Ruhr Valley also had sufficient funds to support
the penurious cofounder of international socialism and communism.
Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ thus existed long before Lenin." Just what is this
supposed to mean? The words say that Engels was a dupe, a kind of 1940’s
Hollywood-type, maybe like Edward G. Robinson or John Garfield - but
such an interpretation of Friedrich Engels’ rble in the history of
socialism would be . . . incorrect.
What to say about K-L’s treatment of classical liberalism? Well, first of I
all, there are incomprehensible stupidities: he thinks that the Manchester
School was contemporaneous with Adam Smith, and he lists Bismarck
(and Mazzini) as an “Old Liberal” along with Gladstone, Cobden (who
evidently did not belong to the Manchester School) and Mises! Then, to
smear German liberalism, he takes the National Liberals to be
representative of it, never mentioning the truly liberal Freisinnige Partei
and its great leader, Eugen Richter: the difference is that, where the
former supported the laws against the socialists and Catholics, and
protectionism, imperialism and militarism, the latter opposed these.
Whatever K-L’s forte is, it is not analytical thought, so that it would not
be worth our while to enter into an examination of his ideas as to the
evolution of liberalism through various phases. As an anti-totalitarian
Christian conservative, what he is trying to prove, of course (so what else
is new?), is that classical liberalism somehow set the stage for
totalitarianism and statism, in Germany and elsewhere. But, to prove
anything, one must deal with coherent propositions. Now, K-L says that:
"it is not surprising that old liberalism became illiberal. If one is
solemnly convinced that all strong stands, all firm affirmations, all
orthodoxy, all absolutes in thought are evil . . ." etc., etc. But he himself
lists Mises and Gladstone (and one would suppose he would include
writers like Spencer and de Molinari) as Old Liberals. Did these men not
take strong stands, not make firm affirmations? What value as historical
interpretation could we expect to find contained in such a collection of
absurdities, distortions and self-contradictions as this?
The prime example of the bitter fruits of liberalism and “leftism” is,
naturally, Nazism. It came into heing because the Germans "divorced
themselves from religion and willfully turned their backs on great
traditions." The old conservative song-and-dance. Yet what ,evidence is
there that the majority of Germans who voted for the Nazis were not
sincere Christians? K-L correctly points out that part of the Nazi vote
came from voters who had previously supported the “liberal” parties
(such as they were in Germany by then); but why not mention that the
Enabling Act of March, 1933, the basis for the Nazi consolidation of
power, was supported by the Catholic Center Party in the Reichstag? At
times, Catholicism did offer some resistance to the Nazis, and deserves
credit for it. On the other hand, there were instances such as the
proclamation issued by Cardinal Imitzer of Vienna, speaking for the
bishops of Austria, which celebrated the "extraordinary
accomplishments of National Socialism in the sphere of voelkisch and
economic reconstruction as well as social policy." This was in 1938.
Naturally, the complexity of this cluster of problems is not something
that K-L could be expected to do justice to. More generally, as a brief
response to this line of consenrative interpretation, we would have to say:
the maintenance of Christian faith cannot be the key to solving the
problem of how to have a humane world, since Christian faith has
historically been compatible with every manner of swinishness
perpetrated on human beings, especially before humanism came to
temper religious fanaticism and liberalism to limit its possib~lities for
doing harm. In any case, it is not for a member of that Church to lay the
blame for massive diabolical mistreatment of human beings at the door
of “leftism,” agnosticism and liberalism.
Although they do nothing to redress the balance, there are a few good
points to be noted in Leftism: K-L has an attractive curiosity about and
love of certain kinds of facts - facts about persons, places, tribes and
nations and their traditions, and so on. Many of his judgments and values
are commendable: he is a strong revisionist on the Paris Settlement of
1919; dislikes Wilson, Roosevelt and Churchill heartily; hates Eleanbr
(although he overestimates her importance) ; has contempt for American
left-liberals and fellow-travellers; realizes that the war criminals of
World War II included those who caused the ovens to be lit not only at
Auschwitz and Dachau, but also in downtown Hamburg and Tokyo, in
Dresden and Hiroshima. The author passes some friendly comments on
anarchism and admits that he would not be reluctant to call himself a
“Christian Conservative Anarchist” (but what could this amount to if he
is, for example, a lover of the Franco regime? Probably not much more
than a relish in “variety”). Occasionally, the quality of his thinking
passes muster: Chapter 20, for instance, on some of the dilemmas
historically faced by European conservative thought, is decent enough.
But this is all in all as bad a book as has come to my notice in many years;
and I believe I have given adequate grounds for this judgment. If the
reader thinks I have been too “harsh” on K-L, let him or her recall his
slanders, explicit and implied, on hundreds of thousands of socialist men
and women, the class of people for whose intelligence and good intentions
Hayek had enough respect to dedicate to them his Road to Serfdom.
In the minds of many of those who keep up with Buckley’s magazine
and with the American conservative movement, there is, I think, the
sense that writers like Russell Kirk and Kuehnelt-Leddihn are being
presented as the conservative counterparts of libertarians like Mises and
Hayek; the former are their big guns and deep scholars, some attempt at
an answer to the obvious excellence of the latter. ActualIy, as
symbolizing the relative intellectual power behind the two movements,
this notion seems to me entirely correct.