A reformed history must be imaginative and humane; like poetry, like the great novel, it must be personal rather than abstract, ethical rather than ideological. Like the poet, the historian must understand that devotion to truth is not identical with the cult of facts. The middle decades of our twentieth century have been marked intellectually [...]
In The Duel, a riveting account of Churchill’s confrontation with Hitler in the spring and summer of 1940, John Lukacs wrote that Churchill was the opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was [...]
John Lukacs has given us a short, penetrating study of George Kennan, who is forever associated with the Cold War strategy of containment. For all of Kennan’s famed realism, Lukacs shows that there was also a streak of naïveté in some of his views. George Kennan: A Study of Character, by John Lukacs (Yale University Press [...]
John Lukacs and Wendell Berry This is the best introduction to the historical craft of John Lukacs. History and the Human Condition does not replace the much longer Remembered Past, a wide-ranging selection of Lukacs’s works also published by ISI Books. But this work, a coda to the author’s career, contains just the right mixture of [...]
Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, by John Lukacs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 248 pp. There are few scholars whose intellectual achievements are so respected that their intuitions are as highly regarded as their more formal scholarship. John Lukacs is one of these rare individuals. He brings to his work a lifetime of devotion [...]
At the End of an Age by John Lukacs. In his book, At the End of an Age, historian John Lukacs argues that the Modern Era, which began about five hundred years ago, is rapidly coming to its terminus, or might indeed already have given way to a new era, the outlines of which do not [...]
Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past by John Lukacs, Transaction Publishers (Library of Conservative Thought), 1994. Applying a philosophical intellect to the study of history, Dr. Lukacs believes that historical studies may become the principal literary form and way to wisdom in the dawning age. This does not mean that he endeavors to present a “philosophy [...]