#john lukacs

[blackswaneuroparedux]

The historian must enter into the dialectic of the actual and the potential contained in every critical moment of the past. Memory is the real psyche or life force and nothing is genuinely more alive than the historian’s disciplined rejoining of the past; apprehended in the right way, history becomes palpable.

- John Lukacs

A fine modern historian whose writing was influenced by his upbringing in war torn Hungary and as a devout Catholic. Lukacs was an iconoclast who brooded over the future of Western civilisation, wrote a bestselling tribute to Winston Churchill, and produced a substantial and often despairing body of writings on the politics and culture of Europe and the United States.

A proud and old-fashioned man with a cosmopolitan accent, and erudite but personal prose style, Lukacs was a maverick among historians. In a profession where liberals were a clear majority, he was sharply critical of the left and of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. But he was also unhappy with the modern conservative movement, opposing the Iraq war, mocking hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller as the “Zsa Zsa Gabor of physics” and disliking the “puerile” tradition, apparently started by Ronald Reagan, of presidents returning military salutes from the armed forces.

Lukacs completed more than 30 books, on diverse subjects including his native country and 20th century American history, as well as the meaning of history itself. His books include “Five Days in London,” the memoir “Confessions of an Original Sinner,” and “Historical Consciousness,” in which he contended that the best way to study any subject, whether science or politics, was through its history.

He considered himself a “reactionary,” a mourner for the “civilisation and culture of the past 500 years, European and Western.” He saw decline in the worship of technological progress, the elevation of science to religion, and the rise of materialism. Drawing openly upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings about a “tyranny of the majority,” Lukacs was especially wary of populism and was quoted by other historians as Donald Trump rose to the presidency. Lukacs feared that the public was too easily manipulated into committing terrible crimes.

Hitler and Stalin were Lukacs’ prime villains, Churchill his hero. Lukacs wrote several short works on Churchill’s leadership during World War II, focusing on his defiant “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech as the Nazis were threatening England in May 1940. Lukacs wrote that the speech was at first not well received and that instead of having a unified country behind him, Churchill had to fight members of his own Cabinet who wanted to make peace with the Nazis.

One Churchill book attained unexpected popularity after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Rudolph Giuliani, then New York City’s mayor, held up a copy of Lukacs’ “Five Days in London,” declared he had been reading it and likened New Yorkers to the citizens of London.

Quietly published in 2000, the book jumped into the top 100 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list. But Lukacs was not entirely grateful. He noted that “Five Days in London” had little to say about how Londoners endured the Nazi assault, and he rejected comparisons between London in 1940 and New York City in 2001.

“The situation was totally different,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time. “As a matter of fact, it was much worse in England.”

He wrote about how the postwar era signaled the end of an age of civility. Modernity, he argued, had run its course since the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, and a new barbarism would take its place.

Lukacs’ ideas defied easy classification. He was for a time a darling of conservatives, but he rejected the notion that people could be defined as hewing to the political left or right.

The Cold War, he argued, had never been a conflict between communism and democracy; rather, it was a struggle between Russia and the United States. At the same time, he insisted that economic conditions never determined human belief.

Born Jan. 31, 1924, in Budapest, Lukacs Janos Albert had a Catholic father and Jewish mother, making him technically a Jew, although he was a practicing Catholic for much of his life. For the Nazis, who occupied Hungary in 1944, being half Jewish was enough to be sent to a labour camp.

By the end of 1944, he was a deserter from the Hungarian army labor battalion, hiding in a cellar, awaiting liberation by Russian troops. Within months of living under Soviet control, he fled the country on a “dirty, broken-down train” to Austria. In 1946, he arrived by ship in Portland, Maine, his youthful affinity for communism shattered.

Lukacs was a visiting professor at Princeton University, Columbia University and other prominent schools but spent much of his career on the faculty of the lesser-known Chestnut Hill College, a Catholic school (all girls until 2003) in Philadelphia where he taught from 1946 to 1994.

He called himself a “reactionary” because he was a traditionalist and a persuasive advocate of the necessity of historical knowledge to make any sense out of most things, and because he lamented the transformation of science into a false religion and the over-commercialisation of economic progress, and was viewed  as curmudgeonly. He was, in fact, unimpressed with much that was modern but not a pessimist; he never resented disagreement, and was always good-natured in debate. He was an important historian of great integrity and originality, and certainly one of the greatest American historians of modern Europe.

A pessimist by definition, he often expressed personal contentment. He wrote warmly about his enjoyment of romance, friendship, books, teaching and the rural life, the “pleasure of fresh mornings, driving alone on country roads, smoking my matutinal cigar, mentally planning the contents of my coming lecture whose sequence and organization are falling wonderfully into place, crystallizing in sparks of sunlight.”

“Because of the goodness of God,” he concluded in his memoir, “I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one.”

He died at age of 95 years old in 2019.

[freakishlynonsense]

"As primeiras [as motivações] são empurrões do passado, os segundos [os objetivos] puxões do futuro." - John Lukacs

[geopolicraticus]

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

John Lukacs and non-Copernican History     

Wednesday 31 January 2024 is the centenary of the birth of historian John Lukacs (31 January 1924 – 06 May 2019), who was born in Budapest, Hungary, on this day one hundred years ago. 

Lukacs was a prolific writer who not only wrote many books of history, but also many books on historical thought, which give something of an anti-realist and non-Copernican view of history in which history does not fall short of the mark of science, but is something more than science. 

Quora:             https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:              https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:      http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Podcast:           https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nick-nielsen94/episodes/John-Lukacs-and-non-Copernican-History-e2f61ha

[familyabolisher]

At times in the writing of wine history, wine itself has been treated as a historical actor. This is the case in many of the sweeping histories of wine, such as Hugh Johnson’s original Vintage: The Story of Wine, Paul Lukacs’s recent Inventing Wine, John Varriano’s Wine: A Cultural History, or Marc Millon’s Wine: A Global History. These lucid and entertaining histories, written by great narrators with serious wine expertise, follow a similar narrative arc. Wine is the central protagonist, the potable Zelig, popping up in different historical moments in different parts of the world. The story begins in the Fertile Crescent, where Wine is born, or in the ancient Mediterranean, where Wine enters a boisterous adolescence in the symposia and bacchanalia of the ancient Greeks. The reader is invited to pause and appreciate the wine-themed mosaic and shards of amphorae. The story then skips a few centuries and a few hundred miles, to medieval Europe (we are left to wonder what Wine has done in between), where Wine joins forces with powerful and institutionalized Christianity and canny monks create a patchwork of orderly clos on the Côte d’Or: bless them! Wine remains in France, or perhaps summers in Germany, and Bordeaux emerges in the seventeenth century, eventually finding its way to Britain (we are treated to a Samuel Johnson quote, or Pepys). Port and sherry have their seafaring adventures. The nineteenth century opens with Champagne surviving war, producing widows and conquering Russian markets; France produces Pasteur, who produces better wine, a triumph of science and the Enlightenment; wine is enjoying its golden years. Then, three-quarters of the way through this drama, tragedy strikes, in the form of the vine disease phylloxera. Wine is dealt a staggering blow and its very survival is threatened. Fortunately, a new world of scientists, mavericks, and neoliberal entrepreneurs emerge: capital is found, the plucky New World steps in to help, and new vines are grafted. Wine is saved! This cannot be criticized as being a Eurocentric narrative, because the tale concludes in California, or Uruguay, or China. Undeniably, at the conclusion of this story there is incredible momentum and optimism. Global wine production is the highest it has ever been, consumption of wine is high, and wine is (relatively) cheap. Were he a wine historian, Francis Fukuyama would declare it the end of wine history.

This hagiography of Wine is a great read: a mouth-watering tale of high drama, blind monks, and supple tannins. And it is not necessarily inaccurate. But it is, on the other hand, what British historians have called a Whiggish narrative: one that presumes continual progress, culminating in the current era, which is assumed to be the best ever. This Whiggishness may overlook some of the current difficulties in the market, or shrug off past problems in the wine industry, since all ended well. Geographically and chronologically it is uneven, such that the producers studied here generally do not merit inclusion until they have become major global actors. This type of narrative structure is what gives the false impression that South Africa produced a great wine called Constantia in the eighteenth century, and then produced nothing again until 1994. The place of Wine as the embattled protagonist who overcomes many hardships (vine diseases, consumer apathy, high taxation) and emerges triumphant and affordable in the late twentieth century, is also what is known in Marxist terms as “commodity fetishism.” As Bruce Robbins has argued, in the new commodity histories, “each commodity takes its turn as the star of capitalism.” The commodity itself, rather than the social and economic relationships that led to its production, becomes the driving force of the narrative.

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Imperial Wine: How the Empire Made Wine's New World

[74fdc]

Is this Techism, or a Tech Bro Bubble?

Techism, Technocracy, or Techarchy?

“The isms have all become wasms.” - Historian John Lukacs

[hayingsang]

What I read in 2022

A little late. 2023 to follow soon.

* * *

Ying Shih Yü, Chinese History and Culture, Volume 1

Yuen Yuen Ang, China’s Gilded Age

Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women

Stephan Körner, Kant

Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, Vol 5

Leonard Susskind & George Hrabovsky, Classical Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum

Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine

Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, Vol 6

George Orwell, 動物農莊（港豬版）

Tom Hopkins, Sales Prospecting for Dummies

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack

Kenn Amdahl, There Are No Electrons

Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State

Ehrhard Bahr & Ruth Goldschmidt Kunzer, Georg Lukacs

Gianfranco Poggi, Forms of Power

Thomas Gordon, Parental Effectiveness Training

Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

James Fok, Financial Cold War

Angela Carter, The New Eve

Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton

Ying Shih Yü, Chinese History and Culture, Volume 2

Bill Hayton, The Invention of China

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

林匡正, 香港足球史

Karl Ulrich & Lele Sang, Winning in China

Harry Morgan, Sunny Places for Shady People

Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle

Naomi Standen (ed), Demystifying China

Angela Carter, Wise Children

Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys

John Gribbin, Get a Grip on Physics

Chris Waring, An Equation for Every Occasion

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Mary McCarthy, Birds of America

Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps

Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

Hon Lai-chiu, The Kite Family

Jim Breithaupt, Physics

John Gribbin, Seven Pillars of Science

John Gribbin, Six Impossible Things

Barry Lopez, Horizon

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittridge

Elizabeth Strout, Anything is Possible

Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!

Mike Goldsmith, Waves

Monica Ali, Untold Story

Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War

Jessica Andrews, Saltwater

Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature

AM Homes, May We Be Forgiven

Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene

Ho-fung Hung, City on the Edge

Richard Feynman, QED

Fredric Raichlen, Waves

Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop

Karen Cheung, The Impossible City

Adam Tooze, The Deluge

Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

Sean Carroll, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe

Louisa Lim, The Indelible City

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Wave Watcher’s Companion

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction

Adam Tooze, Shutdown

Annie Ernaux, A Frozen Woman

Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Virgina Woolf, The Waves

Ursula Le Guin, Tehanu

Ursula Le Guin, The Telling

Gaia Vince, Nomad Century

Janna Levin, How the Universe Got Its Spots

Lara Alcock, Mathematics Rebooted

Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

Emily St John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

Anon, 伊索傳 & 驢仔

Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky

Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven

Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

Bruno Mansoulié, All Of Physics (Almost) In 15 Equations

[dipnotski]

John Bellamy Foster – Antroposen’de Kapitalizm (2023)

İçinde yaşadığımız kapitalist sistem geleceğimizi tehdit ettiği gibi şimdi bir de dünya ile çatışıyor. Bu kitap, zamanımızın korkunç gerçekliğine dair. Ancak aynı zamanda da tarihin kritik anlarında insanlığın gösterdiği çabanın bilgisine sahip olmanın getirdiği bitip tükenmez bir umuda da dair. 1919 yılında Marksist felsefeci Georg Lukacs dünyanın kaderinin tehlikeye girdiği devrimci durumlarda…

[college-girl199328]

The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) – an independent, quasi-judicial tribunal coming under fire for its ineffectiveness and lack of enforcement when punishing airlines for denying compensation to impacted air passengers.

“Right now, the process puts the burden on the Canadian consumer that’s got a complaint,” said John Gradek, faculty lecturer and coordinator of McGill University’s aviation management program.

Gradek says air travelers who file a complaint with the CTA go through a very long and exhausting process. “They are not the right tool and vehicle to look at adjudicating and making decisions about appeals from customers about airlines’ refusals to pay compensation. There’s got to be a better way,” Gradek told Consumer Matters.

The CTA says as of Dec. 20, it had over 31,000 complaints pending. The wait time reviewed is over 18 months. While critics argue the wait time is unacceptable, the lack of action to fine airlines that breach Canada’s Air Passenger Protection Regulations (APPR) is just as concerning.

“We have a system that we have established under the APPR that defines what the violation of these rules are not being applied, they are not being enforced,” Gradek said.

A notice issued back in September by the CTA for 55 separate violations by WestJet may be proof. It shows the CTA issued a penalty of $200 per violation instead of the maximum of $25,000.

“What that means economically is that it is actually more profitable for the airlines to disobey the law, stonewall passengers, and occasionally pay a pittance of a fine,” Air Passenger Rights advocate Gabor Lukacs told Consumer Matters.

So what can consumers do? Some airline passenger advocates suggest taking the airlines to small claims court, while others would like to see more action taken by the Federal Transport Minister.

“The minister hasn’t been very public about ‘I have your back get this fixed next’ and that’s unfortunate because I think that’s his role without there won’t be any movement from the airlines because they sense the weakness in the government and they say why should we change,“ said the Public Interest Advocacy Centre’s John Lawford.

Still, Canada’s Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said protecting passengers’ rights is a priority. “It’s that passengers’ rights are protected. It’s a priority for me. It’s a priority for our government, and we will continue to pursue the highest level of protection for our passengers,” said Alghabra.

“We are looking forward to figuring out what other measures put in our passenger bill of rights to make sure the airlines are the ones who are responsible for these claims, not the CTA.”

Alghabra’s comments come after the recent travel chaos during the holidays, which saw thousands of travelers stranded in Mexico after Sunwing canceled their flights.

When asked if his department had a large-scale investigation over what happened, Alghabra said he’s deferring that responsibility to the CTA.

[aktitudrock]

#Repost @elzettamasuno with @let.repost • • • • • • Y YA SALIÓ LA EDICIÓN 6 DE LA REVISTA EL Z + 1 Y para cerrar el año 2022 nuestro sexto número que tiene en la TAPA un remember con 47 y Christian Echegaray a 14 años de la partida del líder de una de las bandas más representativas del rock cristiano en el Perú. Escribe Marco Echegaray bajo el título de Mi Voz ahora. Además... ÍCONO. Pelé, O Mais Grande do Mundo LIBRO. Neo Entes de Miklos Lukacs DESTAPE. Nos mintieron en pandemia MÚSICA. Hey Girl Anne Wilson HISTORIA. La Hispanidad como sinónimo de bien, verdad y belleza ARTE. Mi nombre es Russ Mills SERIE. El miedo y lo sublime. Por Ivete Lanzieri RANKING. La Canción del Año 2022 con la banda Sett Y no dejes de leer a NUESTROS COLUMNISTAS: Convivir con virus por El Zetta OK Amor de Fotocopia por Llanire Martin (USA) El Hígado de Marita por Mar Mounier (SUI) Presionando la Antítesis por Oscar Andres Romero (COL) La Vida y la Palabra por José Belaunde (PER) En Orbita por Yosua de la Rosa (PAN) RESEÑAMOS los discos... John Van Deusen - "(I Am) Origami Pt.4 - Marathon Daze" Undemoniac - "The Legacy Of Evil" Anne Wilson - "My Jesus" Elle Limebear - "Lost In Wonder" Becoming The Atchetype - "Children Of The Great Extinction" Y sigue nuestros HABITUALES: Plugged, Santos y Pecadores y Software Redil. Feliz Año 2023 siempre cerquita de Dios!!! #ElZettaMasUno es una revista distribuida gratuitamente a suscriptores y perteneciente a El Z + 1 Editores. Aún no te has suscrito? SUSCRÍBETE GRATIS a elzettamasuno@gmail.com PD. Recíbelo en tu email. #elzettamasuno #elzettamasunomagazine #elzettamasunoradio #elzettamasunopodcast (en San Miguel, Buenos Aires) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm6E_dKOmY4/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[blackswaneuroparedux]

There are innumerable instances suggesting that modern intellectuals do not believe themselves, that they don't really believe what they say, that they say certain things only in order to assure themselves that they possess opinions and ideas that are different from those that are entertained by the common herd of men.

- John Lukacs

The eminent historian John Lukacs, a World War Two Hungarian Nazi labour camp survivor and escapee from post-war Communist Hungary to America, called himself a “reactionary” because he was a traditionalist and a persuasive advocate of the necessity of historical knowledge to make any sense out of most things, and because he lamented the transformation of science into a false religion and the over-commercialisation of economic progress. he thought post-structuralism of the French and postmodernism as a passing fad for lazy navel gazing bourgeoisie intellectual minds.

For all this he was viewed  as curmudgeonly. He was, in fact, unimpressed with much that was modern but not a pessimist; he never resented disagreement, and was always good-natured in debate.

He was an important historian of great integrity and originality, and certainly one of the greatest American historians of modern Europe.

[themaninthegreenshirt]

John Lukacs 

[tail-feathers]

Generalizations, like brooms, ought not to stand in a corner forever; they ought to sweep as a matter of course.

John Lukacs

[ferrell-foster]

The Age of the Book may be ending, but ...

The Age of the Book may be ending, but …

Books on shelves line my walls. They are like a lifeline for me. Along one wall are the books I’ve completely read and kept. I look at the bindings and recall not only the contents of the book but also the places and times in life when I read them. They are markers of my life with learning. On another wall are the books I have not yet completely read. The show me that there is still so much to…

[meseszerelo]

Mi más a bosszúvágy, mint szenvedést okozni, hogy ezáltal találjunk gyógyírt szenvedésünkre?

John Lukacs: A történelmi Hitler

[peculiarhungarians]

“A proud and old-fashioned man with an eminent forehead, cosmopolitan accent, and erudite but personal prose style, Lukacs was a maverick among historians. In a profession where liberals were a clear majority, he was sharply critical of the left and of the cultural revolution of the 1960s.”

[cinematic-literature]

Denial (2016) by Mick Jackson

Pictures 1 and 2 Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) by Alan Bullock Valkyrie, The Plot to Kill Hitler (2009) by Philipp Von Boeselager Hitler (1974) by Joachim C. Fest Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992) by Alan Bullock

Picture 3: The Hitler of History (1997) by John Lukacs