While courtly love was mostly a literary genre exploited by troubadours and poets such as Dante, in practice, it may have been very well been an actual phenomenon, or at least a cultural aspect strong enough to survive in chivalric traditions still extant to our days, most particularly in England, where the Order of the …
Biographical accounts of the lives of great men and great scholars are usually complex subjects since they are rarely objective images of the people they portray but rather projections of the writers researching them and embellishing their stories with the strokes of their pens.
The Austrian polymath Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, needs little to no exaggeration when presented to the public, not because he was well-known (actually rather the opposite), but because his life, his time, his works, his ideas and ultimately his intellectual legacy show he was truly worthy of the title of “the world’s most fascinating man“ that his friend and editor at National Review magazine, William F. Buckley, gave him during the time they worked together.
Now, this little endeavor of presenting ‘the Lion of Lans‘, as he also got called, in reference to his family’s crest and coat of arms and his final residence, I am undertaking here is no gratuitous task, but the result of a many years drive to learn about him and place him properly alongside other Austrian thinkers, like F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises have had entire collections of biographies and books written about their lives.
It would be no surprise, either, that Kuehnelt-Leddihn was their contemporary, as well as of other great men of his time, like Otto von Habsburg-Lothringen or Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, and that in their little network of intellectuals and statesmen, there might have very well been some contact among all of them, mostly with only one to no degrees of separation.
But back to Erik Maria, to begin with, the most basic details of his life would already be a hard task: born in 1909, the beginning of the last decade of existence of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the small town of Tobelbad (now Haselsdorf-Tobelbad), close to Graz, in Styria, Austria, he belonged to the aristocratic Kuehnelt-Leddihn family, a noble house that had been ennobled and given the title of hereditary knights (Ritter) by the Habsburg emperors.
The first ten years of his life were marked by World War I, the end of the rule, and the very short one of the last two Danubian monarchs, Franz Josef and Karl, but by the time young Erik had become sixteen after the dust of conflict and political instability had settled, he was already writing for the London-based The Spectator news magazine as their correspondent in the capital of the newly proclaimed Austrian Republic.
As the scion of a surviving family of the old Austro-Hungarian nobility, Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s education was not bound by the borders imposed in the peace treaties/dictates of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Trianon, as as soon as he was of age, he went to study law and theology at the University of Vienna, before pursuing further studies in economics and later political science at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, where he was taught by the once and future Hungarian Prime Minister and political geographer, Count Pál Teleki de Szék, and where he got awarded his master’s and doctoral degrees in the early 1930s.
Following the old traditions of European nobility, Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s first language was not his native German but French, and aside from English, the tongue he used in his foreign work, and Magyar, which he took during his studies in Hungary, he also learned, spoke and another dozen languages, each with their own stories and contexts, such as Russian, when he was sent to Russia as a special correspondent for a Hungarian daily during his twenties, Spanish, when he covered the Spanish Civil War in situ in the late 1930s (and later during his trips to Latin America), and Japanese, which he actually taught as a college professor at Fordham University in New York during the middle of World War II.
A renegade child of the Wilsonian order of self-determination of peoples that broke his ancestral homeland and bound by the Catholic loyalties of his family, Kuehnelt-Leddihn became a political legitimist and a monarchist early on in his life, but he was not merely another simple partisan for the restoration of altar and throne in his country and region, but a deep thinker who studied and understood the nature of his land and his peoples as a different, yet equal, to the one he found in the other country that received him the most, which was the United States.
You see, dear reader, Kuehnelt-Leddihn was no ordinary man, and aside from his aristocratic background and impressive skills as a polyglot, his life allowed him to become a universal man of letters and an avid traveler, writing over 35 books, including four novels and 3, now timeless, classics in social and political theory, as well as countless columns in both German and English, published by some of the most important outlets of the places in which he lived and visited.
His ideas can be easily summarized in his own words: “I dislike specialization. I have repeatedly altered the line of my activities in order to attain and retain a comprehensive view of the humanities. My skeptical views in regard to democracy resemble those of the Founding Fathers, of Alexis de Tocqueville, Jacob Burckhardt and, especially, Montalembert whom I admire greatly. My studies in political theory and practice have been largely directed toward finding ways to strengthen the great Western tradition of human freedom, now under attack from so many sides.”
In a lifetime marked by the dual threats of hyper-nationalist and hyper-egalitarian totalitarianisms, Kuehnelt-Leddihn took a different path, the path of liberty and tradition against the danger and excesses of mass mediocrity, which he saw as the essence of the revolutionary spirit that had plunged Europe in two centuries of destruction and later engulfed the entire world in a similar path.
Pulling no punches, he wrote continuously against the vices of mass electoralism, alternating between his admiration for the American experiment in government and his blood and faith loyalty to the old Christian Empire and Kingdoms of Central Europe, amassing an impressive amount of philosophical and political knowledge that gave him the nickname of “a Walking Book of Knowledge” that only increased as his trips abroad, departing from his permanent home in the Austrian Tyrol, could allow him yearly.
Analyzing Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s entire body of work, including all published writings, both long and short format, as well as the hundreds of hours of lectures recorded, freely available online for any interested researcher would be a Herculean task, so for the sake of simplicity, it should be better to focus on his three major works, all in socio-political theory: The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large, originally published in 1943, pseudonymously as Francis S. Campbell, in order to protect his relatives in Nazi-occupied Austria (the old Austrian Catholic nobility was heavily persecuted after the Anschluss since they were the bulwark of the the resistance movement against Nazi occupation in Austria, and more so since this resistance was informally lead by Archduke Otto, son of the last Habsburg Emperor), Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of our Times, published in 1952, and Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse, which first appeared in 1974, with its Revisited edition from 1990 (now subtitled From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot to update the contents up to the latest Communist carnage: the Cambodian genocide).
These three books constitute the core of Kueenelt-Leddihn’s thought, presented as timely reflections of the moments they were written against the mirror of history, united in a common thread characterized by their author’s magnanimous disdain for mass electoralism as prime culprit for the decreases in human dignity, war, famine and mass death in the 20th century, drawing the genealogy of all our modern evils from historical processes beginning with either the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution up to Hitlerism, Stalinism and contemporary progressivism.
In The Menace of the Herd, he set up to extensively describes the spirit of modernity as one of grey, boring sameness, embodied in the collectivist ideal that destroys hierarchy, diversity, order, faith, and freedom in the name of equality. His frequent praise of the Middle Ages in contrast to the (then) present time is marked by his obvious Catholicism and by a certain Romantic nostalgia, reminiscing of a certain classical liberalism in the veins of Acton and Tocqueville that had been long forgotten in his day: one that conceives freedom as a necessary element in the eternal order of heavenly hierarchy, naturally anti-egalitarian and yet functional for the greater common good.
As Kueenelt-Leddihn put it himself in this very book, “the plenitude of life so eagerly sought by the Romantic, as here conceived, is inaccessible to the animal. The terrifying diversity of the total cosmos (visible as well as invisible) has no meaning for the termite or the herdist with their limited existences in their limited buildings.
The great achievements — sanctity, heroism, holy wisdom, the beatific vision — are not eagerly sought for by the herdist who like the beasts of the field longs to be a ‘secure’ animal (to use an expression of Peter Wust) instead of being proud to remain an insecure’ animal, which man is by nature and in the order of things. Hostile to adventure, which after all was one of the great magnetic powers of the Middle Ages, the herdist moves cautiously in the broad stream of the mediocre masses avoiding all extremes except those in a frenzied mass hysteria.
Yet Christianity is an extreme. The yoke of Christ is not a lesser menace to his meager and miserable personality than the iron postulates of the Cross — of the same Cross which is a flat denial of his shining rule of the ‘fifty-fifty’, and disturbing to all his cautious calculations and plannings.
Only the select can be closely confronted with the Absolute without taking flight. Only the saints, but not the ‘commonsensical’ herd, can and will surrender to the ‘Holy Folly of the Cross’. For this reason we have such hatred on the part of the mediocre man, who hates any sort of hierarchy, whether of the saints or of sanctity itself.
Sanctity is not only an extraordinary condition but also an adventure. And adventure belongs to the domain of the ‘Romantic’. Adventure is a solitary enterprise, like sanctity, and therefore not congenial to the herd and the herdist.”
He further developed these ideas in Liberty or Equality, considered by some as his masterpiece for bringing back into intellectual discussion a serious defense of monarchy as a political institution in a discipline tainted by egalitarian dogmas.
In this book, he clearly lays a considered critique of the contemporary forms of political organization as the formal base upon which totalitarianism takes root, explaining their descent from the radical Jacobin republicanism of the French Revolution, distinguishing from the organic, controlled and naturally limited extent of monarchy, preferably Catholic, in society, for which liberty and responsibility as its complement were paramount.
His defense of monarchy as the best political system stems from his love of individualized “differentiation, not ‘identity’“, in which kings, acting as fathers of their known, mature sons, hold the exercise of power over a diverse society in cautious discretion, authorized only if the limits of their faith, not by the “authority from anonymous, secretly voting masses on a purely numerical basis“, from which nothing can be liable in their collective, and thus irresponsible, behavior.
His opposition to egalitarianism is increasingly explored here, with Kueenelt-Leddihn famously declaring that “liberty and equality are in essence contradictory“, using the concept of justice as a base and expanding it through ideas of logical reasonability and the empirical account of history, both medieval, modern and contemporary.
In a sense, Liberty or Equality managed to combine the understanding of ordered freedom with traditional monarchy, in a complex but fair system of inequalities, as the ultimate opposite of the egalitarian phenomenon represented in mass electoralism, where tyranny is able to reign with absolute might with the support of hordes of nameless voting ‘equals’.
At last, in Leftism, and later in its Revisited edition, Kueenelt-Leddihn provided the genealogy of ideas behind totalitarianism in its many forms through recent history and contrasted it with the different variants of Liberalism, Conservatism, and American political realism, mostly in foreign policy.
Following the same line set by his previous works, he thoroughly tried to explain the intricacies of the different leftist movements of his time, controversially including fascism and national socialism as part of them due to their egalitarian, even if virulently nationalistic, nature.
Here he claimed that “in the last two hundred years the exploitation of envy—its mobilization among the masses—coupled with the denigration of individuals, but more frequently of classes, races, nations, or religious communities, has been the key to political success,” equating Marxist class struggle theory with the persecution against perceived internal enemies and war against apparent external enemies promoted by all fascist national variants.
He also took shots against mainstream American politics, which he saw dangerously close to it European counterpart, albeit different in its presentation but not in its statist and interventionist spirit, which he saw particularly represented in the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In his eyes, there was little to no difference in the war crimes committed by any of all sides and belligerents during World War II, for the conflict was not one between sound beliefs respectful of freedom and local diversity but between simplistic ideologies hellbent on global domination at the cost of millions of lives.
As always, he defined his position as a sui generis syncretic “conservative arch-liberal” synthesis, which while highly attuned to the echoes of a political tradition lost in the past, was immensely foreign to the modern understanding.
This position explored at length in his socio-political books, was also made available for the occasional reader and for the activist in shorter works, among those famously included his Intelligent American’s Guide to Europe and his Credo of a Reactionary, Roots of ‘Anticapitalism’ and Four Liberalisms essays, as well as the founding Portland Declaration for the Philadelphia Society, to which many of his fellow contemporary libertarian and conservative thinkers belonged.
To American and, by default, Anglo-Western audiences, Kuehnelt-Leddihn was primarily known as the regular foreign contributor to National Review, and aside from that, and was held as a dear friend and associate scholar of the Mises and Acton Institutes, which promoted the same economic and, to some extent, also political, views to which he had arrived through his independent scholarship and which he shared with many of his fellow Austrian émigrés.
But unlike many other intellectuals of his time, Kuehnelt-Leddihn was not only a polymath and a man of letters, but in true Romantic and Renaissance fashion, he also indulged in other activities, such as photography, hitch-hiking, music, bridge, stamp collecting, and painting, all activities that were, in his own words, dearer to him than writing, for he enjoyed “much more wielding the brush than the pen.”
If his deeply Catholic religious faith was not completely understated through his works, some of his colourful life stories would do, such as when Erik, travelling through Finland, encountered the Devil himself in a freak event that blurs the line between anecdote and apocryphal account, one that traveled through the years and countries just like he went from place to place as he grew older, always returning to his beloved Austria and Hungary. Those who knew him knew that whether this story was real or just the product of an old man with a life well lived, they needed to let Erik be Erik.
A man out of time yet who experienced the marvels and the horrors of his age and a voice of old reason in an era obscured by its very zealous cult to reason for its own sake, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn truly deserved to be called “the world’s most fascinating man.”
However, his relentless will to reincorporate Catholic thinking into the Godlessness of liberal political theory should grant him another title, one more fitting to his station as a nobleman of old and a gentleman of new: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn may have been the Last Knight of Christendom, at least until someone else takes up his torch. We can only hope.
***
Out of the couple of biographical essays I’ve written, this one might be one of the most personally relevant to me, since the influence of Kuehnelt-Leddihn has been one of the major pillars in my own political and philosophical self-education since my own coming-of-age.
I remember my first encounters with his works through the magic of the internet, and the first time I managed to read him in paper the first time I visited the Mises Institute in Alabama years ago. and I also remember how, through the threads and networks laid out by his ideas, I found out about Catholic monarchist author Charles Coulombe and how I began exchanging through text with him up to the point we actually talked about him when we met for lunch in Vienna last year.
The thing about us, readers and scholars of Kuehnelt-Leddihn, is that just like him, we try to live interesting lives that can permeate and shape our faith and our beliefs into something greater than ourselves and our times.
My conversation with Charles keeps popping around, maybe because Kuehnelt-Leddihn somewhat manages to pull off that combination of Romanticism, Liberalism, and Traditionalism that could only be found in an unholy mix between Lords Acton and Byron, since just like Kuehnelt-Leddihn, he might be the current runner-up to his legacy, and if life and destiny, God willing, could allow someone in my generation to work their way up to become their intellectual heir apparent.
It might sound pretentious, yes, but part of the duty of most libertarians and conservatives, in the opinion of Bradley J. Birzer, should be to be as eccentric as possible. To individualize themselves while strengthening their ties to our communities. If the track record is not wrong, then Kuehnelt-Leddihn might have just been the most eccentric of them all, and rightfully so: not every other guy could have been a polyglot, polymath, Austrian Catholic nobleman traveling around the world and writing for American publications.
But the key to understanding Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is not just to see him as a traditionalist of the old school who found his way into mainstream liberal conservatism by casual chance and the adequate combination of talent in the most adequate moment.
My choice to name him as “the Last Knight of Christendom“, is, like with almost everything else, no coincidence since I wanted to make a parallel with Ludwig von Mises, who was christened as “the Last Knight of Liberalism” by Jörg Guido Hülsmann in the biography he wrote of the Austrian economist.
Kuehnelt-Leddihn must be understood first as a deeply Catholic writer and then as a Liberal thinker, without each category contradicting the other, who devoted his life to tirelessly defending faith and freedom as one and the same against the spirit of his time and the strength of its waves.
Unlike many others in these circles, I never had the conflict of having to choose between tradition and faith on the one hand and freedom and prosperity on the other, and I am fairly certain I owe that balance between the two to having been exposed to Kuehnelt-Leddihn very early on in my intellectual development, mostly through intermediaries, like Matthew Scarince with his amazing essay on the vice of illiberalism.
I cannot forget one of his quotes from Leftism, where he explained and released this tension in the simplest terms that follow: “The root is liber (‘free’). The term liberalis (and liberalitas) implies generosity in intellectual and material matters. The sentence ‘he gave liberally’ means that the person in question gave with both hands. In this sense liberality is an ‘aristocratic’ virtue. An illiberal person is avaricious, petty-minded, tight-fisted, self-centered. Up to the beginning of the Nineteenth century the word “liberal” figured neither in politics nor really in economics”
It should be natural, thus, to see how his works would attract young scholars like me, dreaming beyond the pettiness of electoral politics and half-baked ideologies, who, in one way or the other, would feel reflected in his life and his ideas.
But unlike the staff of National Review, who merely viewed him as a shiny relic from the Old World and would just “let Erik be Erik” in his writings, I think better advise would be to be more like him, to try to achieve that aristocratic eccentricity that would allow individuals and societies to thrive in the freedom offered in tradition and faith.
Maybe that way, there might be someone to succeed him as The World’s Most Fascinating Man & the Last Knight of Christendom.
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