Tea at Trianon: Thomas Molnar's Place in American Conservatism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, July 14, 2023

Thomas Molnar's Place in American Conservatism

From ISI:

Thomas Molnar was one of the influential intellectuals who contributed to the spectacular emergence of American conservatism after World War II. As a young scholar he joined the circle of conservative thinkers and received praise for his broad horizon of knowledge, his sharp criticism of utopian liberalism, and his defense of a revised notion of authority. Born in Hungary in 1921, Molnar graduated from the University of Brussels in 1946 and earned a doctoral degree at Columbia University in 1949. His main field of expertise was post-Enlightenment conservative French philosophy and literature, especially the thought of Georges Bernanos. His career was assisted by some of the prominent personalities of the conservative movement, the most important of whom was Russell Kirk, his mentor and longtime friend. It was the founding father of modern American conservatism who asked Molnar to write for Modern Age, fostered his appearance in National Review, and supported his academic career. Kirk repeatedly invited Molnar to his home in Mecosta, Michigan, and found publishers for his first books. For a time their friendship was so close that they decided to go together for a long trip in Africa, and even in later years they corresponded regularly.1

With a university degree from Brussels, Molnar was open to a number of inspirations: aristocratic conservatism between the two world wars, the Scholastic renewal of the nineteenth century, the ontological turn in philosophy in the 1920s, the air of a new beginning among refugee intellectuals in the United States, and Central European legal traditions. Accordingly, Molnar’s writings gained influence in the United States, France, to some extent in Spain, Italy, and Germany, and after 1990 in Central Europe as well. Many of his more than forty books were translated into various languages; his articles regularly appeared in American and European intellectual magazines. More than most contemporary American conservative authors, Molnar became a familiar name in the intellectual circles of many post-Soviet countries, such as Croatia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.2

Molnar’s emergence as an essayist and public philosopher was decidedly helped by what has been called the American conservative revolution. Without suitable knowledge of the history of this movement after World War II, it would be difficult to assess properly Molnar’s work; and without knowing the intramural developments in American conservatism, it would be hard to understand the formation of Molnar’s position as a traditionalist Catholic intellectual, a passionate opponent of utopian liberalism, and a thinker of order and authority.

Throughout his long and active life, Molnar gradually distinguished his philosophical position from traditionalism or paleo-conservatism, conservative liberalism, and neoconservatism. He strenuously labored to give a clear expression to his own understanding. I term Molnar’s view “perennialism,” and this perennialism, I contend, is a special kind of conservatism characteristic of only a few authors in Western history.

Molnar’s intellectual journey, completed with his passing away in 2010, moved in a circle. He started his career with a strong criticism of modernity as “paganism” and arrived by the end of his life at the most perceptive assessment of utopianism available in our day. Molnar’s way to Anti-Utopia was a peregrination gradually uncovering the central insights he already possessed in a seminal form at the beginning of his philosophical voyage. Already in this way Molnar shows a specifically conservative character: instead of moving along the line of a simple progression, his intellectual odyssey realized a return, more elaborated in form and content, to what he had already possessed in his youthful intuitions.3 (Read more.)