Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Explained

I would like to respond to Michael’s defense of European conservatism at greater length at a later time. For now, I want to focus on his treatment of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (try spelling that without looking it up):

Buckley ran Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn — an Austrian monarchist — in NR’s pages. This was a man who (like many on the continent and a few in the States) saw liberalism not as the clear vision of the Scottish Enlightenment, but as the bloody revolt against God launched with guillotines in Paris.

Michael cites EKL as proof that the American conservative movement has always been more connected to European conservatism, and to European affairs, than is often understood. On a superficial level, EKL does prove this. But to think of him only in this way is somewhat reductive. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1909, the Catholic nobleman lived a fascinating life. He began working as a journalist at age 16 and continued as a serious writer and thinker until his death in 1999. He visited dozens of countries, and all 50 U.S. states. He spoke eight languages and could read eleven others. He claimed to have once seen the Devil himself. William F. Buckley described him as “the world’s most fascinating man”; he could quite easily have competed with the Dos Equis guy as “the most interesting man in the world.”

His thought was as interesting as his life. He was an Austrian monarchist, yes, but one who believed that monarchy and aristocracy (and Catholicism!) could be better safeguards of liberty than democracy was. In 1990, EKL lamented in National Review that the “democrats” prevailed in urging the dissolution of the Habsburg empire. This left its former subjects “to their unhappy, and in some cases truly gruesome, fates.” In Liberty or Equality (1952), EKL, mindful of Plato’s warning that “tyranny, then, arises from no other form of government than democracy,” argued that, in societies without sufficient basis for self-government, “the value of the monarchical alloy should not be underestimated.” After all, “government from above on a bureaucratic basis is not the only safeguard against the alternative of anarchy and party dictatorship.”

EKL was skeptical not only of democracy, but also of nationalism. He viewed them as related phenomena. In Liberty or Equality, he wrote that, “in spite of the blood-curdling excesses of racialism during World War II, it must be admitted that, in historic perspective, ethnic nationalism has committed more mischief than the biologic mania.” Michael is correct that EKL abhorred the French Revolution. He wrote in Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot (1990) that “for the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.” But nationalism was one of the problems he believed the French Revolution unleashed. In Liberty or Equality, he blames Napoleon, “a true son of the French Revolution,” for it. He adds that “nationalism was always closely allied with modern militarism, which in turn has strong totalitarian, democratic and collectivistic implications.” Against this, EKL preferred patriotism:

Patriotism, not nationalism, should inspire the citizen. The ethnic nationalist who wants a linguistically and culturally uniform nation is akin to the racist who is intolerant toward those who look (and behave) differently. The patriot is a “diversitarian”; he is pleased, indeed proud of the variety within the borders of his country; he looks for loyalty from all citizens. And he looks up and down, not left and right.

By contrast, he greatly admired his fellow Austrian, the economist F. A. Hayek. In a 1992 obituary for National Review, EKL described Hayek as a “friend” who “will live forever in our memory.” He called Hayek and his mentor and fellow Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises “two outstanding fighters for freedom.” Like them, EKL was fond of free enterprise:

The free world which is practically synonymous with the world of free enterprise alone provides a climate, a way of life compatible with the dignity of man who makes free decisions, enjoys privileges, assumes responsibilities, and develops his talents as he sees fit. He is truly the steward of his family. He can buy, sell, save, invest, gamble, plan the future, build, retrench, acquire capital, make donations, take risks. In other words, he can be the master of his economic fate and act as a man instead of a sheep in a herd under a shepherd and his dogs. No doubt, free enterprise is a harsh system; it demands real men. But socialism, which appeals to envious people craving for security and afraid to decide for themselves, impairs human dignity and crushes man utterly.

In 1979, he also bemoaned that the great ordo-liberal economist Wilhelm Ropke had “lamentably few” followers.

In many ways representative of European conservatism, EKL did not fully embody it, and in fact acknowledged how it differed from its American variety. In that same 1979 National Review article, he wrote:

An American publisher has recently reprinted the works of Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville, advertising them as “Classics of Conservatism.” Ludwig von Mises and others from the Austrian School of economics are considered in America to be “conservatives.” This labeling makes sense to American intellectuals, because in the United States traditionalists and libertarians co-exist, though not without some tension, under the general heading, “conservatives.” The common enemy—socialism and the provider state —gives the focus for unity. Nevertheless, a European unfamiliar with American intellectual history would be stunned by this taxonomy. In Europe, conservatism is not libertarianism. Conservatives here, since the French Revolution and the Philosophes, have been more or less the supporters of the memories and values (the reality having long since disappeared) of the Ancien Regime; they have stood athwart history, yelling “Stop.” In the past, the landed gentry and their peasant dependents—with their fixed lives and assets—despised the mercurial manufacturers and bankers. The conservative forces were headed by the monarchy, in uneasy alliance with the aristocracy, the rural interests, and the clergy; they opposed the burgher class of liberal merchants, who gradually increased their power under the intellectual label of the “Enlightenment.” Socialism was, until the middle of the twentieth century, only a weak third party to the liberal-conservative battle.

While fully conscious of the differences between European and American conservatism, EKL both admired America and was not afraid to criticize it. As for his admiration, he called this country “his second home” in the preface to Liberty or Equality, and in a 1965 National Review article lamented the “mounting tide of anti-Americanism,” including from European conservatives, who cling to “the silly myth of a highly cultural and intellectual Europe being methodically poisoned by a materialistic America whose Wall Street is simply a Kremlin in reverse.” The “wisest among us,” he concluded, “while critical of America in many ways, are growing tired of the cheap anti-Americanism so prevalent now in Europe. And our reasons are practical as well as moral.”

As for his criticisms, one of EKL’s main complaints about America was that it was not living up to its national destiny to the world. He lamented in 1976, again for NR, that

there is a tendency among the newer conservatives not to look beyond their own borders. Many American conservatives—in a return to the isolationism of an earlier era—now leave international affairs to the Left—as European conservatives also do only too frequently.

He elaborated on these thoughts for NR in 1983:

It might be objected that Americans, of all people, are unsuited to the task of combatting Marx and Engels’s pervasive ideology. North America is, geopolitically speaking, a gigantic island surrounded by oceans. This automatically creates an insularity and even an isolationism in the hearts of Americans. Yet they must rise above this restrictiveness if they want to live up to the role imposed upon them by history. American conservatives have become too self-centered in the last hundred years; thus foreign affairs have been left to the Left.

So, yes: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was a European conservative important to American conservatism. But he was also a liberty-minded monarchist; a multilingual anti-nationalist; a free-market aristocrat (he pointed out in his obituary for Hayek that, “with the exception of Fritz Machlup, the original Austrian School consisted of members of the nobility”); and an America-loving Austro-Hungarian who urged our country to be more active internationally.

I have undoubtedly failed to capture the fullness of his thought here. It is a rich vein for conservatives to mine. To do so would be far more rewarding than merely to invoke his name.