John Lukacs’s new book tell us more about the author than we need to know. Lukacs suffers from an intellectual obsession: he must at all costs claim that logic and truth are human inventions. His scatterbrained theories infect his historical work, sometimes with fatal results. Lukacs’s skepticism about the Cold War is welcome, but by no means is he a supporter of the traditional American policy of nonintervention in European power politics. Quite the contrary, he smears the American opponents of entry into World War II. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/4020/blunders-lies-and-other-historicist-habits/
Blunders, Lies, and Other Historicist Habits
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This is a bit nasty and over the top. Lukacs is a respected and very productive diplomatic historian. He may teach at a “Catholic girls school” but his books are published by Yale University Press (How many Mises.org contributors can claim that? Most seem to be adjunct professors at community colleges.) Lukacs is not an economist, and he’s something of a philosophical amateur — but that’s not the proper basis for evaluating his scholarly work.
And what’s so hard about the point Lukacs makes on U.S. entry into World War II? It was clear by the end of 1941 that Germany would have a hard time knocking Russia and Britain out of the war. But without U.S. entry, London and Moscow could not have forced Germany to surrender. The outcome would have been stalemate and eventual truce, leaving most of Europe under Nazi control — and the extermination of Jews, gypsies, gays, and various and sundry Slavic groups.
Or is it now the Austrian “line” that libertarians in the 1940s should have been indifferent to the defeat of Hitler? Was Mises indifferent? Did he oppose U.S. entry into the war?
Bruce,
David Gordon is not picking on John Lukacs. He is “bit nasty and over the top” to all who deserve it. It’s quite refreshing.
Tom
Bruce,
I think you have to show why you think that Mr. Gordon is mistaken in his analysis of Lukacs’ book. That would reveal to us(or me) the other side of the coin.
Thanks
I wouldn’t defend everything Lukacs has written (if I had even read everything he has written). But judging a prolific historian by some oddball statements on philosophy or economics is like judging an economist — Mises, say — by the occasional goofy passage in Human Action. It just doesn’t do justice to the man’s work.
Mises.org readers who want to sample Lukacs’ work should start with his superb “The Last European War,” which tells the story of World War II in Europea up to the U.S. entry. It’s long and intricate but still in print after 30 years — an achievement few authors can claim!
For an assessment of Harry Elmer Barnes that is quite different from David Gordon’s, readers should go to this website:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/denialbrief.html
Last comment from me!
Bruce:
So what?
Haven’ read either Lukacs or Barnes.
I have no opinion upon the accuracy of the reviewer’s description of them.
However the mention of Godel lead me to TNT, where I was lost, amidst a sea of ceberal pleasure for hours.
Then I got back to the review.
Then the reviewer’s mention of Heisenberg.
Got lost revisiting the Uncertainity Principle.
Point of fact, it took me the day just to finish this one dang email!?!?!
But I loved every minute of it!
Respects,
JZ
Tim Starr posted this on Atlantis_II, a Yahoo group. — Dan
From: “timstarr2001″
Date: Tue Sep 6, 2005 6:37 pm
Subject: Re: Blunders, Lies, and Other Historicist Habits timstarr2001
— In atlantis_II@yahoogroups.com, “Technotranscendence”
>http://mises.org/daily/1900
My first impulse is to respond with a list of Rothbard’s blunders and
lies, such as his claim that Uganda under Idi Amin was a good example
of a regime which was internally tyrannical but externally peaceful,
written in “For A New Liberty” before Amin provoked Julius Nyerere of
Tanzania to order the invasion of Uganda to overthrow Amin.
However, there is a more substantive point to make about Gottfried’s
review of Lukacs’ book. Gottfried seems to think that the fact that
Britain and the Soviet Union had not been conquered by Nazi Germany by
December 7, 1941, means that US entry into that war wasn’t necessary
to prevent German victory. This is a mistake that I used to make.
While it’s true that Britain had won the Battle of Britain in 1940, it
was a near thing, could easily have gone the other way, and Germany
could’ve resumed it at any time. And while it is also true that
Russia had won the Battle of Moscow by the time US Lend-Lease aid
began arriving, Germany was still occupying much of Russian territory
and capable of occupying much more.
The real crucial battle of WWII was the Battle of the Atlantic.
Germany had enough U-boats to defeat the British Navy, but not the US
Navy. If not for the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain would’ve run out
of food and other supplies, and Russia would’ve run out of the
supplies she needed to win the war, too. Furthermore, without the US
Army Air Corps, the strategic bombing of Germany wouldn’t have been as
effective, and that would’ve allowed Albert Speer to increase German
war production far more than he did.
So, without US entry into WWII, Germany’s conquest of Europe would
probably have succeeded, and the naval bases it had arranged for in
North Africa, Spain, and the Canary Islands, would’ve been filled with
the vast armada Germany had in the works for an invasion of the
Western hemisphere. Werner von Braun’s transatlantic rocket-planes
would’ve been carrying conventional warheads at the very least to New
York City, as well as the Amerika bombers, and Germany would’ve had
the time it needed to get its nuclear weapons program going (with
Japanese help).
Some points in this review are well made. I have a number of contentions, though.
“Our author suffers from an intellectual obsession: he must at all costs claim that logic and truth are human inventions.â€
-I would venture to suggest that a great deal of the trouble here is your conflation of logic and truth. Though a decontextualized quote might suggest otherwise, he does not at all claim that truth is a human invention. That you cannot distinguish between logic and truth is telling and may, perhaps, shed light on some of your struggles reading Lukacs.
“‘the idea of Economic Laws as if they were something like the Laws of Nature is even more dead [than the idea of free trade].’â€
-I won’t say it is intentional, but you certainly have misconstrued Lukacs with this quote in a way advantageous to your point. Lukacs does not say that the idea of free trade is dead; he says that the ideal of Free Trade is dead. Perhaps, like your inability to separate logic and truth, you cannot conceive of an idea of free trade that is not the ideal of Free Trade.
“But if Hitler was unable to overcome British and Russian resistance before December 1941, why was American entry into the war essential?â€
-If you’d read more Lukacs, you would understand his point. Hitler was unable to win his war – that is, achieve his goal of a Europe entirely dominated by Hitler with Russia, cowering and held in check (for the time being) behind her borders, and a docile England across the channel. At the same time, this does not mean that Hitler lost the war, or that the victory of England and Russia was inevitable. All parties involved in the war saw American intervention as inevitable, if the war would drag on long enough. But, had Hitler knocked either Russia or England out of the war in 1940 or 1941 prior to Pearl Harbor, America might not have had a side on which to come. Lukacs elsewhere points out that England could not win the war without American intervention, but in the early years they avoided losing it altogether.
“For his argument to have merit, Lukacs would have to show that the British and Russians would have been unable to resist further after December 1941, absent American intervention.â€
-To begin with, he does argue that some of that resolve was due to expected eventual American intervention. Again, at that level of stalemate, the British and Russians could only effectively “hold out.†If America maintained absolute isolationism (which they didn’t at any time during 1941), eventually Britain and Russia would have to reach some sort of settlement with Germany; with Russia, probably something approximating the original non-aggression pact, and with England, who knows? Perhaps Churchill would have been ousted in favor of Halifax, who would negotiate with Hitler, or even, God forbid, Mosley.
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