In April 1979, J.M. Cameron introduced Aurel Kolnai to readers of the New York Review of Books as "a remarkable man little known outside small groups of friends and colleagues." The tribute was occasioned by the posthumous appearance of Ethics, Value and Reality, a collection of Kolnai's English-language papers that Bernard Williams and David Wiggins edited. These distinguished British philosophers had come to know Kolnai during the years--1959 to 1973--that he was Visiting Lecturer in Ethics at Bedford College in the University of London. It was, they remind us, "an increasingly political period in the University. It is questionable whether the subtlety of Kolnai's philosophical method was as keenly appreciated at that time as the fact that he was a very political moral philosopher."
And so he was, though not always the brilliantly conservative one whom Williams and Wiggins knew. Aurel Thomas Kolnai was born on December 5, 1900, to an assimilated Jewish family in Budapest, then the vibrant and rapidly growing capital of the Hapsburg Empire's eastern half. Virtually everywhere one looked, one could see new thoroughfares and bridges reaching across the Danube; there was a new Opera House, where for a time Gustav Mahler acted as chief conductor, and a new Parliament building that rivaled England's in its splendor. The burgeoning population of more than 700,000 made the city the eighth largest in Europe.
With this urban development came an urban culture that clashed sharply with the older, more conservative ways of country life. Its lodestar was the extravagantly talented poet and political journalist Endre Ady, whose "new songs for new times" filled the hearts of young Hungarians determined to forge a cultural synthesis from contradictory spirits: one modern, Western, and metropolitan; the other ancient, national, and rooted in the soil. Among Ady's most illustrious followers were the composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, the philosopher and literary critic Gyorgy Lukacs, the poet and dramatist Bela Balazs, the sociologist Oszkar Jaszi, and the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi.
Intellectually precocious, Kolnai read with avid interest each number of Ady's principal forum, the modernist literary review Nyugat (West), and of Jaszi's Huszadik Szazad (Twentieth Century). At the age of twelve, he decided that he was an atheist, and at sixteen, he joined the freethinking Galileo Circle at the University of Budapest. At one of the Circle's meetings, he listened with rapt attention as Ferenczi unveiled the mysteries of psychoanalysis. He was especially intrigued by the learned physician's insistence that the new science could be a means of transforming society as well as individuals. Thus, at the beginning of his intellectual/spiritual odyssey, Kolnai adhered to what historians now refer to as the Freudian Left.
Not that he was a Freudian Marxist in the manner of Wilhelm Reich or Herbert Marcuse. Quite the contrary. As an admirer of Jaszi and a self-styled "liberal socialist," he preferred progressive evolution to what he described disparagingly as regressive revolution. He rallied in support of the democratic republic that Count Michael Karolyi established in 1918, after the Great War and the dissolution of the old monarchy. And when Karolyi was pressured to step aside in favor of the Bolshevik convert Bela Kun, he joined the silenced opposition. Kun's Soviet Republic survived for only 133 days in 1919, but that was long enough to inoculate Kolnai forever against the communist virus. A
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