116 years ago, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was born in Tobelbad, Styria, Austria-Hungary. Born to Austrian nobility, he’s a fascinating figure of the 20th century. A staunch Catholic and a proud monarchist, he referred to himself as a “conservative arch-liberal” or “extreme liberal.” Those that met him, on the other hand, often described him as one of the most brilliant men they had ever met.
While alive, he was an Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute, where he gave fascinating lectures on the Cultural Background of Ludwig von Mises and Mises’s and Hayek’s Critiques of Modern Political State. Lew Rockwell described it as a personal honor to edit his still timely book Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse for Arlington House. Two of his other books, Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time and The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large are also available for free in our digital library.
As the titles of those works suggest, Kuehnelt-Leddihn was a man who was strongly opposed to the political trends of his time. While sympathetic to “non-democratic republics”, he viewed mass democracy as a dangerous road to tyranny.
For fans of Ludwig von Mises, his lecture on their common Austrian heritage would be a particular interest. Beginning by noting how difficult it was to describe “a world radically different from yours, a world far away, which in many ways no longer exists,” he depicts the intellectual and cultural influences on the great man. He concludes by noting that Mises, “was not a ‘regular fellow,’ but very much a gentleman of the old school, and, above all, a great scholar who had rediscovered forgotten permanent truths and deflated new superstitions. He never gave up. He battled until his last breath. Perhaps he remembered the first line of the Polish National Hymn, which he heard often in his childhood: ‘Poland is not lost yet!’ Since then it has risen twice from the ashes. Well, freedom is not lost yet, if we, like Ludwig Edler von Mises, really fight for it.”
At a time where there is a clear intellectual void being felt on the right, which has long been hollowed out by modern conservatism and a deeper desire for something more grounded in tradition, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s work deserves a modern revival. A strong intellectual enemy of both Nazism and Socialism, he took pride in the brand of being a “reactionary” a term which he saw as rejecting the the “reductio ad absurdum of so-called democracy and mob domination.”
