The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai

Aurel Kolnai was born to Jewish parents in Budapest on the 5th of December, 1900. He died in a London hospital of a heart attack on June 28th, 1973. During those 72 years he lived, successively, in Budapest, Vienna, Paris, New York, Boston, Quebec and, finally, London. Kolnai is primarily known in English and American academic circles as a moral philosopher and conservative political thinker, though in Vienna he is perhaps better known as a member of the Psychoanalytical Association, and then again as a Christian leftist journalist. Although he never held or tried for political office, he was engaged on the fringe of the 1918 "Chrysanthemum Revolution" in Hungary, and then again as part of the Christian democratic movement in Austria when the country began to move towards fascism. Apart from that, he was always active as a philosophically inclined writer on politics, with special attention to National Socialism in the 1930s, and, during the early years of the Cold War, to Communism. This biography covers Kolnai's life and career, and discusses his personality. Kolnai's own memoirs say very little about his own writings, apart from sketching out the main themes of the most important of them. Therefore this study includes some account of nearly everything he published, including his journalism, and much of what still remains unpublished. The author has not been primarily concerned with an assessment of Kolnai's thought, but seeks to offer the reader an orientation in Kolnai's oeuvre.

Table of Contents:
Family and school (1900-1918); political education (1916-1919); war, revolution and counter-revolution (1918-1920); Kolnai's psychoanalytic episode (1920-1926); early days in Vienna (1920-1924); university studies and related publications (1922-1930); political journalism or philosophy? (1920-1930); fighting for the west in Vienna (1930-1937); peripatetic (1937-1940); New York and Boston (1940-1945); Quebec (1945-1955); England or Spain? (1952-1961); England -early difficulties (1958-1964); the last 15 years (1958-1973). Appendix - Kolnai's attitude to the Catholic faith.