Aurel Thomas Kolnai was a 20th-century philosopher and political theorist.
14 Facts About Aurel Kolnai
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In 1938, Aurel Kolnai published his critique of National Socialism titled The War Against the West.
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The Nazi threat compelled Aurel Kolnai to leave Austria in 1937, where he was then a citizen, and depart for France where he married Elisabeth Gemes in 1940, a Catholic convert.
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The Vichy threat prevented the newly-wed Aurel Kolnai from remaining in France, and after a brief stay in England, Aurel Kolnai and his wife moved to Quebec where he accepted a teaching position at the University of Laval.
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Frustrated by what he saw as the oppressive parochial Catholicism and the rigid neo-Thomism, Aurel Kolnai left Quebec in 1955 and returned to England on a Nuffield Foundation Travel Grant.
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Aurel Kolnai is an eclectic, well-read thinker in the fields of philosophy, economics, and politics.
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Aurel Kolnai drew on the philosophical realism of Thomas Aquinas and believed that Aquinas could provide a valuable contribution to the recovery of broad dialectical objectivism, but he was opposed to the rigidity of 20th century neo-Thomistic orthodoxy and the dogmatic claims of Thomistic ideology.
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Aurel Kolnai explores what he calls the "utopian mind" phenomenologically, which he links with what he calls the "perfectionist illusion", which is marked by the view that human goods existing in a state of tension can somehow be reconciled.
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Aurel Kolnai's political thought arises from both his phenomenological method and his belief in the importance of philosophy for human life.
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However, though Aurel Kolnai was sympathetic to what he called "the conservative ethos", he was not a partisan thinker but rather a self-proclaimed centrist opposed to all forms of totalitarianism.
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Aurel Kolnai had an ongoing concern that unrestrained liberalism would inevitably end in totalitarianism, and his critiques of liberalism as he saw it manifest in the United States and Europe center on preventing such consequences.
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Aurel Kolnai's ethical thought is characterized by strong loves and hates and expressed in terms of values and universal meanings.
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The negative character of moral duties was key for Aurel Kolnai, as expressed in his treatise on "Morality and Practice II:".
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Aurel Kolnai currently remains relatively unknown, but especially in the light of the dialectical return to classical political theory in the writings of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, as well as the recent debates concerning neo-Conservative philosophy, it is likely that Aurel Kolnai will receive increasingly more attention in the near future.