Leftism: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse

by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse is a comprehensive, if informal and radical, study of the major trends in leftist thought from the era of the French Revolution. This title is the original edition.

Genres: Politics, History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Economics, French Revolution, Society

886 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 5, 2012

About the author

Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was an Austrian Catholic nobleman and socio-political theorist. Describing himself as an "extreme conservative arch-liberal" or "extreme liberal", Kuehnelt-Leddihn often argued that majority rule in democracies is a threat to individual liberties, and declared himself a monarchist and an enemy of all forms of totalitarianism although he also supported what he defined as "non-democratic republics" such as Switzerland and the early United States as originally intended in its constitution.

Described as "A Walking Book of Knowledge", Kuehnelt-Leddihn had an encyclopedic knowledge of the humanities and was a polyglot, able to speak eight languages and read seventeen others. His early books The Menace of the Herd and Liberty or Equality were influential within the American conservative movement. His best-known writings appeared in National Review, where he was a columnist for 35 years.

Reviews

[Ruza · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a political nerd and this book was literally a page turner and what a history lesson wrapped up in this wonderful book. The author is one of my favorite political geniuses and a man that I wish more people who are interested in politics, especially about European liberalism(which is the equivalent to American Conversativism) took up reading. Erik Von Kuehnelt is a polyglot, he spoke over 5 languages fluently and could read and write in many others as well. He was a man who's vision surpassed many and his knowledge of history and movements, should be studied by all political science students. What I love about this book is he dissects the history of the lefts fruition and shows how certain words for example, the word "Democracy" are used in an incorrect form. For example, the US is a Republic, but the majority of people in this country and elsewhere in the world, use the world democracy freely, while they do not understand it's true meaning. If we were a true democracy, America would literally be ancient Greece. Overall, amazing read, I highly recommend.

[Xenophon · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first excursion into the highly recommended EvKL.

The book is a historical and almost empirical expedition into what Leftism is in actual time and space. There are, of course, philosophical and even theological nuggets throughout, but they do not hold up the spine of the book as expected.

My strong suggestion is to read this book instead of listening as I did (yeah, I took the coward's way). The author possesses an ability to build up to awesome quotes and a gift for acerbic wit. I laughed several times throughout.

The latter half of the book will be most interesting to the historically literate as the French Revolution, the rise of Bolshevism, and Nazism are all pretty well-worn topics now. His views on the modern American Left, the New Left, conservatism, and the disconnect between American and European thought are more profitable given how they preempt the questions we ask in 2021.

This is not an essential book in my mind, but a good supplement to any study of modern political developments.

[Félix Tremblay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is wordy. But if you want to understand anything about anything, it's a must. Plus, you can find it for free on the Internet, so what excuse do you have?

[Mathias · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is quite a (too) lengthy book, with a lot of lengthy footnotes and it generated a lengthy review. I started reading it at the beginning of Nov 2019. Back then I wasn’t yet taking notes and wasn’t planning to write a review but since I’ve read it on my books app on my iPad, I was using the highlighting function regularly, which helps me now in finding the parts of the book that were important to me.
I’ve started reading it because its author, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (K-L) was an acquaintance of Ludwig von Mises. All the persons in Mises’ orbit become interesting to me. And it has to be said that K-L is an interesting figure in his own right. He speaks or understands about a dozen languages and has read a lot of books and articles. But on the other hand, he doesn’t seem to be a constantly deep thinker. At times he had problems understanding economic theory, maybe he should have read more books by Mises.

In the Libertarian Forum, Ralph Raico (of whom I recently reviewed three books and one essay) wrote a devastating review about Leftism called Conservative Myths in History and writes about K-L: ”But the quality of K-L’s thought is so low, his power of reasoning so dim, that the rest [him reading lots of languages and visiting interesting places in the world] just does not matter very much.” And further: ”All in all, I cannot recall ever coming across a case such as K-L’s, where a scholarly apparatus of similar magnitude was put to the service of such a low-grade intellectual effort.” or: “K-L’s languages and life of reading allow him to make disdainful comments (justifiable, I suppose) about all kinds of ignorant, man-in-the-street Americans (it’s part of his indictment of democracy, you see); but, judged by the standards of the better sort of academic thinking prevalent here, he doesn’t begin to qualify as a serious intellectual.” The review isn’t always completely fair, take for example this excerpt: “How, the reader might wonder, does Hitler wind up on the left? The answer is simple: everything evil is identified with the left in K-L’s mind, just as everything good is identified with the right.” K-L actually puts forward more argumentation than this. First, he notes that Hitler was a national socialist, favouring collectivism over individual freedom. He also shows how national socialists are racial equalitarians or identitarians. And observes, as Mises did, that rather than dividing by social class (like Marxists do), they divide by race. This distinction between the two socialisms is hardly enough to put them on politically opponent poles. The question therefore has to be put back to Raico: ”How does Hitler not end up on the left?” or “Why would it surprise the informed reader to see Hitler on the left?” I find the implication of Raico’s statement, that Hitler is obviously on the right, rather childish and silly. It’s certainly fair or even sometimes helpful to label Hitler as a rightist, depending on the context of the discussion and/or situation, but to deny the similarity of Hitler’s position with those of default socialism is simply barroom talk. Be it as it may, Raico caricatures K-L’s reasoning here.
I also have to disagree with Raico on the question whether Marx’s poetical phase as a teenager has any relevance or is mere “personal nonsense”. I definitely side here with K-L, Wurmbrand and Rothbard, though I’m siding with Raico when it comes to how specifically K-L dealt with the issue. I also think it’s fair to discuss Marx’s personal and moral life, the more considering that he is venerated as a quasi-saint even by moderate, non-marxian leftists. He ends his review with: “If the reader thinks I have been too harsh on K-L, let him or her recall his slanders, explicit and implied, on hundreds of thousands of socialist men and women, the class of people for whose intelligence and good intentions Hayek had enough respect to dedicate to them his Road to Serfdom.” Of course I personally can know only very few of these socialist men and women. But those who I met were hardly intelligent or had good intentions. Most of them were unbearable hypocrites, egomaniacs and spoiled brats. Maybe Raico has met different persons than I did. However, on a theoretical level, it seems impossible as a socialist, to be both intelligent and have good intentions. How would that even work out in real life? You’re an intelligent person and one of your genuine goals in life is to make life better for the poor, yet you never stumble over the most basic economic laws? You somehow always end up with exactly those schemes that hurt the poor? Common, get real. That’s as stupid as anything K-L has written.

On the other hand, Raico manages to show how K-L applied dishonest juxtaposition of statements in his books and writes:” K-L is obviously making a desperate gamble on the ignorance of his readers” and I have to admit that in my case K-L would have gotten away with it. I find it hard to understand why K-L would do such a thing. It puts his whole lifework into serious question. Interestingly, K-L writes: “Modern man is unhistorical and therefore he can be told every imaginable nonsense which he readily will believe.”
Anyway, it showed me how little besides economic theory I still know. Ironically, this is also why I finished the book, after getting demotivated by Raico’s review, to which I mostly and whole-heartedly concur. But I said to myself, since I know much less about history than Raico, that I might profit somewhat more from the book than he did (He had some positive things to say about the book as well). Since I just learned that K-L was untrustworthy, this was maybe a bit stupid. But then again, as I said in the beginning, everything in the orbit of Mises has my interest.

So what is the book about? K-L puts forward the theory that everything was great until the 18th century. In that time, elites like Voltaire started to mock religion which led to the outbreak of the French Revolution, which was the first left revolution and the root of all current evils. He makes Marquis de Sade responsible for it. Because of some obscenities on his part, de Sade ended up in the Bastille from where he shouted down from a window that he was one of many political prisoners in that building. According to K-L, this started the myth that later led to the Storming of the Bastille. This is at least a huge exaggeration. I once read half of the Schwarzbuch des Kapitalismus (Blackbook of capitalism) in which the author, a German left-wing journalist argued that de Sade was a liberal (in the classic sense) because he favoured institutions where women and girls are held captive so that men can rape them for free. He must have somehow associated the *freedom to rape* with liberalism. K-L on the other hand puts him in the leftist camp, which I guess is more to the point. Still, what K-L should have done was analyse de Sade’s political writings and present its findings to the reader, rather than pick here and there a sentence and then use non-sequiturs as a support for his theory. Marquis de Sade was surely an interesting person (Personally, I’ve only read a German translation of 120 days of Sodom and saw Passolini’s masterpiece adaption to celluloid, which managed to still become a police scandal when it should have been aptly shown in a church in the 00s in “progressive” Zurich city) and maybe his influence on the French Revolution is underestimated (though I doubt it), but then K-L should have worked harder to make this point clear. If he would have been really serious about his position on de Sade it would have made sense to dedicate the whole book on this worthy subject and toss everything else out.

L-K’s story goes on like this: Anyway, after the French revolution, socialism and liberalism are on the rise and religion on the decline. Socialism is evil and liberalism is good but in the end unable to save the world from the destruction of the left and the rise of totalitarianism (only good old religion, preferably Catholicism, can furnish that job). We are still under the spell of the French Revolution.
I think K-L is absolutely right here concerning the French Revolution, I think many people underestimate the influence that this event had on the posterity and on us. I haven’t yet read de Tocqueville’s work on the French Revolution where he argues that the impact was smaller than believed (I only listened to Raico’s audiobook Democracy in America where he, besides talking about de Tocqueville’s most famous work, he briefly discusses the work on the French Revolution. I will write a review about this nice and short audiobook soon).
According to de Tocqueville, and Raico seems to concur, it was a process of centralization of power that was going on for several hundreds of years. To me this seems counter-intuitive as there were so many advances made in France during the 18th century, especially in economics. In my experience, countries with big centralization of power are generally not famous for advancing the social sciences. But I have to defer my judgement at least until I have read this famous work. But I think it hardly can be denied that the French Revolution marks a new something, maybe a new era. According to F.J.P. Veale (In his Advance to Barbarism), the wars that followed between 1792 and 1815 were the first People’s wars, so called because people in arms were fighting rather than mercenaries. They were the beginning of the end of civilized warfare in Europe. K-L rightly called conscription an evil gift of the French Revolution. I think K-L is very in the right to put the French Revolution up there on the map as the starting point of leftism or modern leftism (a lot of leftism’s prejudices are older than the invention of writing). Of course, this insight is in itself not worthy of a whole book, much less a long book.
In leftism, L-K discusses some forerunners, leftists that theorized centuries before the French Revolution, so he obviously is aware that Leftism existed beforehand. It’s not like the French Revolution came from outer space and invaded earthlings and mocked their traditions. It’s even a truism to say that like any other historical event, it had its root in the past. It did not come out of nowhere. Nevertheless it constituted a break and catharsis (though these are now my own views and not necessarily those of K-L).

A big flaw of the book is that he deals with outrageous crimes of violence only when it fits his narrative. He overlooks the torture and other harm done by Catholic Rome or Monarchies. How he can ignore those glaring omissions is beyond me. Of course it demolishes his central theme that everything evil started with the leftism of the French Revolution, so it’s only natural that he would want to shed no light on it. Yet it is so big a hole in his theory that a child will be able to see through it. What was he trying to achieve? He must have been aware that such a perforated plot would never stand the test of time. Was he talking about eternal truths and honours seeking momentary fame? K-L was a rather big name in conservative circles back in his days in North America, so people seemed to have bought it after all. But the weakness of his position seemed to have correlated with the decline of his popularity in the decades afterward.

After de Sade and the French Revolution, K-L deals with Marx. For me, the only interesting point was that Marx was inspired by the bloodlust of the French Revolution and wanted to imitate it. Does he belong to the intelligent socialists with good intentions? I fear not. I also learned that Heinrich Heine knew him personally and labelled him a “godless self-god”. Apart from that there was nothing noteworthy that was new to me about Marx. It is telling that K-L completely shunned away from dealing with Marx’s economics. If I remember correctly, he even gives us some reason for it, but the truth is that he a) simply does not understand Marx’s economic theory and b) does not understand enough about real economics to corroborate or dismantle Marx’s (or Rodbertus’) theory.

What I found most interesting was K-L’s partition of liberalism into four schools (I’m not fully sure whether K-L invented it, but I haven’t seen it used elsewhere):

Pre-Liberalism: Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Shouldn’t the French economists like Turgot who preceded Smith or ideologists like Destutt de Tracy not also be in this phase?

Early Liberals: de Tocqueville, Acton and Jacob Burckhardt. This phase had primarily a cultural and political, not an economic character. I wonder whether Alexander von Humboldt shouldn’t also belong here.

Old Liberals: Mises and Bismarck. They were anticlerical and convinced that dogmatic beliefs automatically led to intolerance. Which of course, as Raico pointed out in his review, does in no way fit Mises, who was very, and rightly so, dogmatical (used here in its original, positive meaning).

Neo-Liberals: Wilhelm Röpke (Never heard). They were inspired by the Early Liberalists and differed from the Old Liberals by their greater sympathy for Christian values and their greater toleration for intervention and their leanings toward conservatism.

Maybe this classification could be extended to protoliberals (liberal writers of the first part of the 18th century or earlier) and postliberals (ancap’s).

K-L’s economic illiteracy however is shown in sentences like: “True, the evils engendered by a private monopoly are sometimes as great as those due to the state monopoly of socialism.” or “because if the rich man pays 50 cents and his less affluent fellow-citizen only 25 cents of his dollar in taxes, equality before the law becomes a sham”. Or by the fact that he calls Galbraith an economist of note (in the sense that his “economic” work was worthy of attention).

He claims that the empiricist Napoleon has invented the term ideologist. This is not true. The term has been coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy after landing on death row during the French Revolution. He tried to come up with a science that in future could prevent such atrocities as had happened to him and others.

My original review was longer but they sadly have a limit here, so ended:
Another reason why I stayed with the book till the end was that it was easily readable. It was far less demanding than some other books I’m reading. This was perfect for times when I didn’t feel my best because of my illness.
In the end K-L is an entertaining, arrogant, and as Raico probably rightly claimed, writer with a “lack of intelligence” and without analytical skills, but having some intuitive insights here and there. He’s somewhat of an imposter who tries desperately to be someone he’s not: an intellectual heavheavyweight like Mises. I wonder what their relation was. Maybe their relation was just another of K-L’s exaggerations.

[Monty Milne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had mixed feelings about this. It is very long – and the footnotes are even longer than the main text. It is often entertainingly written and I was never bored. I learned many things, and it provoked much thought. I don’t mind that it is highly opinionated – that’s part of the fun – but I do mind that quite a lot of it is demonstrably false and self contradictory. Sometimes the author makes a boldly assertive (and highly contentious) statement only to state the exact opposite on the very next page. This makes for exasperating reading. (An example would be when he argues that the French Revolution did not automatically lead to the Terror – only to argue the exact opposite shortly after).

There is also stuff like this: “Homosexuality is form of narcissism because it refuses to establish the (difficult) spiritual/psychological bridge with the opposite sex.” This is obviously false: if the only reason the homosexual can’t make the “bridge” is because he won’t have sex with a woman, then all relationships between the sexes are reduced to the sexual, which is absurd. On this basis, a homosexual would never be able to connect with his mother or his sister, so this is obviously nonsense. It suggests the author had no very profound relationships with anyone of the opposite sex if he thought it was all reducible to sex.

Some of his political analyses break down on closer examination. The author maintains that centralism is always Left and federalism is always Right. In the context of the Spanish Civil War, this puts the Carlists on the right, where they have traditionally belonged, because they argued for Spain’s regional traditions and identity in contrast to centralism. But it puts Franco, as a centralist, on the Left. As are all ultra nationalists, such as (of course) Nazis, and also Catalan and Basque separatists. This made my head hurt.

There are also difficulties when discussing interwar French politics. Having argued that the Right stands for freedom and variety, and the Left for slavery, collectivism and uniformity, the author then has the problem of the Action Francaise leader Charles Maurras – whom he acknowledges is a Rightist – but who ends up writing and acting in support of Nazism – which the author has defined as Leftist. At this point one throws up one’s hands in despair and is forced to admit that the author’s categories of Left and Right make no real sense at all, as he himself seems to acknowledge (for once), in the case of Maurras (although he can’t admit he is wrong, he just says the case of Maurras is “contradictory”).

There are some interesting and thought provoking discussions here. According to the author, Marx hated Proudhon and Lassalle and his hatred limited their influence on Leftist thought, and yet both might have taken socialism in more positive directions. Roosevelt was astonishingly ignorant and responsible for many disastrous foreign policy decisions; Mrs Roosevelt was eye openingly left wing. The Reformation was anti Humanist and against the Renaissance (I found this hard to swallow, but interesting to consider). Fourier’s Utopianism is given a detailed discussion – and shown to be clearly bonkers and accounting for the “raving madness” at the beginning of Bolshevism (I found this more convincing). And so on…

The trouble is that the author is often entangled by his own prejudices which contradict what he pretends to believe in. An example would be the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935: when a philosophically left regime (according to the author) like Mussolini’s invades a feudal monarchy like Ethiopia, you would expect him to be on the side of Haile Selassie: but he isn’t. This, to my mind, completely undercuts all his arguments, because the only reason I can think of why he would prefer the Italian Fascists to the Ethiopian monarchists is because he favours white men over black men. This is worse than mere racism: it is self contradictory and therefore intellectually bankrupt. Overall, this was interesting and at times enjoyable: but I don’t trust it.

[John Engelman · Rating 2 out of 5]

When commenting on a book like “Leftism: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse” by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn I would first of all like to point out that definitions are conventions. They are not absolute facts.

In Chapter 4, “Right and Left,” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn writes, “The right has to be associated with personal freedom…but the left is the advocate of opposite principles.”

If this is to stand as the description of the dichotomy of the difference between right and left, then certainly Nazism is a form of leftism. But what are we to call the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile? In September, 11 1973, Pinochet seized power in Chile in a military coup against the democratically elected left leaning government of President Salvador Allende.

Now, I know von Kuehnelt-Leddihn does not like democracy, but does he honestly think there was more freedom under a military dictatorship than under a democratically elected government?

Moreover, what does he mean by “freedom” and who is it for? There is freedom for aristocrats, like von Luehnelt-Leddihn under an aristocratic government, which is what he prefers to democracy, but what about everyone else?

Voltaire was given a sentence in the Bastille for criticizing the aristocratic government of France. Now that France has a democratic government, one is free to criticize the government. When Allende was president of Chile one was free to criticize him. When Pinochet seized power, one was not allowed to criticize him. If we are to classify Pinochet as a left wing leader, the description of “left” has no meaning.

I think a more useful description of the difference between left and right is that the left is committed to the ideal of equality, or at least more equality, and the right is committed to the ideal of inequality, whether it be of wealth, race, or religion.

The religious right wants Protestant Fundamentalism to become the de facto established religion in the United States. In essence, it wants a government that forces its values on the general population. It does not advocate freedom for homosexuals to live normal lives without discrimination. It does not advocate freedom for those who enjoy pornography, and for women who want to have abortions.

In “Mein Kampf,” “Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941 – 1944,” and in his speeches, Adolf Hitler did not condemn the aristocratic society and government that existed in Germany before Germany’s defeat in World War I; he condemned Marxism, Bolshevism, and the German Social Democratic Party.

The reason the Nazi Party deserves to be called “right wing” is because it advocated Aryan superiority, and the preservation of the German class system. Rich Germans supported the Nazi Party because they knew that if the Communists took power they would lose their wealth, and that this would not happen if the Nazis took power. When the Nazis did take power they did keep their wealth, unless they opposed the new regime, or were Jews.

The inclusion of the word “Socialist” in the term “National Socialist Party” was a cynical marketing ploy by Hitler. He knew that the German working class liked socialism, and he believed that if the Nazi Party pretended to be socialist, German workers would support it. Unfortunately, most German blue collar workers did. Nevertheless, Joseph Goebbels assured Germany’s rich that the Nazi Party had no designs on their riches.

Karl Marx and Marcuse are authentically on the left. De Sade was a degenerate who does not deserve to be called a leftist any more than Giacomo Casanova does.

Nevertheless, Marx and Marcuse have had little influence on American politics, despite the claims of conservatives.

A title and thesis that would be relevant to the role leftism has played in the United States could be, “Leftism: From the Old Testament Prophets to Thomas Jefferson and John Maynard Keynes."

The Old Testament Prophets blamed the decline and fall of King David’s Empire in part on the oppression of Israel’s poor by Israel’s rich.

The terms “left” and “right” were first used during the beginning of the French Revolution. When the National Assembly was viewed from the rear, delegates representing the King, the aristocracy, and the established Roman Catholic Church sat on the right. Those representing the commons sat on the left.

Thomas Jefferson supported the French Revolution until the execution of the king, and the reign of terror.

John Maynard Keynes inspired the economic reforms that enabled the United States to recover from the Great Depression under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. The reforms of the Roosevelt administration also shifted wealth, power, and prestige from the business community to the government. That is why reactionaries like Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn dislike them. Finally, New Deal reforms created in the United States the largest and richest middle class in history. That is why Keynesian remains popular with the voters, and why Republican politicians do not dare attack them directly. Instead they raise the national debt in an effort to make New Deal reforms unaffordable.

[Casimir de Bonneval · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, densest book I have ever read. Can't wait to read the Revisited edition!

[Almir Santos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A complete work about Leftism. Every inch of it is thoroughly analyzed, from the very beginning of its ideas with the church's reforms, going through America's Independence War, the French Revolution, WWI, Russian Revolution, WWII, and ending up at present state of things, with the new left and the unavoiding totalitarian democracies.

The man - Kuehnelt-Leddihn -, as Mises rightfully defines, was a walking encyclopedia. For about everything that he said was a footnote with a reference to a primary source or something very close to it (half the book is footnotes, by the way), leaving very small a room to challenge his interpretations.

Definitely a must-read for everyone who wants to start figuring out the reality-puzzle in which we live today.

[Ethan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book comes to different conclusions than others on similar topics. His thesis was antithetical to many deeply held beliefs in democratic societies, but his arguments are very compelling. A very interesting and thought provoking book.

[Vini Vince · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very interesting book BUT there is a major problem: the exaggerations in some claims made by the author and the shortcuts taken to produce those exaggerations. The book is still worth the read for its analysis of historical and political events, but one has to make sure to read this work keeping in mind the essence of Kuehnelt-Leddihn's very opinionated line.

Sometime K-L is completely dishonest and seems to take his readers for idiots that are not capable of checking his notes and references(Raico says the same in his review that I link at the end of my own modest one). I will give one example of his manners. In the chapter XVI, he writes:

"In France a large sector of the collaborators were recruited from the left, embracing ideologies which were "national- leftist" in character. Neither Laval nor Darnand, Deat or Doriot belonged to the "right." The Germans suspended Le Figaro, the conservative daily, and supported the leftist paper L'Oeuvre. The French Communists fully collaborated with the Nazis between 1939 and 1941. De Gaulle, who went into opposition, had belonged to the Action Francaise. Other French rightists and conservatives fled France (Henri de Kerillis was one of them), but there were also men of the French right who stayed without collaborating and others again who (rightly or mistakenly) considered it their duty to protect whatever remained of France as well as they could. Among them was Marshal Petain whose patriotism should no more be questioned than General Weygand's. Petain had negotiated with Churchill an agreement which (in order not to irritate de Gaulle) Downing Street tried to deny, but we have documentary evidence of its existence.179"

Then report to this note:
"179 Cf. Louis Rougier, Les Accords Petain-Churchill, Histoire d'une mission (Montreal: Beauchemin, 1945). As was to be expected, nobody from Britain's Foreign Office dared testify at the Petain trial that, behind De Gaulle's back, Britain had made secret agreements with the Marshal."

In the first part of the excerpt K-L tries to make believe (most of the book is like that) that most collaborators were from the left (some definitely were from) and that the Germans were helping left papers against the right wing ones (giving only two example serving his thesis)... one only has to know which were the major collaborationist papers in Paris at the time, I will just cite "Je Suis Partout" as a clue those who want to check some of the main ones... and yes, JSP never was on the left and most of its writer used to be in the Action Francaise, like De Gaulle that K-L cites as if being in that extreme right organisation would prevent anyone to collaborate.

Later, regarding the supposed Petain-Churchill agreement, K-L refers us to an obscure book that is a basic apology of Petain written by a French engineer who was an amateurish historian in Alger. But what was this agreement between Churchill and Petain? What did they agreed to? K-L won't say and for a reason: there never was any agreement, just mere talks but nothing signed and documents found after the war were faked.

This is one example on THOUSANDS. After seeing many such examples, ones completely give up on checking every K-L's claims... because it's not serious historical work, this is closer to a pamphlet.

Finally, I have here the devastating review from Raico where he summed up the book's problems, it's titled "Conservative Myths In History" : http://www.rothbard.it/articles/liber...

[Andre · Rating 3 out of 5]

I seriously wonder what the author would think of WEF and Davos.

I picked up this book to try to gain a better understanding of "the Left." That gets thrown around a lot in casual conversation as if it means something, so me being me I wanted to understand what it means even if those I'm conversing with don't.

After hundreds of pages with long winded historical explanations and extensive end notes the best (and it's pretty good) I got was "by leftism we mean that attitude, usually rationalized and systematized into an ideology, which stands on identitarianism, egalitarianism, collectivism, statism, centralization, majoritism, materialism, coercion." Also "We mean movements which are antipersonal, antidiversity, antiprivilege, antispiritual, antifederalist and, indeed, antiliberal even if they misuse the liberal label."

So Leftism isn't an *-ism on it's own, but is a loose collection of *-isms that all have certain tendencies. However this definition is so broad as to not be much use in casual or technical conversation. And you also have to take into account how much Left someone actually is. I don't mean how far Left, but how *much*. 1/4 Left, 1/2, thoroughly committed? And which particular flavour of Left? Not all Leftish parties are entirely the same.

So after reading this I have a much greater appreciation for how broad and deep "the Left" can be I also come away with an even stronger conviction that talking about the political spectrum in terms of Left/Right is next to useless. The world is far to complex to be able to compress things meaningfully down to 1 linear dimension.

[Nichita Damian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Socialism as a system of thought rooted in Christian heresy is a very valuable intellectual discovery. Also the fact that communism, national-socialism, fascism, all kind of collective, statist way of social arrangement is secularized monasticism, a perversion of the Christian manifestation. Ask a communist how he imagines a communist utopia: him, alone with his books, writing poetry, working just as much as he need to, having free food, free shelter. All he needs is a roof above his head, food in his belly and time to meditate. He just described the Monastery.

[Rafael Abreu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sensacional.

[Илья Дескулин · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading devoted and intelligent monarchists is always refreshing. Kuehnelt-Leddihn distinguishes political Left and Right in the way I have never thought of. His knowledge of history is also astonishing. However, it seems to me this honorable "arch-liberal" fails to realize that liberalism in the broad sense (individual freedom, toleration, questioning dogmas) brings to power exactly those people who destroy everything which Kuehnelt-Leddihn cherishes: Christianity, monarchy and eventually liberalism itself.

[Juni Pontes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Livro denso, repleto de referências, que ilumina vários pontos obscuros do ensino de História ministrado nos nossos dias. Como por exemplo: o que se conta sobre a Revolução Francesa nas escolas e a realidade fartamente documentada de injustiças, violações e extermínio.
No entanto, tendo em vista que a pesquisa para a confecção desse livro foi ampla e somando-se a isso a grande bagagem intelectual do autor, o resultado é que o livro está repleto de notas, que muitas vezes são imensas, o que torna a leitura mais lenta, menos fluída. Mas nada disso deveria impedir alguém de ter a experiência enriquecedora de ler "Leftism: From Sade and Marx to Hitler anda Marcuse".
Por fim, recomendo este livro para os amantes da História, que nunca mais verão o passado com os mesmos olhos.

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Dense book, full of references, which illuminates several obscure points of the teaching of History taught today. For example: what is said about the French Revolution in schools and the abundantly documented reality of injustice, violations and extermination.
However, considering that the research for the production of this book was extensive, besides the great intellectual background of the author, the result is that the book is full of notes, which are often immense, which makes the slower, less fluid reading. But none of this should stop anyone from having the enriching experience of reading "Leftism: From Sade and Marx to Hitler walks Marcuse".
Finally, I recommend this book to History lovers, who will never see the past with the same eyes again.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amaziNG, erudite, facinating book