Books by Aurel Kolnai

Ethics, Value, and Reality is a collection of essays written after Kolnai settled in England in 1955

A collection of essays written after the author settled in England in 1955.

The political memoirs of 20th-century philosopher Aurel Kolnai. He recounts his life, from his childhood in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his education in Germany and his early professional life in pre-war Vienna to his exile in the USA and Canada, before settling in Great Britain.

We are currently witnessing an increasingly influential counterrevolution in political theory, evident in the dialectical return to classical political science pioneered most prominently by Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. In this context, the work of the relatively unknown Aurel Kolnai is of great importance. Kolnai was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century to place the restoration of common-sense evaluation and philosophical realism at the center of his philosophical and political itinerary. In this volume, Daniel J. Mahoney presents Kolnai's major writings in political philosophy, writings that explore - in ways that are diverse but complementary - Kolnai's critique of progressive or egalitarian democracy. The title essay contains Kolnai's fullest account of the limits of liberty understood as emancipation from traditional, natural, or divine restraints. 'The Utopian Mind,' a pr_cis of Kolnai's critique of utopianism in a posthumous book of the same title, appears here for the first time. 'Conservative and Revolutionary Ethos,' Kolnai's remarkable 1972 essay comparing conservative and revolutionary approaches to political life, appears for the first time in English translation. The volume also includes a critically sympathetic evaluation of Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics and an incisive criticism of Jacques Maritain's efforts to synthesize Christian orthodoxy and progressive politics. Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy is a searching critique of political utopianism, as well as a pathbreaking articulation of conservative constitutionalism as the true support for human liberty properly understood. It is a major contribution to Christian and conservative political reflection in our time.

In On Disgust, pioneering philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1905-1973) draws on Husserl's phenomenological method to examine the experience of disgust. He distinguishes disgust from other emotions of aversion such as fear and contempt and shows how it relates to the five senses. Kolnai argues that disgust is never related to inorganic or nonbiological matter, and that its arousal by moral objects has an underlying similarity with its arousal by organic material: a particular combination of life and death. This book also includes an article published shortly before the author's death titled "The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust, and Hatred."