Thomas Molnar, RIP

Thomas Molnar was one of the great ones alongside Dietrich von Hildebrand, Eric Kuehnelt-Leddihn and John Lukacs. Here's the link to the Society of Bonaventure where we found it, here.

Given the scale of his achievement, I can only touch on one aspect of Molnar’s thought. He was a preeminent chronicler and analyst of the ideological trends and deceptions of the current age. In conducting his dissections, Thomas Molnar drew primarily on Thomism, on the thought of the French right and on his immense knowledge of European literature, philosophy and history. In The Two Faces of American Foreign Policy (1962) he described the dangers of the recurrent American temptation to ideology in foreign affairs forty years before the march into Iraq squarely raised this issue. In The Decline of the Intellectual (1961; perhaps his magnum opus), he analyzed “global ideology” decades before globalization became the mantra of every corporation and government on earth. In The Counter-Revolution (1969) we find an extremely perceptive (and harshly critical) analysis of Vatican II and the papacy of Paul VI. Molnar had reached the latter conclusion only after some hesitation: in Ecumenism or New Reformation?(1968) he had still recommended rallying to the papacy as the cure for the present disorders in the Church.

Later, Molnar spelled out the dangers of the Neuhaus/Novak/First Things ideology 25 years before the bankruptcy of the “neocon” movement’s political, economic and ecclesiastical policies. Need I say that he likewise clearly foresaw the ignominious end of the National Review crowd as a claque of the establishment they had once opposed? Indeed, Molnar, generally speaking, was a critic of the “American conservative movement” and considered it a failure.