ABSTRACT
Modern anti-Semitism reacts to the crisis-ridden development of capitalist modernity: to industrialisation, modernisation, the loss of obligatory views on life and the reification of human relationships. Some scientists and writers, although they were only small in number, reacted to the Nazi world view, including its anti-Semitism, at an early stage – among them was Aurel Kolnai, an author who has been rediscovered much too late. In Canada, Ingrid Vendrell Ferran writes, Kolnai became friends in the 1950s with the Spanish philosopher Leopoldo Palacios, who enabled the publication in Spain of two books by Kolnai in 1952: Errores del Anticomunismo and La Divinizacion y la suma Esclavitud del Hombre. Aurel Kolnai’s monumental work, The War Against the West, was published in 1938 and offers nothing more and nothing less than a comprehensive, almost encyclopaedic, description of National Socialist ideology in all its nuances and diverse origins.
