Aurel Kolnai's The War against the West remains one of the most insightful analyses of Nazi thought ever written. In this edited collection published 80 years after the original book, a team of distinguished scholars reassess this classic text and also consider its continued relevance to contemporary politics.
Wolfgang Bialas, self-employed lecturer and translator, editor of Aurel Kolnai, Der Krieg gegen den Westen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015) and author of Moralische Ordnungen des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).
1. Introduction - Wolfgang Bialas Part I - Topics addressed in Kolnai's The War against the West 2. Aurel Kolnai's comparison of Nazism and Communism in the context of the contemporary comparison of dictatorships - Uwe Backes 3. Nazism, Christianity and the development of political religion theory in Kolnai's War against the West - Richard Steigmann-Gall 4. Aurel Kolnai's reflections on anti-Semitism in contemporary context - Micha Brumlik Part II - Comparing Kolnai with contemporary attempts of coming to terms with Nazism 5. Aurel Kolnai's The War against the West and British attempts to understand Nazism before the war - Dan Stone 6. Aurel Kolnai's The War Against the West and the American debate on Nazism - Michaela Hoenicke Moore 7. Aurel Kolnai and Franz Neumann: Normative critique and structural analysis of National Socialism - Rolf Zimmermann Part III - Kolnai's work and the reception of The War against the West 8. Aurel Kolnai's The War against the West contextualized - Lee Congdon 9. Kolnai's The War against the West from a present-day scholarly perspective on Nazism - Wolfgang Bialas 10. Nazi seual politics: Aurel Kolnai on the threat of re-primitivism - Graham McAleer Part IV - Kolnai's political and moral philosophy 11. Kolnai's War against Carl Schmitt's War: The war of wars - Zoltán Balázs 12. The viability of Kolnai's moral phenomenology: moral awareness and anti-Utopianism - Chris Bessemans 13. Kolnai's War against the West revisited in light of his anti-Utopianism and his concrete conservativism - Andrew S. Cunningham