Aurel Kolnai became a philosopher of hatred by necessity. By his own description, he was a sensitive child, particularly attentive to the value of common and ordinary things. But this was the 1920s and urgent issues were at hand. For Kolnai, philosophy was always in dialogue with what was really happening in the world of history. Kolnai, with his affection for the given and the ordinary, rebelled against fascism as much as he did against communism. In it, he saw an ideology that was opposed to human reason and to human dignity. He was one of the earliest intellectual critics of this new philosophy, arguing that it was an assault on all that was good in “the West.”

Unfortunately, Kolnai found himself somewhat lonely in his opposition to radicalism.