To a casual observer, the British writer and thinker Anthony Ludovici, one of the most politically incorrect Europeans of the twentieth century, was a paradox. After all, he had in the Jewish Nietzschean Dr. Oscar Levy a close friend, mentor, and patron—and yet Ludovici had toured Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s and found much to admire there. Ludovici’s most loyal friends, he recognized, were all women—and yet, as an extreme antifeminist who wanted women to remain in the home, he could describe academic knowledge gained by women as “so much trash.” His grandparents were natives of France, Germany, and the Basque country—and yet he repeatedly attacked human outbreeding, even between Europeans from different countries.1
But Ludovici was not a paradox. The man’s detailed arguments about race, eugenics, feminism, and many other subjects always ran along strictly logical lines, just as a train holds to its rails. Ludovici had the kind of objectivity and intellectual honesty that puzzles egotists, and he didn’t care if his conclusions wounded his own or anyone else’s self-esteem. For example, when he lectured he had to explain patiently to audiences that, yes, he did find modern people on the whole to be physically botched—but that he included himself in this stricture.
Today, however, more than three decades after his death in 1971, Anthony Ludovici—the author of more than thirty books on subjects as varied as aristocracy, Nietzsche, eugenics, women, religion, and art—has been all but forgotten by the English-speaking world. Thankfully, there are signs on the horizon that after his period of oblivion Ludovici is beginning to make a small comeback, and a few friends and enemies have in recent years rediscovered his work.
Despite being one of the best propagandists of old-style conservatism, Anthony Ludovici currently receives most of his attention from historians of “fascism” and “racism.” The leftist historian Richard Griffiths has documented the role of Ludovici (and many other patriotic Englishmen) in the struggle to prevent Britain from going to war with Germany in the 1930s.2 Another hostile critic, Dan Stone, whose interests are the predictable trio of eugenics, fascism, and the Holocaust, has taken a more general look at the man’s life and ideas, noting that Ludovici’s “career trajectory” plummeted from his heyday in the 1920s and 1930s to a low point in the egalitarian 1960s, downgrading him “from a radical, provocative but mainstream thinker to an intellectual outcast.”3 Despite Dan Stone’s constant sneering, he recognizes that, if Ludovici had been prepared to compromise his frank opinions on race and politics, he might have become one of the leading writers of his time.4 More positively, a friend of the conservative English journalist Auberon Waugh, a latter-day Mencken who died in 2001, told me that Waugh admired Ludovici’s writings.
Ludovici should win more friends from The Lost Philosopher, the recently published anthology of his best work (s, which should be followed this year by his autobiography, a book that, if the terms of his will had been followed, would have been published thirty years ago. A few of Ludovici’s hottest works are available on the Internet. A website honoring Ludovici and his work now offers full-text versions of several of his out-of-print books, articles, reviews, and poetry (for more on Ludovici, visit: http://www.anthonymludovici.com).
Always looking to the past, Ludovici reminded us that for the ancient Hindus the creation of a new hereditary elite required no less than seven generations. But can we in the West’s crumbling civilization wait for seven generations, or about two hundred years, to experience this elite?
At least in this respect, Ludovici’s views now seem antiquated. His approval of eugenics based on numerous offspring from appropriate marriages would have seemed familiar to Plato. But recent advances in genetic engineering have thrown up radically different prospects for man’s biological future. At the current rate of discoveries in genetics, we shan’t have to wait two hundred years for signs of evolutionary progress.
Neverthless, Ludovici was right to stress that human groups should keep apart. For mankind to evolve into different species and maximize our descendants’ chances of surviving in a pitiless universe, modern nations must splinter into a host of micronations—“ethnostates,” as Wilmot Robertson calls them. Regrettably, for the past century or two our roads, railways, and now airways have all colluded to mix people together.
But we might soon find that artificial intelligence will match and even surpass mankind’s accomplishments. Who knows, before the century is out intelligent machines may be so concerned by the stupidity and poor memories of even the brightest members of Homo sapiens that they will discuss denying us the vote—in our own best interests, of course.
For the time being, though, Ludovici’s typically candid analysis has detected a flaw in the psychology of northern Europeans which means that the end of Western democracy is not yet in sight:
The Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon races have little of the seer in their constitution. They are better at meeting and enduring disaster than at foreseeing and forestalling it…. They are completely wedded to the doctrine of experience…. It is so with democracy and it will be so with ochlocracy. These things have been tried before. They are known and have proved fatal to the civilization that tried them. But what is that to the Teuton and Anglo-Saxon? He has no personal experience of their evils and is therefore determined to stake the fate of his civilization on trying them.41
Such candor makes Ludovici an ever-stimulating writer and, for those who hold with Spengler that “optimism is cowardice,” a great prophet.
1. For a general overview of Ludovici’s work and ideas, see "British subscriber," “Anthony Ludovici: Conservative from Another World,” Instauration 14.11, 1989, pp. 6–9. (http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Ludovici/index.html)
2. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-39 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism, 1939–40 (London: Constable, 1998).
3. Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p. 59.
4. . Stone, op. cit., p. 61.
5. David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 1890-1914: The Growth of a Reputation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 1970; Marita Knödgen, Die frühe politische Nietzsche-Rezeption in Großbritannien, 1895–1914: Eine Studie zur deutsch-britischen Kulturgeschichte, dissertation, Fachbereich III, Universität Trier, 1997, pp. 60–67.
6. The poet Coventry Patmore described 1867 as “The year of the great crime / When the false English nobles and their Jew, / By God demented, slew / The trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong.”
7. The Quest of Human Quality: How to Rear Leaders (London: Rider, 1952), p. 46.
8. The Specious Origins of Liberalism: The Genesis of a Delusion (London: Britons, 1967), p. 27.
9. William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elites (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), p. 177.
10. For an historical survey of opponents of democracy, from Plato down to the twentieth century, see Alexander Jacob, Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the Early Twentieth Century (Lanham: University Press of America, 2001).
11. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001), pp. 145–47.
12. The Choice of a Mate (London: John Lane, 1935), p. 52.
13. Ibid.; The Quest of Human Quality, p. 151.
14. A Defence of Aristocracy: A Text-Book for Tories (London: Constable, 2nd edition, 1933), pp. 300–1; The Quest of Human Quality, pp. 152–8.
15. A Defence of Aristocracy, pp. 301–2; The Quest of Human Quality, pp. 161–2.
16. A Defence of Aristocracy, pp. 302–6; The Quest of Human Quality, pp. 164–5.
17. A Defence of Aristocracy, p. 307; The Quest of Human Quality, p. 166.
18. A Defence of Aristocracy, pp. 334–8.
19. A Defence of Aristocracy, pp. 331–2; The Choice of a Mate, pp. 73–85; The Quest of Human Quality, pp. 161–2.
20. The Quest of Human Quality, p. 98.
21. The Choice of a Mate, p. 118.
22. See Hans F. K. Günther’s essay, “Die Notwendigkeit einer Führungsschicht für den Staat,” in Vererbung und Umwelt (Pähl: Franz von Bebenburg, 4th edition, 1967).
23. Compare, perhaps, the late Princess of Wales’s own observation that her brain was “the size of a pea,” and the observation of many others that her mind, whatever its size, was not attuned to reality.
24. The Specious Origins of Liberalism, pp. 140–2; cf. Robert Lacey, Aristocrats (London: Hutchinson and the British Broadcasting Corporation, 1983), pp. 124–6.
25. The Specious Origins of Liberalism, pp. 142–5.
26. A Defence of Aristocracy, pp. 367-8; The Quest of Human Quality, pp. 204–5.
27. “The Essentials of Good Government,” Part IV, The South African Observer 9.7, February 1964, p. 10. For further discussions by Ludovici of Jewish influences in anthropology and on immigration policy, see also “The Black Invasion of Britain,” The South African Observer 1.3, July 1955, p. 5; “The Importance of Racial Integrity,” Part XVIII, The South African Observer 5.5, September 1959, p. 12; and Cobbett [Anthony M. Ludovici], Jews, and the Jews in England (London: Boswell, 1938), pp. 109–10.
28. Lacey, op. cit., p. 178. However, Lacey also quotes Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who, if she had to liken aristocrats to any other social group, declares that “it would be to the Jews—and also to the Mafia because, she says, ‘they only marry their own kind, and they always stick together.’” Op. cit., pp. 24–5.
29. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition (Cambridge, Eng.: The Belknap Press, 1980), p. 38.
30. The Choice of a Mate, pp. ix, 302.
31. See, for example, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and J. W. Jamieson, Family, Kin and City-State: The Racial Underpinning of Ancient Greece and Rome (Washington, DC: Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1999). Also John W. Richards: “Early Indo-Aryan Social Structure,” Mankind Quarterly 19, 1978–9, pp. 129–48; “Family and Social Structure in Early Rome,” Mankind Quarterly 19, 1978–9, pp. 349–62; “The Evolution of the Spartan Social System,” Mankind Quarterly 20, 1979–80, pp. 31–43; “Sacral Kings of Iran,” Mankind Quarterly 20, 1979–80, pp. 143–60; and “The Celtic Social System,” Mankind Quarterly 21, 1980–81, pp. 71–95.
32. John V. Day, Indo-European Origins: The Anthropological Evidence (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 2001).
33. Raymond B. Cattell, A New Morality from Science: Beyondism (New York: Pergamon Press, 1972), p. 211.
34. A Defence of Conservatism: A Further Text-Book for Tories (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927), p. 39.
35. Lacey, op. cit., p. 21.
36. Hans Christian Andersen, “Everything in the Right Place.” (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Bluffs/8336/aesop/everything.html)
37. Günther, op. cit., p. 99. See also Alain de Benoist’s essay, ”Pour une Nouvelle Aristocratie,” in La Ligne de Mire: Discours aux Citoyens Européens; I. 1972-1987 (Arpajon: Éditions du Labyrinthe, 1995), pp. 50–1.
38. Nick Griffin, “Democracy and British Freedom” (http://www.bnp.org.uk/articles/article79.html).
39. A. T. Culwick, Who Shall Inherit the Earth? (Capetown: Nasionale Boekhandel Beperk, 1969), pp. 100–12.
40. David Tribe, The Rise of the Mediocracy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975), pp. 29–30.
41. Woman: A Vindication (London: Constable, 2nd edition, 1929), pp. 361–2.