Thomas Molnar (1921–2010)
Hungarian-born American Catholic philosopher; Brooklyn College emeritus; longtime National Review contributor; traditionalist Catholic theorist; author of The Counter-Revolution (1969), Authority and Its Enemies (1976), and Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred (1988); a parallel figure to Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn inside the postwar *NR* circle’s continental-Catholic register; defender of Portuguese colonialism in NR during the decolonization era.
Why He Matters Here
Per Iberian Vistas, Molnar (alongside Kuehnelt-Leddihn) was one of the NR’s European-correspondent voices defending Salazar’s Portuguese colonial project in Africa as civilization-defense:
“[The civilizing force of Western colonialism manifested] a moral vigor, [and] an undivided loyalty to a cause… In the western world, as far as I can see, there are only three such nations possessing this stuff: the Americans, the Portuguese, and the South Africans.” (1966)
Molnar’s grouping of the U.S. with Portugal and apartheid-era South Africa is the wiki’s cleanest example of the anti-decolonization-as-civilization-defense logic that ran through the postwar Catholic NR circle.
Molnar’s later book The Counter-Revolution (1969) is — as Tait’s Conservatives or Counterrevolutionaries? effectively notes — an early explicit articulation of the counterrevolutionary self-understanding the wiki tracks as central to the Counterrevolution frame. Molnar argued that “counter-revolution” was not a reactionary refusal but a positive substantive politics aimed at restoring proper hierarchical order. The argument is structurally close to the contemporary postliberal position, sixty years early.
Cross-References
- Iberian Vistas
- António Salazar
- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn — parallel NR continental-Catholic voice
- Counterrevolution
- National Review
- Catholic Integralism
Stub.