There are occasions, though only rarely, when a philosopher, historian or writer articulates a thesis that contradicts the accepted orthodoxies of his time. Rejected by his contemporaries as lacking credibility, it is only vindicated by events long after his death. Such exceptional instances of prescience, based on a deeper insight than was attained by rivals, may reasonably be described as prophetic.

The latest example of this phenomenon is the Austrian political scientist and polymath Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose insistence that democracy leads ultimately to tyranny dismayed postwar intellectual society and caused him, despite his undoubted brilliance, to fall behind his friends Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in popularity. Today, the evident crisis of democracy in Europe and North America has rehabilitated Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s thinking, as liberal, globalist assumptions seem increasingly threadbare and what were once regarded as basic axioms of democracy are denounced as ‘populism’. To this turbulence in the ideological market, the response of the clever money deserves to be: ‘Sell Fukuyama, buy Kuehnelt-Leddihn.’

Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (‘Ritter’ being the Austrian title of hereditary knight, broadly equivalent to an English baronet) was born on 31 July 1909 at Tobelbad, in Styria, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He remained, in spirit, a subject of that empire until his death in 1999. His nostalgia for the comfortable, multinational and highly cultured ambience of Habsburg rule equalled that of Joseph Roth, who sublimated his regret into his novel The Radetzky March, and Stefan Zweig, who did the same in his memoir Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), both coincidentally Jewish. Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Catholicism was the axis around which his ideas rotated, while politically he was a lifelong Legitimist; ‘habsburgstreue’, in the terminology of his fellow countrymen.

What aroused the interest of his contemporaries was not initially his ideas, but his intellectual and linguistic precocity. He was, by general consent, acknowledged to be both the last great polymath and polyglot in Europe. Educated by the Jesuits (he later described himself as ‘Jesuit by birth’), at the age of 16 he became Vienna correspondent of the Spectator, the first of many journals to which he would contribute in the course of his prolific writing career; this despite the fact that English was his fourth language (after German, Latin and Hungarian).

Kuehnelt-Leddihn became an exceptional linguist: he credited himself with speaking eight languages and able to read 11 others, but that calculation is based on his own strict interpretation of what constituted knowledge of a language; those who knew him elevated that figure to 17. He claimed that his main purpose in learning a language was to be able to read it, rather than to converse, in order to further his research and accumulate the prodigious knowledge that infused his work with an authority that confounded his critics.

The fact that he was born and died in Austria might give a misleading impression: in the course of his life he visited more than 75 countries, including the impenetrable Soviet Union in 1930-31, and all 50 states of America, plus Puerto Rico. His post-school educational formation was at the University of Vienna (civil and canon law) and the University of Budapest (MA in economics, studying under Pál Teleki, and a doctorate in political science). He then returned to Vienna, where he studied theology. In 1935 he travelled to England and taught for a year at Beaumont, the Jesuit public school, then moved to the United States, where he taught at Georgetown University (1937-38), and St Peter’s College, New Jersey (head of the History and Sociology Department, 1938-43), both Jesuit institutions.

After Pearl Harbor, the US government, having interned its Japanese citizens, was desperate to find Japanese speakers to teach government and military personnel. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, being fluent in Japanese, was established in that role at Fordham University (1942-43) before moving to Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia (1943-47). An exile from Nazi-occupied Austria, he remained in America until after the War, later returning home. He married Countess Christiane von Goess and had three children.

His written output was prodigious; but three books stand out above the rest of his work: The Menace of the Herd (1943); Leftism (1974) and its revised version, Leftism Revisited (1990); and his acknowledged masterpiece Liberty or Equality (1952).

Many thought that Kuehnelt-Leddihn was being whimsical when he described himself as an ‘extreme conservative arch-liberal’: in fact, this terminology reflected his fastidious concern, as an accomplished linguist, for the precise and original meaning of words. Despite his identifiably reactionary views, he never ceased to describe himself as a liberal, in the authentic sense of the term. It was in this context that Kuehnelt-Leddihn launched his attack on democracy, culminating in his magnum opus Liberty or Equality. The book’s title deliberately referenced the French Revolution, which Kuehnelt-Leddihn identified as a product of the Enlightenment and the progenitor of the symbiotic totalitarianisms of the 20th century, Nazism and Communism.

He was a fierce critic of Woodrow Wilson, who, ignorant of European history and culture, reordered Europe arbitrarily in a fashion that led to Hitler and the Third Reich. As a meticulous researcher, he identified George David Herron, an influential aide to Wilson, as the main culprit who ‘helped dig the grave of Old Europe’. Americans did not understand Europe and Franklin D Roosevelt demonstrated the fact again at Yalta, repeating the mistakes of Versailles and Trianon.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn was a Catholic and monarchist who believed that same religion and system of government were the best guarantors of human liberty and happiness. He detected the seeds of modern European problems as far back as the Hussites. He did not indulge in the highly technical language favoured by modern writers on philosophy: the closest he came to engaging in that kind of terminology was in his concept of the Scita – the political, economic, psychological and other knowledge possessed by the masses – and the Scienda – the knowledge in those fields that is required to reach logical, rational and moral conclusions. The problem was that the gap between the two was increasingly widening, making democratic governments incapable of dealing with conditions in a modern, technological mass society.

A particular feature of Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s writing is his use of copious footnotes, reflecting the depth of the research in which he engaged before putting pen to paper, while also drawing upon his own polymath resources. More than with any other writer, his footnotes are essential, even intrinsic, to the text. They also reflect the fact that an apparently challenging argument advanced in the text can be seen to be supported by hard facts. Kuehnelt-Leddihn influenced many of his contemporaries, notably Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr, Friedrich A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Pope Benedict XVI. Buckley described him as ‘the world’s most fascinating man’.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s basic thesis was that liberty and equality were mutually exclusive: nations and societies had to choose one or the other. ‘Democracy’, originally a competent governing system for Greek city states, but unsuited to the mass societies of modern Europe, had become synonymous with equality, yet egalitarianism could only be enforced by tyranny. In Leftism Revisited he pointed out (drawing heavily, as he routinely did, on the works of Alexis de Tocqueville) that America’s Founding Fathers ‘despised democracy’. He insisted that ‘the foundations of the American republic are aristocratic and Whiggish with an anti-monarchic bent’.

In his early years he was particularly engaged in analysing the phenomenon of Nazism. Kuehnelt-Leddihn dismissed the propensity of most commentators to allocate Nazism to the right wing of politics – an incongruous position for a movement that called itself National Socialism. He cited a statement by Joseph Goebbels, writing in 1931 in Der Angriff: ‘The NSDAP is the German Left. We despise bourgeois nationalism.’ Since Marxism espoused internationalism, for the purpose of globalising the revolution, nationalism became identified with the Right; yet when it had first become a serious force in Europe, during the uprisings of 1848 that sought to topple centuries-old thrones, it had clearly been identified with ‘progressive’ ideas.

In fact, the chief driver of the notion that Nazism was right-wing was the need for the Left, especially Marxism and its principal exponent the Soviet Union, to disown the symbiotic connection, which Kuehnelt-Leddihn detected and exposed, between the twin totalitarianisms of Nazism and Communism. He traced the descent of Nazism from the French Revolution and Jacobinism, with its obsession with ‘égalité’, materialism and centralisation. In Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s thesis, Nazism, Fascism, radical Liberalism, Communism, Socialism and even Anarchism all shared a common parentage in the French Revolution and were all essentially democratic movements, in the purest sense of the term, since their original impetus depended on mobilising the masses to destroy all ancient forms of society.

Once the masses had overthrown the original social order, the risk was that, if they became disillusioned with the new dispensation, they might rise up to destroy that, too; hence the need for total conformity – in Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s terminology, ‘herdism’. ‘The true “herdist”,’ he wrote in The Menace of the Herd, ‘will carefully avoid acting or thinking originally, in order not to destroy the uniformity which is so dear to him, and he is also ready to rise immediately against anybody who dares to act independently and thus destroy the sacred unity of the uniform group to which he belongs’. That is a prefiguring of ‘cancel culture’ and the ‘no-platform’ principle dominating so many university campuses today.

The core issue, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn indicated in the title of his greatest work, was equality. Egalitarianism was the toxic aspiration that militated against liberty, individual expression and personal happiness, because it was alien to the natural order of things and therefore could only be imposed by coercion. ‘Liberty and equality are in essence contradictory,’ he wrote in his magnum opus. In the same work he observed: ‘Even 51 per cent of a nation can establish a totalitarian and dictatorial regime, suppress minorities, and still remain democratic; there is, as we have said, little doubt that the American Congress and the French Chambre have a power over their respective nations which would rouse the envy of a Louis XIV or a George III were they alive today.’

In making that point, Kuehnelt-Leddihn understated his case: the current British government gained 412 seats at the last general election, giving it a majority of 174, by securing just 33.7 per cent of the vote – far less than his ‘51 per cent of a nation’. Yet it is proposing to pass legislation antipathetic to freedom of expression. Kuehnelt-Leddihn saw the secret ballot as, in itself, tending to promote tyranny.

In the same work, he stated that ‘the demo-republican government nonetheless derives its authority from anonymous, secretly-voting masses on a purely numerical basis. It is even impossible to trace the empowering individual; and thus we get what French authors call the “cult of irresponsibility”. The electees, rejecting all responsibility, can easily blame the electors for their “mandates”. Thus we get today the immoral idea of making whole nations responsible for the misdeeds of their rulers, regardless of whether these had majority support or not. This collective judgement of moral acts is one of the great maladies of the democratic age.’

On close examination, certain tensions, verging on contradictions, can be detected in Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s arguments. However, in denouncing the secret ballot, one of the chief totems of democracy, he demonstrated the consistency of his thesis: just as the individual is deprived of his rights by the tyranny of the masses, he is congruently deprived of his responsibilities by the anonymity of the vote. A favourite term employed by Kuehnelt-Leddihn was ochlocracy – meaning the most debased form of democracy, mob rule tyrannising over those in governance – which had no legitimacy, whereas he conceded the validity of democracy in certain instances, e.g. in ancient republics such as Switzerland, or in the early United States.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s preferred alternative was monarchy: ‘The monarch is a responsible person. The fact that a monarch is responsible “to God alone”, rather than to an assembly or a popular majority, is rather shocking to an agnostic mind; but while God cannot be fooled, the masses can.’ His ideal social order was Christendom, as experienced in the Middle Ages. He did not see modern ills as dating only from the French Revolution, but, successively, from the Reformation and the Enlightenment, too. He traced the genesis of Nazism from Protestantism, as practised historically in Germany, and also from the Hussites.

That was not a unique interpretation, other conservative and reactionary philosophers had traced a similar ideological genealogy. Where Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s interpretation of the genesis of modern totalitarianism was more unique was in the pivotal role in the French Revolution that he allocated – rather than to Rousseau, Danton or Robespierre – to the Marquis de Sade.

When the Duc de La Rochefoucauld informed Louis XVI that the Bastille had been stormed, the king asked: ‘Pourquoi?’  That was the response, not of a dim-wit, but of a man of sense. There was no reason to attack the ancient fortress, it held no strategic importance and, unlike other prisons in Paris, housed only a few well-heeled reprobates. One of those reprobates, however, De Sade, had been exhorting passers-by to storm the Bastille, from the window of his apartment there; he was removed to another place of confinement, but the seed had been planted.

It was not just De Sade’s activities on that occasion that caused Kuehnelt-Leddihn to regard him as a key figure in the Revolution: it was the degeneracy he had introduced into French society, through his writings, that infused the Revolution with unprecedented and perverse violence, such as acts of cannibalism and the noyades, the drowning of innocent victims. The sadism that permeated the French Revolution and the concept of ‘Terror’, to prevent counter-revolution, was exemplified in the 20th century by the Gestapo and the Soviet Cheka or NKVD.

What has made Kuehnelt-Leddihn suddenly more relevant today is the crisis of democracy that has arisen in the West. Freedom of speech has become an issue in Britain and Europe, especially in Germany, where there is discussion about the possibility of banning the second largest political party, the AfD, with 10 million votes behind it. A presidential election has been cancelled in Romania, and Marine Le Pen, the favourite, is banned from contesting the next French presidential election. In Britain, people have been imprisoned for online posts.

It would be satisfying to say that Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn foresaw and forecast all this, but not entirely accurate. He undoubtedly read the big picture correctly: he insisted that democracy would lead inevitably to tyranny; today, that is the common complaint from growing millions of voters, from online commentators and the new, but not the legacy, media. They point to the protracted frustration, in Britain, of implementation of the Brexit vote, resisted to the last ditch by the elites, despite having lost a democratic referendum, as evidence of a tyranny being exercised by the ‘deep state’, i.e. by the individuals and institutions, such as the civil service, that remain permanently in power, regardless of election results, acting in defiance of the popular will.

But, a casuist might object, do not those very forces of populism, demanding that the governing class should bow to the majority will, and drawn, as surveys have shown, from the less-educated echelons of society, constitute the rampant ‘demos’  that Kuehnelt-Leddihn deplored and feared? If he were alive today, would he not be urging the elites to stand firm against the threat of the ochlocracy he dreaded? Superficially, it is a tempting exegesis; but when placed in the full context of Western politics today, it does not hold water.

The governments that are cancelling elections, disqualifying candidates and, potentially, parties of which they disapprove, are the products of democratic elections. Their repressive conduct now is a response to a change of mood among the public, especially around issues of immigration and the freedom to critique that phenomenon, which is in the process of cancelling their mandates. In resisting that reaction, those governments are degenerating into precisely the tyrannical mindset that Kuehnelt-Leddihn predicted.

Resentment is not the preserve of elderly conservatives. The latest YouGov poll of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) across Europe shows only 57 per cent now support democratic forms of government, with 21 per cent preferring authoritarian rule. Among young men who see themselves as disadvantaged, only one in three now supports democracy. It seems Fukuyama got it wrong and Kuehnelt-Leddihn got it right.

In the 21st century, which he did not live to experience, certain changes have occurred that Kuehnelt-Leddihn could not have been expected to foresee. His concern was that the brute force of majority rule would trample on the rights of minorities and individuals. In an ideological development that he could not have imagined, the liberal elites selected certain minorities and awarded them privileged status over the multiplicity of other minorities that compose the majority. Their ‘rights’ have been used as a pretext to silence debate and constrict the rights of other groups.

This championing of select groups was designed to portray the elites as the defenders of minorities, but the categories they defended resulted in a fissiparous division in society. Christians, for example, have fared badly at the hands of western elites. Would Kuehnelt-Leddihn, an ultra-devout Catholic, have sided with the elites on that issue? The evident answer is ‘no’. The forces of secularism and liberalism (in the non-Kuehnelt-Leddihn sense), centred around the Brussels bureaucracy, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, would have been targets for his polemic.

The observable reality is that, independently of any prophecy by Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the globalist, liberal, ‘rules-based order’ is failing, due to the incompatibility of its aspirations with those of the people it governs. The so-called ‘populists’ are not some sinister ‘far-right’ insurgency, but ordinary people who have wearied of being ruled by those who want the opposite of what they desire, to a degree that is radically altering the demography of their countries and eroding their culture. Their right to oppose that imposition would have been defended by Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s mentor, St Thomas Aquinas.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, despite his noble birth and intellectual eminence, was no lofty Whig oligarch, contemptuous of the people: the opposite was the case. Long before JD Vance celebrated hillbillies, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was praising mountain men, in The Menace of the Herd: ‘Many people see the “real” Europeans in these mountaineers. In these parts of the world traditions have been better preserved; patriarchalism, piety, loyalty, altruism – all the truly “romantic” virtues are here more at home than in the progressive plains.’

Kuehnelt-Leddihn was thinking primarily of his native Alpine culture, but he would equally have lauded the Jacobite Highlanders of Scotland and the Carlists from the hills of Navarre. His conclusion was pessimistic: ‘The age of the rule of the plains and the cities, which put an end to the rule of the mountains and castles, was indeed the beginning of the decline of Europe.’ Technology naturally developed in cities and on the plains, being unsuited to mountainous terrain. Material progress left the mountains and their people behind. It is a great pity that Kuehnelt-Leddihn did not survive to comment on the phenomenon of Artificial Intelligence.

Unlike Whig historians, Kuehnelt-Leddihn viewed monarchy and aristocracy as complementary, rather than as rivals for power: in English terms, a classical Tory belief. His loyalty to the man he regarded as his true sovereign, Crown Prince Otto, was undeviating and their correspondence from 1953 to 1998 is preserved by the Otto von Habsburg Foundation. One of his books, dedicated to Otto von Habsburg in his own hand, is inscribed in Hungarian: ‘To my King, His Majesty Otto II, from his loyal subject…’

Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Legitimism was the logical extension of his historical worldview, which he succinctly described in Leftism Revisited: ‘For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.’

By the time he died at Lans, in Tyrol, on 26 May 1999, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn bequeathed a legacy of contrarian thought, founded on an array of formidably marshalled facts, to a world that admired his intellectual virtuosity, but was repelled by his scepticism regarding democracy. Today, his insistence that democracy has a worm in the bud is gaining increasingly wide support, from millions of alienated people who have never heard of him, let alone read him. That revolution in public opinion provokes a further question: if Kuehnelt-Leddihn was correct in his most controversial contention, what else was he right about, that we should now reappraise?