Liberty or Equality

A Catholic Austrian aristocrat’s argument that liberty and equality are not partners but rivals, and that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries chose the second at the cost of the first. Kuehnelt-Leddihn reads mass democracy as tending toward conformity, majority tyranny and eventually totalitarian rule — his most provocative claim being that National Socialism was a democratic and egalitarian phenomenon rather than a reactionary one — and argues that the old European monarchies, indifferent to whether their subjects were alike, protected minorities better than the regimes that replaced them.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s liberalism, democracy and pluralism section, which collects the arguments for and against majority rule; Kuehnelt-Leddihn is the section’s sharpest case for the prosecution.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Liberalism, Democracy, and Pluralism. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Democracy — the institution the book argues against.
• Liberalism — the tradition it argues democracy consumed.
• Christianity — the Catholic commitment from which the argument is made.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.