Utópia és politika – Kolnai Aurél politikai filozófiája [avagy miért feltétlenül baj, ha homályosan fejtjük ki a világos dolgokat?]
Utopia and Politics: Aurel Kolnai’s Political Philosophy

Summary/Abstract: The Hungarian-born moral and political philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973) was among the twentieth century’s most philosophically minded conservative critics of utopian mind and „progressive democracy”. This paper makes attempt to analyse this critic – with the method of Kolnai. The core of Kolnai’s political philosophy may be stated in two broad statement. The first is that the name of utopia the legitimate search for social improvement will be perverted into an exercise in destruction. Kolnai maintained that utopianism is a product of extravagant moral demands, a fierce determination to compress Is into Ought, Value into Reality, until they became one and the same. Such an utopian attitude found its fullest expression in Communist totalitarianism. The Communists misjuged human imperfection as intolerable evil and remained ignorant of the fact that moral values were phenomenologically given in reality. Kolnai’s second basis thesis is that (Communist) totalitarianism is not the only form taken by the utopian mind. Kolnai denounced a „’common man’ conception of modern democracy” which reduced the inherent plurality of individual and collective life to an understanding of man as „nothing but man”, „unencumbered by culture and possessions” and „unfettered by dogma, tradition and presupposition”. Kolnai believed that such a reduction of man undermined the Normality, the „normally” human life and practice.

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