Anthony Mario Ludovici MBE (8 January 1882 – 3 April 1971) was a British philosopher, sociologist, social critic and polyglot. He is best known as a proponent of aristocracy, and in the early 20th century was a leading British conservative author. He wrote on subjects including art,[1] metaphysics, politics, economics, religion, the differences between the sexes, race and eugenics. Ludovici began his career as an artist, painting and illustrating books. He was private secretary to sculptor Auguste Rodin for several months in 1906, but the two men parted company after Christmas, “to their mutual relief.” Ultimately, he would turn towards writing, with over 40 books as author, and translating over 60 others.
Ludovici was born in London, England on 8 January 1882 to Albert Ludovici, an artist, and Marie Cals. He married Elsie Finnimore Buckley on 20 March 1920. He was educated privately, in England and abroad. He spent several years in Germany where he studied Nietzsche’s writings in the original German. He was fluent in several languages.
He began lecturing on art, politics, religion, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,[5] about whom he wrote Who is to be Master of the World?: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1909) and Nietzsche: His Life and His Works (1910). According to Steven Aschheim, his 1911 Nietzsche and Art was “a unique attempt to write a Nietzschean history of art in terms of rising aristocratic and decadent-democratic epochs”.[6] This was the year of the first Parliament Act 1911, cutting back the power of the House of Lords. It also marks a watershed or change in Ludovici’s writing, to a more overt political line, which would only sharpen over the next 25 years.
During World War I he served as an artillery officer at Armentières and the Somme, and then in the Intelligence Staff at the War Office. For his service during the war he was awarded the Order of the British Empire.
After the war, he became a student of Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first translation of Nietzsche’s works in English. Ludovici contributed several volumes.[7]
Ludovici came across the Alexander Technique in 1925 and said he had lessons in ‘deportment’ over a period of four years with F.M. Alexander.
Ludovici’s writing was varied, and took traditional conservative stances on social issues. Liberalism, socialism, Marxism, Christianity, feminism,[9][10][11][12] multiculturalism, and the modern culture of consumerism and revolt against tradition constituted Ludovici’s main areas of attack.
He wrote “I have long been an opponent and critic of Christianity, democracy, and anarchy in art and literature. I am particularly opposed to ‘Abstract Art,’ which I trace to Whistler’s heretical doctrines of art and chiefly to his denial that the subject matters, his assimilation of the graphic arts and music, and his insistence on the superior importance of the composition and colour-harmony of a picture, over its representational content.” He was an early critic of Jacob Epstein, attacking him in The New Age,[13][14] to which he contributed as an art critic before the Great War.[15][16][17]
In his A Defence of Aristocracy (1915), Ludovici defends aristocracy against government in popular control. In The False Assumptions of “Democracy” (1921), he attacked the democratic idea and the liberal attitude in general, as having originated in specious philosophy, wholly opposed to nature.[18] A Defence of Conservatism (1927) defends tradition as not only a policy of preservation, but of discernment in change, writing, “Man is instinctively conservative in the sense that probably millions of years of experience have taught him that a stable environment is the best for peace of mind, present and future security, automatism of action… and a ready command of material and artificial circumstances. It is the repeated introduction of new instruments, new weapons, new methods, and needs for fresh adaptations, that makes automatism impossible. And it is the complication of life by novel contributions to life’s interests and duties that makes a ready command of circumstances difficult.”[19]
For Ludovici, egalitarianism in all its forms constituted a denial of the innate biological differences between individuals, the sexes and races. He criticized what he saw as the sentimental coddling of the mediocre and botched. His articles were a regular feature of the New Pioneer, a far-right journal controlled by Viscount Lymington and closely linked to the British People’s Party.
Ludovici’s doctrines were nationalist, traditionalist, and centrally concerned with a form of eugenic reasoning.[21] He argued that heredity can yield strong family lines, group values, and national and racial characteristics. Politicians should not only be individuals of intelligence, and knowledgeable of mankind, but also of the same stock as those they lead.
It is in the interest of the nation to maintain unique characteristics by safeguarding a native and particular potentiality of success and opportunities for self-expression and expansion. This includes a concern for the health of one’s people, that ill-health not only leads to maladaptation, but also to the decay of the strength capacity and character of the nation. “To be a good forester, a man must know how to give trees their proper health conditions, and must also know how to chop and prune them.”
National prestige means power, power is safety, and safety is security. Since the conservative politician is concerned with the security and extension of his own nation’s power, he cannot tolerate anything that jeopardizes its position. In dealing with a vis major, he acts firmly and quickly; using the full might of his nation against any enemy that threatens it.
The conservative is naturally suspicious of change. He must know enough about his nation’s character and potentialities, of mankind in general, and be able to judge whether new tendencies are desirable, in keeping with the eternal nature of men, or fatalistic, when they apply “only to angels, goblins, fairies or other harebrained fictions”.
The conservative is concerned with the happiness of his people. When examining unhappiness amongst his people he differentiates between the type of maladaptation that arises from injustice and oppression, and that which is resultant from degeneracy or morbidity. He can meet the demands of the former easily and accomplish improvement, but in taking on the later he will only penalize the nation.
Ludovici summed up his definition: (esoteric) conservatism “is the preservation of the national identity throughout the process of change by a steady concern for the whole of the nation’s life.” He opposed Jews, foreigners, and ‘odd people’ — eccentrics, cranks and fanatics — having anything to do with government.
He was on the Selection Committee of the Right Book Club,[22] with Norman Thwaites, Trevor Blakemore, Collinson Owen and W. A. Foyle.[23]
After the Second World War, Ludovici fell rapidly into obscurity.[24] In 1936, he had written enthusiastically about Adolf Hitler.[25] He was critical of the effect of Jews on the history of England, writing a work under the pseudonym Cobbett, Jews, and the Jews in England (1938).[26]
From 1955 until 1969 Ludovici wrote a series of essays in the monthly journal The South African Observer.[27] Topics under his analysis included “The Essentials of Good Government”[28] in a series of 20 monthly parts, and “Public Opinion in England”[29] in a similar series.
Anthony Ludovici wrote about the Alexander Technique:
Certain minor troubles, due chiefly to inadequate oxygenation of the blood, thus steadily improved. I distinctly grew. My clothes of a year previously were the garments of a different man. No amount of tailor’s tinkering could any longer adapt them to my frame, and with it all I began to feel a new joie de vivre, a new zest both at work and at play.
Sleep, digestion and general functioning began to grow more normal, more reminiscent of my childhood and adolescence…
Quite apart from the surprising and welcome benefits to health derived from the change, however, there is the new joy, and a great joy it is, of governing and directing one’s use of self, of watching one’s body, like the perfect machine it is, responding accurately to the correct controls, the skilled management, and of looking on while orders which previously one would have declared fantastic and futile are smoothly and punctually carried out by an organism that has at last acquired [conscious control].
And how has all this come about?
Not by tedious exercises! Not by any hitherto hackneyed and disappointing physical regimen. But by learning the proper use of the central control of my postural reflexes in every one of my activities, by learning to inhibit the viciously conditioned and faulty reflexes of old, and by acquiring a vigilance and alertness beside which the vigilance and alertness of a motorist or an airman is elementary and puerile.
If I were asked to summarize the effect of a course of training in the correct use of self on the mental processes, I should be inclined to say that it consists of increasing a man’s sympathies by breaking down the barriers set up by subjective preoccupations. In this sense it produces a more realistic, more objective attitude to environment. A man whose consciousness has been extended is less prone than the average man to delusive obsessions about the world and his neighbors, he is more awake in his wakeful hours, and more inclined to complete inactivity of mind while asleep. He is more balanced because less harassed, more equable because less worked upon by inner pertubations, and perhaps more charitable because less egocentric. The modern world has yet to learn that it is the invalid, in every sense of that word, who, being perpetually reminded of self and of his functions (owing precisely to the latter’s imperfections) is more likely to be unenlightened in his egoism, self-centered and unable to look out peacefully and receptively about him. Like the infant, the invalid is compelled constantly to feel, if not to say, ‘all for myself’, and for the simple reason that subjective preoccupations perpetually demand his attention.
It is not difficult to see, therefore, that, quite apart from the extension of consciousness, the release from the subjective preoccupations of dysfunction alone must exert a very appreciable influence on the mental processes; and were it not for the extreme rarity of perfect functioning in modern mankind, particularly among intellectuals, the distinction between the outlook of the perfectly and the imperfectly functioning type would long ago have been exemplified and recorded in two wholly different philosophies, generally recognized and valued in accordance with the nature of their human source…
In such a man [who has learned conscious control of himself], owing to his long familiarity with the difficult practice of inhibiting primitive impulses, there is developed a power of deliberation and resistance to outside and inside influences which tends to make his mental reactions less precipitate, less headlong and less ill-considered. Judgments and actions become less impulsive. He becomes less easily swayed, less suscecptible to hetero-suggestion, firmer in any position once assumed, but less stubborn than the wholly subjective person because he has a check even upon auto-suggestion. He develops, in fact, what is known as character, which is resistance, and in his mental attitude acquires that strength which is the counterpart to the immunity from disease imparted to him by his improved functioning.
Let no one imagine, however, that the path of the student of the correct use of the self is strewn with roses. Let no one suppose that he can take it up as a pleasant pastime, like golf, bridge or chess. It is in many respects the most exacting and at the same time the most humiliating experience a man can undergo. For, while it holds out vistas of the heights to which a man can attain if only he applies himself and concentrates, it also exposes him to himself as a creature so automatically directed hitherto, so essentially the thrall of his unconscious processes, that it constitutes the severest rebuke that could possibly be administered to his pride. Through it he sees revealed the extremely thin partition that once separated him from the borderline mental case, and as he begins to master it he wonders whether there was anything more than speech alone that formerly distinguished him from the highest anthropoids or even the beasts of the field.
When I read Ludovici’s 1938 book on the Jews, he seems like an adumbration of Kevin MacDonald and Steve Sailer. Here are some excerpts from Ludovici’s chapter on “The Character of the Jews“.
We see a people hardened and sharpened by the merciless life of the desert, recognizing no differences of rank among themselves, intolerant of dominion, disinclined to obey, independent, not given to manual labour, and scorning laws that are not based on their customs and religion. But a people fitted by millenniums of privation, uncertainty and simple living to become formidable in any close struggle for existence with a type less hard and less hardened; and a people accustomed to wait, to endure and to be masters of their own destiny…
We refer to that complex of mental habits, emotions, gifts and tastes which necessarily forms in the nomad state — such, for instance, as the inability to become, or to feel, rooted to any territory, hence the lack of appreciation and capacity for a territorial national’s attachment to a particular soil and environment. Such also is the ready ability to become adapted to new surroundings and to a new soil, provided it offers opportunities for a livelihood which are not too offensive to bedouin or nomad taste. Such, too, is the inability to recognize any obligation to any other man or to any community, in respect of property possessed — in fact, the inability to understand property as a privilege involving responsibilities and duties. The nomad is essentially a particularist who is by nature, as it were, born into the philosophy of the Manchester School, whether this came after or before him. Not only is it difficult for him to recognize mutuality in the institution of property, but he is also quite incapable of building up a society in which the relations of the various classes and of their members are based on mutuality. He knows only personal property, and when he packs up his household goods and his tent, and moves to a fresh pasture, driving his herd before him, he feels an obligation to no man. He moves, moreover, not merely because he is a rover by nature, but also because he tends, by his congenital disinclination towards productive labour, to exhaust the land on which he establishes his temporary settlement, and his constant refrain, like the essential particularist that he is, is après moi le déluge!
…For the Jew is not soft towards himself. His history proves that he is capable of imposing the greatest hardships on himself and capable of the greatest bravery. In his three greatest feats — the conquest of Palestine after the sojourn in Egypt, the Maccabean revolt, and the clash with Rome — there stand revealed his indomitable courage and his exceptional powers of endurance. Besides, after the Great Dispersion, when all Europe began persecuting and martyrizing him, his behaviour was in most cases exemplary. It is said that the way in which many of the Jews, condemned by the Inquisition to be burnt alive, went to their death, so much stirred the onlookers that the Church often dreaded a revulsion of feeling among the populace…
Israel Zangwill, describing the essential character of the Jews, says: “Indeed the Jew is a born intermediary, and every form of artistic and commercial agency falls naturally into his hands.” [27] Lord Melchett acknowledges the same characteristic. He writes of the Jews: ” They have . . . become pedlars, merchants, money-lenders, doctors, lawyers, professional men, following any occupation which does not imply a rooted existence, and which makes rapid removal possible . . . In fact, the Jews have become the middlemen and the town-dwellers of the countries in which they have been dispersed.” [28]
But in the very manner with which Lord Melchett prefaces this admission, he tenders the most eloquent excuse for it. He says: “After an experience of many centuries, the Jews have been driven by law, by religion, by terrorism, to avoid the ownership of immovable goods. Those who are liable to be expelled at a moment’s notice take care to have no property that cannot easily be taken with them.”
…Hardly any writer, from Renan to Dr Ruppin, fails to mention this indomitable ambition as an outstanding feature of the Jews, and added to their other qualities enumerated above it naturally makes them formidable exponents of the will to power, and ruthless competitors in any contest for influence and ascendancy.
Whatever Ludovici’s flaws in analysis, I don’t think you can dismiss him as a hater. He primarily relies upon established Jewish sources. He may commit various sins and be wrong and about this or that, but his analysis is worthy of consideration. He does not seem out of left field. Of course no criticism of Jews is permitted in today’s Western world thanks to our memories of the Holocaust, but I am not at all sure that this is good for either Jews or for the West. I believe Muslims are worthy of critique and Christians and Mexicans and Jews too. No group has only good qualities.
Not all peoples are equally gifted at the same things. I can’t remember the last starting white running back in the NFL nor the last starting white cornerback. Those positions are exclusively black today. By contrast, most winning quarterbacks and coaches in the NFL are white and all NFL owners are white.
I like Reggie White’s approach that different people have different gifts. Goyim have gifts and Jews have gifts.
Not only do different people have gifts, they also have group interests. It may well be that even today and for ever more, the interests of Germans, English, Americans, Christians, Muslims and Jews clash. For instance, I think it would be naive to expect that blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Chinese and other tribesmen would have the same veneration of America as WASPs and ancestors of the Mayflower do.
Steve Sailer wrote in 2008: “American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start more accurately thinking of themselves as belonging to the best-connected inner circle of the contemporary American Establishment.”
