John Adalbert Lukacs (; Hungarian: Lukács János Albert; 31 January 1924 – 6 May 2019) was a Hungarian-born American historian and author of more than thirty books. Lukacs was Roman Catholic. Lukacs described himself as a reactionary. Life and career Lukacs was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Magdaléna Glück and Pál Lukács (born Löwinger), a physician. His parents, Jewish converts to Roman Catholicism, were divorced before World War II. Lukacs attended a classical gymnasium, had an English language tutor, and spent two summers at a private school in England. He studied history at the University of Budapest. During the Second World War, when German troops occupied Hungary in 1944, Lukacs was forced to serve in a Hungarian labour battalion for Jews. By the end of 1944, he had deserted from the battalion and was hiding in a cellar until the end of the war, evading deportation to death camps and surviving the siege of Budapest. According to his son, Lukacs never saw his parents again. After the war, Lukacs worked as the Secretary of the Hungarian-American Society. In 1946, he received his doctorate from the University of Budapest. On 22 July 1946, as it was becoming clear that Hungary would become a Communist state, he fled to the United States. He found employment as a part-time assistant lecturer at Columbia University in New York City. He then relocated to Philadelphia, where in 1947 he began work as a history professor at Chestnut Hill College, a women's college at the time. He was a professor of history at Chestnut Hill College until 1994 and chaired the history department from 1947 to 1974. He served as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Princeton University, La Salle University, Regent College in British Columbia and the University of Budapest and Hanover College. He was a president of the American Catholic Historical Association and member of both the Royal Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society. Views Being a proponent of a liberal democracy and an anti-Communist, Lukacs nevertheless wrote in the early 1950s several articles in Commonweal criticizing the approach taken by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he described as a vulgar demagogue. Lukacs saw populism as the primary threat to modern civilization. By his own description, he considered himself a reactionary. He identified populism as the essence of both Nazism and Communism, denying the existence of generic fascism and