Over three decades ago, Francis Fukuyama famously announced “the end of history,” declaring Western liberal democracy the final form of human government. But liberalism has failed to spread to the East and is now under threat in the West. In this article, contributing editor Oliver Adelson turns to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, arguing that its explosive philosophical battles anticipated the current crisis of liberalism and what might come next.
After the First World War, Bertrand Russell became convinced of the need for international governance and sought to establish a “League for Peace and Freedom.” Russell’s protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein purportedly rebuked him so severely for the proposal that Russell snapped, “I suppose you would rather establish a League for War and Slavery.” Wittgenstein’s reply: “Yes, rather that, rather that.”
At the center of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is such a collision of liberalism and its reactionary holdouts. Sequestered in a sanatorium in Davos, the novel’s protagonist Hans Castorp initially makes his ascent to the Swiss Alps for a three-week visit to his cousin. Days turn to weeks, months, even years, giving Castorp the chance to witness the duel—first intellectual, then deadly—between the Italian liberal humanist Lodovico Settembrini and the reactionary Jew-turned-Jesuit Leo Naphta.
Like so many of our era’s liberals, Settembrini has unbounded faith in the power of reason. “Humanity has sprung from the depths of fear, darkness, and hatred,” he explains to Castorp, but this fallen condition is only temporary. “The powers of reason and enlightenment will in the end set humanity wholly free.” To hasten mankind’s liberation, he joins the League for the Organization of Progress and contributes to its encyclopedia, The Sociology of Suffering, whose goal is nothing less than the abolition of all suffering on earth.
Settembrini’s adversary, Naphta, has a pedagogic itch and cannot resist sparring for influence over the impressionable Hans Castorp. Naphta scorns Settembrini’s religion of reason, which he argues has simply replaced God with Science and Progress. Settembrini’s international law for international governance is declared nothing but a secularized jus divinum. His individualism is dismissed as a pale imitation of the Christian doctrine that each person is created in God’s image. And his méliorism is brushed aside as a copy of Christian salvation after the Fall.
As for his positive proposals, Naphta supports the establishment of a Marxist world order which will assert the ideals of Augustine’s City of God by offering an alternative to the “decadent standards of the capitalistic bourgeoisie.” The Enlightenment—which turned individual reason into a universal solvent for existing forms of tradition, hierarchy, and community—went quite too far for Naphta. “Liberation and development of the individual… are not what our age demands,” he declares. “What it needs, what it wrestles after, what it will create—is terror.”
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One century later, the same themes are playing out. Not least in Davos.
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The clash of ideologies plays out over hundreds of pages before reaching its bloody climax. The violent rupture between Naphta and Settembrini marks the end of the sanatorium’s spell on Hans Castorp. Soon thereafter, the insulation from the outside world dissolves—Franz Ferdinand is assassinated and Castorp descends the mountain to fight in the First World War.
23rd July 2025
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