Progressive, melioristic liberalism once again on the brink. Revisiting Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain in an age of authoritarian revival. Or: why Martin Wolf thinks
The Magic Mountain with Hans Castorp caught between Ludovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta, between Clavdia Chauchat and Mynheer Peeperkorn is the twentieth century’s most revealing novel—and why he’s probably right…
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Martin Wolf: The Wolf-Krugman Exchange: AI Hype vs. Reality <https://www.ft.com/content/a8875a4c-759d-4ac3-bdbb-c48c7f7be73f>: ‘The most important novel of the 20th century, at least the most revealing… is Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain…. The core of the book was the intellectual ferment going on in the first half of the 20th century between old fashioned, staid, civilised, liberal humanism, embodied, in this case, in the figure of a man called Settembrini, putting forward the sort of views I hold, and I'm beginning to feel are equally old fashioned. And on the other hand, Naphta, who is a Marxist revolutionary. But actually, when you push him, he turns out to be very similar to the far right revolutionaries…. The difference between Hitler and Stalin turned out to be pretty small when all things are done….
Mann puts forward the idea that the first World War was the beginning of the destruction that followed from this. It was written during the war and published shortly afterwards. So it's extraordinary how a book—novel, published hundreds years ago, can be so brilliant at describing the sort of things we are seeing right now and the challenges we are now seeing between pretty feeble, liberal, humanist-type people and passionate authoritarians…
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I was lucky enough to have taken The Magic Mountain along on my backpack in my summer of 1982 post-college graduation trip to Europe, and to have read it and reread it and then re-reread it—thus reading it for a third time—on intercity Eurail that summer. It ws the best book I have ever read. And yet, somehow, I have never been able to get back into it. And I have tried perhaps four times during the 43 years since. Yet more evidence that it is as much the reader as the book—that deep, active reading is indeed, even for those who are the most extremely skilled and well-trained professionals in it, a chancy, contingent, mysterious, and sorcerous process.
Some people recommend the audiobook. Perhaps I will try that next?
Mann himself, looking back from 1953:
Thomas Mann: The Making of The Magic Mountain <>: ‘I return to something I spoke of before: the mystery of the time element, dealt with in various ways in the book. It is in a double sense a time-romance. First in a historical sense, in that it seeks to present the inner significance of an epoch, the pre-war period of European history. And secondly, because time is one of its themes… as a part of the hero’s experience, but also in and through itself. The book… depicts the hermetic enchantment of its young hero within the timeless… [and] attempts to give complete presentness at any given moment to the entire world of ideas that it comprises… to establish a magical nunc stans…. But its pretensions are even more far-reaching, for the book deals with yet another fundamental theme, that of ‘heightening’, enhancement (Steigerung). This Steigerung is always referred to as alchemist.... The book, then, both spatially and intellectually, outgrew the limits its author had set. The short story became a thumping two-volume novel...
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What is the theme of The Magic Mountain? It is the inner significance—while it lasted—of the pre-WWI Belle Époque that we might date from 1849 to 1913.
At its core, The Magic Mountain is a “novel of ideas.” Set in a Swiss sanatorium before World War I, it stages debates between characters who represent competing worldviews—liberal humanism, revolutionary radicalism, rationalism, mysticism, and more. The protagonist, Hans Castorp, is exposed to these clashing ideologies, which mirror the intellectual ferment of early twentieth-century Europe. The book doesn’t just present these ideas; it dramatizes their appeal and their dangers, showing how easily the lines between left and right, progress and reaction, can blur. This makes the novel a microcosm of the broader crises that would soon engulf Europe.
At its core, The Magic Mountain is a parable of the unreason of ideological conflict, the seductions of extremism, and the fragility of liberal values.
At its core, The Magic Mountain is a coming-of-age novel. Hans Castorp’s journey is not just physical but spiritual and intellectual. He arrives as a naive young man and is transformed by his encounters with illness, love, death, and the great questions of existence. The novel suggests that true education is not about acquiring facts, but about grappling with ambiguity, mortality, and the limits of reason.
At its core, The Magic Mountain is a novel about how to find—or fail to find—meaning in a life lived in the shadow of inevitable death. And about how to live with uncertainty, how to balance progress and tradition, how to be truly alive, and wahta that might mean.
At its core, The Magic Mountain is a modernist wolf in traditional-narrative novel sheep’s clothing. Mann weaves together realism, irony, and symbolism, creating a text that is both accessible and endlessly interpretable. Things are what they appear to be. And then, again, they are not. The sanatorium itself becomes a metaphor for Europe on the brink of catastrophe. The characters’ debates echo the anxieties of a world facing the collapse of old certainties
I have long thought that I ought to have done a better job than I did in Slouching Towards Utopia in presenting the reasons that the Belle Époque went crash in 1914 and that we might date beginning to coalesce in 1849. It was the time of Liberal Progress with a capital-L and a capital-P. As John Maynard Keynes wrote immediately after its end:
John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace <https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/15776/pg15776-images.html>: ‘After 1870… larger proportional returns from an increasing scale of production became true of agriculture as well as industry…. More emigrants… to till the soil… more workmen… in Europe to prepare the industrial products and capital goods… to maintain the emigrant[s]… and to build the railways and ships… the resources of tropical Africa… and a great traffic in oil-seeds…. In this economic Eldorado… most of us were brought up…. What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!…
[For] the middle and upper classes… life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages… [and] regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.
The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life…
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Perhaps the place to start the aftermath of the failed Revolutions of 1848.
It was then that European reactionaries came to a sobering realization: the old order could not simply be preserved through repression or inertia. The famous quip of Tancredi in The Leopard that “if everything is to remain the same, everything must change,” captures the paradoxical attitude of the conservative elite. They recognized that to maintain their privileges and authority, they would need to adapt, at least superficially, to the rising demands for constitutional government, civil liberties, and economic modernization.
The pseudo-classical semi-liberalism that emerged was not so much a principled embrace of liberal ideals as it was a pragmatic concession to the new realities of mass politics and industrialization. In places like Prussia and Austria, this meant granting limited parliaments and suffrage while ensuring that real power remained concentrated among the aristocracy and monarchy. The result was a patchwork of reforms that placated some demands for progress without truly democratizing society—a balancing act that would prove increasingly precarious as the century wore on. Pseudo-classical semi-liberalism drove toward an order where the ruling maxim was the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market. Only acceptance of that maxim would allow the coördination of society in a prosperous division of labor in which every could look forward to their children or grandchildren having enough. And if you rigged the distribution of property in the interests of those you favored, you could use that maxim to run the kind of society-of-domination an élite would want, and run it on the cheap as substantive gross inequality and exploitation was masked by the false mask of equal civil, social, and economic rights and fair voluntary exchange.
But to have accepted that the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market maxim would truly have required the faith and patience of an Iyov. Rather than that Old Dispensation (which in Slouching I associate with Friedrich von Hayek) society could only function if there was, somehow, constructed a New Dispensation (which in Slouching I associate with Karl Polanyi): like all institutions made for humans, the market was made for man, not man for the market. But how, exactly? And how to get society to its Good Place, or one of its Good Places?
From 1849 to 1914 as the pseudo-classical semi-liberal order grew, balancing the interests of the aristocracy, plutocracy, middle classes, and working classes became a central challenge as Europe’s economy began to undergo the wrenching transformations associated with what Joseph Schumpeter later dubbed “creative destruction” as the coming of the SteamPower Age slowly—but they thought it was fast—upend edtraditional social hierarchies by creating new fortunes, new classes, and new urban centers. The ruling élite sought to maintain authority, wealth, and stability by sharing wealth and distributing power to forge uneasy alliances: landowners might support protective tariffs to appease industrialists, while middle-class liberals were courted with promises of legal equality and property rights.
Meanwhile, the growing working class was alternately repressed and coöpted, with reforms such as the extension of voting rights or the establishment of social insurance schemes. The emergence of these new class coalitions was not a matter of harmonious consensus but of constant negotiation and latent conflict, the echoes of which would reverberate throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The period from 1770 to 1870 had already been a time of extraordinary social and economic upheaval. The twin shocks of the American and French Revolutions, followed by the Napoleonic Wars, had destabilized the old European order. The subsequent spread of industrial capitalism introduced new technologies—steam engines, railways, telegraphs—that transformed both production and daily life. Population growth, urbanization, and the rise of a literate public put unprecedented pressure on traditional institutions. The social fabric was stretched to its limits by waves of rural-to-urban migration and the emergence of a new, self-confident bourgeoisie. By the mid-nineteenth century, the contours of modern society were visible, but the mechanisms for managing its tensions remained rudimentary at best.
After 1870, however, the pace of change accelerated dramatically. The so-called Second Industrial Revolution brought electricity, steel, chemicals, and mass production to the fore. These innovations not only increased overall prosperity but also heightened volatility, as established industries were rendered obsolete and new centers of economic power emerged almost overnight. The resulting instability was not merely economic but political and social as well: old elites were threatened by upstart capitalists, while workers found themselves at the mercy of boom-and-bust cycles and the caprices of global markets. The rapid expansion of imperialism—Europe’s “scramble for Africa” and the carving up of Asia—was in part an attempt to export domestic tensions abroad. Yet these efforts only postponed the reckoning, as the interconnectedness of the world economy made crises harder to contain and their effects more far-reaching.
The resulting sense of insecurity and injustice fueled the growth of radical ideologies—socialism, anarchism, and eventually fascism—that promised to sweep away the old order altogether. The collapse of the Belle Époque in 1914 was less a sudden catastrophe than the culmination of decades of mounting tensions and not quite sufficient reforms.
As then, so now. And so The Magic Mountain is at least as relevant as ever, and more relevant than it was to the world from 1945-2015.
Debates over the proper balance between markets and social cohesion, between innovation and stability, remain central to contemporary politics. The tension between the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market and the market was made for man, not man for the market. appears as sharp, dire, and dangerous now as it was then. The extraordinary material progress of the twentieth century was accompanied by the worst tyrannies and bloodshed in human history, a reminder that technological advance alone does not guarantee human flourishing. The so-called “Thirty Glorious Years” after World War II—marked by rapid growth, low inequality, and expanding welfare states—were the exception, not the rule. Their passing has left societies searching for new ways to combine growth with equity, a task made all the more urgent by the ongoing challenges of globalization, automation, and environmental crisis.
The central lesson of the past 150 years, I think, is that the management of creative destruction—technological, economic, and social—remains the defining challenge for any society that hopes to avoid both stagnation and catastrophe. And at its core The Magic Mountain is about a group of people ensorcelled at the top of a, well, magic mountain—people with not that much else to do than to think about how they will act when and if what enspells them is dissolved and they return to the world below.
Thomas Mann ends The Magic Mountain thus, with Hans Castorp in the middle of WWI:
Thomas Mann (1924): The Magic Mountain <https://archive.org/details/magicmountain00mann/>: ‘He gets up, he limps and stumbles forward on mud-laden feet, singing thoughtlessly:
And all its branches ru-ustled,
As if they called to me—
And so, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, he disappears from sight.
Farewell, Hans Castorp, life’s faithful problem child. Your story is over. We have told it to its end; it was neither short on diversion nor long on boredom—it was a hermetic story. We told it for its own sake, not yours, for you were a simple fellow. But it was your story at last, and since it happened to you, there surely must have been something to you; and we do not deny that in the course of telling it, we have taken a certain pedagogic liking to you, might be tempted gently to dab the corner of an eye with one fingertip at the thought that we shall neither see you nor hear from you in the future.
Farewell, Hans—whether you live or stay where you are! Your chances are not good. The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little sinful year yet, and we would not wager much that you will come out whole. To be honest, we are not really bothered about leaving the question open. Adventures in the flesh and spirit, which enhanced and heightened your ordinariness, allowed you to survive in the spirit what you probably will not survive in the flesh. There were moments when, as you “played king,” you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round—will love someday rise up out of this, too?
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References:
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Toward Utopia: The Economic History of the Long 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. <https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595/>.
Keynes, John Maynard. 1919. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. London: MacMillan. <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15776/15776-h/15776-h.htm>.
King James Bible. 1769. The Book of Job (Sefer Iyov). London: Oxford University Press. <https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Job-Chapter-1/>.
King James Bible. 1769. The Gospel According to Matthew (Evangelion kata Matthaion). London: Oxford University Press. <https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Matthew-Chapter-1/>.
Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. 1958. The Leopard. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. New York: Pantheon Books. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/96424/the-leopard-by-giuseppe-tomasi-di-lampedusa-translated-by-archibald-colquhoun/>.
Mann, Thomas. 1924. The Magic Mountain. Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag,<https://archive.org/details/magicmountain00mann/>
Mann. Thomas. 1953. “The Making of The Magic Mountain”. Atlantic, January. <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1953/01/the-making-of-the-magic-mountain/306651/>
Wolf, Martin. 2025. “The Wolf-Krugman Exchange IV: AI Hype vs. Reality”. Financial Times, June 24. <https://www.ft.com/content/a8875a4c-759d-4ac3-bdbb-c48c7f7be73f>.
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