He graduated summa cum laude in 1926, publishing his dissertation on Der Ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit, which was received favorably in Germany.
Acutely aware of the real threat posed by the Nazi Party in Austria, he began writing for Der christliche Ständestaat, a periodical founded to combat Nazism and edited by Dietrich von Hildebrand.
Salvador Dalí was impressed by Der Ekel; in a 1932 essay for the journal This Quarter, the painter recommended Kolnai's text strongly to other surrealists, praising its analytical power.
The Nazi threat compelled Kolnai to leave Austria in 1937, where he was then a citizen, and depart for France where he married Elisabeth Gemes in 1940, also a Catholic convert.
Frustrated by what he saw as the oppressive parochial Catholicism and the rigid neo-Thomism, Kolnai left Quebec in 1955 and returned to England on a Nuffield Foundation Travel Grant.
Though he had quite an extensive list of publications in five different languages, Kolnai had little luck finding a permanent professorship in Britain, and fraught with financial worries, his health began to rapidly decline.
Due largely to the influence of Harry Acton, Bernard Williams, and David Wiggins, Kolnai was able to secure a part-time "Visiting Lectureship" at Bedford College at London University.
A major theme in his writings is the effort to recover the givenness of reality and the sovereignty of the object in order to develop a common-sense approach to philosophy.
"[8] Because the world was fallen and tension-ridden, Kolnai thought that Christianity should make its concern the secular world, in order to instill in it practical reason and morality, as expressed in a revealing passage in The War Against the West: Personally I am inclined to think that in spite of its Christian polish, Luther's pessimism is more pagan than Hegel's pagan optimism, the latter being not entirely foreign to nineteenth-century progressive and constitutionalist views.
Daniel Mahoney contextualizes Kolnai's anti-utopianism among such thinkers as Alain Besançon and Václav Havel as well as Solzhenitsyn who viewed utopian thinking as the ideological underpinning of totalitarianism.
His emphasis on common sense and his practical point of view frames his political discussions in which he expresses himself as a genuine conservative, praising such concepts as social privilege and hierarchy.
The negative character of moral duties was key for Kolnai, as expressed in his treatise on "Morality and Practice II:" When we speak of 'respecting' alien property (as also life or rights) we use that word in its weak sense of 'leaving alone,' 'not touching,' 'not interfering with,' much as it is used in French medical language (the rash of typhus fever 'respects' the face, i.e. in the soberer style of English textbooks, the face 'escapes'), not in its strong sense of positive appreciation for something distinctively noble and respectable .
Thus, "value ethics precludes the classic pitfalls in Ethics: Hedonism or Eudemonism; Utilitarianism and Consequentialism of any kind, i.e. the interpretation of moral in terms of allegedly more evident primary, natural cognitive experiences; and various kinds of Imperativism: 'duty' cut off from Good and Bad, and its interpretation in terms either of a concrete (social, monarchical, fashionable .