Benoist’s Vivid Memory – Devlin

Alain de Benoist’s Vivid Memory

By F. Roger Devlin

Alain de Benoist
Mémoire vive: entretiens avec François Bousquet
Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2012.

Part 1: A Full Childhood

The title of Alain de Benoist’s volume of reminiscences is a play on words: literally signifying “vivid memory,” it is also the French equivalent for RAM, or Rapid Access Memory. In the form of interviews, the author traces his personal and intellectual development and that of the French nouvelle droite.

Alain de Benoist is descended, on his father’s side, from an ancient Belgian lineage traceable ultimately to a ninth-century Italian captain who defended Apulia from Saracen pirates. His father, also named Alain de Benoist, worked for a perfumery, eventually becoming the firm’s general sales manager for a large swath of France. Benoist remembers being strongly and lastingly influenced by his paternal grandmother. She owned a dilapidated 16th-century castle, without running water or electricity, where Benoist spend many summers. She was

passionate, hyperemotional, but also capricious. I believe she always had a rather turbulent emotional life, which in the end crystallized as religious devotion. Besides, she had a literary and artistic culture which my parents lacked. She introduced me to all the parks and gardens of Paris and took me to all the museums.

It was she who first taught me the meaning of noblesse oblige: viz., that belonging to the aristocracy does not consist in benefiting from more privileges than others or in having additional rights, but in imposing greater burdens upon one oneself, having a higher notion of one’s duties, feeling more responsible than others. Behaving in a noble manner, whatever class one comes from, means never being satisfied with oneself, never reasoning in terms of utility. It means the beauty of gratuitousness, of “useless” expenditure, the beau geste, the conviction that one could always have done better, that it is odious to boast of what one has done, that a man’s quality is tested by his ability to act contrary to his own interests whenever it becomes necessary.

All these things were inculcated in me in an almost passionate fashion. My grandmother lived in a sort of permanent state of exaltation.

His mother, born Germaine Langouët, was working at a post office in St. Malo, Brittany, when she met Benoist’s father. She was descended entirely from Norman and Breton peasants and fishermen.

My maternal grandparents were simple people. Thanks to their surroundings, I was also able to live in contact with the popular classes. But it was also thanks to them that I quickly understood the reality of class relations. It was not social inequalities as such which shocked me so much as the contemptuous fashion in which I too often saw people of the lower classes treated.

Born 1943 at Tours, an only child, Benoist’s family moved to Paris when he was six, and he has remained there ever since. He was enrolled at the Lycée Montaigne:

I was an excellent student in the subjects which interested me: French, literature, history, geography, Latin, Greek; and very bad in those I did not like: math, geometry, physics. I think I reached the end of my studies without ever having understood the difference between a division and a fraction. I feel ill at ease as soon as I see numbers instead of letters.

From the age of eight I began to read in a compulsive, bulimic fashion. I read all the time and everywhere. My mother had the weakness to allow me to read at the table; I would pick at my plate without even looking at what I was eating, so as not to interrupt my reading. I would read during class. I would even read in the street, walking to school, holding my book up in front of me, casting only the most cursory glances at the traffic.

I read an astronomical number of comic books, which I got my mother to buy or traded with my school fellows. But it was particularly fairy tales and legends which enchanted me: the tales of Andersen, of Perrault and the Grimms. The Greek myths and the Homeric universe particularly fascinated me.

I quickly went on to literature. My paternal grandmother had in her library a first edition of the works of Hugo in sixty volumes. I read them from the first to the last line, after which I devoured all the volumes of Balzac’s Human Comedy. Then I went on to Zola’s Rougon-Macquart, then Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, Mérimée, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol. . . . Whatever pocket-money my mother gave me was immediately converted into books. At about age ten or eleven, she gave me bus tickets for my trip to school. I went on foot and resold the tickets half price to other pupils. Anything in order to read!

I read above all in order to escape from a daily routine which I found humdrum, drowned in philistinism and bourgeois convention. In adventure stories it was the change of scene more than the action that I sought.

But I should also admit that I stole books, and with a perfectly easy conscience: it was all for a good cause! I stole quite a few from Gilbert, boulevard Saint-Michel, right up to the day I got caught. The bookstore personnel called up my mother, who arrived immediately, livid in the face. She imagined I would perish on the scaffold one day. She paid for the books but, upon leaving the store, threw them into an open gutter. I was so angry, I went the very next day and stole exactly the same books from another bookstore.

Next to reading, the visual arts were his greatest passion: “Van Gogh and Salvador Dalí were my heroes.” For a time, he imposed on himself a duty to visit at least one exhibition of paintings every day.

The cinema was another interest. His local church published notices concerning which of the new films were wholesome for young viewers and which were to be avoided. The young Benoist consulted these notices and then went to see every film condemned as unsuitable, on the assumption that these would be the most interesting.

He was a difficult catechumen:

I asked all sorts of questions, such as: ‘if God is all-powerful, can he make 2 + 2 = 5? Did Neanderthal man have a soul? If there are extraterrestrial beings, how would they know about the incarnation? If the sun danced in the sky before the little visionaries of Fatima, how is it that no astronomical observatory registered this movement?’

The curés thought my questions preposterous, though perhaps they were only disturbing.

Benoist’s generation was the last to glimpse an era now vanished forever:

The 1950s were a continuous prolongation of the ’30s and ’40s. Despite the war, little had really changed in the realm of social and family structures or in daily life. The automobile and the television spread only slowly. Frenchmen’s ways of speaking and behaving were not yet determined by what they saw on television. They spoke like their parents, with regional accents, not like the host of the latest TV program. Educated people had more learning, the popular classes more spontaneity. People did not systematically mock everything. And among the young, no one would have thought of taking an interest in the brand of clothing you wore.

It is only at the end of the ’50s and the very beginning of the ’60s that the great caesura occurs. There was the revolution in the household, with refrigerators and washing machines. The contraceptive pill came on the market in 1960. Supermarkets appeared in 1962.

Above all, rural life began to decline, a real silent revolution whose full scope hardly anyone understood at the time. Today, the peasants—become farmers, if not “agricultural operators”—represent less than one percent of the French population, whereas they constituted the majority in the 19th century, and still numbered ten million in 1945. The end of the rural world brought about the end of a way of life expressing a mentality which has now disappeared. It involved the end of popular traditions which until recently structured collective existence, the end of a world where men and women often sang as they worked. No one does that anymore; at most, they listen to the radio.

Benoist sums up his childhood by saying “there was nothing exceptional about it—only, it was very full.”

Part 2: An Agitated Youth

When Benoist was a teenager, his father purchased a small country house to the west of Paris. Here he began to spend part of his summer vacations and most of his weekends in the company of a group of boys and girls his own age. One of the girls in the band had a father who was a journalist and author. This fascinated the young Benoist, and he determined to make the man’s acquaintance.

The man was Henry Coston, a longtime anti-Jewish polemicist and, under the occupation, an enthusiastic collaborator. The young Benoist knew none of this, being mainly interested to meet a man who lived by his pen. Coston described himself as an author of books on “big money,” and gave Benoist one of his works, entitled The Financiers Who Run the World.

In the summer of 1960, when Benoist was sixteen years old, Coston invited him to contribute to a large reference work he was compiling on French political parties and movements. Benoist wrote several articles, including the one on Action Française, signing them “Cédric de Gentissard.” By Christmas, he was a published author.

“The youth at that time was incredibly politicized,” Benoist recalls. “At the lycée Louis-le-Grand, half my fellow pupils belonged to a political party (not so today for even one percent of high school and university students). Most were socialists or communists.”

Perceiving that Benoist was still searching politically, Coston recommended he get in touch with the Jeune Nation movement and its student branch, the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN). When he arrived at Jeune Nation’s headquarters, a young woman said to him “you want to be a militant, my friend? Start by sweeping this floor!” Benoist conscientiously fulfilled the task; she took his information and said “you will be contacted.”

From 1961 to the end of 1966, [recalls Benoist,] I passed a total of six years on the extreme right. It was a short time, really, but undeniably marked me for life, both because of the political situation—the end of a world—and because of my age: there is always a part of our adolescence we do not survive.

The FEN maintained at least forty chapters in all the important university towns of France. They held semiannual meetings for chapter leaders in Paris, as well as summer camps for the general membership, which were a mixture of sporting activities and political training. Benoist was employed mainly in writing and editing various newsletters: “I often slept on an inflatable mattress I kept under my desk, in order to resume work the more quickly the next day.”

The FEN’s official goal was to fight against the ”marxification” of the university, and it also supported French Algeria. Members distributed tracts, put up posters, staged public meetings and demonstrations, and (not least) got into fistfights with political opponents of their own age.

I loved the electric atmosphere of the demonstrations, the movements of the crowd, the way in which slogans and cries spread, the confrontations with the police, the smell of teargas. In February 1961, during a demonstration in place de l’Etoile, I was arrested and remanded in custody. My mother, who had come to take me home, was picked up too!

We used to tour all the local chapters of FEN, criss-crossing France in a little car stuffed with tracts and propaganda material. We usually slept in the woods, in sleeping bags, or simply in ditches beside the road, under the open sky.

[Once] we went to brush slogans in tar on various buildings in Chartes—including the cathedral. Each group was assigned a driver with a getaway car. When my group went to our car, we found it had disappeared: the driver had chickened out. We were arrested by the police. Although covered in tar, we energetically denied the evidence; we ended up paying a heavy fine.

Meanwhile, Benoist continued his studies.

Philosophy class had a capital importance for me, for I had a feeling of finally being at home. Although up to that time I had had a purely literary and artistic education, the discovery of the great systems of philosophical thought found in me a prepared heart. It seemed to me that I already had an essentially philosophical spirit without knowing it. I learned the history of philosophy at a great pace, discovering Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Bergson, Sartre. . . .

This brought me not so much a way of understanding the world, nor of changing it, but of interpreting it. The world ceased to be a pure given, neutral, something à propos of which agreement could immediately be reached. Henceforth it existed as something which could gain access to the human understanding only through a meaning attributed to it—which, of course, posed the problem of the criteria of such appreciation. At least, that is how I understood philosophy, as an interpretive key.

It was thanks to philosophy that I realized the need to have a Weltanschauung, a global conception of the world. Without such a conception, things had no meaning. [I don’t mean] an a priori conception, which seeks willy-nilly to fit the real to some sort of Procrustean bed, but one formed on the basis of observation of the world and a systematic interpretation of what is observed.

Benoist matriculated at the Sorbonne in the department of law, following a curriculum in general philosophy, history of religion, ethics and sociology. Yet he refused to sit his exams; obtaining degrees was looked upon as “collaboration with the regime” in his circle of political militants! As a result, Benoist was ineligible for advanced studies later; to this day, he holds no academic degree.

In 1963 Benoist began writing for Dominique Venner’s new monthly, Europe-Action. The magazine had little in common with traditional throne-and-altar traditionalism; it promoted “first, the idea of European nationalism; second, an explicit anti-Christianity; third, a biologizing interpretation of society, implying both ‘biological materialism’ and racism (delicately renamed ‘biological realism’).” Benoist estimates that Europe-Action attained a circulation of approximately 15,000.

He began to travel a lot, becoming a sort of foreign correspondent for the publications with which he was involved.

In each country, I scoured the bookstores and went to see the most diverse political parties and movements. In London, I visited both the Anglo-Rhodesian Society and the African National Congress. In New York, I met Thomas Molnar and Ralph de Toledano. The next day, I went to Harlem to make purchases at the Black Muslim bookstore. In Washington I went to visit the Democrats as well as the Republicans, and then the Nazi party, based in Arlington, VA. In Mississippi, I attended a grotesque nocturnal ceremony of the Ku Klux Klan, where even the grandmothers and babies were decked out in white hoods.

Meanwhile, the movement was changing character. Many of the militants began to devote their efforts to electoral politics. They formed a National Movement of Progress in 1966, but its electoral performance was dismal. Another faction, with which Benoist identified, preferred to move in the direction of what in America would be called a “think tank”: “I proposed to dissolve the FEN and replace it with an Institute of Doctrinal Studies, which was rejected. If one is determined to seek the origins of the ‘New Right,’ then this is the turning point to which one must refer.”

Asked by the interviewer whether in retrospect he sees his years of militancy as a waste of time, Benoist strongly denies it:

Militancy is a school, one of the best there is. It is a school of discipline and deportment, of exaltation and enthusiasm, a school of self-sacrifice. It’s also a crucible of friendship like few others: being militants together creates a bond which endures across time and, sometimes, triumphs over anything else. You have many illusions, believing your impact will be increased in the same proportion as you mobilize yourself completely, but you [also] get the feeling of giving a meaning to your existence.

All this being said, it is a school one must know how to leave. Nothing is more ridiculous than those old militants who keep trotting out the same slogans for decades. The militant is not only someone who gives of himself completely; he is also a partisan in the worst sense of the term. He repeats a catechism; he refers to a collective “we” which relieves him of all personal thought. The “good militant” is a true believer who prefers answers to questions, because he requires certainties. And like all believers, he puts aside all critical spirit and glories in his sectarianism.

Part 3: The Beginnings of the Nouvelle Droite

During the years 1966–’67, the movement in which Benoist had been a militant went into its death throes. Europe-Action ceased publication following its November 1966 issue; the FEN held its last summer training camp in 1967. Concurrently, Benoist was undergoing a personal evolution which might be summed up as the victory of the philosophy student over the militant.

I felt a strong desire to start again from scratch. At twenty-three, I had just passed several years in a milieu where I had the feeling of having “seen it all.” I had learned a lot, but also experienced its limits. I was aware of having said a lot of stupid things, of having repeated slogans only because they corresponded to what “we” were supposed to think. I wanted to submit all that to a critical examination, perform a sort of triage between the correct ideas that could be kept and the false ideas that had to be abandoned.

I had definitely concluded that I was not a man of power but a man of knowledge. The life of reflection, not to say the vita contemplativa, was more important to me than the vita activa. After having forced my own nature for a time, I had found myself. I aspired to reconstruct a general view of the world on a new basis.

In the fall of 1967, I went to stay in Denmark for a week or so, on the coast of the Baltic, in order to reflect calmly upon what I wanted to do: viz., to lead a “theoretical” life, as Aristotle said—but how? I did not want to set forth any catechism of ready-made ideas, but to set in motion a train of thought. I could imagine the starting point, but did not wish to prejudge where it would lead. It was a matter of taking clear positions, engaging oneself completely, but never forgetting the primacy of questioning.

A few weeks later I arranged a working seminar in an old barn in the Vendée where a FEN summer training camp [presumably the last] had just been held. It was during this meeting that I announced my intention of launching a review entitled Nouvelle Ecole.

The inaugural meeting of the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE) took place at Lyons, May 4–5, 1968. But the idea had been in the air for some time. At the beginning, I conceived GRECE quite unrealistically as a kind of synthesis between the Frankfurt School, Action Française, and the Centre nationale de recherche scientific!

From the chronology, we can see that the Nouvelle Droite was not, as is so often asserted, a “response” to the events of May 1968. Benoist, however, did take an interest in the events of that “revolutionary” month, and witnessed many of them close up.

It was only afterwards that I understood that there were in fact two different “May ’68s.” On the one hand, there was the initiation of a radical critique of consumer society, the society of the spectacle and mercantile values, with which I could only sympathize. On the other hand, it was a pseudo-revolution of “desire” (“untrammeled enjoyment,” “it is forbidden to forbid,” “the beach on the pavement”) which betrayed a spoilt-child individualism beneath its revolutionary appearances. Unfortunately, it was the second tendency which won out.

By 1970, GRECE was expanding rapidly, with “circles” forming in most of the major university towns: the Vilfredo Pareto Circle in Paris, the Henry de Montherlant Circle in Bordeaux . . . even a Leconte de Lisle Circle on the island of Réunion!

By the fall of 1968 it acquired a modest internal newsletter, Eléments, which expanded over the years until it became autonomous, the magazine for the general public it is today. Beginning [also] in 1968, GRECE has organized a national colloquium every year, as well as a summer university which is held in a big provençal building at the foot of the Roquefavour Aqueduct near Aix-en-Provence.

It was a matter of creating a working community, even if the first term was forgotten by some. But it is true that we attached great importance to the idea of community. We appropriated the classic distinction made by Ferdinand Tönnies between community, inherited or acquired, but always founded upon organic bonds, and society, of a contractual nature, and thus more artificial and “mechanical.”

Most of the members of GRECE were then between twenty and thirty years old. Some were still students. It was the time of first marriages and the arrival of first children. Since we were not Christians, there were no baptisms or church marriages. Some members wanted us to work out substitute rites.

I myself got married June 21, 1972—the day of the summer solstice—to a young German from Schleswig-Holstein, Doris Christians, who all her life has always remained a wonderful wife. We would have two sons: Frédérik (1978) and Adrien (1981).

Benoist describes the 1970s for GRECE as a period of “systematic exploration of the ideological landscape, with inevitable ambiguities, some theoretical wavering or mistakes.”

I wrote a number of articles on the nexus between culture and politics. I was struggling to define the idea of “cultural power.” I insisted on the role of culture as an element in political change. A political transformation [merely] sanctions a revolution which has already occurred in minds and mores. Intellectual and cultural work contributes to this mental change by popularizing values, images and themes which break with the order in place or with the values of the dominant class.

The first polemics against GRECE came at the end of 1972 from a far-right royalist organization which accused them of “racism.” Some members even attacked a GRECE seminar, pick-handles in hand. This had no lasting effect, and GRECE “established itself definitively in the intellectual landscape during the next five years.” In 1976, members established the publishing house Copernic, which published some fifty titles over the next few years.

In 1977 a series of events began which would turn Benoist’s little “working community” into an international media sensation. A close associate, the author and journalist Louis Pauwels, began to produce a Sunday supplement for the newspaper Le Figaro in which Benoist published interviews and book reviews. This venture proving successful, in October 1978 it was upgraded to a weekly magazine, Le Figaro-Magazine. Benoist worked closely with Pauwels on the project, and induced many of his associates to write for the magazine. “Nearly all [Pauwels’] editorials were a fairly faithful reflection of the ideas and work of the Nouvelle Droite,” remembers Benoist. After ten weeks of publication, the magazine had boosted Le Figaro’s circulation to 400,000, and it eventually shot up to 850,000.

By the summer of 1979, the ideological mainstream was worried. On the 22nd of June, Le Monde launched an attack under the title Le Nouvelle Droite s’installe (“The New Right Settles In”). This was the first appearance of the term “nouvelle droite,” which had never been used by Benoist or his associates to describe themselves. On July 2nd, the Nouvelle Observateur followed up with a cover story about GRECE. “From that point on,” remembers Benoist, “a snowball effect took hold.”

Within the space of a few weeks, several hundred articles were devoted to the Nouvelle Droite. After the articles there were books, then radio and television programs. I was giving swarms of interviews. One of the most memorable was two full pages in France-Soir of 20th July on the theme “What to Think of the New Right?” Playboy devoted their interview of the month to me. I was also pressed with questions by the television networks of France, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Japan, Denmark, Israel, Mexico, Brazil, Lebanon, etc. They asked whether I was considering running in the presidential elections. It was surreal.

We may note that not a single English speaking country appears in Benoist’s long list of international media which took an interest in the Nouvelle Droite.

On October 3, 1980 a bomb went off in a Paris synagogue, a crime later shown to have been the work of Middle-Eastern terrorists. The head of Licra (French acronym for International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism) declared that the attack was the consequence of a certain intellectual “climate” to which Figaro-Magazine had contributed. Hysterical reactions followed, and the police told Pauwels and Benoist that they could not guarantee their safety, and recommended that they “beat a retreat.”

I had to leave my house and spend several days undercover in Paris. Pauwels and I arranged a few discreet meetings. He wore dark sunglasses and looked over his shoulder as he spoke. It was like being in a John Le Carré novel. Two months later, a national colloquium organized by GRECE was forcibly attacked by a band of zealots. One of our friends lost an eye in the course of the brawl.

 

———————

Devlin, F. Roger. “Alain de Benoist’s Vivid Memory.” Counter-Currents Publishing. “Part 1: A Full Childhood,” 10 July 2012, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/alain-de-benoists-vivid-memory-part-1-a-full-childhood/ >. “Part 2: An Agitated Youth,” 17 July 2012, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/alain-de-benoists-vivid-memory-part-2/ >. “Part 3: The Beginnings of the Nouvelle Droite,” 25 July 2012, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/alain-de-benoists-vivid-memory-part-3/ >.

Notes: This review of Alain de Benoist’s Mémoire vive does indeed end as presented here (with the quotation), a manner which many readers would consider somewhat abrupt.

Also of note is the fact that Mémoire vive has been recently translated into German as Mein Leben: Wege eines Denken (Berlin: Junge Freiheit, 2014).

For a listing of other major works by Alain de Benoist and their translations, see the section on further reading on the page for the “Manifesto of the New Right”: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/manifesto-of-the-new-right-benoist-champetier/ >.

 

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Left-Right Dichotomy – Benoist

End of the Left-Right Dichotomy: The French Case

By Alain de Benoist

Consider the frequently cited quotation by the French philosopher Alain: “When I am asked if the division between parties of the Right and parties of the Left, between leftists and rightists still has any meaning, the first thing which occurs to me is that whoever is asking the question is certainly not on the Left.” [1] Alain would be surprised to learn that today this question, which he thought could only have been posed by someone from the Right, is on everyone’s lips — at least in France.

During the past few years, all the Sofres opinion polls have shown that for most of the French people the Left-Right split is becoming increasingly meaningless. In March 1981 only 33% considered notions of Right and Left to be outdated and no longer descriptive of political positions. In February 1986, this figure was 45%; in March 1988, 48%; in November 1989, 56%. [2] This last figure was confirmed by two subsequent Sofres polls published in December 1990 and July 1993. [3] It does not seem to have changed since. As for the inverse opinion, according to which the Left-Right split still has meaning, since 1991 it has not been more than 33% of those polled, as against 43% in 1981.

This evolution is remarkable for three reasons. First, because it shows a growing tendency: from year to year the notions of Right and Left appear increasingly discredited. Second, it has only taken a dozen years for the credibility of the Left-Right split to decline by more than 20 points in public opinion polls. Third, because this development is a fact in all political circles and all sectors of opinion: in April 1988, a Sofres poll indicated that since 1981 this conviction had made the most progress within the Left. [4]

At the same time, however, most French people continue to identify themselves as either Left or Right — a paradoxical result confirming the extent of the gap separating political parties from their voters. But this kind of self-definition is also weakening. Whereas during the 1960s, 90% of the French people located themselves along the Left-Right axis, [5] by 1981 the number had dropped to no more than 73%, to only 64% in 1991.

All these figures show clearly that the Left-Right dichotomy which has structured the French political landscape for more than two centuries –what Emmanuel Berl described as “by far the most lively distinction for the mass of the French electorate,” and Jean-Francois Sirinelli has more recently characterized as “in essence, the major French split,” [6] is losing much of its meaning. This is all the more surprising since it was in France that the concepts Left and Right first saw the light of day. The general opinion is that this dates from August 28 1789, when the Estates-General, in session since May and transformed into a constituent assembly, began to debate in Versailles whether the king should have veto rights. This debate sought to establish whether in the constitutional monarchy being installed the monarch had any prerogatives over and above that of national sovereignty, i.e., a prerogative exceeding that of the representatives of the people organized in a body politic. To indicate their choice, those in favor of a royal veto were placed to the right of the speaker, while their opponents sat on the left. So the distinction Left-Right originally came about as a topographical accident. [7] It was to expand gradually into all of Europe, then to the entire world, taking permanent roots in the Latin countries and, in a more circumstantial way, in Germanic and above all Anglo-Saxon countries. In France it took its contemporary meaning and became part of everyday language during the Third Republic. [8]

What are the reasons for the gradual erosion of the concepts of Left and Right? There are several ways to answer this question. One would be to ask about the exact meaning of the terms in order to establish whether they are attached to certain permanent themes or merely to attitudes (psychological traits, “sensibilities”) where one would be able to locate their recurrence in certain well-determined political families, yet again to certain key concepts constituting the “hard core” whose heuristic value can facilitate analysis. For reasons too long to go into, such an approach would lead to an impasse, and that is why it is more fruitful to focus on the French situation. Today the three great debates which for two centuries in France have characterized the Right-Left dichotomy are essentially over.

The first of these debates concerns political institutions. Beginning with the Revolution and for over 100 years it was to pit against each other the supporters of the Republic, the partisans of the constitutional monarchy and those nostalgic for the monarchy by divine right. It was a debate bearing on the Revolution itself, which ended in the Restoration and the 1815 compromise which, in some way, marks the birth of modern France. Next, starting from the July Monarchy, it became a debate concerning the definition of the political regime — republic or monarchy– which culminated in 1875 with the establishment of universal suffrage and the definitive installation of a republic. From then on rightists became essentially republican, while monarchist movements were gradually east to the fringes of the political spectrum.

The second major debate, beginning in the 1880′s, dealt with the question of religion. Pitting supporters of a “clerical” concept of the social order against those advocating a purely secular vision of justice, the debate took the place of the one about institutions and generated a polemic whose violence has now been somewhat forgotten. For some time, it came to be identified exclusively with the Left-Right split and became the touch-stone for all political life. “By comparison,” wrote Rene Remond, “all other divergencies appeared secondary. Whoever followed the prescriptions of the Catholic Church was ipso facto catalogued on the Right, and the anti-clerical had no need to furnish any other proof of democratic sentiments and attachment to the Republic.” [9] This was the atmosphere that eventually gave rise to the Dreyfus Affair (which lead to a shift of anti-Semitism from Left to Right and, for the first time, introduced the Left-Right cleavage in intellectual circles). This argument culminated in 1905 in the separation of Church and state. It left profound traces on French political life. It gradually lost its relevance due, on the one side, to the rallying of a party of the Catholic hierarchy to republican institutions and, on the other, to the appearance of a secularized theory of the traditional social order (from Auguste Comte to Taine) –a double movement which came to an end with a progressive dissociation of the Church from the counter-revolution. Subsequently, religious controversies continued to lose relevance and soon survived only in debates about state subventions for schools run by the Church.

The final debate is obviously the social one. It began in the 1830s when capitalism imposed itself on economic forms inherited from the past, paving the way for the class straggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the development of industrial society, the birth of socialism and the founding of the labor movement. Interrupted during the “Sacred Union” of WWI, it resurfaced in 1917. From 1920 on, to be on the Left no longer meant simply to be a republican (since everybody was republican), or even secular (since by then there were Left Catholics), meant to be a socialist or a communist.

Before anything else, the social question raises the problem of the role of the state in regulating economic activity and the eventual redistribution of wealth. Divided between reformers and revolutionaries the Left identified itself with the rejection of the market economy –and even private property — and advocated a planned, centralized and state-controlled economy. Its objective was to assure collective emancipation through economic and social institutions in order to promote a kind of general contract via the collectivization of the means of production. In addition, the Left made purely quantitative and material demands: it denounced capitalism (the exploitation of labor and the inequalities in the distribution of wealth), without challenging its central objective (constant growth). It sought to ground itself in the working class and turn workers into a political force bearing a concrete program for emancipation. This statist and productivist project was to last decades before collapsing under the joint impact of the implosion of “real socialism” and the exhaustion of the welfare state, while the working class itself became increasingly reformist and eventually evaporated with consumerism and popular shareholding. As Remond put it: “In a short period of time, almost all the issues over which elections were fought, which did and undid majorities, which fed debate, which gave political life its colors have ceased to evoke passion, have lost their spark and have even disappeared from the scene.” [10]

After WWII, the rapid rise in the standard of living was accompanied by a deep transformation of political practices as well as the behavior and value orientation of society. “In France, enriched by the ‘Thirty Glorious Years,’ the relaxation of economic constraints led to the relaxation of social controls.” [11] On the other hand, the growth of the middle class began to erase confessional and sociological criteria for voting. In the 1960s, the more Catholic one was the more one was likely to vote for the Right. In the social context, the more one was a worker (or the more one felt to be one, for it is a subjective perception of social class which exercises the most decisive influence on political choice) the more one voted for the Left. Ten years later, this was no longer completely true. Various commentators have pointed out the specificity of the political behavior of the “salaried middle classes,” whose numbers more than doubled between 1954 and 1975 (owing to the expansion of the service and public sectors), who vote mostly Left, and of those self-employed who vote mostly Right.

This trend has generally continued. The sense of belonging to a social class, as measured by opinion polls, fell from 68% in 1976 to 56% in 1987. Indeed, it is among workers that it has fallen the most, from 74% to 50%. As for the Catholic vote, it has become distributed across all sectors of opinion: between 1978 and 1988 the correlation between voting for the Right and religious practice fell by 20 points.

In 1981, the Left coming into power appeared to mark the victory of this new sociological model. In order to explain it, one used to point to urbanization, economic growth, etc. Shortly afterwards, the rapid diminishing of support for the Left among the very groups that had brought it to power, concurrent with the appearance of new parties and social movements, began to cast doubt on this schema and favored the appearance of competing models questioning the pertinence of the Right-Left split as much as its sociological foundations. This is when talk began about the “new voter,” unconcerned with social or professional ties and of a very limited “rationality.” [12] We were entering an era which has been described as “electoral self-service” or “commercial democracy.” [13] As Jerome Jaffre has written: “Voters choose either Right or Left, whichever seems to suit them. This phenomenon is evidence for the ideological destructuring of the French that corresponds to the weakening of major parties.” [14]

This has resulted in a considerable increase in electoral volatility. In 1946 Francois Goguel calculated that at no point in France, between 1877 and 1936, did the balance of forces between the Right and the Left vary by more than 2%. Today 17% of voters for the far Left in the 1986 legislative elections voted for a right-wing party in the first round of the 1988 presidential elections and, inversely, 60% of Mitterand’s voters in 1988 refused to vote socialist in 1993.

On the level of political leadership, this destructuring of the electorate corresponds to a substantial move toward the center. [15] Not only has the Left finally accepted the institutions of the Fifth Republic and the principle of nuclear deterrence (which it resisted ferociously in the past), not only has the Right in large part come to terms with the Left on such issues as contraception, the death penalty and new models for authority in the family and society, but as soon as they come to power Right and Left alike seem increasingly inclined to adopt the same policies. The more rapid their alternation the clearer this identity becomes. In this regard, since 1981 the French have hardly seen any difference between the economic policy followed by the Left and that adopted by the Right. Neither have they seen the slightest difference between the social policies of Edouard Balladur and of Pierre Beregovoy, the foreign policy of Giscard d’Estaing and Francois Mitterand, the “security” obsessions of Michel Charasse and Charles Pasqua, the budget priorities of departmental or regional authorities controlled by the majority and those controlled by the opposition. Of course, the Right wants a little more liberalism (in the French sense of the word:, i.e., more free-market economics) and fewer social programs, while the Left prefers a few more social programs and a little less liberalism. On the whole, however, the political class does not seem to be tom apart all that much in the shifts between “socio-liberalism” and “social liberalism.”

This move toward the center has also affected intellectual circles, as witnessed by the collapse of critical thinking in an age when most of those who only yesterday would rash to refute the established order have been transformed into passionate defenders of liberal democracy, the New World Order, and the right to neo-colonialist interference on humanitarian pretexts. This move to the center, however, gives a strong impression of the end of something. Maybe only the end of modernity. This is Serge Latouche’s thesis: “The political form of modernity is running out of steam because it has run its course. Right and Left have essentially realized their programs. Alternation has succeeded extraordinarily well. The enlightened Right and the Left lay claim to the legacy of the Enlightenment, but neither of the two claims it entirely. Each sees itself as having realized its part of the legacy. The Left, whose imagination is tied to a radical version of the Enlightenment, used to worship progress, science and technology …. The liberal and enlightened Right, from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, exalted individual liberty and economic competition. The Left advocated well-being for all, while the Right defended growth and the right to enjoy the fruits of enterprise. Through shocks and crises, the modem state has achieved all that.” [16]

As Regis Debray has pointed out: “When there will be no more differences between Left and Right than between the services of a nationalized or a private bank, or between the TV news on a public or commercial channel, then we will switch from one to the other without regrets and, who knows, without even realizing it.” [17] We seem to have reached this point.

Some people may rejoice about this in the name of “consensus.” They are wrong. First, because democracy is not the end of conflict but conflict mastered. For a political society to function normally, a consensus must be established over the framework and modalities of debate. But if the consensus results in the disappearance of debate, then democracy will also disappear. Even more than a plurality of parties, democracy implies a diversity of opinions and choices as well as the recognition of the legitimacy of a clash between them so that the adversary is not transformed into an enemy (for the opposition of yesterday can be the majority of tomorrow). But, if parties are no longer distinguished by anything other than insignificant differences in their programs, if current factions advocate basically the same policies, if they are no longer distinct regarding their objectives or even the means to attain them, in short, if citizens no longer see themselves confronted with real alternatives and choices, then debate ceases to have any raison d’etre and the institutional framework for it becomes nothing more than an empty shell which most voters, not surprisingly, prefer to ignore.

Too much consensus is also anti-democratic in another sense. Contrary to the advocates of the “political market” (who postulate that voters seek above all to rationally maximize their best interests at polling time), in effect voting is primarily a means of representing and affirming the self. [18] In a context where the homogenization of all social space by the middle classes is already depriving the concepts of Left and Right of any sociological content, if in addition the electorate feels that the parties vying for power provide no alternatives, this electorate can only lose interest in a political game which no longer allows the expression of a sense of belonging or affiliation through the ballot. The end of the “democracy of identification” (Pierre Rosanvallon) translates into a growing abstention which leads to social anomie and the exclusion of those socially marginalized and no longer concerned with power games. In both cases there is a great risk of ending up not with a society pacified by “consensus,” but with a dangerous and potentially belligerent one characterized by other modes of affirming identity (religious, ethnic, national, etc.). These may not result in any desire for “dangerous purity” (Bernard-Henri Levy) but will be the logical consequence of the fact that it is no longer possible to function as citizens.

This is the direction in which things are headed today. Everything confirms it: the multiplying corruption scandals, which discredit both Left and Right politicians; the dominant individualism encouraging civic irresponsibility and turning in on oneself; the contrast between stated ambitions and the insignificance of results; the transformation of the political game into a media spectacle where “making things known” always counts more than “knowing how to do things”; the intellectuals’ conceptual impotence and social anomie. As a final result, the political class seems to be increasingly made up of professionals alien to society and of parties which have become mere machines to sell electoral goods for the sole profit of their present leaders. In other words, in market terms, political life is characterized by a decreasing supply in the face of ever more indifferent, because disoriented -demand.

As for the move to the center, although it constitutes one of the causes of the current clouding of the Right-Left split, it is itself the consequence of a whole series of broader events. It has resulted from the accumulation of discomfort and disillusion brought about by the collapse of predominant lately-hegemonic ideologies and socio-historical models. Typified by the implosion of the Soviet system, this collapse has mined many hopes and has resulted in a false belief in the “end of ideology,” i.e., the disappearance of one of the most powerful resources of political thought and imagination. The blurring has increased confusion and fudged differences. But it has also created conditions for a greater acceptability of the idea that many phenomena are “ineluctable,” for example, the “laws” regulating the market economy and the uncontrolled growth of technology. All these phenomena are deemed inevitable because we have lost the habit of questioning the meaning of outcomes, resulting in the assumption that it is no longer possible to validate decisions. This denies the very essence of politics and reduces it to a simple technique of administrative management. The rise of technocracy and the role of experts already set the stage. This legitimates the belief that political choices are simply a matter of technical rationality, allowing only one possible solution. This is a denial of the very essence of politics. But it is also a denial of democracy, since for the experts, “pluralism always results either in misunderstandings or in a lack of rationality: on one side there are competent experts and on the other incompetents. For the latter to be rational and informed it is sufficient to accept the opinion of the former.” [19]

From this viewpoint, one of the today’s most salient features is the nation-state’s growing inability not only to steer a society characterized by the dilution of social relations, but also to react to the internationalization of national spaces and markets, the development of a global economy and the planetary deployment of information. Today the nation-state can no longer deal with problems such as unemployment, drugs, economic instability and social ostracism. Divested of its means, the state is increasingly reduced to the daily management of phenomena which transcend it, i.e., to find short-term solutions while continuing to perfect techniques of social control and repression. As Sami Nair has put it: “The crisis of the welfare state is first of all the crisis of the nation-state’s inability to deal with the internationalization of capital. Today the structure of the capital market and thus the forms of the resulting competition are determined by transnational oligopolies against which the traditional nation-state has hardly any response …. The state is confronted with a tragic dilemma it cannot resolve: either drastic protectionism with very uncertain economic and social consequences, or capitulation before the major poles of the international economy.” [20]

The problem is that, in this regard, both the Right and the Left have already accepted capitulation. Once again, this is one of the reasons for the move to the center, as well as the blurring of the distinction between Left and Right. This is not really surprising for the Right, which has long since allied itself with money and the wealthy classes. According to Bernard Charbonneau: “While justifying the state’s protection of economic interests, patriotism has become its own caricature: chauvinism. The role of the best people in justifying the whims of the richest makes it impossible to distinguish between a genuine aristocracy and a so-called ‘elite’ defined exclusively by money.” [21] In so doing, however, the Right has betrayed itself. “Those values which the Right espouses are exactly those by which it is judged. The criticisms the Left makes of the Right are nothing compared to those the Right should be able to make of itself. Capitalism claims the virtues of property, and it supports the dispossession of millions of people by capitalism in order to safeguard private property, bringing about the largest undertaking of expropriation in modern times. It exalts the motherland and for the glory of one nationalism it feeds a will to power which tends to destroy all other motherlands. It upholds authority and character, while on the whim of one, be it monarch or owner, it transforms all others into serfs. While defending liberty, the Right everywhere gradually slides into monopoly…. Against Marxist materialism, it sets itself up as a champion of the power of the spirit, but serves a social class whose sole reason for being is economic activity….”[22]

The classical Right has always been in an uncomfortable position. On the one hand, it has to respond to the exigencies of profitability, competitiveness and modernization, which are vital to its interests; while on the other, to continue enjoying the support of its voters, it has to appear to embody traditional values (authority, family, patriotism, etc.), which are exactly those which oppose the logic of the commodity and what Jurgen Habermas calls the “colonization of the lifeworld” by “economic and administrative sub-systems.” As long as capitalism remained tied to the nation-state, this dilemma could still be managed. Economic modernization could be presented as part of national greatness, sometimes even as triumphant nationalism. In a world economy which seeks to suppress all local particularities that act as an obstacle to its movement or threaten to slow its expansion, this is no longer the case. Liberal capitalism no longer has a “national strategy”: globalization of the economy has led it to make the state’s primary task to support this process of globalization with appropriate legislation –an assortment of new forms of internal control to disarm all kinds of social resistance.[23] This can be seen in France with the conversion of most of the Gaullist program to the very economic liberalism excoriated by General de Gaulle — with the consequent appearance on the political margins of social protest movements which tend to widen the gap between politicians and voters.

The monied Right has no principled convictions, only principled interests. “This is why, among other reasons, it shows itself so magisterial in its mastery of what one might call the relativism of ideologies. All representations can serve it on the condition that they do not challenge its system of interests.”[24]

The Left has followed the same path. Fifteen years ago it was still an old republican bedrock, coated with socialist and communist or even anarchist sediments. This heterogenous mixture was generally unified by the same political culture, common sociological references and, as it was claimed at the time, a certain ethics. Since then its political culture has fallen apart. The working class has seen its contours eroded. As for “ethics,” it is best not to mention it! Discredited by the defeat of “really existing socialism,” the communist wing has not survived the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The anarchist trend is no more than an erratic underground stream. As for the socialist and social democratic wings, which were the main components of the Left, they have been dealt a major blow by the crisis of the welfare state.

Socialism espoused an emancipatory ideology meant to allow man, beyond all forms of domination and social exploitation, to recover his self, i.e., to be restored to himself in all his authenticity. Achieving this aim presupposed a radical transformation of society as organized by triumphant capitalism. The whole history of the labor movement revolves around the debate regarding the nature of this transformation and the best means to carry it out. Some claimed it had to take place through a violent rupture, others by gradual evolution. The former only succeeded in installing unprecedented forms of dictatorship, while the latter have been reduced to perpetually postponing the project, having failed to find an alternative to the capitalist system or to propose a viable project of social reconstruction.

It was already paradoxical to identify the state as the agency of emancipation since the main characteristic of the paternalist-state model is to strip individuals of their autonomy in exchange for security. Today, under the weight of bureaucratic burdens and fiscal impositions, all models of intervention from above have collapsed. Along with this, the discrediting of the idea of progress has ruined optimistic visions of a future seen to coincide automatically with an ideal of emancipation. The Left, heir of Descartes, wished to change the world and subdue nature. Now it realizes that the results are not too brilliant, that the achievement of modernity is passing it by and that the subdued nature is in a pitiful state. As for a socialism which presented itself as the “civilization of labor,” it must henceforth confront the problem of free time.

During the past few years, all Left ideological constructs as well as those of the managerial New Class have become either considerably weaker or have collapsed altogether. Nair writes: “For more than a decade, the crisis over representing the future, the evaporation of the grand organizing narratives of the future (socialism, communism) has intensified. This process entails considerable cultural, political and sociological displacement; essential ingredients of socialism as a vision have collapsed. We are now witnessing a progressive disappearance of the main values of the Left. The concept of exploitation is gone from the polemical vocabulary, while that of equality, at best, is only stuttered with some compunction in political confrontations. Already derailed in its bureaucratic form in the East, socialism is equally in trouble in its democratic version.”[25] Peter Glotz adds: “The Left has been philosophically disoriented since its concept of progress has been destroyed and the humanism of the Age of Enlightenment has become a universal concept. Its economic theory is breached because the crisis in Marxism has, like it or not, stripped it of its own economic vision; and it is further threatened by the loss of an old advantage: the solid organization of unions and workers’ parties. The Left finds itself disoriented in the post-modern age.”[26]

In 1981 in France, the Left triumphed politically against the background of ideological confusion. It might have been able to seize this occasion to restructure its identity. What happened, however, was the opposite. Not only did Mitterrand’s rise to power accelerate the confusion, but the Left assimilated the “managerial culture” so well that, redoubling its efforts, it suddenly adopted and perfected everything it had previously denounced. Beginning in 1982-3, the adoption of a new economic policy brutally confirmed the move toward the center. The critique of capitalism was abandoned, and with it the idea that the state, even if not the motor of the economy, might at least have the right to oversee the private sector. Add to this the rehabilitation of the notion of profit, the apology for the market and “entrepreneurial culture,” greater growth in capital revenues as compared to labor and the picture is complete. By abandoning the Jauresian idea that the state is first of all a balance of forces between the social classes, the Left has chosen to put the freedom of capital before the freedom of citizens, and has laid its statist identity to rest without, however, trying to recenter itself in society. In short, acting as if the final stage in social organization had been reached and as if it would be impossible for people to act collectively, it has implicitly enshrined the mercantile West as the unsurpassable ideal. The result will be unbridled Stock Exchange, corruption at the highest level and the promotion of crooks-turned-politicians such as Bernard Tapie as paradigmatic “winners.”

In 1979, at the Metz congress of the Socialist Party, Mitterrand and his friends argued that “economic rigor, as understood by those in power, is a formidable lie.” In 1992 the socialist project, titled “A New Horizon,” stated: “Yes, we believe that the market economy is the most efficient means of production and exchange. No, we no longer believe in a break with capitalism.” This is what enabled Michel Rocard to redefine socialism as a “kind of tempered capitalism” (sic).

Today Left and Right worship the same god: the cult of performance, efficiency and profit. This can be seen in the answers to questions regularly posed to the French by Sofres seeking to find what terms evoke positive or negative responses. In November 1989 one of these polls allowed one to state that the word “liberalism” garnered positive responses from 59% of the socialist sympathizers, whereas a majority of UDF voters looked favorably upon the term “social-democracy.”[27] Between April 1981 and October 1990, when Mitterand was head-of-state, the terms which received the most positive responses in public opinion were “profit,” “capitalism” and “participation”; while those which had lost the most were “socialism,” “unions” and “nationalization.” In 1992 Roland Cayrol concluded: “The tendency toward convergence over liberalism, competition, participation and profit is the law of the decade.[28]

The Right had already been corrupted by its possession of wealth; the Left was corrupted by acquiring this wealth. The Right allied with wealth contributed more than the Left to the destruction of the values which it pretended to advocate. The Left, as it came to be allied with wealth, contributed more than the Right to prevent the advent of the new society it wished to bring about. In short, the Left has lost its principles before a Right which never cared too much about having any, thereby confirming Bernard Charbonneau’s claim: “To describe the evolution of the Left and of the Right is to trace the curve of their respective self-betrayals. How living moral became instantly paralyzed in the idea, how the fury of the struggle progressively deformed the idea into a self-serving lie, and how, animated by the same will to power and using the same means, different ideologies have ended up dissolving themselves in the same chaos. This is their history.”[29]

The Right has lost its main enemy: communism. The Left has chosen to collaborate with its own: capitalism. As a result, the Right can no longer mobilize its voters by denouncing the “red menace,” while the Left can no longer rally its own by proposing “to change society.” This, however, does not prevent them from periodically attempting to revive extinct arguments. But the symmetrical myths of anti-communism and anti-fascism, polemical evocations of a bygone era, cannot forever serve to economize on profound thinking nor to hide the emptiness of ideas.[30] Some day it will be necessary to reconstruct values and reformulate identities.

For now, that remains far into the future. While the populist Right is looking for identity, thanks to the immigrants, the Left exhausts itself in various “renewals” and “regroundings,” or seeks to regroup on the margins of political life by advocating aid to oppressed minorities, solidarity with the most impoverished, and the straggle against social ostracism. However sympathetic they might be, and assuming they are responding to an authentic commitment to altruism and not to a straightforward need for a clear conscience and moral comfort, such aims are unfortunately also an admission of defeat. To replace ideological with purely moralizing criteria, to reduce militant activity to first aid for the war-wounds of change and justice to a profane version of that caritas theologians in the Middle Ages defined as a kind of non-erotic love is only an attempt to correct the faults or excesses of a society we cannot change, i.e., to reinforce it. By seeking remedies merely for a few consequences of the degradation of social relations, by changing into a charitable lady in the best of traditions of that paternalism it previously denounced, the Left is implicitly demonstrating it no longer thinks itself capable of acting on the causes of the problems. However, to act in politics is to build, not just to repair. Today, in opinion polls, solidarity wins clearly as a positive value to the Left, over and above justice, class straggle or equality. What remains undone is to combine this theme of solidarity with an aspiration for “autonomy,” which should not become the alibi for a new form of individualism and thus of indifference to others. Social action cannot be confined to the administering of alms. The ideal of solidarity implies the creation of new public spaces where active forms of citizenship can be articulated.

For two centuries there has been a Right and a Left, but their contents have constantly changed. There is neither a metaphysical Right nor an absolute Left, only relative positions and systems of variable relations, constantly forming and reforming. They cannot be abstracted from their context. “In every era, certain oppositions disappear or lose their importance, while others, seemingly secondary, suddenly assume a pole position.”[31]

The current crisis of Right and Left does not mean that either will no longer exist, only that this dichotomy as it has been understood until recently has lost its rationale. It has had its day. Current events provide ample confirmation. Whether it is a question of the Gulf War, the war in the former Yugoslavia, GATT, German reunification and its ramifications, the Maastricht Treaty and the single European currency, Islam in France, cultural identities or biotechnologies — all the debates of the last few yearss have produced conflicts impossible to account for in terms of the traditional dichotomy. The: fault lines cut across everything, penetrating to the very heart of both Right and Left. Although they have not yet led to real reclassifications, according to all accounts this is the beginning of a long process of regrouping.

There will be new splits in the future. In an age when the imperative of solidarity is imposing itself irresistibly, when ancient forms of exploitation of some by others tend to give way to new forms of alienation bearing down on everyone, when work is no longer the major source of social cohesion, these new cleavages will lead to unexpected regroupings and will draw fluid boundaries, be it around modernity and postmodernity, work and unemployment, production or the environment.

Modern societies have passed from extensive to intensive capital accumulation, i.e., from the systematic search for spaces for realizing profits to the general transformation of all forms of human activity in commodities. To set a limit to this process, not in order to suppress the marketplace but in order to prevent it from substituting itself for all kinds of social relations and to refute the idea that market values are socially paradigmatic as well as to prevent their destabilizing effects; to recreate organic forms of solidarity and to develop the economy for the benefit of all in the name of the common good and against Right and Left management, to initiate a European anti-oligopolist strategy challenging the internationalization of capital and the phenomenon of transnational and extraterritorial markets which determine economic realities, to find at last, before the steamroller of a homogenous world, the means to safeguard the diversity of peoples and cultures without cultivating xenophobia or hatred m these are the objectives around which men and women who today still belong to different camps will rally around tomorrow.

Then it will become clear that concepts once regarded as contradictory are in fact complimentary. Jose Ortega y Gasset’s saying is well-known: “To be on the Left or to be on the Right is to choose one of the many ways available to people to be an idiot; both are forms of moral paralysis.”32 Charbonneau has written: “Discussion of principles between Left and Right is absurd, because their values complement each other…. Liberty in itself or order in itself can only be the lie which dissimulates tyranny and chaos. Truth belongs to neither Right nor Left, neither is it in equal distance from the two. Rather, it is contained in the tension of their extreme exigencies. If one day they have to meet each other, it will not be in denying what they are but in going fight to the end of themselves.”[33] He concluded: “The time has finally come for us to reject Left and Right together, in order to reconcile within ourselves the tension of their fundamental aspirations.”[34]

It is not a matter of “neither Left nor Right” but of salvaging their best features. It is a matter of developing new political configurations transcending both.

Notes:

1. Pen Name for Emile-Auguste Chartier, Elements d’une Doctrine Radicale (Paris: Gallimard, 1925)
2. Sofres opinion poll, in Le Point (November 27, 1989), pp. 62-65. The same poll revealed that most socialist sympathizers no longer saw a significant difference with the Right over issues such as human rights, culture or social welfare, while a majority of RPR-UDF voters said they no longer saw a difference with the Left over issues such as education, crime or information policies.
3. Le Point (December 3, 1990), pp. 56-57; Le Nouvel Observateur (July 1, 1993, p. 42.
4. Cf. Le Nouvel Observateur (April 1, 1988), pp. 42-43.
5. Cf. Emetic Deutsch, Denis Lindon and Pierre Weill, Les Families Politiques Aujourd ‘hui en France (Minuit, 1966), pp. 13-14.
6. Interview with Le Magazine Litteraire (April 1993).
7. The date most frequently cited is August 28, 1789. Some writers, however, cite August 11 and still others the month of September. In their Histoire Parlementaire de la Revolution Francaise (published in 1834), Buchez and Rouzhold claim that the Right-Left polarity appeared before June 27. In any case, the August 27, 1791 L’Ami des Patriotes already talks of “Right” and “Left” in the body of the Constituent Assembly.
8. Cf. Marcel Gauchet, “La Droite et la Gauche” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de Memoire, Vol. 3: Les France. 1: Conflits et Partages (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), who shows that the popularization of the terms took place later than generally believed.
9. La Politique n’est plus ce qu’elle etait (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1993), p. 26.
10. Ibid., p. 21.
11. Jean-Francois Sirinelli, “La Morale Entre Droite et Gauche,” in “Morale et Politique,” special issue Pouvoirs, No. 63 (1993).
12. In this regard, Nonna Meyer and Pascal Perrineau note that “even the concept of political ‘rationalism’ is relative. A voter faithful to the party which seems to best defend the interests of his social class or the values of his religion is no less rational than one who switches. Those who swing between parties belonging to the same political family are no more rational than those who cross the Left-Right boundary.” (See Les Comportements Politiques (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), p. 87.
13. Cf. Denis Jeambar and Jean-Marc Lech, Le Self-service Electoral. Les Nouvelles Famillies Politiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), pp. 21-22 and 151-162.
14. La Tribune de L’Expansion (March 23, 1992).
15. Cf. Francois Furet, Jacques Julliard and Pierre Rosanvallon, La Republique du Centre. La Fin de l’Exception Francaise (Paris: Calman-Levy, 1988).
16. “Le MAUSS est-il Apolitique?” in La Revue du Mauss, Nos. 3/4 (1991), pp. 7071. In a similar spirit, Jacques Julliard could note that “it is from its own success that the Left has come out exhausted: it is passing away for having realized in two centuries the essence of its program.” (“Une Quatrieme Vie pour la Gauche,” in Le Nouvel Observateur [February 25, 1993], p. 44). To be fair, it ought to be pointed out that it is also “passing away” for having seen a part of this program realized . . . . by its opponents. Gerard Grumberg and Etienne Schweisguth claim that while the Right defends primarily economic liberalism and the Left primarily cultural liberalism, philosophical liberalism seems to reconcile everyone. “The strong link between cultural liberalism and a Left stance on the one side, and between economic liberalism and a Right stance on the other might lead one to ask if these two liberalisms do not form the two opposing poles of one and the same dimension, which would be nothing other than the Right-Left dimension itself.” (“Liberalisme Culturel et Liberalisme Economique,” in Daniel Boy and Nonna Mayer, eds., L’Electeur Francais en Question, CEVIPOF (Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1990). But they also observe that “the growth in the two levels of economic liberalism and cultural liberalism has rendered visible a very weak connection between them,” which has a paradoxical result: “Economic liberalism and cultural liberalism have a strong statistical relation as opposites in the Right-Left dimension, but they are only very weak negatively opposed to each other.” Ibid.
17. Que Vive la Republique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1989). Cf. also Max Gallo, La Gauche est Morte, Vive la Gauche (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990).
18. For a critique of the theory of the “political market,” see especially Pierre Merle, “L’Homo Politicus est-il un Homo Oeconomicus? L’Analyse Economique du Choix Politique: Approche Critique,” in Revue Francaise de Science Politique (February 1990), p. 75.
19. Pierre Rosanvallon, “Repenser la Gauche,” interview with L ‘Express (March 25,
1993), p. 116.
20. “Le Socialisme n’est plus ce qu’il Etait,” in L’Evenement Europeen, No. 1 (1988), pp. 101-102.
21. L’Etat (Economica, 1987), p. 153.
22. Ibid.
23. Cf. Andre Gorz, “Droite/Gauche. Essai de Redefinition,” in La Revue du MAUSS, Vo. 4, No. 4 (1991), pp. 16-17.
24. Nair, op. cit., p. 104
25. Ibid., p. 95.
26. “Le Malaise de la Gauche,” in L ‘Evenement Europeen No. 1 (1988).
27. Le Point (November 27, 1989), pp. 62-65.
28. “La Droite, la Gauche et les References Ideologiques,” in Sofres, ed., L’Etat de l’Opinion 1992 (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 67.
29. Op. cit., p. 152.
30. On anti-fascism, see Karl Dietrich Bracher: “Anti-fascism is not a scientific idea. It is an ideological and political concept whose utility has been to mount an alliance against the Nazi horror, but which has also served to define democracy too restrictively.” Cf. also Annie Kriegel, “Sur l’Antifaseisme,” in Commentaire (Summer 1990), pp. 299302, who qualifies anti-fascism as a “Stalinist myth par excellence,” and attributes it to the triple character of being, “an obscure concept, a concept of variable dimensions and a constantly changing concept.”
31. Etienne Schweisguth, Droite-Gauche: un Clivage Depasse? (Documentation francaise, 1994), p. 3.
32. La Revolte des Masses (Livre-Club du Labyrinthe, 1986), p. 32. Ortega returned to this often, notably in a 1930 article (“Organization de la Decenia Nacional”) and in a 1931 collection (“Rectification de la Republica”) where he qualifies the terms Right and Left as “sterile words” and as “the vocabulary of the past.”

33. Op. cit., pp. 150-151. 34. Ibid., p. 158.

———————–

De Benoist, Alain. “End of the Left-Right Dichotomy: The French Case.” Telos, Vol. 1995, No. 102 (December 1995), pp. 73-89. Text retrieved from: <http://www.amerika.org/texts/end-of-the-left-right-dichotomy-the-french-case-alain-de-benoist/ >.

Note: In the Spanish language, articles by Benoist and other Spanish New Right authors have been published in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 63, “Derecha-Izquierda: ¿Una Distincion Politica?” (Enero 2014), <http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n___63.dcha-izda >.

 

Idea of Empire – Benoist

The Idea of Empire

by Alain de Benoist

 

Europe was the place where two great models of polity, of political unity, were elaborated, developed and clashed: the nation, preceded by the monarchy, and the empire. The last emperor of the Latin West, Romulus Augustus, was deposed in 475. Only the Eastern empire remained. But after the Western empire was dismantled, a new unitary consciousness seems to have arisen. In 795, Pope Leon III started to date his encyclicals based on the reign of Charles, king of the Franks and patrician of the Romans, rather than on the reign of the emperor of Constantinople. Five years later in Rome, on Christmas Day in the year 800, Leon III placed the imperial crown on Charlemagne’s head.

This is the first renovation of the empire. It obeys the theory of transfer (transratio imperii) according to which the empire Charlemagne revived is a continuation of the Roman empire, thus putting an end to theological speculations inspired by the prophet David who foresaw the end of the world after the end of the fourth empire, i.e., after the end of the Roman empire which succeeded the Babylonian, the Persian and the Alexandrian empires.

At the same time, the renovation of the empire also breaks with the Augustinian idea of a radical opposition between civitas terrena and civitas Dei, which could have been understood to mean that a Christian empire was only a chimera. In fact, Leon III had a new strategy — a Christian empire, where the emperor would be the defender of the City of God. The emperor derived his powers from the pope, whose spiritual powers he reproduced in the temporal realm. Of course, all quarrels surrounding investitures will stem from this equivocal formulation which makes the emperor a subject in the spiritual order but at the same time makes him the head of a temporal hierarchy whose sacred character will soon be asserted.

After the Verdun Treaty (843) sealed the division of the empire between Charlemagne’s three grandsons (Lothario I, Ludwig the German, and Charles the Bald), the king of Saxony, Henry I, was crowned emperor in 919. The empire then became Germanic. After Carolingian power was dislocated, it was restored again in the center of Europe with the Othonians and the Franks in 962 to the benefit of King Otto I of Germania. It remained the major political force in Europe until the middle of the 13th century, when it was officially transformed into the Sacrum Romanum Imperium. After 1442, the appellation “of the German nation” was added.

It is not possible to retrace the history of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation here beyond pointing out that throughout its history it was a composite bringing together three components: antiquity, Christianity, and German identity.

Historically the imperial idea began to disintegrate in the Renaissance, with the appearance of the first national states. Of course, the 1525 victory of Pavia, won by imperial forces against Francis II’s troops, seemed to reverse the trend. At the time, this event was considered very important and caused a renaissance of Ghibellinism in Italy. After Charles V, however, the imperial title did not go to his son Philip, and the empire was again reduced to a local affair. After the Peace of Westphalia (1648), it was seen less and less as something dignified and more and more as a simple confederation of territorial states. The decline went on for another two and a half centuries. On 6 April 1806, Napoleon brought the revolution to fruition by destroying what remained of the empire. Francis II resigned his tide and the Holy Roman Empire was no more.

At first sight, the concept of empire is not easy to understand, given the often contradictory uses that have been made of it. In his dictionary, Littre is satisfied with a tautological definition: an empire is “a state ruled by an emperor.” This is a bit too brief. Like the polis or the nation, the empire is a kind of political unity; unlike the monarchy or the republic, it is not a form of government. This means that the empire is compatible a priori with different forms of government. The first article in the Weimar Constitution stated that “the German Reich is a republic.” Even in 1978, the constitutional court at Karlsruhe did not hesitate to claim that “the German Reich remains a subject of international law.” The best way to understand the substantive reality of the empire is by comparing it with that of the nation or the nation-state — the latter represents the end of a process of nationality-formation for which France more or less provides the best example.

In its current meaning, the nation appears as a modern phenomenon. In this respect, both Colette Beaune [1] and Bernard Guenée are wrong in locating the birth of the nation very early in history. This idea rests on anachronisms; it confuses “royal” and “national,” the formation of nationality and the formation of nation. The formation of nationality corresponds with the birth of a sense of belonging which begins to go beyond the simple natal horizon during the war against the Plantagenets — a sense reinforced during the Hundred Years War. But it should not be forgotten that in the Middle Ages the word “nation” (from nation, “birth”) had an exclusively ethnic meaning — the nations of the Sorbonne are simply groups of students who speak a different language. In the same way, the word “country,” which only appeared in France with the 16th century humanists (Dolet, Ronsard, Du Bellay), originally referred to the medieval notion of “homeland.” When more than a mere attachment to the land of one’s birth, “patriotism” is fidelity to the lord or allegiance to the person of the king. Even the word “France” appeared relatively late. Starting with Charles III (called the Simple), the title borne by the king of France was Rex Francorum. The expression Rex Franciae only appeared at the beginning of the 13th century, under Philippe-Auguste, after the defeat of the Count of Toulouse au Muret, which ended with the annexation of the countries speaking the langue d’oc and with the persecution of the Cathars.

The idea of nation was fully constituted only in the 18th century, especially during the revolution. At the beginning it referred to a concept of sovereignty opposed to that of absolute monarchy. It brought together those who thought the same politically and philosophically—it was no longer the king but the “nation” which embodied the country’s political unity. Finally, it was the abstract location where people could conceive of and exercise their rights, where individuals were transformed into citizens.

First of all, the nation is the sovereign people which, in the best of all cases, delegates to the king only the power to apply the law emanating from the general will; then it is those peoples who recognize the authority of a state, inhabit the same territory and recognize each other as members of the same political unity; finally, it is the political unity itself. This is why the counter-revolutionary tradition, which exalts the aristocratic principle, initially refrains from valuing the nation. Conversely, Article 3 of the 1789 Declaration of Rights proclaims “The principle of all sovereignty essentially resides in the nation.” Bertrand de Jouvenel even wrote that: “In hindsight, the revolutionary movement seems to have had as its goal the foundation of the cult of the nation.” [2]

What distinguishes the empire from the nation? First of all, the fact that the empire is not primarily a territory but essentially an idea or a principle. The political order is determined by it — not by material factors or by possession of a geographical area. It is determined by a spiritual or juridical idea. In this respect, it would be a serious mistake to think that the empire differs from the nation primarily in terms of size in that it is somehow “a bigger nation than others.” Of course, an empire covers a wide area. What is important, however, is that the emperor holds power by virtue of embodying something which goes beyond simple possession. As a dominus mundi, he is the suzerain of princes and kings, i.e., he rules over sovereigns, not over territories, and represents a power transcending the community he governs.

Julius Evola writes: “The empire should not be confused with the kingdoms and nations which constitute it because it is something qualitatively different, prior to and above each of them in terms of its principle.” [3] Before it expressed a system of supra-national territorial hegemony, “the old Roman notion of imperium referred to the pure power of command, the quasi-mystical force of auctoritas.” During the Middle Ages, the prevailing distinction was precisely one between auctoritas (moral and spiritual superiority) and potestas (simple political public power exercised by legal means). In both the medieval empire and the Holy Roman Empire, this distinction underlies the separation between imperial authority and the emperor’s sovereign authority over a particular people. For example, Charlemagne was part emperor and part king of the Lombards and the Franks. From then on, allegiance to the emperor was not submission to a people or to a particular country. In the same way, in the Austro-Hungarian empire, loyalty to the Hapsburg dynasty constituted “the fundamental link between peoples and replaced patriotism” (Jean Béranger); it prevailed over relations of a national or confessional character.

This spiritual character of the imperial principle directly provoked the famous quarrel concerning investitures which pitted the partisans of the pope and those of the emperor against each other for many centuries. Lacking any military content, the notion of empire originally acquired a strong theological cast in the medieval Germanic world, where one could see a Christian reinterpretation of the Roman idea of imperium. Considering themselves the executors of universal sacred history, the emperors deduced from this the idea that the empire, as a “sacred” institution (Sacrum imperium), must constitute an autonomous power with respect to the pope. This is the reason for the quarrel between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

The emperor’s followers who denied the pope’s pretensions—the Ghibellines — found support in the old distinction between imperium and sacerdotium, seen as two equally important spheres both instituted by God. This interpretation was an extension of the Roman concept of relations between the emperor and the pontifex maximus, each being superior to the other in their respective orders. The Ghibelline viewpoint was not to subject spiritual authority to temporal power but to claim for imperial power an equal spiritual authority in the face of the Church’s exclusive pretensions. So for Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, the emperor is the half-divine intermediary whereby God’s justice is spread on earth. This renovatio, which makes the emperor the essential source of law and confers on him the character of “living law on earth” (lex animata in terris), encapsulates the Ghibelline claim: like the pope, the empire must be recognized as an institution sacred in nature and character. Evola emphasizes that the opposition between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines “was not only political . . . it expressed the antagonism of two great dignitates, both claiming a spiritual dimension . . . On its deepest level, Ghibellinism held that during his life on earth (seen as discipline, combat and service) the individual could transcend himself . . . by means of action and under the sign of the empire, in accordance with the character of the ‘supernatural’ institution which was granted to it.” [4]

From here on, the decline of the empire throughout the centuries is consistent with the decline of the central role played by its principle and, correspondingly, with its movement toward a purely territorial definition. The Germanic Roman empire had already changed when the attempt was made in both Italy and Germany to link it to a privileged territory. This idea is still absent in Dante, for whom the emperor is neither German nor Italian but “Roman” in the spiritual sense, i.e., a successor of Caesar and Augustus. In other words, the empire cannot transform itself into a “great nation” without collapsing because, in terms of the principle which animates it, no nation can assume and exercise a superior ruling function if it does not rise above its allegiances and its particular interests. “The empire in the true sense,” Evola concludes, “can only exist if animated by a spiritual fervor . . . If this is lacking, one will only have a creation forged by violence — imperialism — a simple mechanical superstructure without a soul.” [5]

For its part, the nation finds its origin in the pretension that the kingdom has to give itself imperial prerogatives by relating them not to a principle but a territory. Its beginnings can be located in the division of the Carolingian empire following the Verdun Treaty. At that point France and Germany, if one can call them that, began to have separate destinies. The latter remained in the imperial tradition, whereas the kingdom of the Franks (Regnum Francorum), seceding from the Germanic community, slowly evolved toward the modern nation by the intermediary of the monarchical state. The end of the Carolingian dynasty dates from the 10th century: 911 in Germany, 987 in France. Elected in 987, Hugh Capet was the first king who did not understand francique. He was also the first sovereign who situated himself clearly outside the imperial tradition, which explains why, in the Divine Comedy, Dante has him say: “I was the malignant roof whose shade darkened all Christian land!”

In the 13th and 14th centuries, the kingdom of France was constructed against the empire with Philippe-Auguste (Bouvines, 1214) and Philippe le Bel (Agnani, 1303). As early as 1204, Pope Innocent III declared that “it is publicly known that the king of France does not recognize any authority above him in the temporal realm.” Just as the Trojan legend was instrumentalized, an entire work of “ideological” legitimation allowed the empire to be opposed to the principle of sovereignty of national kingdoms and their right to recognize no law other than their own interest. The role of jurists, emphasized so well by Carl Schmitt, is fundamental here. In the mid-13th century they were the ones who formulated the doctrine according to which “the king of France, who does not see anyone above him in the temporal realm, is exempt from the empire and may be considered as a princeps in regno suo.” [6] This doctrine was further developed in the 14th and 15th centuries with Pierre Dubois and Guillaume de Nogaret. By proclaiming himself “emperor in his own realm” (rex imperator in regno suo), the king opposed his territorial sovereignty to the spiritual sovereignty of the empire—his purely temporal power was opposed to imperial spiritual power. At the same time, jurists took the side of centralization against local freedoms, and against the feudal aristocracies, thanks especially to the institution of the cas royal. They founded a juridical order, bourgeois in character, in which the law — conceived as a general norm with rational attributes — became the basis of a purely statist power. Law was transformed into simple legality codified by the state. In the 16th century, the formula of the king as “emperor in his own realm” was directly associated with the idea of sovereignty, about which Jean Bodin theorized. Schmitt remarks that France was the first country in the world to create a public order completely emancipated from the medieval model.

What happened next is well known. In France the nation came into being under the double sign of centralizing absolutism and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Here the main role fell on the state. When Louis XIV said “L’Etat c’est moi,” he meant there was nothing above the state. The state creates the nation, which in turn “produces” the French people; whereas in the modern age and in countries with an imperial tradition, the people create the nation, which then creates a state. The two processes of historical construction are thus entirely opposed and this opposition is based on the difference between the nation and the empire. As has often been pointed out, the history of France has been a constant struggle against the empire. The secular politics of the French monarchy was primarily aimed at breaking up Germanic and Italian spaces. After 1792, the republic took up the same objectives: the struggle against the house of Austria and the conquest of the Rhine.

The opposition between the spiritual principle and the territorial power is not the only one. Another essential difference concerns the way in which the empire and the nation regard political unity. The unity of the empire was not mechanical but organic, which goes beyond the state. To the degree to which it embodies a principle, the empire only envisages a unity on the level of that principle. Whereas the nation engenders its own culture or finds support in culture in the process of its formation, the empire embraces various cultures. Whereas the nation tries to make the people and the state correspond, the empire associates different peoples.

The principle of empire tries to reconcile the one and the many, the particular and the universal. Its general law is that of autonomy and of the respect for diversity. The empire tries to unify on a higher level, without suppressing the diversity of cultures, ethnic characters and peoples. It is a whole whose parts are autonomous in proportion to the solidity of what unites them. These parts are differentiated and organic. In contrast to the unitary and centralized societas of the national kingdom, the empire embodies the classical image of universitas. Moeller van den Bruck rightly saw the empire as a unity of opposites, while Evola defined it as “a supranational organization such that its unity does not tend to destroy or to level the ethnic and cultural multiplicity it embraces,” [7] adding that the imperial principle makes it possible “to retreat from the multiplicity of diverse elements to a principle which is at once higher and prior to their differentiation—a differentiation which proceeds only from sensible reality.” So it is not a question of abolishing but of integrating difference.

At the height of the Roman Empire, Rome was an idea, a principle, which made it possible to unite different peoples without converting or suppressing them. The principle of imperium, which was already at work in republican Rome, reflected the will to realize an always threatened cosmic order. The Roman Empire did not require jealous gods. It admitted other divinities, known or unknown, and the same is the case in the political order. The empire accepted foreign cults and the diversity of juridical codes. Each people was free to organize its federation in terms of its traditional concept of law. The Roman jus prevailed only in relations between individuals of different peoples or in relations between federations. One could be a Roman citizen (civis romanus sum) without abandoning one’s nationality.

This distinction (foreign to the spirit of the nation) between what today is called nationality and citizenship can be found in the Germanic Roman Empire. The medieval Reich, a supra-national institution (because animated by a principle beyond the political order), was fundamentally pluralist. It allowed people to live their own lives according to their own law. In modern language, it was characterized by a marked “federalism” particularly able to respect minorities. After all, the Austro-Hungarian empire functioned efficiently for centuries while minorities began to constitute most of its population (60% of the total). It brought together Italians and Romanians, as well as Jews, Serbs, Russians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, Croats and Hungarians. Jean Béranger writes that “the Hapsburgs were always indifferent to the concept of nation-state,” even to the point where this empire, founded by the house of Austria, for many centuries refused to create an “Austrian nation,” which really only took shape in the 20th century. [8]

Conversely, what characterizes the national realm is its irresistible tendency to centralization and homogenization. The nation-state’s investment of space is first revealed in a territory on which a homogeneous political sovereignty is exercised. This homogeneity may at first be apprehended in law: territorial unity results from the uniformity of juridical norms. The monarchy’s secular struggle against the feudal nobility, especially under Louis XI, the annihilation of the civilizations of countries where the langue d’oc was spoken, the affirmation of the principle of centralization under Richelieu, all tended in the same direction. In this respect, the 14th and 15th centuries marked a fundamental shift. During this period the state emerged as the victor against feudal aristocracies and ensured its alliance with the bourgeoisie at the same time as a centralized juridical order was put in place. Simultaneously, the “national” economic market appeared. Thanks to a monetarization of all forms of exchange (non-commercial, intra-community exchanges being untaxable before then), it responded to the will of the state to maximize its fiscal revenues. As Pierre Rosanvallon explains: “the nation-state is a way of composing and articulating global space. In the same way, the market is primarily a way of representing and structuring social space; only secondarily is it a decentralized mechanism for regulating economic activity through the price system. From this perspective, the nation-state and the market refer to the same form of socialization of individuals within space. They are conceivable only in an atomized society in which the individual is considered autonomous. In both the sociological and economic senses of these terms, a nation-state and a market cannot exist in spaces where society unfolds as a global and social entity.” [9]

There is no doubt that monarchial absolutism paved the way for bourgeois national revolutions. After Louis XIV had broken the nobility’s last resistances, the revolution was inevitable when the bourgeoisie could in turn win its autonomy. But there is also no doubt that in many respects the revolution only carried out and accelerated the tendencies of the Ancien Régime. Thus Tocqueville wrote: “The French Revolution caused many subordinate and secondary things, but it really only developed the core of the most important things; these existed before it . . . With the French, the central power had already taken over local administration more than any other country in the world. The revolution only made this power more skillful, powerful, enterprising.” [10]

Under the monarchy, as under the republic, the “national” logic tried to eliminate anything that might interfere between the state and the individual. It tried to integrate individuals to the same laws in a unified fashion; it did not attempt to bring together collectivities free to preserve their language, cultures and laws. State power was exercised over individual subjects, which was why it constantly destroyed or limited the power of all forms of intermediate socialization: familial clans, village communities, confraternities, trades, etc. The 1791 law against corporations (loi Le Chapelier) thus found its precedent in Francis I’s suppression of “all confraternities of trades and artisans in the whole kingdom” in 1539 — a decision which at that time targeted those artisans belonging to societies said to be of duty. With the revolution, of course, this trend accelerated. The restructuring of the territory into departments of more or less equal size, the fight against “the provincial spirit,” the suppression of particularities, the offensive against regional languages and “patois,” the standardization of weights and measures, represent a real obsession with bringing everything into alignment. In terms of Ferdinand Tönnies’ old distinction, the modern nation emerges when society rises on the ruins of old communities.

This individualist component of the nation-state is essential here. The empire requires the preservation of the diversity of groups; by its very logic, the nation recognizes only individuals. One is a member of the empire in a mediated fashion through intermediary structures. Conversely, one belongs to the nation in an immediate way, i.e., without the mediation of local ties, bodies or states. Monarchial centralization was essentially juridical and political; it thereby pointed to the work of constructing the state. Revolutionary centralization, which accompanied the emergence of the modern nation, went further still. It aimed at “producing the nation” directly, i.e., at engendering new social modes of behavior. The state then became productive of the social, a monopolistic producer: it attempted to establish a society of individuals recognized as equal on a secular level, on the ruins of the intermediate bodies it had suppressed. [11]

As Jean Baechler points out, “in the nation the intermediate groups are seen as irrelevant with respect to the citizenry and so tend to become secondary and subordinated.” [12] Louis Dumont argues along similar lines, that nationalism results from transferring the subjectivity characteristic of individualism to the level of an abstract collectivity. “In the most precise, modern, sense of the term, ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ (distinguished from simple patriotism) have historically been part and parcel of individualism as a value. The nation is just a type of global society which corresponds to the reign of individualism as a value. Not only does the nation accompany individualism historically, the interdependence between them is so indispensable that one could say the nation is a global society composed of people who consider themselves individuals.” [13]

This individualism, woven within the logic of the nation, is obviously opposed to the holism of imperial construction, where the individual is not dissociated from his natural connections. In the empire the same citizenry is composed of different nationalities. In the nation the two terms are synonyms: belonging to a nation is the foundation for citizenship. Pierre Fougeyrollas summarizes the situation in these terms: “Breaking with medieval societies which had a bipolar identity—that of ethnic roots and of the community of believers — modern nations are constituted as closed societies where the only official identity is that which the state confers on citizens. Thus in terms of its birth and foundations, the nation has been an anti-empire. The Netherlands originated in a break with the Hapsburg Empire; England originated in a break with Rome and the establishment of a national religion. Spain only became Castilian by escaping from the grasp of the Hapsburg system, and France, which was slowly constituted as a nation against the Germanic Roman Empire, only became a nation by combating traditional forces in all of Europe.” [14]

The empire is never a closed totality, as opposed to the nation, which has been increasingly defined by intangible boundaries. The empire’s frontiers are naturally fluid and provisional, which reinforces its organic character. Originally the word “frontier” had an exclusively military meaning: the front line. At the beginning of the 14th century, under the reign of Louis X (“Louis the Stubborn”) in France, the word frontiere replaced marche, which had commonly been used up to then. But it would still take four centuries before it acquired its current meaning of delimitation between two states. Contrary to legend, the idea of a “natural frontier,” which jurists sometimes used in the 15th century, never inspired the external politics of the monarchy. Its origin is sometimes wrongly attributed to Richelieu, or even to Vauban. In fact, only during the revolution was this idea, according to which the French nation would have “natural frontiers,” used systematically. Under the Convention especially, the Girondins used it to legitimate the establishment of the eastern frontier on the left bank of the Rhine and, more generally, to justify their annexation policies. It is also during the revolution that the Jacobin idea that the frontiers of a state must all at once correspond to those of a language, a political authority, and a nation begins to spread everywhere in Europe. Finally, it is the Convention which invented the notion of the “foreigner within” (of which Charles Maurras was paradoxically to make great use) by applying it to aristocrats who supported a despised political system: by defining them as “strangers in our midst,” Barrère asserts that “aristocrats have no country.”

Even with its universal principle and vocation, the empire is not universalist in the current sense of the term. Its universality never meant expansion across the whole earth. Instead, it was connected to the idea of an equitable order seeking to federate peoples on the basis of a concrete political organization. From this viewpoint, the empire, which rejects any aim of conversion or standardization, differs from a hypothetical world-state or from the idea that there are juridico-political principles universally valid at all times and in all places.

Since universalism is directly linked to individualism, modern political universalism must be conceived in terms of the individualist roots of the nation-state. Historical experience shows that nationalism often takes the form of an ethnocentrism blown up to universal dimensions. On many occasions the French nation wanted to be “the most universal of nations,” and it is from the universality of its national model that it claimed to derive its right to disseminate its principles throughout the world. At the time when France wanted to be “the older sister of the Church,” the monk Guibert de Nogent, in his Gesta Dei per Francos, made the Franks the instrument of God. From 1792 on, revolutionary imperialism also tried to convert all of Europe to the idea of the nation-state. Since then, there has been no lack of voices authorized to ensure that the French idea of nation is ordered to that of humanity, and that this is what would make it particularly “tolerant.” One can question this pretension since the proposition can be inverted: if the nation is ordered to humanity, it is because humanity is ordered to the nation. With this corollary, those opposed to it are excluded not only from a particular nation but from the human species in its entirety.

The word empire should be reserved only for the historical constructions deserving this name, such as the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Germanic Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire. The Napoleonic empire, Hitler’s Third Reich, the French and British colonial empires, and modern imperalisms of the American and Soviet types are certainly not empires. Such a designation is only abusively given to enterprises or powers merely engaged in expanding their national territory. These modern “great powers” are not empires but rather nations which simply want to expand, by military, political, economic or other conquest beyond their current frontiers.

In the Napoleonic era the “empire” (a term already used to designate the monarchy before 1789, but simply in the sense of “state”) was a national-statist entity attempting to assert itself in Europe as a great hegemonic power. Bismarck’s empire, which gave priority to the state, also attempted to create the German nation. Alexandre Kojève observed that “Hitler’s slogan: Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer is only a (bad) German translation of the nationalistic watchword of the French Revolution: la Republique une et indivisible.” The Third Reich’s hostility to the idea of empire is also visible in its critique of the ideology of intermediate bodies and “estates.” [15] A centralist and reductive vision always prevailed in the Soviet “empire,” implying a unified politico-economic space thanks to a restrictive concept of local cultural fights. As for the American “model,” which tries to convert the whole world into a homogeneous system of material consumption and techno-economic practices, it is difficult to see what idea, what spiritual principle, it could claim!

“Great powers” are not really empires. In fact, modern imperialisms should be challenged in the name of what an empire truly is. Evola thought no differently when he wrote: ‘”Without a Meurs et deviens, no nation can aspire to an effective and legitimate imperial mission. It is not possible to retain one’s national characteristics and then to desire, on this basis, to dominate the world or simply another place.” [16] And again: “If the ‘imperialist’ tendencies of the modern age have been abortive because they often accelerate the downfall of the peoples who give in to them, or if they have been the source of all kinds of calamities, this is precisely because they lack any really spiritual — supra-political and supra-national — element; the latter is replaced by the violence of a power which is greater than the one it wants to subjugate but which is not of a different nature. If an empire is not a holy empire, it is not an empire but a kind of cancer attacking all the distinctive functions of a living organism.” [17]

Why think at all about the concept of empire today? Is it not purely chimerical to call for the rebirth of a true empire? Perhaps. But is it an accident if, even today, the model of the Roman Empire has continued to inspire all attempts to go beyond the nation-state? Is it an accident if the idea of empire (the Reichsgedanke) still mobilizes reflection at a time when thought is in disarray? [18] And is it not this idea of empire which underlies all the debates currently surrounding the construction of Europe? Is the nation-state irreplaceable? Many on the Left and on the Right have said so. This is, notably, Charles Maurras’ viewpoint. According to him, the nation is “the biggest of the temporally solid and complete communitarian circles.” [19] He declared that “there is no political framework larger than the nation.” [20] Thierry Maulnier replied: “The cult of the nation is not in itself a response but a refuge, a mystifying effusion, or worse still, a redoubtable diversion from internal problems.” [21]

What basically moves the world today is beyond the nation-state. The latter finds its framework for action, its sphere of decision-making, torn apart by many ruptures. The nation is challenged both from above and below. It is challenged from below by new social movements: by the persistence of regionalisms and new communitarian claims. It is as if the intermediate forms of socialization which it once did away with were born again today in new forms. The divorce between civil society and the political class is reflected in the proliferation of networks and the multiplication of “tribes.” But the nation is also challenged from above by often weighty social phenomena which mock national frontiers. The nation-state is stripped of its powers by the world market and international competition, by the formation of supra-national or communitarian institutions, by intergovernmental bureaucracies, techno-scientific apparati, global media messages or international pressure groups. At the same time, there is the increasingly distinct external expansion of national economies at the expense of internal markets. The economy is becoming globalized because of interacting forces, multinationals, the stock-exchange, global macro-organizations.

The imagery of nations also seems to be in crisis and those who talk of “national identity” are generally hard-pressed to define it. The national model of integration seems to be exhausted. The evolution of politics toward a system of techno-managerial authorities, which brings to fruition the implosion of political reality, confirms that the logic of nations is no longer able to integrate anyone or to assure the regulation of relations between a state criticized on all fronts and a civil society which is breaking apart. So the nation is confronted with the growth of certain collective or communitarian identities at the very moment when global centers of decision-making paint a gloomy picture above it. Daniel Bell expressed this when he said that nation-states have become too big for little problems and too little for the big ones. Deprived of any real historical foundation, in the Third World the nation-state seems to be a Western import. The long-term viability of, e.g., black African or near Eastern “nations,” seems increasingly uncertain. In fact these nations are the result of a series of arbitrary decisions by colonial powers profoundly ignorant of local historical, religious, and cultural realities. The dismantling of the Ottoman and of the Austro-Hungarian empires as a result of the Sevres and Versailles treaties was a catastrophe whose effects are still felt today — as the Gulf War and renewed conflicts in Central Europe show.

In such conditions, how can the idea of empire be ignored? Today it is the only model Europe has produced as an alternative to the nation-state. Nations are both threatened and exhausted. They must go beyond themselves if they do not want to end up as dominions of the American superpower. They can only do so by attempting to reconcile the one and the many, seeking a unity that does not lead to their impoverishment. There are unmistakable signs of this. The fascination with Austria-Hungary and the rebirth of the idea of Mitteleuropa [22] are among them. The call for empire will be born of necessity. The work Kojève wrote in 1945, only recently published, is remarkable. In it he makes a fervent appeal for the formation of a “Latin empire” and posits the necessity of empire as an alternative to the nation-state and to abstract universality. “Liberalism,” he wrote, “is wrong to see no political entity beyond the nation. Internationalism sins because it can see nothing politically viable beyond humanity. It too was incapable of discovering the intermediate political reality of empires, i.e., of unions, even international fusions, of related nations, which is today’s very political reality.” [23]

In order to create itself Europe requires a unity of political decision-making. But this European political unity cannot be built on the national Jacobin model if it does not want to see the richness and diversity of all European components disappear. It also cannot result from the economic supra-nationality dreamt by Brussels technocrats. Europe can only create itself in terms of a federal model, but a federal model which is the vehicle for an idea, a project, a principle, i.e., in the final analysis, an imperial model. Such a model would make it possible to solve problems of regional cultures, ethnic minorities and local autonomies, which will not find a true solution within the framework of the nation-state. It would also make it possible to rethink the whole problem of relations between citizenship and nationality in light of certain problems arising from recent immigration. It would allow one to understand the resurgent dangers of ethno-linguistic irredentism and Jacobin racism. Finally, because of the important place it gives to the idea of autonomy, it would make room for grass-roots democratic procedures and direct democracy. Imperial principle above, direct democracy below: this is what would renew an old tradition!

Today there is a lot of talk about a new world order, and one is certainly necessary. But under what banner will it take shape? The banner of man-machine, of the “computer-man,” or under the banner of a diversified organization of living peoples? Will the earth be reduced to something homogeneous because of deculturalizing and depersonalizing trends for which American imperialism is now the most cynical and arrogant vector? Or will people find the means for the necessary resistance in their beliefs, traditions, and ways of seeing the world? This is really the decisive question that has been raised at the beginning of the next millennium.

Whoever says federation, says federalist principle. Whoever says empire, says imperial principle. Today this idea does not seem to appear anywhere. Yet it is written in history. It is an idea which has yet to find its time. But it has a past and a future. It is also a matter of making an origin dear. At the time of the Hundred Years War, Louis d’Estouteville’s motto was, “Where honor is, where loyalty is, there lies my country.” We have our nationality and we are proud of it. But it is also possible to be citizens of an idea in the imperial tradition. This is what Evola argues: “The idea alone should represent the country . . . It is not the fact of belonging to the same soil, speaking the same language, or having the same bloodline which should unite or divide us, but the fact of supporting or not supporting the same idea.” [24] This does not mean that roots are unimportant. On the contrary, they are essential. It only means that everything must be put into perspective. This is the whole difference between origin as a principle and origin as pure subjectivity. Only origin conceived as a principle makes it possible to defend the cause of peoples, of all peoples, and to understand that, far from being a threat to one’s own identity, the identity of others in fact plays a role in what allows one to defend one’s respective identity against a global system which tries to destroy them. It is necessary to affirm the superiority of the idea which preserves diversity for everyone’s benefit. It is necessary to assert the value of the imperial principle.

Notes

[1] Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
[2] Les débuts de l’État moderne. Une histoire des idées politiques au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1976) p. 92.
[3] Révolte contre le monde moderne (Montreal: L’Homme, 1972) p. 121.
[4] Les hommes au milieu des ruines (Paris: Sept Couleurs, 1972) p. 141.
[5] Essais politiques (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1988) p. 86.
[6] Robert Folz, Le coronnement impérial de Charlemagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
[7] Essais politiques, op. cit., p. 83.
[8] Histoire de l’empire des Habsbourg 1273-1918 (Paris: Fayard, 1990).
[9] Le libéralisme économique. Histoire de l’ldée de marché (Paris: Seuil, 1989) p. 124.
[10] L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) p. 65. (First edition 1856).
[11] Cf. Pierre Rosanvallon, L’État en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990).
[12] ‘Dépérissement de la nation?’ in Commentaire (Spring, 1988) p. 104.
[13] Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Seuil, 1983) pp. 20-1.
[14] La nation, essor et déclin des sociétés modernes, (Paris: Fayard, 1987) p. 931.
[15] Cf. Justus Beyer, Die Standeideologien der Systemzeit und ihre Uberwindung (Darmstadt, 1942).
[16] Essais politiques, op. cit., p. 62.
[17] Révolte contre le monde moderne, op. cit., p. 124.
[18] During the Weimar Republic, there was a real growth in publications concerning the idea of empire and of ‘thinking about the Reich’ (Reichsgedanke). On this subject, see Fritz Buchner, ed., Was ist das Reich? Eine Aussprache unter Deutschen (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1932); Herbert Krüger, ‘Der Moderne Reichsgedanke’, in Die Tat (December 1933) pp. 703-15 and (January 1934) pp. 795-804; Edmund Schopen, Geschichte der Reichsidee, 8 Volumes, (Munich: Carl Rohrig, 1936); Peter Richard Rohden, Die Idee des Reiches in der Europäischen Geschichte (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1943); Paul Goedecke, Der Reichsgedanke im Schriftum von 1919 bis 1935 (Marburg: Doctoral thesis, 1951). The authors dealing with this subject often disagree about the meaning of the idea of empire and about the relation between the medieval Germanic Reich and the Roman imperium. In Catholic circles, the apology for empire often expresses nostalgia for the medieval Christian unity before the religious wars. The concept of the Reich as a ‘Holy Alliance’ or as a ‘sacramental reality’ frequently points to romanticism (Novalis, Adam Müller) but also to Constantin Franz. In other respects, the idea of a ‘third empire’ carries chiliastic representations from the end of the Middle Ages (Joachim of Fiore’s announcement of the Reign of the Spirit). On the Protestant side, one finds the ‘Reich theologies’, especially in Friedrich Gogarten’s Politische Ethik (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1932), Wilhelm Stapel’s Der Christliche Staatsmann: Eine Theologie der Nationalismus (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932) or Friedrich Hielscher’s Das Reich (Berlin: Reich, 1931), but from a different perspective. In Stapel, the main idea is that of a national Reich having its own ‘nomos’ with a pronounced pluri-ethnic character but sanctifying German hegemony. See his reply to the supporters of the Catholic Reich, ‘Der Reichsgedanke zwischen den Konfessionen’, in Deutsches Volkstum, (15 November 1932) pp. 909-16. In Moeller van den Bruck, this secularized and strictly German concept of empire is stressed even more. Very critical of the Holy Roman Empire, Moeller accuses Staufen of having been taken in by the ‘Italian mirage’, and of wanting to make the imperium romanum (the ‘periphery’) live again rather than trying to unify the German people (the ‘center’). This is the reason for his strange sympathy with the Guelphs and for his preference for the Deutsches Reich deutscher Nation as opposed to the Heiliges römisches Reich. After 1933, the discussion concerning the idea of Reich (Reichsidee) was carried on outside official circles. For Carl Schmitt, the notion of empire is the central representation of a new right-wing political order of peoples associated with the notion of ‘great space’ (Großraum) — an idea which was strongly criticized by the supporters of a purely German and völkische notion of empire. These supporters saw in the Reich the organizing force for a ‘living space’ grounded in the ‘biological’ substance of the German peoples. This argument is made by Reinhard Höhn (‘Großraumordnung und völkisches Rechtsdenken’: in Reich, Volksordung, Lebensraum, 1943, pp. 216-352). See also Karl Richard Ganzer, Das Reich als europäische Ordnungsmacht (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1941-2); and Oswald Torsten, Rîche. Eine Geschichtliche Studie bet die Entwicklung der Reichsidee (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenburg, 1943).
[19] Mes idées politiques (Albatros, 1983) p. 281.
[20] Enquête sur la monarchie 1900-1909, 1st ed. (Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1909) p. XIII.
[21] Au-delà du nationalisme (Paris: Gallirnard, 1938).
[22] Cf. Karlheinz Weissmann, ‘Das Herz des Kontinents: Reichsgedanke und Mitteleuropa-ldee’, in Mut (January 1987) pp. 24-35.
[23] ‘L’empire latin’, in La Règle du jeu (1 May 1990) p. 94.
[24] Les hommes au milieu des ruines, op. cit., p. 41.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “The Idea of Empire.” Telos, Vol. 1993, No. 98-99 (December 1993), pp. 81-98. Text retrieved from: <https://eurocontinentalism.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/the-idea-of-empire-alain-de-benoist/ >. (See this essay in PDF format here: The Idea of Empire).

Note: The essay “The Idea of Empire” was originally published in French as “L’idée d’Empire” (published in Critiques – Théoriques [Lausanne & Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 2003]). It is also available in a German translation as “Der Reichsgedanke. Das imperiale Modell für die künftige Struktur Europas” (published in Schöne Vernetzte Welt [Tübingen: Hohenrain-Verlag, 2001]), in a Spanish translation as “La idea de Imperio” (published in Elementos Nº 32, “Imperio: Orden Especial y Espiritual” [11 September 2012], <http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__32 >, pp. 3-30), in an Italian translation as “L’idea di Impero” (published in Incursioni [May 2007], pp. 31-51), in a Dutch translation as “De Europese Rijksgedachte” (published in Teksten: kommentaren en studies No. 68 [July-September 1992], pp 34-48), in a Russian translation as “Идея Империи” (published in Против либерализма: к четвертой политической теории [Санкт-Петербург: Амфора, 2009]), in  a Portugese translation as “Nação e império” (published online: website Legio Victrix, 10 April 2012, <http://legio-victrix.blogspot.com/2012/04/nacao-e-imperio.html >), and in a Belarusian translation as “Ідэя Імперыі” (published online: website Cytadel, n.d., <http://cytadel.org/en/node/2356 >).

Note on further reading: On this topic, see also the related essay by Benoist known as “What is Sovereignty?”

 

History of Idea of Progress – Benoist

“A Brief History of the Idea of Progress” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 110 KB):

A Brief History of the Idea of Progress
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De Benoist, Alain. “A Brief History of the Idea of Progress.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 7-16. <http://toqonline.com/archives/v8n1/TOQv8n1Benoist.pdf >.

 

Nazism & Communism – Benoist

“Nazism And Communism: Evil Twins?” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 52.6 KB):

Nazism and Communism – Evil Twins

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De Benoist, Alain. “Nazism And Communism: Evil Twins?” Telos, Vol. 1998, No. 112 (Summer 1998), pp. 178-192. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/evil_twins.pdf >.

Note: Alain de Benoist has written an entire book related to this subject entitled Communisme et Nazisme: 25 réflexions sur le totalitarisme au XXe siècle, 1917-1989 (Paris: Labyrinthe, 1998). It has been translated into German as Totalitarismus: Kommunismus und Nationalsozialismus – die andere Moderne, 1917-1989 (Berlin: Junge Freiheit, 2001), into Spanish as Comunismo y Nazismo: 25 reflexiones sobre el totalitarismo en el siglo XX, 1917-1989 (Barcelona: Áltera, 2005), into Italian as Comunismo e Nazismo: 25 riflessioni sul totalitarismo nel 20. secolo, 1917-1989 (Casalecchio: Arianna, 2000),  into Portuguese as Comunismo e Nazismo: 25 reflexões sobre o totalitarismo no século XX, 1917—1989 (Lisboã: Hugin Editores, 1999), into Dutch as Totalitarisme: Communisme en nationaal-socialisme: die andere moderniteit, 1917-1989 (Wijnegem: Delta-Stichting, 2001), into Croatian as  Komunizam i nacizam: 25 ogleda o totalitarizmu u XX. Stoljecu (1917-1989) (Zagreb: Zlatko Hasanbegovic, 2005), and into Hungarian as Kommunizmus és nácizmus: Gondolatok a XX. Századi totalitarizmusokról (Budapest: Europa Authentica, 2000).

 

Tradition? – Benoist

Tradition?

By Alain de Benoist

There are many ways to understand tradition. Its etymology is Latin, from the verb tradere, which means “to give, to hand in, to transmit directly.” Originally tradition designated “that which is transmitted” and it had a religious meaning. Tradition understood as “the action of transmitting” was nevertheless in common usage in France up to the end of the 18th century and is still part of today’s legal lexicon. Yet tradere has also meant “betray,” in the sense of delivering up a man or a secret. In the plural, traditions are generally considered as forming part of the distinctive features of a culture in a particular period. They evoke a body of accepted and immutable hereditary characteristics inherited from the past customs, ways of being, but also celebrations, work cycles, and popular traditions. Tradition here implies a sense of duration: it contrasts with novelty, even if one accepts its evolution. It also implies the idea of standard or norm, even if the traditions in question can be challenged. Tradition encompasses what is permanent and immutable, as opposed to the succession of events and fashions. An older definition describes it as marking the submission of the living to the authority of the dead, encompassing accepted customs and habits (we obey traditions because we always have) that modern people denounce as conventions, prejudices or superstitions. The term can have a positive or pejorative meaning, depending on the context in which it is used. When advertisers and tourist offices extol the virtues of “traditional craftsmanship,” they implicitly refer to a tried set of values and know-how. Tradition here evokes quality and authenticity. But it may also be seen as what is outmoded, as in the modernist critics’ use of “traditional morality.”

But there is another meaning to the word tradition, articulated by the representatives of traditional thought. Here the term is singular and has a capital T: Tradition. The first name that comes to mind is that of Rene Guenon (1886-1951), who published his Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines in 1921 and died thirty. years later in Cairo under the pseudonym AbdeI Wahed Yahia.[1] Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World appeared in 1934. Other names are Arturo Reghini, Guido De Giorgio and Attilo Mordini,[2] Frithjof Schuon, whose writings began to appear in 1933 in Etudes Traditionelles, Michel Valsn, Titus Burckhardt, Ananda N. Coormaraswamy, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Marco Pallis, Martin Lings and Philip Sherrard.

In defining this school of thought, the word “traditionalism” (which appeared in France only in the middle of the 19th century) may lend itself to misunderstandings the representatives of traditional thought have been the first to denounce.[3] Rene Guenon qualifies as “traditionalists” those who “have only one sort of tendency or aspiration toward Tradition, without any real knowledge of it.”[4] Guido de Giorgio presents an even more radical opinion. “Tradition is absolutely different from traditionalism: one is an eternally fecund living patrimony, rich with infinite potentialities in all times and circumstances …. the other is but sterile residue, an inefficient, self-enclosing concreteness impossible to adapt and lacking all energetic and creative force. Tradition is clearly opposed to traditionalism, just as truth is opposed to commonplaces.”[5]

The word “traditionalism” contains yet another ambiguity. The way it is used by the representatives of traditional thought could be confused with counter-revolutionary political traditionalism or with Catholic traditionalism, sometimes referred to as “integral,” which is hostile to “progressivism” within the Church, to liturgical reform and to newer “modernist” theologies. If the school of traditional thought is perfectly counter-revolutionary, it is so in a way very different from those who claim to be linked politically to the Counter-Revolution. While some of the school’s adherents call themselves Catholics (or at least accord Catholicism a privileged place with respect to Tradition in general) others do not. Some even affirm themselves as anti-Christian. Mario Polia states: “Considering it more closely, ‘Catholic traditionalism’ is an ambiguous expression, as if being Catholic were only a specification of a more general and absolute category: ‘traditionalism.’ It is equally unsatisfactory to speak of ‘traditionalist Catholicism’, giving the expression the sense of ‘traditional’, for it either presupposes the parallel and antithetical possibility of a Catholicism outside of tradition or, by defining ‘traditionalism’ as the ‘traditional interpretation’ of Catholicism, reserves for the traditionalist movements the prerogative of being the only true Catholicism. Traditionalist movements would then assume the prerogative of being Catholicism. To speak of ‘traditional Catholicism’ does not make much sense, either because one cannot define Catholicism in terms of Tradition, or because it presupposes an anti-traditional type of Catholicism.”[6] In fact, there is much difference between, for example, a traditionalist like Marcel Lefebvre and a “Christian traditionalist” like Attilo Mordini.

In seeking to define the “Indo-European tradition,”Jean Haudry speaks of a “constituted literary heritage, essentially of formulas and schemes expressing and transmitting a concept of the world that guides individual actions and that can be materialized within institutions.”[7] Such a definition, with its reference to a “literary” origin, obviously does not conform to what traditional thought understands by Tradition. According to this school, Tradition cannot be defined through sociological or cultural data, nor can it be appreciated in purely human terms. Tradition is not the body of customs but rather that which derives from the philosophia perenis.[8] Far from encompassing a body of observed and accepted rules, it constitutes a doctrine voluntarily and consciously transmitted as principles — a series of transcendental truths of permanent worth and of non-human origin. According to traditional thought, tradition is only secondarily cultural. At most, it can be said to inspire certain cultural or social activities. It is fundamentally spiritual, possesses a religious character and implies the metaphysical. Taking it as unique or ‘primordial’ and anterior to all local traditions. Tradition becomes a metaphysical doctrine — drawing on knowledge of ultimate, invariable and universal principles. It is not a human invention but a supra-human ‘gift’ manifesting the existence of a superior order of reality. On this point, all are unanimous. For Antonio Medrano, Tradition must be understood as “a sacred articulation of reality based on metaphysical principles.” Frithjof Schuon, who espouses the principle of the “transcendental unity” of all religions, sees in Tradition a body of truths principally uniting “all that is human to a divine reality.” Guenon connects Tradition with metaphysics, defining it as “suprarational knowledge, intuitive and immediate.”

Thus conceived, Tradition is defined as a coherent body of intangible and sacred principles imposed on all which delineates the essential rules of conduct, allowing man to accede to the supra-human level, allowing the homo to detach from the humus, to pass from the terrestrial to the celestial order. In this light, the transmission of Tradition from generation to generation obviously plays an essential role. Mario Polia writes: “There is Tradition — in the spiritual sense — only if there is the ‘transmission’ of a truth of metaphysical (not simply cultural) order embodied in a doctrinal system, transmitted and guarded by a spiritually qualified hierarchy, encompassing the possibility of acceding to such truth through ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ means. In addition, a tradition must ensure a qualified and uninterrupted transmission through time from the source to the beneficiary, and the continuance of liturgical, ritualistic and “sacrificial” practices, without which transmission would become a purely cultural variable.”

Symbolic language is thus quintessentially traditional. Just as myth is beyond events and a properly historical significance, the symbol, contrary to allegory, is beyond words and semantic definition. Seeking to manifest the inexpressible, it communicates the abstract by transfiguring it into an always provisional and imperfectly concrete representation. It arouses affectivity in the body as much as in the mind. D.H. Lawrence said in Apocalypse: “Symbols are organic entities of conscience that have their own life: one can never exhaust their meaning, because they have a dynamic emotional value to the sensorial conscience of the body and spirit that is more than just intellectual.”

Above all, symbolic language constitutes the main path of analogical thinking that, by expressing correspondences between different levels of reality, simultaneously unveils the unity of the world and the subtle complementarity of the One and the Many. Reasoning by analogy can establish qualitative correspondences between these levels of reality and situate the backgrounds of meaning corresponding to symbols. Guenon evokes this “law of correspondence, which is the very foundation of all symbolism and by virtue of which each thing, while proceeding from a single metaphysical principle which guarantees its reality, translates or expresses this principle in its own way and according to its order of existence, such that all things are drawn together and correspond from one order to the next.” [10] According to the traditional outlook, the idea of non-separation is essential. “What is below is like what is above. Miracles are performed from one and the same thing,” according to the famed Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus. The city of men must reproduce the harmony pervading the city of God or expressed in the well-ordered cosmos. Similarly, Meister Eckhart writes: “The eye with which I see myself and the eye with which God sees Himself are one and the same” (Sermon 12), and Goethe adds: “What is inside is also outside.” For Raymond Abellio, the gnosis is also defined as a vision of universal interdependence, challenging the idea that there are separate beings or phenomena, though they may be distinct (union without confusion). This universal interdependence, says Abellio, implies an “intentionality of the world.” Being general, it can be applied to emotions as well as thoughts. Nothing — no thing, no person — can claim to be autonomous in the absolute.

This “holistic” vision is traditional in esotericism. From the viewpoint of traditional thought, the difference between esoteric and exoteric levels is also fundamental. One can say that Tradition constitutes the esoteric aspect of a spiritual reality. In their more immediately perceivable forms, institutionalized religions then express the esoteric aspect of this spiritual reality. Here esotericism should be taken in the sense of initiation and not the occult, which the school considers more a phenomenon of decadence or “counter-initiation.” Abellio states that esotericism dispels interior darkness .just as positive knowledge dispels exterior darkness. He adds that transcendental interior darkness does not proceed from an opposition or a duality between consciousness and the world but from a correlation between the world and consciousness of our own consciousness. “This genitive encapsulates the secret of esotericism. One must consider it in its immediate genetic function: it serves to generate another consciousness. Hence the deep meaning of what we call initiation, which is the awakening of consciousness to its own transcendental self-consciousness.” [11] This consciousness of consciousness, grounded in the internalized perception of external perception, is by definition fundamentally “self-intensifying.” Esotericism is the mode of knowledge and activity whereby man seeks to situate himself from a viewpoint which is no longer merely human.

Traditional thought, which began to develop seriously in the 1920s, has devoted itself to restoring order to the “occultist” jumble of the preceding century. It is a modern version of Oswald Spengler’s “second religiosity.” This demand for rigor undoubtedly distances it radically from false spiritualities and the “religious” pseudo-syncretisms of which the New Age doctrine is an extreme example. The boundary, however, is not always as clear-cut as desired. Should we treat the problems of sacredness and spirituality in general, as they are found within different religions? Should we speak of traditionalisms that do not conform to the traditional doctrine as we have defined it and which may be directly opposed to it? Where should the “theocratic” ideas of a Bonald, a Donoso Cortes or a Joseph de Maistre be placed? How can we avoid evoking the question of gnosis, as posed by Jean Borella, Raymond Ruyer and Raymond Abellio? Traditional thought emphasizes the study of myths and symbols. Jung and de Bachelar, Roger Caillois and perhaps also Rene Daumal immediately come to mind, as do the historical studies of religion by Mircea Eliade and the works on “myth analysis” and studies of the imaginary by Gibert Durand and various other contemporaries inspired by Jung. The traditional school also has its great ancestors, from Plato to Pericles, Meister Eckhart and many others. Should we also refer to the studies of Frederic Tristan and Antoine Faivre on hermetic philosophy and alchemy, and those of Jacob Bohme and Swedenborg about occultist Masonry and the Cabbala? Finally, how can we not also consider Islam, to which many of the school’s major representatives have turned? Little by little, one touches on the history of religions, mysticism, esotericism, even psychoanalysis, and the risk is therefore great from Annie Besant to Blavasky, from Rudolf Steiner to Krishnamurti, from Gurdjieff to Aurobindo, to arrive at a syncretism interested in all and feeding off anything (from holistic medicine to transcendental meditation, from popular astrology to runic divination, etc.). By keeping to the exposition of the fundamental themes of traditional thought, we have attempted to focus on and elucidate a few contiguous subjects.

Would Julius Evola’s denunciation of the “modern world” be as scandalous today, when criticism of modernity comes from all sides? The Greens question productivism. Post-modernists want to abolish the grandiose historicist narratives of legitimation. From Left and Right, modernism as the role of individualism, as the atomization of the world, as the triumph of the values of the market, as the dictatorial hegemony of the economy and money is being challenged. Felix Guatarri has recently written: “We focus our attention on impending catastrophes, while the true catastrophes are already here, under our noses, with the degeneration of social practices, with the mass media’s numbing effect, with a collective will blinded by the ideology of the ‘market’, in other words, succumbing to the law of the masses, to entropy, to the loss of singularity, to a general and collective infantilization. The old types of social relations, the old relations with sex, with time, with the cosmos, with human finitude have been rattled, not to say devastated, by the ‘progress’ generated by industrial firms.”[12] Clearly stated: the ideology of progress is crumbling. Novelty is no longer to be interpreted as increased well-being. It may well be that it is generally regressive and that we are living out the end of a cycle.

It is not surprising for the representatives of traditional thought who, in criticizing modernity, exhibit a radicalism difficult to surpass. Generally adhering to a cyclic conception of history, the school affirms that, within each cycle, humanity runs a course leading inexorably from a state of perfection and simplicity to a state of spiritual decline and accentuated materialism. The history of humanity is interpreted as “metaphysical entropy,” as fall, degradation from an original primordial state. All traditional authors see in modern times the time of Kali-Yuga [in Hinduism, the present age of the world, full of conflicts and sin], the apogee of the blackest age, the terminal phase of the cycle, the ne plus ultra of spiritual decline. The conflict between Tradition and anti-Tradition in fact crystallizes itself in decadence, and it is this decadence that the decadents call “progress”. The opposition between traditional thought and the ideology of progress is therefore total, while being perfectly symmetrical (but inversely). All that modern consciousness analyses and perceives as progress, the school interprets as decline: the Renaissance was a fall (decline); the Enlightenment, a darkening.

For Guenon, the crisis of the modern world is essentially explained by the weakening and extinction of principles that originally inspired the institutions and, afterwards, by the multiplication of structures charged with remedying the situation. These structures bring about the proliferation of abstract and contradictory rules, such that finally “the contradictions proper to the institutional system overcome the satisfaction that it is supposed to afford.” [13] Again, nothing is separated: the spiritual level falls as the material level rises, the maintenance of quality (in all areas) is incompatible with the dominance of quantity. Social life becomes mechanical and abstract as the very result of the dissolution of organic and concrete communities. Secularization — the disenchantment of the world (Max Weber’s Entzauberung), social atomization, the materialist hegemony of traded goods, the primacy of the principle of reason (an exclusively technical and reductionist reason), all the phenomena characteristic of the contemporary word — proceed (according to the school) from a sole logic that must be understood as the end of a secular and probably millenary involution. The ultimate effect of the hegemony of the principle of subjective individuation is the death of God, which entails the death of man and allows for, in the best case, only the self-consciousness of the radical void which constitutes the truth of an ego separated from the world and of the nonsense of a social life without finality, completely enclosed in the race for growth and the negation of being in exchange for material possessions.

The modern world is thus perceived first and foremost as distraction: literally, it diverts man away from the essential and keeps him in a state of a perpetual estrangement that prevents him from returning to and regrounding himself authentically. We must search for sense in a world which no longer seems to make sense. We have almost become incapable of understanding even the meaning of the word, “sense.” Guenon writes: “If all men understood what the modern world truly is, it would cease to exist.” Nihilism is also put to the test.

Notes

1. Guenon’s three fundamental works are Orient and Occident (1924), La crise du monde moderne (1927) and Le regne de la quantite et les signes des temps (1945).
2. Arturo Reghini, founder of the Italian Theosophical Society, editor of the journal Atanor, translator of Agrippa de Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia, introduced Guenon to Evola. Guido de Giorgio (1890-1957) also collaborated with Evola in the journals Ur and La Torre. For more on Mordini (1923-1966), see Carlo Fabrizio Carli, Attilio Mordini, il Cattolico Ghibellino (Rome: Settimo Sigillo, 1989).
3. “Integral traditionalism” has also been discussed. See Karlheinz Weissmann, “Vom Geist der Uberlieferung. Die Lehre von der integralen Tradition,” in Etappe 2 (October 1988), pp. 79-90.
4. Le regne de la quantite et les signes du temps, op. cit., p. 280.
5. Linstant et l’eternite et autres textes sur la tradition (Milan: Arche, 1987), p. 148.
6. “Tradizione. 11 significato di un Termine,” in I Quaderni di Avallon 10 (January-April 1986).
7. Etudes indo-europeenes (December 19, 1986), p. 2.
8. This expression, often attributed to Leibniz, probably comes from Augustinus Steuchus’ book, De perinni philosophia, published in 1540 and read by Leibniz.
9. “Tradizione: il Significato di un Termine,” op. cit.
10. Le symbolisme de la croix (Paris: Vega, 1931), p. 12.
11. L’esprit moderne et la tradition, preface to Paul Serant, Au seuil de 1 ‘esoterisme‘ (Paris: Grasset, 1955), p. 18.
12. Liberation (June 30, 1989).
13. F. Jean Borella, “Rene Guenon et la crise du monde moderne” in Connaissance des religions (June 1989), p. 15.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Tradition?” Telos, Vol. 1992, No. 94 (December 1992), pp. 82-88. Text retrieved from: <http://www.amerika.org/globalism/tradition-alain-de-benoist/ >.

 

Human Rights – Devlin

Human Rights between Ideology & Politics: Alain de Benoist’s Beyond Human Rights

By F. Roger Devlin

Alain de Benoist
Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms
London: Arktos Media, 2011

The work under review is the third by French philosopher Alain de Benoist to be translated into English, and the second translation to be published by Arktos Media. Like its predecessor The Problem of Democracy, it is a short, dense book written to challenge the authority of one of the most pompous god-terms of our age.

The current vogue for “human rights” can be traced back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948. Before this famous declaration was issued, explains Benoist, the directors of the United Nations Educational Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) undertook a preliminary enquiry:

An international committee was constituted in order to collect the opinions of a certain number of ‘moral authorities.’ Around 150 intellectuals from all countries were asked to determine the philosophical basis of the new Declaration. This approach ended in failure, and its promoters had to limit themselves to registering the irreconcilable divergences between the responses obtained. Since no accord emerged, the Commission decided not to publish the results of this enquiry. (p. 40)

The UN happily proceeded to issue its Universal Declaration of Human Rights anyway.

UNESCO’s failure at finding any agreed-upon source or rational basis for human rights is hardly surprising. The first great vogue for the rights of man had come with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution a century and a half before, and it had hardly gone unanswered: Nineteenth Century thinkers as different as Burke, Bentham, Marx, and Nietzsche had all subjected both it and the social contract theory on which it was based to withering criticism.

From the point of view of serious philosophical thought, this is more or less where we remain today. Yet the notion of human rights seems to provide modern society with something significant that it would otherwise lack. And so, like a religious teaching, it marches happily on in defiance of any number of refutations. It is continually upon the lips of journalists, politicians, bishops, and even such sublime moral authorities of the present age as Elie Wiesel, Nadine Gordimer, and Kofi Annan; yet no one even bothers trying to justify it anymore. Sometimes this is even admitted explicitly: William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, is quoted by Benoist as saying that human rights are “nothing but what men declare to be rights” (p. 59).

But then it is difficult to see why my list of human rights is not just as good as yours—or the UN’s.

Benoist begins his own inquiry with the suggestion that Europe’s single most important gift to the world is the spirit of objectivity. From objectivity follow such characteristically Western notions as the common good, equity, science, and philosophy (as enterprises independent of traditional authority), and the capacity for self-criticism. But it is the nature of every virtue to border upon particular vices. In the case of objectivity, these vices are subjectivity and universalism. While subjectivity reduces reality to perception, universalism foists upon reality an abstract idea not derived from it.

Human rights, he says, are an ideology which “unites both of these errors. It is universalist insofar as it claims to impose itself everywhere without regard to memberships, traditions and contexts. It is subjectivist insofar as it defines rights as subjective attributes of the solitary individual” (p. 22).

The author then proceeds to outline the historical origins of these supposed rights. They were unknown to the classical world.

Originally, law was not at all defined as a collection of rules and norms of conduct deriving from morality, but as a discipline aimed at determining the best way to establish equity within a relationship. For the Greeks, justice in the legal sense represents good proportion, the equitable proportion between distributed goods and charges. Thus, Cicero says of civil law that ‘its end is to maintain among citizens, in the distribution of goods and in legal cases a just proportion resting on laws and customs.’ (p. 26)

Consisting in a certain kind of relation between persons, or distribution between them, justice is a kind of harmony within a group.

Christianity, developing a universalistic tendency already present in Stoicism, broke with this way of thinking:

The Christian religion proclaims the unique value of every human being. Insofar as he possesses a soul which puts him in a direct relationship with God, man becomes the bearer of an absolute value, i.e., of a value which cannot be confused with his personal qualities or his membership in a particular group. [In this way] Christianity digs a ditch between the origin of man (God) and his temporal existence. It withdraws from the relative existence of the human being the ontological anchoring which is now reserved for the soul. The links between men are, of course, still important, but they remain secondary. (p. 27)

The French legal historian Michel Villey put it this way: “The Christian ceases to be a part of the political organism; he is a totality in himself, an end superior to the temporal ends of politics, and his person transcends the state. Here is the seed of the modern freedoms of the individual which will be opposable to the state, our future ‘human rights’” (p. 28).

Before the modern understanding of natural law was developed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the concept of law became gradually more subjective within Christian thought. Fourteenth Century Nominalist William of Occam taught that only individuals exist; Spanish Scholasticism, writes Benoist, “passe[d] from a notion of objective natural law founded on the nature of things to a notion of a subjective natural law founded on individual reason” (p. 31). So the anticlericalism of the French Revolution and consequent denunciation of the ‘Rights of Man’ by the Church must not mislead us in to thinking that Christianity is incompatible with any conception of universal human rights; in recent years the Catholic Church has acknowledged this, to the dismay of some traditionalists.

On the other hand, the notion of individual rights enforceable against the society as a whole is as unfamiliar to the non-Western world as it was to classical Greece:

Asiatic thought [writes Benoist] is expressed above all in the language of duties. In the Confucian tradition, men are related to each other by reciprocity of duties and mutual obligation. In India, Hinduism represents the universe as a space where beings traverse cycles of multiform existence. In Taoism, the tao of the world is regarded as a universal fact that governs the course of beings and things. In Black Africa, the social relationship includes the dead as well as the living. In the Middle East, the notions of respect and honor determine obligations within the extended family and clan. (p. 65)

Benoist is aware, of course, that all these groups easily learn to mimic Western rights talk where it can be to their advantage; nevertheless, any concept of individual rights remains fundamentally alien to their native and natural thought patterns.

Accordingly, there is much to be said in favor of the view that universal rights represent a disguised form of Western imperialism. This interpretation is strengthened by the frequency with which the slogan of ‘protecting human rights’ is now employed to justify military intervention. Such ‘humanitarian’ intervention is increasingly being asserted not merely as a right, but as a duty. This is tantamount to the abandonment of the Westphalian system which has governed international relations since 1648.

Alternatively, universal rights ideology may be understood as a theory of historical development according to which “the majority of the world’s peoples are engaged, in the same way as Western nations, in a process of transition from a more or less mythical Gemeinschaft . . . to a ‘modernity’ organized in a ‘rational’ and ‘contractual’ manner, such as the Western world knows it” (Raimundo Panikkar, pp. 66-67). On this view the West is not, indeed, morally superior; but it is in advance, while others are lagging behind.

Furthermore, the individual character of human rights inevitably comes into conflict with cultural freedom, i.e., the freedom of traditional cultures to exist—which necessarily involves their right to exclude what is alien. A Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples was actually proclaimed in Algeria in 1976; it asserts, in part, “the right [of a people] not to see a culture imposed on it which is alien to it” (p. 70). This would seem to imply the right of a cultural collective to crack down on any individuals who might be keen on adopting foreign (or ‘modern’) ways. There is no way out of this dilemma which would satisfy everybody.

Since individuals are inherently weak, the enforcement of individual rights also involves what Benoist calls an “extraordinary rise in power of the legal sphere” (p. 85). Thus, guaranteeing full sexual freedom to individual women has entailed the unprecedented expansion of divorce law (my example). Judicial decisions gradually replace cultural tradition and, in Pierre Manent’s words: “Arbitrariness—precisely what our regimes wanted to defend against in instituting constitutional control—will go on increasing and will be, paradoxically, the doing of judges” (p. 86). From maintaining a shared culture—peculiar to itself collectively but not individually—society dissolves into an assemblage of litigious utility-maximizers forever attempting to instrumentalize the judiciary against their neighbors. This is hardly what the champions of ‘human rights’ had in mind, but it is what we have ended up with.

Benoist develops his own position, strongly reminiscent of Carl Schmitt, in the context of discussing “humanitarian intervention.” The very nature of the alleged duty to protect human rights abroad implies that it can only be carried out by stronger states against weaker ones. The seductive “idealism” of enforcing justice beyond national borders issues in a mere sanctioning of the hegemony of superpowers. American intervention in places such as Iraq, Serbia, and Somalia was surely facilitated by the presumption that she would never find herself on the receiving end of similar intervention. But, as the author remarks, “a justice which is not the same for all does not deserve the name” (pp. 87-88).

Consider a question of domestic policy: if a society does not have the means to provide free education to its members, what is gained by asserting an individual “right” to education? In fact, such a right is no more than an “attribution that a particular society which has reached a certain moment in its history thinks itself able and obliged to give its members” (p. 96).

The crux of the confusion inherent in rights ideology is that, while “human rights” is a legal concept, “the law cannot float above politics. It can be exercised only within a political community or result from the decision of several political units to ally themselves with one another” (sc. the Coalition of the Willing; p. 87).

In short, human rights are in reality nothing but political ideals or goals. Men assert them as rights out of an urge to protect them from the risks and uncertainty of political life; but this is mere self-deception about the human condition. In fact, we are political animals whose rights are always at the mercy of political regimes. In constantly attempting to reduce the prerogatives of politics, human rights ideology even serves to undermine the foundations of its own implementation. Better to dispense with it entirely.

The rejection of human rights ideology is hardly an endorsement of despotism. Rather:

It is a question of showing that the necessary fight against all forms of tyranny and oppression is a fundamentally political question which, as such, should be resolved politically. In other words, it is a question of abandoning the legal sphere and the field of moral philosophy to affirm that the power of the political authority must be limited, not because individuals enjoy unlimited rights by nature, but because a polity where despotism reigns is a bad political society. (p. 107)

This reviewer has no criticism to offer.

The best way forward, as Benoist sees it, is the restoration of what Benjamin Constant called the “freedom of the Ancients,” viz., active participation in political life with all the responsibilities it entails, including responsibility for maintaining what are today styled “human rights” (p. 108). As the author suggests in his previous book on democracy, this participation can best be exercised today within the context of municipal associations, regional assemblies and professional bodies. From the perspective of ancient and classical liberty, we of the West are enjoying precisely the government we deserve.

 

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Devlin, F. Roger. “Human Rights between Ideology & Politics: Alain de Benoist’s Beyond Human Rights.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 11 April 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/04/alain-de-benoists-beyond-human-rights >.

Note: Alain de Benoist’s Beyond Human Rights was originally published in French as Au-delà des droits de l’homme: Pour défendre les libertés (Paris: Krisis, 2004). It is also available in a German translation as Kritik der Menschenrechte: Warum Universalismus und Globalisierung die Freiheit bedrohen (Berlin: Junge Freiheit, 2004) and in an Italian translation as Oltre i diritti dell’uomo: Per difendire le libertà (Rome: Il Settimo Sigillo, 2004). A Spanish translation has also been published as Más allá de los Derechos Humanos: defender las libertades (published online in 2008 at Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/mas_alla_de_los_derechos_humanos.pdf >). (we have not yet found out if and where it was published in print).

 

Rethinking Democracy – Devlin

Rethinking Democracy: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy

By F. Roger Devlin

Alain de Benoist
The Problem of Democracy
Arktos Media, 2011

This deceptively brief study of democracy begins from the familiar point that the term can no longer mean much in an age when all regimes claim to be democratic. Benoist suggests that the serious inquirer should turn to history and study democracy as it has actually existed, long before the modern era. One pattern which quickly becomes clear is the intimate connection between democracy and Western civilization:

In contrast to the Orient, absolute despotism has always been exceedingly rare in Europe. Whether in Rome, in the Iliad, in Vedic India or among the Hittites, already at an early date we find the existence of popular assemblies for both military and civil administration.

This does not mean that most Western polities have been democracies; they have most often been mixed regimes containing democratic elements. Yet even such elements have generally been absent in the non-Western world, where the very word for democracy is a recent import from the European languages.

More specifically, democracy was a system of government which developed in Greece during classical times. Benoist next seeks to rediscover what demokrateia meant to the men who invented it. His discussion then evolves toward a defense of this ancient conception and a corresponding critique of modern “democracies.”

The cardinal point to grasp is that the classical understanding presupposed “a relatively homogeneous community conscious of what makes it such,” or “cultural cohesion and a clear sense of shared belonging.”

The closer the members of a community are to one another, the more likely they are to have common sentiments, identical values, and the same way of viewing the world and social ties, and the easier it is for them to make collective decisions concerning the common good without the need for any form of mediation.

The citizens of a Greek polis shared a common descent, common history, common language and common form of worship. It is a moot point what demokrateia would have been in the absence of one or more of them.

Such a regime was distinguished from oligarchy or tyranny by three forms of civic equality: isonomy, or equality before the law; isotimy, or equal eligibility for public office; and isegory, or equal freedom to address one’s fellow citizens on matters of public concern. Civic equality has nothing to do with natural equality, and has no meaning outside men’s relationship to the political community of which they are members.

Athens

Athens is the only ancient democracy of which we have considerable knowledge. We know enough of Sparta and Rome to draw useful comparisons, but these states were mixed regimes with only certain democratic aspects.

Benoist’s too-brief historical review passes hastily over the Solonian reforms, although these certainly had a democratic tendency. In earlier times, power had been monopolized by the Eupatridai (the ‘well-fathered’), an aristocracy typically holding large estates and breeding horses amid the rich bottomland of Attica. By the early sixth century BC, this class had reduced many of the smallholders of the hill country to debt-slavery. Receiving a commission to reform the laws so as to restore civil concord, Solon abolished debt-slavery and cancelled existing debts. This measure was called the seisachtheia, or shaking off of burdens. He also admitted the newly-free class of Yeomen farmers (Zeugetai, or yokefellows) to participation in the Assembly. For these reasons, Solon was often called the father of Athenian democracy. But the poorer, generally landless men known as Thetes continued to be excluded from politics.

Benoist dates Athenian Democracy to the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC. Previous to that time, Athenian society consisted of four phylai, or tribes, which were subdivided into phratria (brotherhoods) and genē (clans). Athenian citizen rolls were based upon membership in phratria. Not surprisingly, civic loyalty to Athens often had to give way to the claims of kinship. This contributed to the establishment of a tyranny by the Peisistratid family while Solon was still alive.

After helping to overthrow the Peisistratids, Cleisthenes instituted a new system of enrolling citizens by place of residence, or deme, regardless of clan or tribe. The four tribes, indeed, were abolished and replaced with ten new groupings. Although still called phylai, they were henceforth composed of demes rather than families. Cleisthenes’ great object was to substitute specifically political or civic bonds for kinship bonds.

Each of the ten new ‘tribes’ was composed of three groups of demes, or districts: one from the plains, one from the hill country and one from the coast. The old eupatrid aristocracy was concentrated in the plains, the independent smallholders in the hills, and the coastal regions were mixed. So the reorganization forced not only different families but also different social classes to work together, forestalling the development of political factions around class interests. Cleisthenes called his system isonomia, or equality before the law, but it gradually became known as demokrateia. This term may originally have signified ‘rule by the demes’ as much as ‘rule by the people’ (the demos).

Forty-six years later a third and final major round of democratic reforms was carried out under the leadership of Ephialtes. Up to this time, much influence had been exerted by the Areopagus, a council of former office-holders somewhat analogous to the Roman Senate. The Areopagus had remained a stronghold of eupatrid power. Ephialtes transferred all its political prerogatives to the popular Assembly, leaving it a mere court with jurisdiction over murder and certain other capital crimes. He also opened participation in the Assembly to the Thetes. The resulting regime is often referred to as the radical democracy.

Ephialtes himself was assassinated by an aristocratic opponent within a year of carrying through his reforms, but they were consolidated by his successor Pericles. Within about fifteen years, the city’s aristocratic faction had virtually fallen apart. Athens continued to be governed democratically for over a hundred years, with two brief interruptions, until the Macedonian conquest of 338 BC. The popular assembly passed laws, made war and peace, appointed officials, and sometimes exercised judicial functions.

In 451 BC, ten years after the death of Ephialtes, a law was passed restricting Athenian citizenship to men born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. This restriction upon the number of citizens eligible to participate in Athenian politics may strike the modern reader as a quintessentially undemocratic measure, but it was seen by contemporaries as a natural consequence of democracy itself: the extension of political rights to ever-broader classes of the population seemed to them to call for a corresponding tightening of civic membership requirements.

The Athenians liked to consider themselves autochthonous: the original inhabitants of Attica, unmixed with foreign blood. As Athens prospered, however, it attracted merchants from all over Greece and beyond. Foreign traders and their families became known as metoikoi, or dwellers-with, and came to form a large fraction of the resident population. Mixed marriages began to occur: a resident Thracian fathered the Athenian historian Thucydides. Such foreigners could own property and enjoyed civil rights such as use of the court system, but they had no political rights of any kind.

According to the notions currently approved for our use, such exclusion was a violation of these foreigners’ “human rights” and the most unconscionable “racism.” Yet there is no evidence that they ever protested their situation. Clearly, they felt that the advantages of living in Athens outweighed the loss of any political participation they might have enjoyed back home. If there were any malcontents among them, they were sent packing by the Athenians too quickly to leave traces in the historical record.

Sparta

What is known of the ethnography and constitution of the Spartan state also confirms Benoist’s assertion of the intimate connection between democracy and racial and social homogeneity. The Spartans never claimed to be autochthonous; they considered themselves pure “Dorians” whose ancestors had led a wandering life before settling in as the masters of Laconia. The earlier, non-Dorian natives of that land were reduced, if they were lucky, to the status of perioikoi, or “dwellers-around,” with no political rights. If they were less lucky, they became helots, or slaves of the Spartan state. The Spartans lived in continual fear of vengeful uprisings from this numerically superior slave class, and dealt harshly with it. Spartans never intermarried with the despised natives of Laconia, whether perioikoi or helots.

The ancients considered the Spartan constitution a model “mixed” regime compounded of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements: it combined a dual kingship with a council of elders and a popular assembly which had to approve all legislation. Yet it is important to stress that this constitution applied only to full Spartan citizens, who formed a small minority of the total population living in Spartan-controlled territory. Considering that territory as a whole, the regime must be seen as an extremely narrow aristocracy.

Clearly, the Spartans considered their political regime essentially bound up with membership in a single clan sharing a common ancestry. Chalk up two for Benoist.

Rome

The case of Rome seems less favorable to the author’s thesis. Romans preserved the surprisingly unflattering tradition that Romulus originally populated his city by offering asylum to runaway slaves, criminals and sundry other outcasts and from the surrounding area. These being mostly men, the city only survived beyond the first generation by kidnapping women from the nearby Sabines. Two of Rome’s seven semi-legendary kings are said to have been of Etruscan origin; the Etruscans spoke a non-Indo-European language and may have originated in Anatolia.

In its early days, Rome quarreled with the independent Latin cities as much as anyone. At no point in its development was the city ever the capitol of a compact, homogeneous, ethnically-based Latin nation-state; the historical record resisted the stoutest efforts of Nineteenth Century historians, influenced by the romantic nationalism of their day, to foist such an interpretation upon it.

More important, perhaps, is the generosity with which Rome extended citizenship to subjects of proven loyalty. This was considered unusual at the time, yet it was among the most important tools of Roman policy. Potentially rebellious conquered peoples were mollified with limited civic rights and, crucially, the possibility of gaining further rights and status over time. It was a program of Romanization, and proved notably effective, yet it involved a major break with the ancient communitarian nature of politics.

Despite this liberality in extending citizenship, the Roman Republic simultaneously granted increasing powers to their popular council, the concilium plebis; in other words, it gradually became more democratic. A deeper study of the democratic component of the Roman constitution than we can undertake here might provide some modifications to Benoist’s thesis concerning ancient democracy and bio-cultural homogeneity, which he bases mainly on the case of Athens.

Of course, nothing in the Roman experience indicates the feasibility of democratic rule in a polity compounded of different “continental population groups.”

Democracy, Equality, and Freedom

Besides dependence on a pre-existing folk community, ancient democracy differed from modern liberal democracy in its concept of equality, which was in no way opposed to hierarchy or authority. “All ancient authors who have extolled democracy have praised it not because it is an intrinsically egalitarian regime but because it . . . enables a better selection of the elite.”

Elections (from the Latin eligere, ‘to choose’) are a form of selection; the very word ‘elite’ has the same etymology. Originally, democracy expressed a will to replace privilege with merit at a time when the former no longer appeared to be the logical consequence of the latter. The aim was to substitute skill for chance factors (especially birth). It is not elites which it is opposed to. . . . What regime, after all, does not seek quality in government? If democracy charmed so many spirits, this is partly because it was seen as the best means for organising elite turnover.

An equality derived from inherited membership is surely comprehensible to us, even if less familiar than leftist leveling. Surely freedom, however, depends upon circumstance and cannot be conceived as an inherited status? Yet for the ancients, it was so:

In Greek, just as in Latin, liberty stems from one’s origin. Freeman, *(e)leuderos (Greek eleutheros), is primarily he who belongs to a certain stock (cf. the Latin word liberi, children). ‘To be born of good stock is to be free,’ Emile Benveniste writes, ‘it comes to the same thing.’ The Indo-European root *leudh-, also served to designate people as belonging to a given folk (cf. the Old Slavonic ljudú, ‘folk’ and German Leute, ‘people’). These terms all derive from a root evoking the idea of ‘growth and development.’

Common Objections to Democracy

In his second chapter, Benoist attempts to defend democracy in its original understanding from a number of common criticisms: it is unstable, with constant factional fighting amounting to a latent state of civil war; it is vulnerable to the appeals of special interests; a thousand fools do not add up to one wise man; its derivation of authority from numbers is a non-sequitur; it consecrates the reign of mediocrity, etc.

Concerning the problems of factionalism and special interests, the author adds nothing to his previously stated position that democracy presupposes homogeneity and may not be practicable in its absence. About Scandinavia, for example, he writes:

[T]his democratic tradition rests on a particularly strong communitarian sentiment—a tendency toward Zusammenleben (‘living together’) which leads people to take account of common interests above all else. . . . This tradition [is] founded on mutual assistance and a feeling of shared responsibility.

It may simply not be possible to practice democracy in the absence of “a particularly strong communitarian sentiment.”

Regarding the ignorance and incompetence of the common people, the author borrows a point from Weber’s Politik als Beruf: “In politics, decision-making does not mean choosing between what is true and what is false; rather, it means choosing between possible [practical] options.” He remarks that if truth were the determinant of political action, no choice would be involved, whereas politics is precisely an art of making choices.

The idea that government should be in the hands of ‘knowers’ stretches back at least to Plato’s Republic. For Plato, however, knowledge preeminently means knowledge of ‘the Good’—the supreme value and telos of human action. For the utopian philosopher-king capable of such knowledge, political decision-making would indeed be reduced to a kind of calculation.

Rightly or wrongly, few of our contemporaries believe in the possibility of any knowledge of ‘the Good’; for them, ‘knowers’ are merely specialists and technicians. Such men understand how to adopt means to a given end, but almost by definition lack the breadth of vision necessary for prudently choosing between ends. For this reason, political rule by technical experts often proves disastrous.

Yet Benoist is surprisingly optimistic about the capacity of properly informed ordinary people for making decisions regarding their own welfare:

The vast majority of citizens today—especially when they have a clear awareness of their shared belonging—are perfectly capable, if given the means to make a real choice (without being misled by propaganda and demagogy), of identifying the political acts most suited to the common good.

The author affirms the reality of the Volksgeist, the spirit of a particular people expressed in its history and institutions. He describes this spirit as a “shared vision” or “collective representations of a desirable socio-political order” which “presents each person with imperatives transcending particular rivalries.” The national or folk-consciousness is the fundamental source of any regime’s legitimacy, transcending any law or constitution. One understands why Benoist has met with incomprehension on the part of Anglophone political science, with its lingering positivist sources of inspiration.

Problems of Popular Sovereignty

In his third chapter, Benoist develops two inherent difficulties involved in popular sovereignty. The first concerns the possibility of unjust and tyrannical action on the part of the demos. “The underlying characteristic of popular sovereignty,” he writes, “is that in principle there is nothing to limit it.” This would render meaningless the distinction between a democracy under the rule of law and an ochlochracy, or rule by a lawless mob. If law is sovereign, the people are not: hence there is no democracy. The author discusses but does not offer any solution to this dilemma, which may simply be inherent in the nature of popular rule.

The second difficulty concerns both the need for pluralism and its necessary limits. On the first point, Benoist emphasizes that majority voting should be seen as a mere technique for decision-making, not as a source of authority or truth. The foundation of democratic legitimacy is not majoritarianism but the appointment of leaders by those governed.

Where the majority is invested with the moral authority of the demos as a whole, as Lenin and Robespierre envisioned, the opposition is left with no rights. Under these conditions, the majority becomes permanent—and this means precisely the end of democracy. A political opposition has, therefore, been described by one liberal theorist as “an organ of popular sovereignty as essential as government.”

Benoist, however, considers this position less than satisfactory: “there is a great risk that as it gradually extends, ‘pluralism’ may dissolve the notion of [a] people, which is the very basis of democracy.” Overgenerous immigration policies immediately spring to mind.

Moreover, certain persons may feel themselves entirely alienated from the national folk community. Yet they may often be willing to participate in democratic institutions for the purpose of subverting such communities and abolishing the rights of democratic citizenship. During the last century, Communists were the prime example of such subversives; today they have been replaced by Muslim immigrants. Surely the regime stands under no duty to let itself be destroyed.

During the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany tried to respond to this difficulty by decreeing Berufsverbote, or ‘profession bans,’ to keep subversives out of certain sensitive kinds of work. Yet such a law has considerable potential for abuse. Today the Berufsverbote are plainly being misused by Germany’s globalist elite to harass and demoralize patriotic opponents of Muslim immigration or European integration—opposition they have been pleased to declare intrinsically ‘antidemocratic.’

Sometimes loyalty to the constitution is said to be the criterion for distinguishing loyal from disloyal political opposition. Yet this seems hardly satisfactory; patriotic citizens may favor all sorts of far-reaching constitutional changes as well.

Benoist masterfully evokes the dilemma of pluralism before concluding as follows:

Pluralism is a positive notion, but it cannot be applied to everything. We should not confuse the pluralism of values, which is a sign of the break-up of society, with the pluralism of opinions, which is a natural consequence of human diversity. . . . Freedom of expression is thus destined to end not where it interferes with others’ freedom (this being a liberal formula which could easily be shown to be hardly meaningful), but rather where it stands in contrast to the general interest, which is to say to the possibility for a folk community to carve a destiny for itself in line with its own founding values.

It remains to be seen whether standards such as “pluralism of opinions but not values” or “the possibility for a folk community to carve a destiny for itself” will prove less ambiguous or less vulnerable to corruption than loyalty to the constitution or not interfering with the rights of others. Perhaps no possible legal remedy against subversion is at once unambiguous and incapable of abuse.

Representative Democracy

In his fourth chapter, Benoist turns to the critique of modern representative democracy, which he sees as “intimately connected to Judaeo-Christian morality and the philosophy of the Enlightenment.” This conception of democracy rests upon supposed rights inherent in all human beings. From such a perspective, nations seem mere conglomerations of people accidentally thrown up by history and without intrinsic meaning. Instead of peoples, we see masses: “transient pluralit[ies] of isolated and rootless individuals.” Democracy in the classical sense becomes impossible, for there is no folk in whose destiny anyone might participate.

Elections were originally meant to be a way of allowing ordinary people to participate in public life by helping to appoint their own rulers. In contemporary mass-democracies, they are little better than a travesty of this idea. They serve instead as “a way of legitimising the power which professional politicians exercise over a passive population” (Benoist quotes archeologist Paul Veyne).

In democratic theory, candidates wish to be elected in order to implement their own program for the people’s future. Today’s candidates are more likely to adopt whatever ideas they think will get them elected. Electoral platforms are increasingly based on opinion polls, which yield the same results for all parties. Campaigning consists of reaching out to the ‘center’ where opinions are nothing but “impression[s]: vague, contradictory and ill-defined ideas that depend on their moods and infatuations and which are in constant flux.”

Using the same techniques to fish in the same swamp, it is hardly surprising that “in the case of a final ballot between two candidates, the result is invariably in the 50/50 range: it is increasingly unusual for elections to be won or lost by more than a tiny percentage of votes.”

Once elected, the politician hastens to take measures he knows will prove unpopular or which go against the promises he previously made; demagogic measures reappear when new elections are approaching. We may blame such behavior, but it is a natural consequence of the undeniable fact that politicians owe their position far more to their parties and financial backers than to the voters. Neither the campaign financing game nor the internal structure of the modern political party have anything democratic about them, however.

In a word, democracy is sick because citizens cannot vote for politicians from whom they may expect a course of action reflecting well-defined commitments. As a result, “the political life of liberal democracies is now experiencing an unprecedented wave of indifference and apathy.”

What the author describes here as the fate of democracy in the modern world is simply bureaucratic corruption, a process which occurs in all sorts of contexts. A lucid and (to this writer) compelling way of analyzing it is provided by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Democracy, in MacIntyre’s terms, is a kind of practice, i.e., a socially established co-operative human activity aimed at a good. Other examples of practices include the arts, the sciences, historiography, warfare, and worship.

Like all human practices, democratic politics requires institutions which support and nurture it, but the practice is not simply equivalent to them. Like all institutions, democratic political institutions create a system of incentives which only partially coincides with the aim proper to democratic practice itself, viz., the flourishing of the political community concerned. Most of the energy which goes into electioneering is directed toward what MacIntyre would call the institutional rewards external to democratic political practice itself: perquisites of office, traffic in patronage and so forth.

Thus, what in a healthy democratic polity might be a leader’s vision for the destiny of his folk community gets replaced by a ‘platform:’ a poll-derived, focus-group-tested list of ‘positions on the issues,’ the merest ideological packaging designed to market the party-designated nonentity du jour to the masses.

MacIntyre goes so far as to define virtue as that which enables those engaged in human practices to resist the corrupting influence of institutions. In terms of this analysis, the crisis Benoist identifies in democratic institutions amounts quite simply to a lack of virtue.

The reader may snort that he was able to arrive at a similar conclusion just by looking at the sort of men who rise to high position in contemporary Western regimes. I agree. The rise to power of moral midgets like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Angela Merkel et hoc geno omne is the best possible confirmation of the correctness of this analysis.

Reforming Democracy

The Problem of Democracy is very much a theoretical treatise, and the final chapter on concrete reforms is the briefest and sketchiest in the book. Benoist emphasizes that institutions themselves matter less than popular participation in them. Venues for such participation include municipal associations, regional assemblies and professional bodies.

The people should be given the chance to decide wherever it can; and wherever it cannot, it should be given the chance to lend or deny its consent. Decentralization, the delegating of responsibilities, retroactive consent and plebiscites are all procedures that may be combined with universal suffrage.

* * *

The Problem of Democracy is not an easy work to digest. In part, this stems from the author’s habit of expressing himself by means of agreement or disagreement with a host of French and continental European figures largely unfamiliar to American audiences. Some of these are worthy men in their own right, while others are forgettable publicists cited only to make a point, but the difference may not always be clear to the reader. The publishers have, however, added numerous footnotes for added clarity.

Alain de Benoist has been a celebrated and controversial figure in French intellectual life, as well as an uncommonly prolific author, since the early 1970s. His non-reception in the English-speaking world contrasts weirdly with the mob of academic acolytes surrounding frivolous figures such as Jacques Derrida. The work under review is only his second title to appear in English, following On Being a Pagan in 2005.

The reason things are, belatedly, starting to change is the recent emergence of small, unsubsidized publishers such as Arktos which have stepped in to do work the sclerotic academic publishing establishment should have performed years ago. Arktos Media, Ltd. has existed only since 2010, yet they have already published the first two English translations of Guillaume Faye and have announced an entire series devoted to Benoist. This is among the most heartening developments of the last few years.

 

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Devlin, F. Roger. “Rethinking Democracy: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 October 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/10/rethinking-democracy-alain-de-benoists-the-problem-of-democracy >.

Note: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy was originally published in French as Démocratie: le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), and is also available in a German translation as Demokratie: das Problem (Tübingen & Zürich: Hohenrain, 1986), in Italian translation as Democrazia: il problema (Firenze: Arnaud, 1985), and in Spanish translation as ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013).

 

What is Racism? – Benoist

“What is Racism?” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 246 KB):

What is Racism?

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De Benoist, Alain. “What is Racism?” Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 114 (Winter 1999), pp. 11-48. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf >.

Notes: The original French version of this essay was “Racisme: remarques autour d’une definition,” which was published in Racismes, Antiracismes, edited by Andre Béjin and Julien Freund (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1986). This book is also available in Italian translation as Razzismo e antirazzismo (Firenze: La roccia di Erec, 1992).

On this subject, see also this commentary on racism in French by Alain de Benoist (“Contre tous les racismes,” Éléments, n°8-9, 1974): <http://grece-fr.com/?p=3385 >. A similar commentary is available in Spanish as “Sobre racismo y antirracismo,” entrevista a Alain de Benoist por Peter Krause (published in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 47, “Elogio de la Diferencia. Diferencialism versus Racismo” [Mayo 2013]): <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/05/elementos-n-47-elogio-de-la-diferencia.html >. (We have made Elementos N° 47 available for download on our site: Elementos Nº 47 – Diferencialismo). The original German version of this interview was “Alain de Benoist, Vordenker der Neuen Rechten in Frankreich, über Rassismus und Antirassismus, Ideologien und Fremdenfeindlichkeit” (Junge Freiheit, 30/98, 17 July 1998): <http://jungefreiheit.de/service/archiv/?www.jf-archiv.de/archiv98/308aa7.htm >.

The matter of racism versus differentialism has also been further discussed in Spanish in Elementos, N° 43, “La Causa de los Pueblos: Etnicidad e Identidad” (Marzo 2013), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/03/elementos-n-43-la-causa-de-los-pueblos.html >. (download from our site here: Elementos Nº 43 – Etnicidad).

 

Let Them Eat Cake – Morgan

Let Them Eat Cake

By John Morgan

Until a few years ago, like most Americans, I knew very little about Sweden, apart from what I picked up through Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman films.

However, since I began working for Arktos, where most of my colleagues are Swedish, they will often regale me with tales about the multicultural, ethnomasochistic nightmare that their country has become. Their latest story, however, which has been receiving quite a bit of attention on the Internet, takes the cake – literally.

Last Sunday, April 15, the Swedish Minister of Culture, Lena Liljeroth, was invited to cut a cake to honor the 75th anniversary of the Swedish Artists’ Federation at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. That in itself sounds innocuous, until one sees the cake.

The cake itself was designed in the shape of an African tribal woman. In the “head” of the cake was an “Afro-Swedish” “performance artist” – I apologize for using so many quotation marks, but the irony is thick here – by the name of Makode Aj Linde, who would scream in mock pain whenever someone would cut into the cake. It turns out that this cake was intended to make Swedes more aware of the evils of female circumcision in Africa. The first piece was cut by the Minister herself, who proceeded to cut out a piece from the cake’s “naughty bits” (Linde himself referred to it as the cake’s “vagaga”) and feed it to Linde, apparently whispering, “Your life will be better after this,” to him as she did so.

Photos of the “performance” can be found on Facebook (under World Art Day), and a short video of it can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCK6zvWEN_Q

Needless to say, as soon as the story reached the Swedish media, many began accusing the Minister of racism, with some calling for her to resign, including the African Swedish National Association. It seems unlikely that she will, however, since, after all, the event was for a “good cause,” and the artist who came up with the idea is himself African, effectively neutralizing any possible objection which might arise, under the logic of multiculturalism. This didn’t stop the Museum from getting closed down on Tuesday when an English-speaking caller who contacted the institution said that he had planted a bomb in their building, in retaliation for their racism.

The bizarreness of this incident only proves how far the ideas of multiculturalism have infected our civilization. I say our civilization, since I could well imagine this same event happening, with the same result, in America. What immediately struck me about it is how closely it comes to what many liberals imagine those of us on the “radical Right” do in our spare time. (Recall the scene where a group of Whites hunt a Black man for sport in the 1988 film, Betrayed.) Yet here we have the supposed guardians of multiculturalism among the Swedish political and artistic elite indulging in the worst racial stereotypes imaginable (an African “tribal” woman, lying helpless while a crowd of rich White people torture her, cannibalize her and giggle), apparently contradicting the worldview they claim to uphold.

There are strong neo-colonialist overtones to this event which mark it as merely a continuation of the arrogance inherent in the ideology of multiculturalism as a whole. As Alain de Benoist eloquently explains in his book Beyond Human Rights, Western nations have made it their task in recent decades to rid the world of all injustice and evil, not just at home but throughout the world. This is why we bomb and invade countries these days in the name of protecting other peoples from their own governments. However, the very standards of Western liberalism arose from the very specific historical and cultural conditions of the West – therefore, is not the idea of enforcing an abstract set of Western “values” through military and economic force upon non-Western nations itself an imperialistic act? Certainly it is.

In the history of Western empires, the Romans and British, among others, conquered and ruled other peoples with the goal of exploiting them. But the fact is, they made little attempt to impose their values on these peoples – that wasn’t their primary goal. Today, however, liberals — I use that term in the broadest sense, to include both Republicans and Democrats, since in foreign policy there is little difference between them — want to reshape all the nations of the world to fit their idea of how they ought to be. Therefore, imperialism in the guise of multiculturalism and international law today, both military and commercial, is far more insidious and destructive than anything ever imagined in earlier times.

It is the essentially imperialistic nature of multiculturalism that causes these Swedish politicians and artists to appreciate the quaintness of a cake in the form of a stereotypical African woman. How nice those tribal women will be when they’re dancing for us, demonstrating their traditions to us vacuous European culture vultures! Let’s just get rid of that nasty genital mutilation, which we don’t like, and then everything will be fine, and they’ll look nice when we can watch them on the National Geographic channel, free from guilt. That is the ultimate goal of multiculturalism: to turn the world into a theme park, where we can “appreciate” the culture of others, as well as our own cultural past, like museum pieces, with anything in them that might threaten the prevailing ideology safely removed.

Guilt is an additional key to what is going on here. This event demands the question: why is it the duty of Swedes to worry about the fate of African genitalia at all? Unfortunately, it is perfectly consistent with the insane logic of Swedish multiculturalism as it has been explained to me by Swedes. Whether one agrees with its rationale or not, at least multiculturalism in the United States has some basis in reality, given its history of slavery and the treatment of the Native Americans. But Sweden is a country which never had any colonies and never had slavery. They haven’t even been involved in a war since Napoleon, unless one counts loaning some soldiers once in a while to join United Nations expeditions.

So what do Swedes have to feel guilty about? That’s a good question. As it’s been explained to me, apparently the very fact that Sweden is part of “the West,” and therefore part of the civilization which is responsible for all the evils of the world, is enough to make liberal Swedes loathe their own culture enough to feel the need to make things right for Africans – who are pouring in at the rate of 100,000 per year, into a country which only has a population of 9 million, approximately 2 million of which are already of non-Swedish origin. After all, how better to atone for the sins of one’s people than to welcome the tempest-tossed in with open arms? There’s nothing worth saving at home, anyway, right?

I could also comment on how a stunt such as this could be termed “art” in the first place, but most “modern art” ceased to be anything of value long ago, and that’s a theme for another essay. Most people accept it as an axiom these days, anyway.

How anyone who planned this event, including the Minister, could have thought it was a wise idea is beyond comprehension, and proves that they are either incredibly stupid, or else completely out of touch with reality, much like our own liberal elites. Apparently, the mere fact that a piece of art flatters one’s ideological preconceptions (anything done in the name of helping African women is good) makes it all right, no matter how ridiculous. The one thing that gives me some hope is the fact that everyone witnessing the “performance” in the video is laughing. On some level, perhaps they recognized how absurd this nightmarish dream of multiculturalism really is. If they did, then there might still be hope yet that they could wake up and return to sanity.

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Morgan, John. “Let Them Eat Cake.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 19 April 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/04/let-them-eat-cake/ >.