Othmar Spann – Tudor

Othmar Spann: A Catholic Radical Traditionalist

By Lucian Tudor

 

Translations: Português

Othmar Spann was an Austrian philosopher who was a key influence on German conservative and traditionalist thought in the period after World War I, and he is thus considered a representative of the intellectual movement known as the “Conservative Revolution.” Spann was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Vienna, where he taught not only scientific social and economic theories, but also influenced many students with the presentation of his worldview in his lectures. As a result of this he formed a large group of followers known as the Spannkreis (“Spann Circle”). This circle of intellectuals attempted to influence politicians who would be sympathetic to “Spannian” philosophy in order to actualize its goals.[1]

Othmar Spann himself was influenced by a variety of philosophers across history, including Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, J. G. Fichte, Franz von Baader, and most notably the German Romantic thought of Adam Müller. Spann called his own worldview “Universalism,” a term which should not be confused with “universalism” in the vernacular sense; for the former is nationalistic and values particularity while the latter refers to cosmopolitan or non-particularist (even anti-particularist) ideas. Spann’s term is derived from the root word “universality,” which is in this case synonymous with related terms such as collectivity, totality, or whole.[2] Spann’s Universalism was expounded in a number of books, most notably in Der wahre Staat (“The True State”), and essentially taught the value of nationality, of the social whole over the individual, of religious (specifically Catholic) values over materialistic values, and advocated the model of a non-democratic, hierarchical, and corporatist state as the only truly valid political constitution.

Social Theory

Othmar Spann declared: “It is the fundamental truth of all social science . . . that not individuals are the truly real, but the whole, and that the individuals have reality and existence only so far as they are members of the whole.”[3] This concept, which is at the core of Spann’s sociology, is not a denial of the existence of the individual person, but a complete denial of individualism; individualism being that ideology which denies the existence and importance of supra-individual realities. Classical liberal theory, which was individualist, held an “atomistic” view of individuals and regarded only individuals as truly real; individuals which it believed were essentially disconnected and independent from each other. It also held that society only exists as an instrumental association as a result of a “social contract.” On the other hand, sociological studies have disproven this theory, showing that the whole (society) is never merely the sum of its parts (individuals) and that individuals naturally have psychological bonds with each other. This was Othmar Spann’s position, but he had his own unique way of formulating it.[4]

While the theory of individualism appears, superficially, to be correct to many people, an investigation into the matter shows that it is entirely fallacious. Individuals never act entirely independently because their behavior is always at least in part determined by the society in which they live, and by their organic, non-instrumental (and thus also non-contractual) bonds with other people in their society. Spann wrote, “according to this view, the individual is no longer self-determined and self-created, and is no longer based exclusively and entirely on its own egoicity.”[5] Spann conceived of the social order, of the whole, as an organic society (a community) in which all individuals belonging to it have a pre-existing spiritual unity. The individual person emerges as such from the social whole to which he was born and from which he is never really separated, and “thus the individual is that which is derivative.”[6]

Therefore, society is not merely a mechanical aggregate of fundamentally disparate individuals, but a whole, a community, which precedes its parts, the individuals. “Universalists contend that the mental or spiritual associative tie between individuals exists as an independent entity . . .”[7] However, Spann clarified that this does not mean that the individual has “no mental self-sufficiency,” but rather that he actualizes his personal being only as a member of the whole: “he is only able to form himself, is only able to build up his personality, when in close touch with others like unto himself; he can only sustain himself as a being endowed with mentality or spirituality, when he enjoys intimate and multiform communion with other beings similarly endowed.”[8] Therefore,

All spiritual reality present in the individual is only there and only comes into being as something that has been awakened . . . the spirituality that comes into being in an individual (whether directly or mediated) is always in some sense a reverberation of that which another spirit has called out to the individual. This means that human spirituality exists only in community, never in spiritual isolation. . . . We can say that individual spirituality only exists in community or better, in ‘spiritual community’ [Gezweiung]. All spiritual essence and reality exists as ‘spiritual community’ and only in ‘communal spirituality’ [Gezweitheit]. [9]

It is also important to clarify that Spann’s concept of society did not conceive of society as having no other spiritual bodies within it that were separate from each other. On the contrary, he recognized the importance of the various sub-groups, referred to by him as “partial wholes,” as constituent parts and elements which are different yet related, and which are harmonized by the whole under which they exist. Therefore, the whole or the totality can be understood as the unity of individuals and “partial wholes.” To reference a symbolic image, “Totality [the Whole] is analogous to white light before it is refracted by a prism into many colors,” in which the white light is the supra-temporal totality, while the prism is cosmic time which “refracts the totality into the differentiated and individuated temporal reality.”[10]

Nationality and Racial Style

Volk (“people” or “nation”), which signifies “nationality” in the cultural and ethnic sense, is an entirely different entity and subject matter from society or the whole, but for Spann the two had an important connection. Spann was a nationalist and, defining Volk in terms of belonging to a “spiritual community” with a shared culture, believed that a social whole is under normal conditions only made up of a single ethnic type. Only when people shared the same cultural background could the deep bonds which were present in earlier societies truly exist. He thus upheld the “concept of the concrete cultural community, the idea of the nation – as contrasted with the idea of unrestricted, cosmopolitan, intercourse between individuals.”[11]

Spann advocated the separation of ethnic groups under different states and was also a supporter of pan-Germanism because he believed that the German people should unite under a single Reich. Because he also believed that the German nation was intellectually superior to all other nations (a notion which can be considered as the unfortunate result of a personal bias), Spann also believed that Germans had a duty to lead Europe out of the crisis of liberal modernity and to a healthier order similar to that which had existed in the Middle Ages.[12]

Concerning the issue of race, Spann attempted to formulate a view of race which was in accordance with the Christian conception of the human being, which took into account not only his biology but also his psychological and spiritual being. This is why Spann rejected the common conception of race as a biological entity, for he did not believe that racial types were derived from biological inheritance, just as he did not believe an individual person’s character was set into place by heredity. Rather what race truly was for Spann was a cultural and spiritual character or type, so a person’s “racial purity” is determined not by biological purity but by how much his character and style of behavior conforms to a specific spiritual quality. In his comparison of the race theories of Spann and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (an influential race psychologist), Eric Voegelin had concluded:

In Spann’s race theory and in the studies of Clauss we find race as the idea of a total being: for these two scholars racial purity or blood purity is not a property of the genetic material in the biological sense, but rather the stylistic purity of the human form in all its parts, the possession of a mental stamp recognizably the same in its physical and psychological expression. [13]

However, it should be noted that while Ludwig Clauss (like Spann) did not believe that spiritual character was merely a product of genetics, he did in fact emphasize that physical race had importance because the bodily racial form must be essentially in accord with the psychical racial form with which it is associated, and with which it is always linked. As Clauss wrote,

The style of the psyche expresses itself in its arena, the animate body. But in order for this to be possible, this arena itself must be governed by a style, which in turn must stand in a structured relationship to the style of the psyche: all the features of the somatic structure are, as it were, pathways for the expression of the psyche. The racially constituted (that is, stylistically determined) psyche thus acquires a racially constituted animate body in order to express the racially constituted style of its experience in a consummate and pure manner. The psyche’s expressive style is inhibited if the style of its body does not conform perfectly with it.[14]

Likewise Julius Evola, whose thought was influenced by both Spann and Clauss, and who expanded Clauss’s race psychology to include religious matters, also affirmed that the body had a certain level of importance.[15]

On the other hand, the negative aspect of Othmar Spann’s theory of race is that it ends up dismissing the role of physical racial type entirely, and indeed many of Spann’s major works do not even mention the issue of race. A consequence of this was also the fact that Spann tolerated and even approved of critiques made by his students of National Socialist theories of race which emphasized the role of biology; an issue which would later compromise his relationship with that movement even though he was one of its supporters.[16]

The True State

Othmar Spann’s Universalism was in essence a Catholic form of “Radical Traditionalism”; he believed that there existed eternal principles upon which every social, economic, and political order should be constructed. Whereas the principles of the French Revolution – of liberalism, democracy, and socialism – were contingent upon historical circumstances, bound by world history, there are certain principles upon which most ancient and medieval states were founded which are eternally valid, derived from the Divine order. While specific past state forms which were based on these principles cannot be revived exactly as they were because they held many characteristics which are outdated and historical, the principles upon which they were built and therefore the general model which they provide are timeless and must reinstituted in the modern world, for the systems derived from the French Revolution are invalid and harmful.[17] This timeless model was the Wahre Staat or “True State” – a corporative, monarchical, and elitist state – which was central to Universalist philosophy.

1. Economics

In terms of economics, Spann, like Adam Müller, rejected both capitalism and socialism, advocating a corporatist system relatable to that of the guild system and the landed estates of the Middle Ages; a system in which fields of work and production would be organized into corporations and would be subordinated in service to the state and to the nation, and economic activity would therefore be directed by administrators rather than left solely to itself. The value of each good or commodity produced in this system was determined not by the amount of labor put into it (the labor theory of value of Marx and Smith), but by its “organic use” or “social utility,” which means its usefulness to the social whole and to the state.[18]

Spann’s major reason for rejecting capitalism was because it was individualistic, and thus had a tendency to create disharmony and weaken the spiritual bonds between individuals in the social whole. Although Spann did not believe in eliminating competition from economic life, he pointed out that the extreme competition glorified by capitalists created a market system in which there occurred a “battle of all against all” and in which undertakings were not done in service to the whole and the state but in service to self-centered interests. Universalist economics aimed to create harmony in society and economics, and therefore valued “the vitalising energy of the personal interdependence of all the members of the community . . .”[19]

Furthermore, Spann recognized that capitalism also did result in an unfair treatment by capitalists of those underneath them. Thus while he believed Marx’s theories to be theoretically flawed, Spann also mentioned that “Marx nevertheless did good service by drawing attention to the inequality of the treatment meted out to worker and to entrepreneur respectively in the individualist order of society.”[20] Spann, however, rejected socialist systems in general because while socialism seemed superficially Universalistic, it was in fact a mixture of Universalist and individualist elements. It did not recognize the primacy of the State over individuals and also held that all individuals in society should hold the same position, eliminating all class distinctions, and should receive the same amount of goods. “True universalism looks for an organic multiplicity, for inequality,” and thus recognizes differences even if it works to establish harmony between the parts.[21]

2. Politics

Spann asserted that all democratic political systems were an inversion of the truly valuable political order, which was of even greater importance than the economic system. A major problem of democracy was that it allowed, firstly, the manipulation of the government by wealthy capitalists and financiers whose moral character was usually questionable and whose goals were almost never in accord with the good of the community; and secondly, democracy allowed the triumph of self-interested demagogues who could manipulate the masses. However, even the theoretical base of democracy was flawed, according to Spann, because human beings were essentially unequal, for individuals are always in reality differentiated in their qualities and thus are suited for different positions in the social order. Democracy thus, by allowing a mass of people to decide governmental matters, meant excluding the right of superior individuals to determine the destiny of the State, for “setting the majority in the saddle means that the lower rule over the higher.”[22]

Finally, Spann noted that “demands for democracy and liberty are, once more, wholly individualistic.”[23] In the Universalist True State, the individual would subordinate his will to the whole and would be guided by a sense of selfless duty in service to the State, as opposed to asserting his individual will against all other wills. Furthermore, the individual did not possess rights because of his “rational” character and simply because of being human, as many Enlightenment thinkers asserted, but these rights were derived from the ethics of the particular social whole to which he belonged and from the laws of the State.[24] Universalism also acknowledged the inherent inequalities in human beings and supported a hierarchical organization of the political order, where there would be only “equality among equals” and the “subordination of the intellectually inferior under their intellectual betters.”[25]

In the True State, individuals who demonstrated their leadership skills, their superior nature, and the right ethical character would rise among the levels of the hierarchy. The state would be led by a powerful elite whose members would be selected from the upper levels of the hierarchy based on their merit; it was essentially a meritocratic aristocracy. Those in inferior positions would be taught to accept their role in society and respect their superiors, although all parts of the system are “nevertheless indispensable for its survival and development.”[26] Therefore, “the source of the governing power is not the sovereignty of the people, but the sovereignty of the content.”[27]

Othmar Spann, in accordance with his Catholic religious background, believed in the existence of a supra-sensual, metaphysical, and spiritual reality which existed separately from and above the material reality, and of which the material realm was its imperfect reflection. He asserted that the True State must be animated by Christian spirituality, and that its leaders must be guided by their devotion to Divine laws; the True State was thus essentially theocratic. However, the leadership of the state would receive its legitimacy not only from its religious character, but also by possessing “valid spiritual content,” which “precedes power as it is represented in law and the state.”[28] Thus Spann concluded that “history teaches us that it is the validity of spiritual values that constitutes the spiritual bond. They cannot be replaced by fire and sword, nor by any other form of force. All governance that endures, and all the order that society has thus achieved, is the result of inner domination.”[29]

The state which Spann aimed to restore was also federalistic in nature, uniting all “partial wholes” – corporate bodies and local regions which would have a certain level of local self-governance – with respect to the higher Authority. As Julius Evola wrote, in a description that is in accord with Spann’s views, “the true state exists as an organic whole comprised of distinct elements, and, embracing partial unities [wholes], each possesses a hierarchically ordered life of its own.”[30] All throughout world history the hierarchical, corporative True State appears and reappears; in the ancient states of Sparta, Rome, Persia, Medieval Europe, and so on. The structures of the states of these times “had given the members of these societies a profound feeling of security. These great civilizations had been characterized by their harmony and stability.”[31]

Liberal modernity had created a crisis in which the harmony of older societies was damaged by capitalism and in which social bonds were weakened (even if not eliminated) by individualism. However, Spann asserted that all forms of liberalism and individualism are a sickness which could never succeed in fully eliminating the original, primal reality. He predicted that in the era after World War I, the German people would reassert its rights and would create revolution restoring the True State, would recreate that “community tying man to the eternal and absolute forces present in the universe,”[32] and whose revolution would subsequently resonate all across Europe, resurrecting in modern political life the immortal principles of Universalism.

Spann’s Influence and Reception

Othmar Spann and his circle held influence largely in Germany and Austria, and it was in the latter country that their influence was the greatest. Spann’s philosophy became the basis of the ideology of the Austrian Heimwehr (“Home Guard”) which was led by Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. Leaders of the so-called “Austro-fascist state,” including Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg, were also partially influenced by Spann’s thought and by members of the “Spann circle.”[33] However, despite the fact that this state was the only one which truly attempted to actualize his ideas, Spann did not support “Austro-fascism” because he was a pan-Germanist and wanted the German people unified under a single state, which is why he joined Hitler’s National Socialist movement, which he believed would pave the way to the True State.

Despite repeated attempts to influence National Socialist ideology and the leaders of the NSDAP, Spann and his circle were rejected by most National Socialists. Alfred Rosenberg, Robert Ley, and various other authors associated with the SS made a number of attacks on Spann’s school. Rosenberg was annoyed both by Spann’s denial of the importance of blood and by his Catholic theocratic position; he wrote that “the Universalist school of Othmar Spann has successfully refuted idiotic materialist individualism . . . [but] Spann asserted against traditional Greek wisdom, and claimed that god is the measure of all things and that true religion is found only in the Catholic Church.”[34]

Aside from insisting on the reality of biological laws, other National Socialists also criticized Spann’s political proposals. They asserted that his hierarchical state would create a destructive divide between the people and their elite because it insisted on their absolute separateness; it would destroy the unity they had established between the leadership and the common folk. Although National Socialism itself had elements of elitism it was also populist, and thus they further argued that every German had the potential to take on a leadership role, and that therefore, if improved within in the Volksgemeinschaft (“Folk-Community”), the German people were thus not necessarily divisible in the strict view of superior elites and inferior masses.[35]

As was to be expected, Spann’s liberal critics complained that his anti-individualist position was supposedly too extreme, and the social democrats and Marxists argued that his corporatist state would take away the rights of the workers and grant rulership to the bourgeois leaders. Both accused Spann of being an unrealistic reactionary who wanted to revive the Middle Ages.[36] However, here we should note here that Edgar Julius Jung, who was himself basically a type of Universalist and was heavily inspired by Spann’s work, had mentioned that:

We are reproached for proceeding alongside or behind active political forces, for being romantics who fail to see reality and who indulge in dreams of an ideology of the Reich that turns toward the past. But form and formlessness represent eternal social principles, like the struggle between the microcosm and the macrocosm endures in the eternal swing of the pendulum. The phenomenal forms that mature in time are always new, but the great principles of order (mechanical or organic) always remain the same. Therefore if we look to the Middle Ages for guidance, finding there the great form, we are not only not mistaking the present time but apprehending it more concretely as an age that is itself incapable of seeing behind the scenes. [37]

Edgar Jung, who was one of Hitler’s most prominent radical Conservative opponents, expounded a philosophy which was remarkably similar to Spann’s, although there are some differences we would like to point out. Jung believed that neither Fascism nor National Socialism were precursors to the reestablishment of the True State but rather “simply another manifestation of the liberal, individualistic, and secular tradition that had emerged from the French Revolution.”[38] Fascism and National Socialism were not guided by a reference to a Divine power and were still infected with individualism, which he believed showed itself in the fact that their leaders were guided by their own ambitions and not a duty to God or a power higher than themselves.

Edgar Jung also rejected nationalism in the strict sense, although he simultaneously upheld the value of Volk and the love of fatherland, and advocated the reorganization of the European continent on a federalist basis with Germany being the leading nation of the federation. Also in contrast to Spann’s views, Jung believed that genetic inheritance did play a role in the character of human beings, although he believed this role was secondary to cultural and spiritual factors and criticized common scientific racialism for its “biological materialism.”

Jung asserted that what he saw as superior racial elements in a population should be strengthened and the inferior elements decreased: “Measures for the raising of racially valuable components of the German people and for the prevention of inferior currents must however be found today rather than tomorrow.”[39] Jung also believed that the elites of the Reich, while they should be open to accepting members of lower levels of the hierarchy who showed leadership qualities, should marry only within the elite class, for in this way a new nobility possessing leadership qualities strengthened both genetically and spiritually would be developed.[40]

Whereas Jung constantly combatted National Socialism to his life’s end, up until the Anschluss Othmar Spann had remained an enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism, always believing he could eventually influence the Third Reich leadership to adopt his philosophy. This illusion was maintained in his mind until the takeover of Austria by Germany in 1938, soon after which Spann was arrested and imprisoned because he was deemed an ideological threat, and although he was released after a few months, he was forcibly confined to his rural home.[41] After World War II he could never regain any political influence, but he left his mark in the philosophical realm. Spann had a partial influence on Eric Voegelin and also on many Neue Rechte (“New Right”) intellectuals such as Armin Mohler and Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner.[42] He has also had an influence on Radical Traditionalist thought, most notably on Julius Evola, who wrote that Spann “followed a similar line to my own,”[43] although there are obviously certain marked differences between the two thinkers. Spann’s philosophy thus, despite its flaws and limitations, has not been entirely lacking in usefulness and interest.

Notes

1. More detailed information on Othmar Spann’s life than provided in this essay can be found in John J. Haag, Othmar Spann and the Politics of “Totality”: Corporatism in Theory and Practice (Ph.D. Thesis, Rice University, 1969).

2. See Othmar Spann, Types of Economic Theory (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930), p. 61. We should note to the reader that this book is the only major work by Spann to have been published in English and has also been published under an alternative title as History of Economics.

3. Othmar Spann as quoted in Ernest Mort, “Christian Corporatism,” Modern Age, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer 1959), p. 249. Available online here: http://www.mmisi.org/ma/03_03/mort.pdf.

4. For a more in-depth and scientific overview of Spann’s studies of society, see Barth Landheer, “Othmar Spann’s Social Theories.” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 39, No. 2 (April, 1931), pp. 239–48. We should also note to our readers that Othmar Spann’s anti-individualist social theories are more similar to those of other “far Right” sociologists such as Hans Freyer and Werner Sombart. However, it should be remembered that sociologists from nearly all political positions are opposed to individualism to some extent, whether they are of the “moderate Center” or of the “far Left.” Furthermore, anti-individualism is a typical position among many mainstream sociologists today, who recognize that individualistic attitudes – which are, of course, still an issue in societies today just as they were an issue a hundred years ago – have a harmful effect on society as a whole.

5. Othmar Spann, Der wahre Staat (Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle und Meyer, 1921), p. 29. Quoted in Eric Voegelin, Theory of Governance and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1921–1938 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), p. 68.

6. Spann, Der wahre Staat, p. 29. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, p. 69.

7. Spann, Types of Economic Theory, pp. 60–61.

8. Ibid., p. 61.

9. Spann, Der wahre Staat, pp. 29 & 34. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, pp. 70–71.

10. J. Glenn Friesen, “Dooyeweerd, Spann, and the Philosophy of Totality,” Philosophia Reformata, 70 (2005), p. 6. Available online here: http://members.shaw.ca/hermandooyeweerd/Totality.pdf.

11. Spann, Types of Economic Theory, p. 199.

12. See Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” p. 48.

13. Eric Voegelin, Race and State (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 117–18.

14. Ludwig F. Clauss, Rasse und Seele (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1926), pp. 20–21. Quoted in Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), p. 307.

15. For an overview of Evola’s theory of race, see Michael Bell, “Julius Evola’s Concept of Race: A Racism of Three Degrees.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Winter 2009–2010), pp. 101–12. Available online here: http://toqonline.com/archives/v9n2/TOQv9n2Bell.pdf. For a closer comparison between the Evola’s theories and Clauss’s, see Julius Evola’s The Elements of Racial Education (Thompkins & Cariou, 2005).

16. See Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” p. 136.

17. A more in-depth explanation of “Radical Traditionalism” can be found in Chapter 1: Revolution – Counterrevolution – Tradition” in Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, trans. Guido Stucco, ed. Michael Moynihan (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002).

18. See Spann, Types of Economic Theory, pp. 162–64.

19. Ibid., p. 162.

20. Ibid., p. 226.

21. Ibid., p. 230.

22. Spann, Der wahre Staat, p. 111. Quoted in Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna, Red Vienna: The Struggle for Intellectual and Political Hegemony in Interwar Vienna, 1918–1938 (Ph.D. Dissertion, Washington University, 2010), p. 80.

23. Spann, Types of Economic Theory, pp. 212.

24. For a commentary on individual natural rights theory, see Ibid., pp.53 ff.

25. Spann, Der wahre Staat, p. 185. Quoted in Wassermann, Black Vienna, Red Vienna, p. 82.

26. Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” p. 32.

27. Othmar Spann, Kurzgefasstes System der Gesellschaftslehre (Berlin: Quelle und Meyer, 1914), p. 429. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, p. 301.

28. Spann, Gesellschaftslehre, p. 241. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, p. 297.

29. Spann, Gesellschaftslehre, p. 495. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, p. 299.

30. Julius Evola, The Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009), p. 190.

31. Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” p. 39.

32. Ibid., pp. 40–41.

33. See Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, Alexander Lassner, The Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Era in Austria: A Reassessment (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), pp. 16, 32, & 125 ff.

34. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Sussex, England: Historical Review Press, 2004), pp. 458–59.

35. See Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” pp. 127–29.

36. See Ibid., pp. 66 ff.

37. Edgar Julius Jung, “Germany and the Conservative Revolution,” in: The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 354.

38. Larry Eugene Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung: The Conservative Revolution in Theory and Practice,” Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association, Vol. 21, No. 02 (1988), p. 163.

39. Edgar Julius Jung, “People, Race, Reich,” in: Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870–1940, edited by Alexander Jacob (Lanham, MD, USA: University Press of America, 2002), p. 101.

40. For a more in-depth overview of Jung’s life and thought, see Walter Struve, Elites Against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1973), pp. 317 ff. See also Edgar Julius Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, 2 vols. (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1995).

41. Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” pp. 154–55.

42. See our previous citations of Voegelin’s Theory of Governance and Race and State; Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932 (Stuttgart: Friedrich Vorwerk Verlag, 1950); “Othmar Spann” in Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, Vom Geist Europas, Vol. 1 (Asendorf: Muth-Verlag, 1987).

43. Evola, Path of Cinnabar, p. 155.

 

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Tudor, Lucian. “Othmar Spann: A Catholic Radical Traditionalist.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 19 March 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/03/othmar-spann-a-catholic-radical-traditionalist/>.

Note: This essay was also republished in updated form in Lucian Tudor’s From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).

 

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German Conservative Revolution – Tudor

The German Conservative Revolution & its Legacy

By Lucian Tudor

 

Translations: Suomi, Română

During the years between World War I and the establishment of the Third Reich, the political, economic, and social crises which Germany suddenly experienced as a result of its defeat in the First World War gave rise to a movement known as the “Conservative Revolution,” which is also commonly referred to as the “Conservative Revolutionary Movement,” with its members sometimes called “Revolutionary Conservatives” or even “Neoconservatives.”

The phrase “Conservative Revolution” itself was popularized as a result of a speech in 1927 by the famous poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was a Catholic cultural conservative and monarchist.[1] Here Hofmannsthal declared, “The process of which I am speaking is nothing less than a conservative revolution on such a scale as the history of Europe has never known. Its object is form, a new German reality, in which the whole nation will share.”[2]

Although these phrases give the impression that the Conservative Revolution was composed of people who shared the same worldview, this was in fact not the case because the thinkers and leaders of the Conservative Revolution often had disagreements. Furthermore, despite the fact that the philosophical ideas produced by this “new conservatism” influenced German National Socialism and also had links to Fascism, it is incorrect to assume that the people belonging to it are either Fascist or “proto-Nazi.” Although some Revolutionary Conservatives praised Italian Fascism and some also eventually joined the National Socialist Movement (although many did not), overall their worldviews were distinct from both of these political groups.

It is difficult to adequately summarize the views held by the Revolutionary Conservatives due to the fact that many of them held views that stood in contradistinction to certain views held by others in the same movement. What they generally had in common was an awareness of the importance of Volk (this term may be translated as “folk,” “nation,” “ethnicity,” or “people”) and culture, the idea of Volksgemeinschaft (“folk-community”), and a rejection of Marxism, liberalism, and democracy (particularly parliamentary democracy). Ideas that also were common among them was a rejection of the linear concept of history in favor of the cyclical concept, a conservative and non-Marxist form of socialism, and the establishment of an authoritarian elite. [3]

In brief, the movement was made of Germans who had conservative tendencies of some sort but who were disappointed with the state into which Germany had been put by its loss of World War I and sought to advance ideas that were both conservative and revolutionary in nature.

In order to obtain an adequate idea as to the nature of the Conservative Revolution and its outlook, it is best to examine the major intellectuals and their thought. The following sections will provide a brief overview of the most important Revolutionary Conservative intellectuals and their key philosophical contributions.

The Visionaries of a New Reich

The most noteworthy Germans who had an optimistic vision of the establishment of a “Third Reich” were Stefan George, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Edgar Julius Jung. Stefan George, unlike the other two, was not a typical intellectual but a poet. George expressed his Revolutionary Conservative vision of the “new Reich” largely in poetry, and this poetry did in fact reach and affect many young German nationalists and even intellectuals; and for this he is historically notable.[4] But on the intellectual level, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (who popularized the term “Third Reich”) and Edgar Julius Jung had a deeper philosophical impact.

1. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

Moeller van den Bruck was a cultural historian who became politically active at the end of the First World War. He was a founding member of the conservative “June Club,” of which he became the ideological leader.[5] In Der preussische Stil (“The Prussian Style”) he described what he believed to be the Prussian character, whose key characteristic was the “will to the state,” and in Das Recht der jungen Volker (“The Right of Young Peoples”) he presented the idea of “young peoples” (including Germany, Russia, and America) and “old peoples” (including England and France), advocating an alliance between the “younger” nations with more vitality to defeat the hegemony of Britain and France.[6]

In 1922, he contributed, along with Heinrich von Gleichen and Max Hildebert Boehm, to the book Die neue Front (“The New Front”), a manifesto of the Jungkonservativen (“Young-conservatives”).[7] A year later, Moeller van den Bruck produced his most famous work which contained a comprehensive exposition of his worldview, Das Dritte Reich, translated into English as Germany’s Third Empire.[8]

In Germany’s Third Empire, Moeller made a division between four political stances: Revolutionary, Liberal, Reactionary, and Conservative. Revolutionaries, which especially included Communists, were unrealistic in the sense that they believed they could totally brush aside all past values and traditions. Liberalism was criticized for its radical individualism, which essentially amounts to egotism and disintegrates nations and traditions. Reactionaries, on the other hand, were criticized for having the unrealistic position of desiring a complete revival of past forms, believing that everything in past society was positive. The Conservative, Moeller argued, was superior to the former three because “Conservatism seeks to preserve a nation’s values, both by conserving traditional values, as far as these still possess the power of growth, and by assimilating all new values which increase a nation’s vitality.”[9] Moeller’s “Conservative” was essentially a Revolutionary Conservative.

Moeller rejected Marxism because of its rationalism and materialism, which he argued were flawed ideologies that failed to understand the better side of human societies and life. “Socialism begins where Marxism ends,” he declared.[10] Moeller advocated a corporatist German socialism which recognized the importance of nationality and refused class warfare.

In terms of politics, Moeller rejected republicanism and asserted that true democracy was about the people taking a share in determining its destiny. He rejected monarchy as outdated and anticipated a new form of government in which a strong leader who was connected to the people would emerge. “We need leaders who feel themselves at one with the nation, who identify the nation’s fate with their own.” [11] This leader would establish a “Third Empire, a new and final Empire,” which would solve Germany’s political problems (especially its population problem).

2. Edgar Julius Jung

Another great vision of a Third Reich came from Edgar Julius Jung, a politically active intellectual who wrote the large book Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, translated into English as The Rule of the Inferiour,[12] which has sometimes been called the “bible of neo-conservatism.”[13] This book presented a devastating critique of liberalism and combined ideas from Spann, Schmitt, Pareto, and other thinkers.

Liberal democracy was rejected by Jung as the rule of masses which were manipulated by demagogues and also the rule of money because it had inherent tendencies towards plutocracy. The French Revolutionary ideas of “liberty, equality, fraternity” were all rejected as corrosive influences harmful to society and sources of individualism, which Jung viewed as a key cause of decay. Jung also rejected Marxism as a corrupt product of the French Revolution. [14] The Conservative Revolution for Jung was, in his words, the

Restoration of all those elementary laws and values without which man loses his ties with nature and God and without which he is incapable of building up a true order. In the place of equality there will be inherent standards, in the place of social consciousness a just integration into the hierarchical society, in the place of mechanical election an organic elite, in the place of bureaucratic leveling the inner responsibility of genuine self-government, in the place of mass prosperity the rights of a proud people. [15]

In the place of liberal and Marxist forms, Jung envisioned the establishment of a New Reich which would use corporatist economics (related to the medieval guild system), would be organized on a federalist basis, would be animated by Christian spirituality and the power of the Church, and would be led by an authoritarian monarchy and an elite composed of selected qualified members. In Jung’s words, “The state as the highest order of organic community must be an aristocracy; in the last and highest sense: the rule of the best. Even democracy was founded with this claim.”[16]

He also critiqued the materialistic concept of race as “biological materialism” and asserted instead the primacy of the cultural-spiritual entity (it was on this basis, rather than on biology, that the Jewish Problem was to be dealt with). Furthermore, he rejected nationalism in the normal sense of the term, supporting the concept of a federalist, supra-national, pan-European Empire, while still recognizing the reality and importance of Volk and the separateness of ethnic groups. In fact, Jung believed that the new Reich should be formed on “an indestructible volkisch foundation from which the volkisch struggle can take form.”[17]

Edgar Jung, however, was not content with merely writing about his ideas; he had great political ambitions and actively worked with parties and conservatives who agreed with him in the 1920s up until 1934.[18] The necessity of battle was already part of Jung’s philosophy: “If the German people see that, among them, combatants still live, then they become aware also of combat as the highest form of existence. The German destiny calls for men who master it. For, world-history makes the man.” [19]

During his political activity, he came to dislike the National Socialist movement due to a personal dislike for Hitler as well as his view that National Socialism was a product of modernity and was ideologically linked with Marxism and liberalism. Jung was highly active in his opposition to the NSDAP and was eventually responsible for writing Papen’s Marburg address which criticized Hitler’s government in 1934, which resulted in Jung’s death on the Night of the Long Knives.[20]

Theorists of Decline: Spengler and Klages

1. Oswald Spengler

The most famous theorist of decline is Oswald Spengler, the “doctor-prophet” who predicted the fall of the Western High Culture in his magnum opus, The Decline of the West. According to Spengler, every High Culture has its own “soul” (this refers to the essential character of a Culture) and goes through predictable cycles of birth, growth, fulfillment, decline, and demise which resemble that of the life of a plant.[21] To quote Spengler:

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. [22]

There is an important distinction in this theory between Kultur (“Culture”) and Zivilisation (“Civilization”). Culture refers to the beginning phase of a High Culture which is marked by rural life, religiosity, vitality, will-to-power, and ascendant instincts, while Civilization refers to the later phase which is marked by urbanization, irreligion, purely rational intellect, mechanized life, and decadence. Spengler particularly focused on three High Cultures which he made comparisons between: the Magian, the Classical, and the present Western High Culture. He held the view that the West, which was in its later Civilization phase, would soon enter a final imperialistic and “Caesarist” stage – a stage which, according to Spengler, marks the final flash before the end of a High Culture.[23]

Perhaps Spengler’s most important contribution to the Conservative Revolution, however, is his theory of “Prussian Socialism” which he expressed in Prussianism and Socialism, and which formed the basis of his view that conservatives and socialists should unite. In this short book he argued that the Prussian character, which was the German character par excellence, was essentially socialist. For Spengler, true socialism was primarily a matter of ethics rather than economics.[24]

This ethical, Prussian socialism meant the development and practice of work ethic, discipline, obedience, a sense of duty to the greater good and the state, self-sacrifice, and the possibility of attaining any rank by talent. Prussian socialism was differentiated from Marxism and liberalism. Marxism was not true socialism because it was materialistic and based on class conflict, which stood in contrast with the Prussian ethics of the state. Also in contrast to Prussian socialism was liberalism and capitalism, which negated the idea of duty, practiced a “piracy principle,” and created the rule of money.[25]

2. Ludwig Klages

Ludwig Klages was a less influential, although still noteworthy, theorist of decline who focused not on High Cultures, but on the decline of Life (which stands in contrast to mere Existence). Klages’s theory, named “Biocentrism,” posited a dichotomy between Seele (“Soul”) and Geist (“Spirit”); two forces in human life that were in a psychological battle with each other. Soul may be understood as pure Life, vital impulse, and feeling, while Spirit may be understood as abstract intellect, mechanical and conceptual thought, reason, and Will.[26]

According to Biocentric theory, in primordial pre-historic times, man’s Soul and body were united and thus humans lived ecstatically in accordance to the principle of Life. Over time, human Life was interfered with by Spirit, which caused humans to use conceptual (as opposed to symbolic) thought and rational intellect, thus beginning the severing of body and Soul. In this theory, the more human history progresses, the more Life is limited and ruined by the Spirit in a long but ultimately unstoppable process which ends in completely mechanized, over-civilized, and soul-less people. “Already, the machine has liberated itself from man’s control,” wrote Klages, “it is no longer man’s servant: in reality, man himself is now being enslaved by the machine.”[27]

This final stage is marked by such things as a complete disconnection from Nature, the destruction of the natural environment, massive race-mixing, and a lack of true Life, which is predicted to finally end in the death of mankind due to damage to the natural world. Klages declared, “. . . the ultimate destruction of all seems to be a foregone conclusion.”[28]

Spann and the Unified State

Othmar Spann was, from 1919 to 1938, a professor at the University of Vienna in Austria who was influential but who, despite his enthusiastic support for National Socialism, was removed by the Third Reich government due to a few ideological disagreements.[29] He was the exponent of a theory known as “Universalism” (which is entirely different from universalism in the normal sense of the term). His Universalist view of economics, politics, society, and science was expounded in numerous books, the most important of which was his most memorable work, Der wahre Staat (“The True State”).[30]

Spann’s Universalism was a corporatist theory which rejected individualism. To understand Spann’s rejection of individualism it is necessary to understand what “individualism” is because different and even contradictory definitions are given to that term; individualism here refers to the concept that the individual is absolute and no supra-individual reality exists (and therefore, society is nothing more than a collection of atoms). The reader must be aware that Spann did not make a complete denial of the individual, but rather a complete denial of individualist ideology.[31]

According to Universalist theory, the individual exists only within a particular community or society; the whole (the totality of society) precedes the parts (individuals) because the parts do not truly exist independent from the whole.[32] Spann wrote, “It is the fundamental truth of all social science . . . that it is not the individuals that are the truly real, but the whole, and that the individuals have reality and existence only so far as they are members of the whole.”[33]

Furthermore, society and the State were not entirely separable, because from the State comes the rights of the individual, family, and other groups. Liberalism, capitalism, democracy, and Marxian socialism were all rejected by Spann as individualist or materialist and corrupt products of French Revolutionary ideas. Whereas in past societies the individual was integrated into community, modern life with its liberalism had atomized society. According to Spann, “Mankind can reconcile itself to poverty because it will be and remain poor forever. But to the loss of estate, existential insecurity, uprootedness, and nothingness, the masses of affected people can never reconcile themselves.”[34] As a solution to modern decay, Spann envisioned the formation of a religious Christian, corporatist, hierarchical, and authoritarian state similar to the First Reich (the Holy Roman Empire).[35]

A lesser-known Revolutionary Conservative academic, Hans Freyer, also held similar views to Spann and challenged the ideas and results of the “Enlightenment,” particularly secularism, the idea of universal reason, the concept of a universal humanity, urbanization, and democratization. Against modern society corrupted by these things, Freyer posed the idea of a “totally integrated society” which would be completed by a powerful, non-democratic state. Culture, Volk, race, and religion would form the basis of society and state in order to restore a sense of community and common values. Freyer also joined the National Socialists believing that the movement would realize his aims but later became disappointed with it because of what he saw as its repressive nature during the Third Reich.[36]

Zehrer and Elitist Theory

Hans Zehrer was a notable contributor to and editor of the “neoconservative” magazine Die Tat, and thus eventually also a founding member of a group of intellectuals known as the Tat-Kreis (“Tat-Circle”). Zehrer held the view that “all movements began as intellectual movements of intelligent, well-qualified minorities which, because of the discrepancy between that which is and that which should be, seized the initiative.”[37] His theory was somewhat related to Vilfredo Pareto’s concept of a “circulation of elites” in that he believed that intellectuals, in most cases gifted and intelligent men emerging from any social class, were crucial in determining the succeeding social order and its ideas.

In Germany at that time, the middle class, which made up a large segment of society and of which Zehrer was a member, was facing a number of economic problems. It was Zehrer’s dream that a new political order could be established by young intellectuals of the middle class which he attempted to reach. This new order would result in the abolishment of the insecure Weimar republic and the establishment of an authoritarian elite made up largely of such intellectuals. This elite would not be subject to control by the masses and would choose its own members based on the criterion of personal quality and ability without regard to social class or wealth.[38]

Zehrer’s vision was not fulfilled due to a series of failures to establish a new state by a “revolution from above” as well because of the rise of the NSDAP, which he attempted to influence in the early 1930s despite his disdain for party rule and, after being unsuccessful, retreated from political activity. However, although most Revolutionary Conservative thinkers did not envision an elite composed almost solely of intellectuals, it is notable that they shared with Zehrer the view that an authoritarian elite should have its membership open to qualified individuals of all classes and ranks.[39]

Sombart and Conservative Socialism

Socialists with nationalist and conservative leanings such as Paul Lensch, Johann Plenge, Werner Sombart, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Oswald Spengler to the rise of a new, national, conservative socialism. Of course, it should be remembered that non-Marxist socialism already had a long history in Germany, including such people as the Kathedersozialisten (“socialists of the chair”), Adolf Stöcker, and Ferdinand Tönnies.[40] Werner Sombart himself began as a Marxist, but later became disillusioned with Marxist theory, which he realized was destructive of the human spirit and organic community much in the same way capitalism was.

Sombart is for the most part remembered for his work on the nature of capitalism, especially his works linking the materialistic character of the Jews with capitalism. The obsession with profit, ruthless business practices, indifference to quality, and “the merely rationalizing and abstracting characteristics of the trader” which were key products of capitalism, destroy any “community of labor” and disintegrate bonds between people which were more common in medieval society.[41] Sombart wrote, “Before capitalism could develop, the natural man had to be changed out of all recognition, and a rationalistically minded mechanism introduced in his stead. There had to be a transvaluation of all economic values.”[42]

Sombart’s major objections to Marxism consisted of the fact that Marxism aimed to suppress all religious feelings as well as national feelings and the values of rooted, indigenous culture; Marxism aimed not at a higher mankind but mere base “happiness.” In contrast to Marxism and capitalism, Sombart advocated a German Socialism in which economic policies would be “directed in a corporative manner,” exploitation would be ended, and hierarchy and the welfare of the whole state would be upheld.[43]

Radicalism and Nationalism: Jünger and Niekisch

1. Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger is well-known for his work on what he saw as the positive effects of warfare and battle, with himself having experienced these in World War I. Jünger rejected the bourgeois civilization of comfort and security, which he saw as weak and dying, in favor of the hardening and “magnificent” experience of action and adventure in war, which would transform a man of the bourgeois world into a “warrior.” The warrior type battled “against the eternal Utopia of peace, the pursuit of happiness, and perfection.”[44] Jünger believed that the crisis and restlessness of Germans after the World War was essentially a good thing.

In his book Der Arbeiter, the “warrior” was followed by the “worker,” a new type which would become dominant after the end of the bourgeois order. Jünger had realized that modern technology was changing the world; the individual man was losing his individuality and freedom in a mechanized world. Thus he anticipated a society in which people would accept anonymity in the masses and obedient service to the state; the population would undergo “total mobilization.”[45] To quote Jünger:

Total Mobilization is far less consummated than it consummates itself; in war and peace, it expresses the secret and inexorable claim to which our life in the age of masses and machines subjects us. It thus turns out that each individual life becomes, ever more unambiguously, the life of a worker; and that, following the wars of knights, kings, and citizens, we now have wars of workers. The first great twentieth-century conflict has offered us a presentiment of both their rational structure and their mercilessness.[46]

Ernst Jünger’s acceptance of technology in the “worker” stage stands somewhat in contrast to the position taken by his brother, Friedrich Georg Jünger, who wrote critiques of modern technological civilization (although Ernst would later in life agree with this view).[47] Ernst Jünger later changed in his attitudes during World War II, and afterwards nearly inverted his entire worldview, praising peace and individualism; a change which had not come without criticism from the Right.[48]

2. Ernst Niekisch

Another notable radical nationalist in the Conservative Revolution was Ernst Niekisch, who began as a Communist but eventually turned to a seemingly paradoxical mixture of German nationalism and Russian communism: National Bolshevism. In accordance with this new doctrine, Niekisch advocated an alliance between Soviet Russia and Germany in order to overcome the Versailles Treaty as well as to counter the power of the capitalist and anti-nationalist Western nations. However, this deviant faction, in competition with both Communists and anti-Communist nationalists, remained an unsuccessful minority.[49]

Political Theory: Schmitt and Haushofer

1. Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt was a notable Catholic philosopher of politics and jurist who was a major influence on political thought and who also supported the Third Reich government after its formation. His most famous book was The Concept of the Political, although he is also the author of numerous other works, including Political Theology and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy.

The “political,” for Schmitt, was a concept distinct from politics in the normal sense of the term, and was based on the distinction between “friend” and “enemy.” The political exists wherever there exists an enemy, a group which is different and holds different interests, and with whom there is a possibility of conflict. This criterion includes both groups outside of the state as well as within the state, and therefore both inter-state war as well as civil war is taken into account. A population can be unified and mobilized through the political act, in which an enemy is identified and battled.[50]

Schmitt also defended the practice of dictatorship, which he distinguished from “tyranny.” Dictatorship is a form of government which is established when a “state of exception” or emergency exists in which it is necessary to bypass slow parliamentary processes in order to defend the law. According to Schmitt, dictatorial power is present in any case in which a state or leader exercises power independently of the approval of majorities, regardless of whether or not this state is “democratic.” Sovereignty is the power to decide the state of exception, and thus, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”[51]

Schmitt further criticized parliamentary or liberal democracy by arguing that the original basis of parliamentarism — which held that the separation of powers and open and rational dialogue between parties would result in a well-functioning state — was in fact negated by the reality of party politics, in which party leaders, coalitions, and interest groups make decisions on policies without a discussion. Another notable argument made by Schmitt was that true democracy is not liberal democracy, in which a plurality of groups are treated equally under a single state, but a unified, homogenous state in which leaders’ decisions express the will of the unified people. In Schmitt’s words, “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second – if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”[52]

2. Karl Haushofer

Karl Haushofer was another philosopher of politics who is well-known for his theoretical work on “geopolitics” which aimed to advance Germany’s understanding of international politics and geography. Haushofer asserted that nations not only had the right to defend their land, but also to expand and colonize new lands, especially when experiencing over-population. Germany was one nation in such a position, and was thus entitled to Lebensraum (“living-space”) for its excess population. In order to overcome the domination of the Anglo-American power structure, Haushofer advocated a new system of alliances which particularly involved a German-Russian alliance (thus Haushofer can be viewed as a “Eurasianist”). Haushofer joined the National Socialists but his ideas were eventually rejected by Third Reich geopoliticians because of their hostility to Russia.[53]

The Influences of the Conservative Revolution

The thinkers of the Conservative Revolution had not only an immediate influence in Germany during the early 20th Century, but also a deep and lasting impact on right-wing (and in some cases even left-wing) thought up to the present day. Aside from the obvious influence on National Socialism, and if we assume that Otto Strasser cannot be included as part of the Conservative Revolution, then Strasserism was still clearly influenced by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Oswald Spengler.[54]

Francis Parker Yockey, the author of Imperium, also revealed influence from Spengler, Schmitt, Sombart, and Haushofer.[55] Julius Evola, the famous Italian traditionalist, is yet another writer who was affected by Revolutionary Conservative intellectuals, as is clear in such major works as Men Among the Ruins[56] and The Path of Cinnabar.[57]

More recently, the European New Right shows a great amount of inspiration from Revolutionary Conservatives. Armin Mohler, who may himself be considered a part of Germany’s Conservative Revolution as well as the New Right, is well-known for his seminal work Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932.[58] In addition, Tomislav Sunic also draws many intellectual concepts from Revolutionary Conservatives in his highly important book, Against Democracy and Equality, including Schmitt, Spengler, and to a lesser extent Spann and Sombart. [59]

Yet another intellectual in league with the New Right, Alexander Jacob, is the translator of Jung’s The Rule of the Inferiour and is also responsible for multiple works on various Revolutionary Conservatives.[60] When one considers these facts, it becomes apparent that much can be learned by studying the history and ideas of the German Conservative Revolution. It is a source of philosophical richness which can advance the Conservative position and which leaves its mark on the thought of the Right even today.

 

Notes

[1] On Hofmannsthal’s political views, see Paul Gottfried, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Interwar European Right.” Modern Age, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Fall 2007), pp. 508–19.

[2] Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation (Munich, 1927). Quoted in Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism; Its History And Dilemma In The Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 9.

[3] Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932 (Stuttgart: Friedrich Vorwerk Verlag, 1950).

[4] Robert Edward Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

[5] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 102–111.

[6] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 156–159.

[7] Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, p. 329.

[8] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire (New York: Howard Fertig, 1971).

[9] Ibid. p. 76.

[10] Ibid. p. 245.

[11] Ibid. p. 227.

[12] Edgar Julius Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, trans. Alexander Jacob (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1995).

[13] Larry Eugene Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung: The Conservative Revolution in Theory and Practice,” Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association, vol. 21, Issue 02 (June 1988), p. 142.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Edgar J. Jung, Deutsche uber Deutschland (Munich, 1932), p. 380. Quoted in Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 121–22.

[16] Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, p. 138.

[17] Jung, “Sinndeutung der konservativen Revolution in Deutschland.” Quoted inJones, “Edgar Julius Jung,” p. 167. For an overview of Jung’s philosophy, see: Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung,” pp. 144–47, 149; Walter Struve, Elites Against Democracy; Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890-1933 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1973), pp. 317–52; Alexander Jacob’s introduction to Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870–1940 (Lanham, MD, USA: University Press of America, 2002), pp. 10–16.

[18] Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung,” pp. 145–48.

[19] Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, p. 368.

[20] Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung,” pp. 147–73.

[21] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol. 1: Form and Actuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926).

[22] Ibid. p. 106.

[23] Ibid. For a good overview of Spengler’s theory, see Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (Third Edition. London: Arktos, 2010), pp. 91–98.

[24] Oswald Spengler, Selected Essays (Chicago: Gateway/Henry Regnery, 1967).

[25] Ibid.

[26] See: Joe Pryce, “On The Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages,” Revilo-Oliver.com, 2001, http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/Ludwig_Klages.html, and Lydia Baer, “The Literary Criticism of Ludwig Klages and the Klages School: An Introduction to Biocentric Thought.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan., 1941), pp. 91–138.

[27] Ludwig Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, trans. Joe Pryce, 14 May 2001, http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/515.html, 453.

[28] Ibid., http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/100.html, 2.

[29] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 204–5.

[30] Othmar Spann, Der Wahre Staat (Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle und Meyer, 1921).

[31] Barth Landheer, “Othmar Spann’s Social Theories.” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Apr., 1931), pp. 239–48.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Spann, quoted in Ernest Mort, “Christian Corporatism.” Modern Age, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer 1959), p. 249. http://www.mmisi.org/ma/03_03/mort.pdf.

[34] Spann, Der wahre Staat, p. 120. Quoted in Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality, pp. 163–64.

[35] Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna, Red Vienna: The Struggle for Intellectual and Political Hegemony in Interwar Vienna, 1918–1938 (Saint Louis, Missouri: Washington University, 2010), pp. 73–85.

[36] Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). The single book by Hans Freyer to be translated into English is Theory of Objective Mind, trans. Steven Grosby (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998).

[37] Hans Zehrer, “Die Revolution der Intelligenz,” Tat, XXI (Oct. I929), 488. Quoted in Walter Struve, “Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Jul., 1965), p. 1035.

[38] Struve, “Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist.”

[39] Ibid.

[40] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 57–58. On Tönnies, see Christopher Adair-Toteff, “Ferdinand Tonnies: Utopian Visionary,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 58-65.

[41] Alexander Jacob, “German Socialism as an Alternative to Marxism,” The Scorpion, Issue 21. http://thescorp.multics.org/21spengler.html.

[42] Werner Sombart, Economic Life in the Modern Age (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. 129.

[43] Jacob, “German Socialism as an Alternative to Marxism.”

[44] Ernst Jünger, ed., Krieg und Krieger (Berlin, 1930), 59. Quoted in Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, p. 183. See also Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, trans. Basil Greighton (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929) and Copse 125 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930).

[45] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 185–88.

[46] Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilization,” trans. Joel Golb, in The Heidegger Controversy (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), p. 129. http://anarchistwithoutcontent.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/junger-total-mobilization-booklet.pdf.

[47] Alain de Benoist, “Soldier Worker, Rebel, Anarch: An Introduction to Ernst Jünger,” trans. Greg Johnson, The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 2008), p. 52.

[48] Julius Evola, The Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009), pp. 216–21.

[49] Klemens von Klemperer, “Towards a Fourth Reich? The History of National Bolshevism in Germany,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Apr., 1951), pp. 191–210.

[50] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded edition, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

[51] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 1.

[52] Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. E. Kennedy, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 9.

[53] Andrew Gyorgy, “The Geopolitics of War: Total War and Geostrategy.” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Nov., 1943), pp. 347–62. See also Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, p. 474.

[54] Otto Strasser, Hitler and I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1940), pp. 38–39.

[55] Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (Sausalito, Cal.: Noontide Press, 1962).

[56] Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002).

[57] Evola, The Path of Cinnabar, pp. 150–55.

[58] See note #3.

[59] See Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality, pp. 75–98, 159–64.

[60] See Jacob, Europa; “German Socialism as an Alternative to Marxism”; Introduction to Political Ideals by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005).

 

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Tudor, Lucian. “The Conservative Revolution of Germany & its Legacy.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 August 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/08/the-german-conservative-revolution-and-its-legacy/ >.

 

Hans Freyer – Lucian Tudor

Hans Freyer: The Quest for Collective Meaning

By Lucian Tudor

Translations: Čeština

Hans Freyer was an influential German sociologist who lived during the early half of the 20th century and is associated not only with his role in the development of sociology in German academia but also with the “Far Right.” Freyer was part of the intellectual trend known in Germany during the 1920s and 30s as the Conservative Revolution, and had also worked in universities under the Third Reich government for much of its reign, although it should be clear that Freyer was never an “orthodox” National Socialist.[1] However, outside of Germany he has never been very well known, and it may be of some benefit for the Right today to be more aware of his basic philosophy, for the more aware we become of different philosophical approaches to the problems facing modern society the more prepared we are intellectually to challenge the dominant liberal-egalitarian system.

Community and Society

Classical liberal theory was individualist, holding that the individual human being was the ultimate reality, that individuals existed essentially only as individuals; that is, that they are completely independent from each other except when they choose to “rationally” associate with each other or create a “social contract.” While this notion has been increasingly criticized in more recent times from different academic positions, in much of the 19th and 20th centuries liberal theory was very influential.[2] One of the most important thinkers in early German sociology to provide a social theory which rejected individualism was Ferdinand Tönnies, who was a crucial influence on Hans Freyer.

Tönnies’s work established a fundamental distinction between Gemeinschaft (“Community”) and Gesellschaft (“Society”), a distinction which Freyer and many other German intellectuals would agree with. According to this concept, Gemeinschaft consists of the organic relations and a sense of connection and belonging which arise as a result of natural will, while Gesellschaft consists of mechanical or instrumental relations which are consciously established and thus the result of rational will. As Tönnies wrote:

The theory of Gesellschaft deals with the artificial construction of an aggregate of human beings which superficially resembles the Gemeinschaft insofar as the individuals live and dwell together peacefully. However, in Gemeinschaft they remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, whereas in Gesellschaft they are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors. [3]

Tönnies emphasized that in modern urban society the sense of organic solidarity or Gemeinschaft was increasingly reduced (with Gesellschaft having become the more dominant form of relationship), thus harming human social relations. However, it should also be remembered for the sake of clarity that he also clarified that these were types of relationships that are both always present in any human society; the issue was that they existed in varying degrees. Although sociological theory did not reject the importance of the individual person, it clearly revealed that individuals were never completely disconnected, as classical liberal theory so foolishly held, but rather that they always have a social relationship that goes beyond them.

Philosophy of Culture

Hans Freyer’s definition of culture included not only “high culture” (as is the case with Spengler’s work), but as the totality of institutions, beliefs, and customs of a society; that is, the term culture was utilized “in the broadest sense to indicate all the externalized creations of men.”[4] More specifically, Freyer identified culture as “objective spirit,” a concept derived from Simmel’s philosophy. This concept denotes that the creations of human beings – everything which culture comprises, including tools, concepts, institutions, etc. – were created by human minds (the “subjective domain of the psyche”) at some point in history in order to fulfill their needs or desires, and following their creation they obtained an “objective value,” became “objectified.”[5] That is, as a result of being manifested and used over time, concrete cultural creations over time obtained a fixed value independent of the original value given to them by their creator(s) and also of the situation in which they were created.[6]

In Freyer’s theory, culture and its traditions are created, first of all, to provide “stability in the face of the natural flux of life,” for if culture changed as quickly as Life then cultural forms would be constantly replaced and would therefore lose their value for providing stability.[7] Furthermore, traditions gained value with an increase in their “depth” and “weight” (metaphorical terms used by Freyer), i.e. their permanence among the changes of life and human conditions.

Traditions gained “depth” by being re-appropriated over generations; while cultural objects gained a new meaning for each new generation of a people due to changes in life conditions, the subsequent generation still retained an awareness of the older meanings of these objects, thus giving them “weight.” Because of this historical continuity in the re-appropriation of culture, cultural forms or traditions acquire a special meaning-content for the people who bear that culture in the present.

It is also very important to recognize that Freyer asserted that the most crucial purpose of a culture and the social groups associated with it was to “convey a set of delimiting purposes to the individual” in order to provide a sense of “personal meaning,” which was “linked to collective stability, collective integration was linked to collective purpose, and collective purpose was linked to the renewal of tradition.”[8]

Culture, Race, Volk

Additionally, it should be noted that another significant aspect of Freyer’s philosophy is that he held that “the only viable cultural unity in the modern world was the Volk,”[9] which means that although culture exists on multiple levels, the only entity which is a reliable source of cultural identity and which carries relatable traditions is the Volk (a term which is oftentimes translated as “nation” or “people” but is in this sense better rendered as “ethnicity”). The Volk was the collective entity from which particular cultures emerged, which bore the imprint of a particular Volksgeist (technically, “folk spirit”) or collective spirit.

The Volk as an entity was created by an interaction between two forces which Freyer termed Blut (“Blood”) and Heimat (“Home”). Home is the landscape or environment in which the Volk formed, “that place from which we come and which we cannot abandon without becoming sick,” while “Blood is that which comprises our essence, and from which we cannot separate ourselves without degenerating,”[10] meaning the racial constitution of the people whose biological integrity must be upheld. While in order to be healthy, a Volk must have the characteristic of Bodenständigkeit (“groundedness in the soil,” as opposed to the “groundlessness” of liberal society), a key foundation of the Volkstum (“Folkdom”) is race:

It is here [at the Volkstum] that all the talk of race originates and has its truth. When one objects that this is pure biology, that after all spiritual matters cannot be derived from their natural basis, or when one objects that there are no pure races – these objections fail to grasp the concept of race that is a component of the new worldview. Race is understood not in the sense of “mere” biology but rather as the organic involvement of contemporary man in the concrete reality of his Volk, which reaches back through millennia but which is present in its millennial depth; which has deposited itself in man’s bodily and psychic existence, and which confers an intrinsic norm upon all the expressions of a culture, even the highest, most individual creations.[11]

The Loss of Meaning and Particularity

Hans Freyer was, like G. W. F. Hegel and Wilhelm Dilthey (two of his major influences), a historicist, although unlike Hegel he did not believe that history was entirely rational or that positive “progress” would be necessarily determined in history.[12] As a historicist, Freyer believed that all human cultures and values are created by historical circumstances and thus change over time, and also therefore that no Volk or culture is, objectively speaking, superior or inferior to another, and that essentially each culture and tradition is just as valid as any other. That is, “history thinks in plurals, and its teaching is that there is more than one solution for the human equation.”[13]

As result, the question of which cultural tradition would form the basis of collective meaning came into question. Freyer, in the German historicist line of thought, rejected the notion that one could scientifically or rationally choose which culture is better (due to the fact that they are all equally legitimate), and furthermore people in modern times held an awareness of the existence of the multiplicity of human cultures and their historical foundations. This awareness caused many modern people to feel an uncertainty about the full validity of their own culture, something which served as a factor in the loss of a sense of meaning in their own traditions and therefore a loss of a sense of personal meaning in their culture. That is, a loss of that sense of guidance and value in one’s own traditions which was more common in ancient and Medieval societies, where human beings tended to recognize only their own culture as valid. Freyer noted: “We have a bad conscience in regard to our age. We feel ourselves to be unconfirmed, lacking in meaning, unfulfilled, not even obligated.”[14]

However, there was also another source of the lack of a sense of collective meaning in modern societies: the development of industrial society and capitalism. The market economy, without any significant limits placed upon it, along with the emergence of advanced technology, had a universalist thrust, not recognizing national boundaries or cultural barriers. These inherently universalist tendencies in capitalism created another factor in the loss of a sense of cultural uniqueness, collective meaning, and particularity in human beings in the West.

The modern economy was the source of the formation of “secondary systems,” meaning structures which had no connection to any organic ethnic culture and which regarded both the natural world and human beings in a technical manner: as objects to be used as resources or tools to be utilized to increase production and therefore also profit. Because of this, the systems of production, consumption, and administration expanded, resulting in a structure controlled by a complex bureaucracy and in which, “instead of membership in a single community of collective purpose, the individual was associated with others who occupied a similar role in one of the secondary systems. But these associations were partial, shifting, and ‘one-dimensional,’ lacking deeper purpose of commitment… [leaving] the individual lonely and insecure.”[15]

Freyer asserted that history is divisible into three stages of development: Glaube (“Faith”), Stil (“Style”), and Staat (“State”). In the stage known as Glaube, which corresponded to the concept of ancient Gemeinschaft, human beings were “completely surrounded, encircled, and bound up in a culture that ties [them] closely to other members of [their] society.”[16] In the stage known as Stil, society would become hierarchical as a result of the domination of one group over another. While ancestry and a belief in the natural superiority of the ruling class would be valued in the resulting system, in later stages the source of social status would become wealth as a result of the rise of economic motives and capitalistic class society would form. As a result, the loss of meaning previously described occurs and history enters “critical epochs in which the objective cultural forms were unable to contain the flux of life.”[17] This would give rise to the necessity of a revolutionary transformation of the cultural reality: the third impending stage, Staat.

Revolution from the Right

Hans Freyer studied the problem of the failure of radical Leftist socialist movements to overcome bourgeois society in the West, most notably in his Revolution von Rechts (“Revolution from the Right”). He observed that because of compromises on the part of capitalist governments, which introduced welfare policies to appease the workers, many revolutionary socialists had come to merely accommodate the system; that is, they no longer aimed to overcome it by revolution because it provided more or less satisfactory welfare policies. Furthermore, these same policies were basically defusing revolutionary charges among the workers.

Freyer concluded that capitalist bourgeois society could only be overcome by a revolution from the Right, by Right-wing socialists whose guiding purpose would not be class warfare but the restoration of collective meaning in a strong Völkisch (“Folkish” or “ethnic”) state. “A new front is forming on the battlefields of bourgeois society – the revolution from the Right. With that magnetic power inherent in the battle cry of the future even before it has been sounded…”[18] This revolutionary movement would be guided by a utopian vision, yet for Freyer the significance of belief in utopia was not the practicality of fully establishing its vision, “utopia was not a blueprint of the future but the will to actively transform the present… Utopias served to transmute critical epochs into positive ones.”[19]

The primary purpose of the new State which Freyer envisioned was to integrate human beings belonging to the Volk into “a closed totality based upon the reassertion of collective particularity.”[20] Freyer asserted that the only way to restore this sense of collective particularity and a sense of community was to create a closed society in which the state ensures that foreign cultural and ideological influences do not interfere with that of the Volk, for such interferences would harm the unity of the people. As Freyer wrote, “this self-created world should completely, utterly, and objectively enclose a particular group; should so surround it that no alien influences can penetrate its realm.”[21] Freyer’s program also carried with it a complete rejection of all multiculturalism, for the state must be composed solely of one ethnic entity in order to have cultural stability and order.

The state which Freyer anticipated would also not do away with the technological achievements of capitalism but rather make use of them while bringing the economic system under its strict control (essentially “state socialism”), eliminating the existence of the economy as a “secondary system” and reintegrating it into the organic life of the Volk. This Völkisch state also served the necessary purpose of unifying the Volk under a single political force and guidance, for, along with Machiavelli and Carl Schmitt, Freyer believed it was essential that a people is capable and ready to defend itself against the ambitions of other states. For the sake of this unity, Freyer also rejected democracy due to the fact that he believed it inherently harmed the unity of the Volk as a result of the fact that it gave rise to a multiplicity of value systems and interest groups which competed for power; the state must be politically homogeneous. “The state is… the awakening of the Volk out of timeless existence [Dasein] to power over itself and to power in time.”[22]

Freyer also believed in both the inevitability and the importance of conflict in human existence: “War is the father of all things . . . if not in the literal sense then certainly for the thing of all things, the work of all works, that structure in which the creativity of Geist [“Spirit”] reaches its earthly goal, for the hardest, most objective and all-encompassing thing that can ever be created – for the state.”[23] The act of war or the preparation for war also served to integrate the people towards a single purpose, to give meaning to the individual by his duty to a higher power, the State. War was not something to be avoided, for, in Freyer’s philosophy, it had the positive result of intensifying the sense of community and political consciousness, as Freyer himself experienced during his time as a soldier in World War I.[24] Thus, “the state as a state is constituted by war and is continuously reconstituted by the preparation for war.”[25] Of course, this did not imply that the state had to constantly engage in war but rather in the preparation for war; war should be waged when diplomacy and strategy fails to meet the state’s demands.

Freyer’s Later Transformation

Hans Freyer believed, before its rise to power, that Hitler’s National Socialist movement constituted the force which would create the state of which he had written and hoped for. However, by the late 1930s he was disappointed by the repressive and basically “totalitarian” nature of the regime, and after World War II began to advocate a drastically different approach to the problems of modern society. He essentially became a moderate and partially liberal conservative (as opposed to being a “radical conservative,” which is a descriptor for his pre-war views), a change which was probably a result of his disappointment with the Third Reich coupled with the Reich’s downfall and the ensuing political changes thereafter.

Freyer concluded that the state was itself a “secondary system” (like those created by the market economy) and if used to organize the re-appropriation of tradition it would negatively distort cultural life. His new line of thought led him to the conclusion that the state should be limited (hence his subsequent support for democracy) and that welfare-state capitalism should be practiced because “it was less likely to create the degree of concentration of power characteristic of a socialist economy.”[26] Freyer still advocated the necessity of creating a sense of value in one’s own particular culture and traditions and a sense of collective meaning, but he believed that this should be done in the private sphere of life and through “private” institutions such as the family, the church, and local communities. Likewise, he no longer advocated a complete closure of society and he also recognized that the existence of a plurality of groups in the state was unavoidable.

We may conclude by pointing out that this transformation in Freyer’s position, while undoubtedly partly influenced by the existence of a new political regime, was also certainly not unjustified, for there is much to criticize in his earlier work. For example, it is certainly not unreasonable to question whether an authoritarian regime, a constant engagement or preparation for warfare, and a society completely closed to other societies are necessary to restore a sense of community and a value in one’s own culture and ethnicity.[27] On the other hand, one does not necessarily have to agree with all of Freyer’s later conclusions, for one could argue they are also not without imperfections. However, ultimately we gain from a view of his thought and its transformation with a wider, more informed philosophical perspective.

The Relevance of Freyer’s Thought Today

There is much in Freyer’s philosophy which is relevant to the current problems our world is facing (although we make no implication that his ideas are entirely unique to him), in some cases even more relevant today than in the time they were written. While his earlier notion of a complete cultural closure of society may be too extreme, in the face of the complete opening of society experienced in the later 20th Century and early 21st Century, it is quite clear that a partial level of closure, that is some (although not absolute) barriers, are necessary to return to a healthy cultural reality.[28] Likewise, his recognition of the importance of race in the cultural and social realm, going beyond the simplistic notion of race as being merely one’s genetic makeup, is pertinent today as far too many people do not even consciously understand the full role of race in culture and society.

Moreover, in light of the fact that the majority of former radical Leftists in most Western and also some Eastern nations have shifted towards the “Center” and have become merely defenders of the political status quo, Freyer’s commentaries on the compromises made by socialists in his time correspond with the present day situation as well. One may also argue that Freyer’s recognition of the importance of a “utopian” vision to guide political movements is necessary to change societies, for without a dream for a better world to motivate people it is not likely that the status quo could be overcome.

Finally, considering the exacerbated “individualism” (which, we must stress, is not merely recognizing the value of the individual, which is perfectly normal, but rather something extreme and anomalous) common in modern Western societies, Freyer’s stress on “collective meaning,” the most crucial concept at the center of his philosophy, is probably of the greatest importance. For today it is indeed the obsession with the individual, and the placing of the individual over ethnicity and culture, which is undoubtedly one of the most significant roots of the ethnic, cultural, and racial downfall of Europe and European-derived nations. Thus, our own quest corresponds to Freyer’s, for like him we must aim to re-establish collective meaning in order to salvage our ethnic and cultural integrity.

Notes

[1] For more in-depth information on Hans Freyer’s life, see Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). We should note here to our readers that Muller’s book, despite its liberal bias, constitutes the single most important and extensive work on Freyer in the English language thus far.

[2] For an explanation of classical liberal theory concerning the individual as well as a critique of it, see Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, Ind.: 1stBooks, 2004), pp. 57 ff. On the forms of liberalism through history, see also Paul Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[3] Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (London and New York: Courier Dover Publications, 2002), pp. 64–65.

[4] Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 93.

[5] Hans Freyer, Theory of Objective Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), p. 79. This is the only book by Freyer to be translated into English.

[6] Note that this entire general theory was expounded by Freyer in Theory of Objective Mind.

[7] Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 94. Note that this notion is comparable to the theory of culture and the nature of human beings provided by Arnold Gehlen, who was one of Freyer’s students. See Arnold Gehlen’s Man: His Nature and Place in the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) and also his Man in the Age of Technology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

[8] Muller, The Other God That Failed, pp. 93 and 96.

[9] Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), p. 123.

[10] Hans Freyer, Der Staat (Leipzig, 1925), p. 151. Quoted in Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 99.

[11] Hans Freyer, “Tradition und Revolution im Weltbild,” Europäische Revue 10 (1934) pp. 74–75. Quoted in Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 263.

[12] On Freyer’s concept of progress as well as some of his thoughts on economics, see Volker Kruse, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Ethics, and Economics in the Newer Historical School: From Max Weber and Rickert to Sombart and Rothacker (Hannover: Springer, 1997), pp. 196 ff.

[13] Hans Freyer, Prometheus: Ideen zur Philosophie der Kultur (Jena, 1923), p. 78. Quoted in Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 96.

[14] Freyer, Prometheus, p. 107. Quoted in Muller, The Other God That Failed, pp. 100–101.

[15] Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 345.

[16] Ibid., p. 101.

[17] Loader and Kettler, Mannheim’s Sociology, p. 131.

[18] Hans Freyer, “Revolution from the Right,” in: The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 347.

[19] Loader and Kettler, Mannheim’s Sociology, pp. 131–32.

[20] Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 106.

[21] Freyer, Der Staat, p. 99. Quoted in Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 110.

[22] Hans Freyer, Revolution von Rechts (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1931), p. 37. Quoted in Loader and Kettler, Mannheim’s Sociology, p. 126.

[23] Freyer, Der Staat, p. 143. Quoted in Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 113.

[24] See Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 64.

[25] Freyer, Der Staat, p. 143. Quoted in Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 113.

[26] Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 348.

[27] On a “right-wing” perspective in contradistinction with Freyer’s earlier positions on the issue of democracy and social closure, see as noteworthy examples Alain de Benoist, The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos, 2011) and Pierre Krebs, Fighting for the Essence (London: Arktos, 2012).

[28] On the concept of a balance between total closure and total openness, see also Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?” Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 114 (Winter 1999), pp. 11–48. Available online here: http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf.

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Tudor, Lucian. “Hans Freyer: The Quest for Collective Meaning.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 22 February 2013, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/hans-freyer-the-quest-for-collective-meaning/ >.

Note: Although very little is available by or about Hans Freyer and his thought in English, more translations of his works can be found in other languages, as recorded at the World Catalogue: <http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Hans+Freyer&fq=dt%3Abks+%3E+ap%3A%22freyer%2C+hans%22&dblist=638&fc=ln:_25&qt=show_more_ln%3A >.

Additional Note: This essay was also republished in updated form in Lucian Tudor’s From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).

 

Ethnic & Racial Relations – Tudor

Ethnic & Racial Relations: Ethnic States, Separatism, & Mixing

By Lucian Tudor

Translations: Español (see note at the bottom of this page)

In our previous essay, “Race, Identity, Community,”[1] we discussed a number of subjects: most importantly, the varying levels and relations of ethnic and cultural groups, the matter of cultural communication, openness, and closure, the relationship between race and culture, the necessity of resisting miscegenation for the sake of ethno-cultural stability, the error of individualism and the value of social holism, and the importance of the sense of community to ethnic and racial identity.

In the present essay, we will not reiterate the major points which we made before, except those which are relevant to the matters discussed. The purpose of this essay is to serve as an extension of the previous one and to expand upon certain points which were not made sufficiently clear or covered properly, and it thus must be read in the context of the preceding essay. Here we aim to discuss the topic of social, cultural, and political relations between ethnic and racial groups, the problem and varieties of social and biological mixing, and the practices and forms of ethnic and racial separatism.

Identity and Interaction

Particularities and particular identities define human beings; contrary to egalitarian and universalist ideology, one cannot be truly human without a belonging to particular groups, including religious, political, cultural, and racial groups. Of course, belonging to a group and possessing a conscious identification with this belonging are two different things (just as we can say that there is a conscious and unconscious aspect to identity). History and observation show that ethnic, cultural, and racial identities come into being and are awakened by awareness of and interaction with other ethnic and racial groups. As Alain de Benoist wrote: “The group and the individual both need to be confronted by ‘significant others.’ Therefore, it is nonsense to believe that identity would be better preserved without this confrontation; actually, it is the opposite: confrontation makes identity possible. Other subjects make a subject become subject.” [2]

Thus, interaction with other types of human beings is an essential part of human existence, since they draw their very awareness of being who they are by this interaction. Furthermore, as we have already mentioned in our previous work (“Race, Identity, Community”), the various cultures (in terms of both smaller and larger groups) develop and are enriched not only by internal development, but also by interaction with and the exchange of products and ideas with other cultures or peoples. It is for these reasons that it is justified to assert that “the originality and the richness of the human heritages of this world are nourished by their differences and their deviations . . .” [3] as Pierre Krebs stated, similarly to many other New Right authors.

Of course, recognizing the value of diversity and differences, and appreciating these differences in other peoples and learning from them, does not mean that all peoples of the world can or should be appreciated equally. It is, of course, perfectly natural that one people will find certain foreign peoples to be unattractive in some cases, and will distance themselves from them. This is why, although diversity is valuable, the present egalitarian and multiculturalist propaganda that all cultures and ethnic groups must be appreciated and accepted equally, is simply wrong and absurd. No healthy people show equal liking for all others, although it is possible to respect all foreign peoples even if one does not treasure them all. It is, for example, completely natural that a European may be repulsed by the culture of an African tribe but simultaneously feel admiration for East Asian culture, while still according to each people a certain level of respect.

It is also a fact of life that without barriers, without a certain level of separation from other peoples, and without a specific territory on which to live as a distinct and relatively homogeneous people, an ethnic or a racial group would disappear through mixture or assimilation into other groups. The extreme modern liberal-globalist propaganda advocating complete openness and mixing between cultures and peoples, using as its justification historical examples of cultural exchanges, is fallacious because normal cultural dialogue and interaction never involved complete openness but always a limited form of interaction.

Total openness and mixing eliminates identities because peoples do not merely change through such processes, but lose who they are or merge with another people entirely. To quote Benoist, “it is the diversity of the human race which creates its richness, just as it is diversity which makes communication possible and gives it value. Diversity of peoples and cultures exist, however, only because, in the past, these various peoples and cultures were relatively isolated from one another.”[4] Culture transforms over time due to internal creativity and development as well as through communication with other cultures, but contact with other cultures must always be limited and imperfect, otherwise the very integrity of a culture is undermined. Therefore, “Identity is not what never changes, but, on the contrary, it is what allows one to constantly change without giving up who one is.”[5]

The Problem of Mixing

It needs to be recognized that mixing, both the social form (so-called “integration”) as well as the biological form (miscegenation), is a complicated human problem. Mixing has occurred all throughout history in a variety of forms and circumstances, as a result of different forms of close interaction between different ethnic and racial groups. The questions of why mixtures occur and whether this is a normal and acceptable phenomenon therefore naturally present themselves, and they must be answered with the proper level of sophistication in order for us to defeat our opponents.

First, it needs to be recognized that mixture between two different peoples belonging to the same race is a distinct matter from mixture between two different races, and involves different principles and circumstances. Ethnicities belonging to the same racial type share the same biological and spiritual background, which serves as a larger foundation for identity which connects them. In cases where two or more ethnic groups of the same racial type no longer live separately and choose to mix socially (from which intermarriage inevitably follows), it is oftentimes because these groups – within a particular time and conditions – have become closely connected culturally and spiritually or because they no longer feel their distinctions to be significant.

This phenomenon cannot be regarded as abnormal and wrong any more than when two racially related ethnic groups choose to separate instead of mix, because both occurrences are rather frequent in history and do not normally have negative effects to identity (even if identity undergoes some change in this). For example, many European ethnic groups (the English, the French, the Balkan peoples, etc.) are the result of an inter-European mixture that occurred centuries ago, although they also have a right to separate. Thus, within a race, separation and mixing can both be regarded as normal phenomena, depending on the circumstances and the nature of the ethnic groups in question.

On the other hand, between different races, mixing can be argued to be an abnormal phenomenon because the relations and effects are different; the state of normality is to desire racial separation. Contrary to the assertions of many egalitarian multiculturalist (“multiculturalism” here signifying the belief and practice of ethnic mixing) propagandists, racial identity and the concept of race is not a modern phenomenon, for, as Benoist pointed out, “the idea of race is almost as old as humanity itself.”[6] So it is clear that recognizing the importance of race and practicing racial separatism does in fact have a historical and even a universal basis; human beings were never in a condition where they completely lacked racial feelings and mixed freely.

The reasons for racial mixing (social and, following that, biological) throughout history are complex and differ based on the circumstances in question. In some cases, it was due to a powerful, militant people conquering another people and forcefully reproducing with the women of the conquered in order to secure their conquest through breeding. In other cases, as some authors have argued, it is due to the decadence of a people who have lost certain spiritual qualities, their sense of differentiation, and their racial identity, and have as a result chosen to mix with other peoples, even those racially different (these other peoples may be immigrants or conquered peoples who formerly lived separated). Of course, where mixing occurs willingly, both sides have surrendered their unique identity.[7] There may be other causes, and in a sense racial miscegenation is inevitable because it is always bound to occur at certain times and places where different races come into contact (even if only to a small extent).

However, it is always important to recognize and reassert that despite its occurrence throughout history, for whatever reasons or causes, race-mixing is not a rule. It is actually rather abnormal, and that it occurs all throughout history does not invalidate this fact. Because the identity, basic anthropological and psychological features, and character of ethnic groups and cultures are influenced by racial type, and because of the spiritual and sociological dimension of race, race-mixing means a deep and profound change completely transforming a family or, when it occurs on a larger scale, a people. This idea cannot be associated with biological reductionism, which we must reject as fallacious; even though culture, society, and cultural identity cannot be reduced to race, and race is only one factor among many which affects them, racial background is still undoubtedly an important factor.

Thus, since preserving their racial type means maintaining who they are, their identity as a folk, peoples are thus historically compelled to resist race-mixing and to separate from other races. It is not only for the sake of their survival that they are so compelled, but also because of the primal impulse to live with their own people in their communities. As Krebs pointed out, “modern ethology clearly established the innate tendency of man to identify with individuals who resemble him . . .”[8] There is, furthermore, also the fact that, as Evola pointed out, “blood and ethnic purity are factors that are valued in traditional civilizations too,” which means that the maintaining physical racial type is a practice which holds a meta-historical value.[9]

We should note that, of course, a people which goes through minor amounts of race-mixing does not lose its identity or its belonging to its original racial type. For example, the Eastern Slavic peoples and Southern Europeans peoples who have endured some level of miscegenation historically still belong to the White-European race, both in terms of their general anthropological-physical type as well as their racial and ethnic identity. Race is defined not by a strict purity, but by the possession of a general physical form (the general anthropological features associated with a race), the general spiritual form associated with it, and the cultural style and identity which is sociologically linked with race.[10]

It also needs to be mentioned here that resisting race-mixing is not necessarily a “racist” phenomenon (which means racial supremacism), because placing value on racial differences and practicing racial separatism can and has taken on non-racist forms. It is clear that it is extremely naïve and erroneous to associate all forms of racial separatism with racism and inter-racial hostility.[11] As Guillaume Faye once wrote:

In effect, just as it is normal and legitimate for the Arab, the Black African, the Japanese to desire to remain themselves, to recognize that an African is necessarily a black man or an Asian a yellow man, it is legitimate, natural and necessary to recognize the right of the European to reject multiracialism and to affirm himself as white man. To link this position with racism is an inadmissible bluster. The real racists are, on the contrary, those who organize in Europe the establishment of a multiracial society.[12]

Practices of Separatism

Evidently, racial and ethnic separatism has taken on a variety of forms throughout history. One commonly recognized form is the creation of a class or caste system, separating people into different castes based on their racial background (or, in a typical analogous system, based on ethnic or cultural background). The class structure of racial separation, which is usually the result of conquest, can be seen in numerous cases throughout history, including in Classical civilization, in certain ancient Near Eastern civilizations, in India, and in many parts of Central and South America after European colonization. The most negative feature of this practice is obviously that it involved “racism” and subjugation, although it also had the positive effect of preserving the racial types which have formed, even after miscegenation (the new, mixed racial types; mulattoes and mestizos), due to the fact that it discouraged race-mixing by class separation.[13]

Another form of separatism is what is commonly recognized as ethnic “nationalism,” which has its primary basis in ethno-cultural identity, although it is oftentimes accompanied by racial identity where inter-racial contact exists. Nationalism is defined, in the most simple terms, as the belief that ethnic groups or nationalities (in the cultural sense) are the key category of human beings and that they should live under their own independent states. It implies complete and total separation of ethnic groups into separate nations. Nationalism is oftentimes associated with ethnic chauvinism, inter-ethnic hostility, imperialism, and irredentism, although it is important to remember that there have been certain select forms of nationalism throughout history that were not at all chauvinistic and imperialistic, so it is erroneous to assume that it always takes on these negative features.

However, “nationalism” is a problematic term because it has been defined in different and sometimes contradictory ways. In one, very generic sense, nationalism means simply the desire of a people to live separately from others, under its own state and by rule of leaders of its own ethnic background; in essence, a basic ethnic separatism and desire for independence. In this sense, nationalism is a very ancient idea and practice, since all across history one can find cases where a people of one particular ethnic background desired to be independent from the rule of another different people and fought for this independence. This is not, however, the way nationalism is always defined, and aside from the fact that it is sometimes defined as being necessarily chauvinistic, it is also often defined in a certain manner that makes it particularly an early modern phenomenon.

Many New Right as well as Traditionalist authors have defined nationalism as a form of state in which the “nation” is politically or culturally absolutised, at the expense of smaller local or regional cultural differences, and regarding other nations as completely foreign and of lesser value. This form of “nationalism” is exemplified by the Jacobin nation-state and form of sovereignty (since the French Revolution was a key force in initiating the rise of this state form), and is identified by the elimination of sub-ethnic differences within its borders and the regard for differences with other peoples or nationalities as absolute. Naturally, this form of nationalism has the consequence of creating hostility and conflict between nations because of these ideological and political features.[14]

From the “Radical Traditionalist” perspective, exemplified by Evola’s thought, nationalism is an anomaly, a deviation from valid state forms. It is regarded as negative, firstly, because this form of traditionalism considers ethnicity and nationality as secondary qualities in human beings; although they have some level of importance, they are not valid as primary features around which to organize states and leadership, which should be based solely upon the values of elitism, aristocracy, and spiritual authority. Nationalism also contradicts the practice of the Empire – the imperial state, which is not necessarily imperialistic – since nationalism means the absolutisation of the “nation,” whereas the traditional empire is organized as a supra-national federalistic union with a central spiritual authority.[15] According to Evola,

The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) . . . safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity. In this world, individual States have the character of partial organic units, gravitating around . . . a principle of unity, authority, and sovereignty of a different nature from that which is proper to each particular State . . . due to its super-ordained nature, would be such as to leave wide room for nationalities according to their natural and historical individuality.[16]

In the imperial state, which Evola asserts is the true traditional model of the state, ethnic or national groups are thus separated federally; different peoples live under the same state and serve the same ultimate monarchical authority, but they live in separate parts of the kingdom or empire. To quote one his key works: “the Middle Ages [and also certain ancient civilizations] knew nationalities but not nationalisms. Nationality is a natural factor that encompasses a certain group of common elementary characteristics that are retained both in the hierarchical differentiation and in the hierarchical participation, which they do not oppose.”[17]

Identitarian Separatism

The European New Right and the Identitarian Movement, the latter being closely related to and derived from the New Right,[18] also advocates the practice of federalism, although their thinkers have some disagreements with the claims of “Radical Traditionalists” concerning certain essential principles. The “New Rightist” concept of federalism involves the vision of a federation (or better, confederation, which more clearly expresses this decentralized type of federalism) which is based upon the principles of subsidiarity, of granting autonomy to its regions, and of local and regional political structures holding the power that is due to them, while the central authority rules primarily when decisions affecting the whole state must be made. This form of state and sovereignty “implies plurality, autonomy, and the interlacing of levels of power and authority.”[19] Subsidiarity and allowing decisions to be made at lower levels are also features of the Radical Traditionalist concept of the federalist state, but in contrast they assert the importance of the ultimate authority of the sovereign (the central ruler) far more.

Aside from supporting a partly different conception of sovereignty and authority from Radical Traditionalists, Identitarians and New Rightists also support the practice of a participatory and organic form of democracy as the ideal state form (which, it must be noted, is still compatible with respect for authority and hierarchy). This idea does indeed have a historical basis, for, as Benoist pointed out, “governments with democratic tendencies have appeared throughout history . . . . Whether in Rome, in the Iliad, in Vedic India or among the Hittites, already at a very early date we find the existence of popular assemblies for both military and civil organisation. Moreover, in Indo-European society the King was generally elected . . .”[20]

Furthermore, New Rightists and Identitarians strongly assert the value of ethnic, cultural, and racial differences and identities, and therefore, according to this conception, organic democracy coincides with the recognition of and respect for ethnic differences.[21] Because organic democracy, meaning true democracy, is based off of respect for ethnic differences, Benoist rightly asserts that:

Democracy means the power of the people, which is to say the power of an organic community that has historically developed in the context of one or more given political structures – for instance a city, nation, or empire . . . Every political system which requires the disintegration or levelling of peoples in order to operate – or the erosion of individuals’ awareness of belonging to an organic folk community – is to be regarded as undemocratic.[22]

The New Right advocates the idea of respecting the identities of smaller, local, and regional ethnic or sub-ethnic groups as well as recognizing the importance of larger ethnic and cultural relations and unities. Thus, for example, to be a Breton, a Frenchman, and a White European[23] all have importance, and each level of identity and belonging has value in a hierarchical relationship. Ethno-cultural groups of all levels and types have the right to live with freedom and separately from others in different states and territories. The New Right acknowledges that there are cases where complete state separation for a people is appropriate (akin to the simpler, generic idea of “nationalism”), but there are also cases where the federalist state system in which each people has its own autonomous region in which to live is more practical or desirable.[24]

Arguably, the New Right or Identitarian vision is not only the most desirable, but also the most realistic in the modern world because it offers the most balanced solution to the current problems and ethnic-racial chaos. In a world where democratic feelings have become permanent among most peoples it offers an organic participatory democracy to replace the corrupt liberal democracies presently dominant. Where there are countries composed of multiple ethnicities which are not in a position to divide themselves entirely (complete nationalism) it offers the idea of a federation of autonomous regions. Finally, in a world where ethnic and racial groups are threatened to be disintegrated by “multiculturalist integration” and mixing it offers a peaceful and fair solution of territorial separation, the creation of unmixed ethnic communities, and cooperation between the different races and peoples of the world to achieve this vision.

Notes

[1] Lucian Tudor, “Race, Identity, Community,” 6 August 2013, Counter-Currents Publishing, http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/race-identity-community.

[2] Alain de Benoist, “On Identity,” Telos, Vol. 2004, No. 128 (Summer 2004), p. 39.

[3] Pierre Krebs, Fighting for the Essence (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 89.

[4] Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?” Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 114 (Winter 1999), p. 46-47. This work is available online here: http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf

[5] Benoist, “On Identity,” p. 41.

[6] Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?” p. 36. It is worth mentioning here that there are certain mainstream historians who have admitted and studied the history of racial feelings since ancient times (in Western and Middle Eastern civilizations, specifically). Among their works include Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, & Joseph Ziegler, eds., The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Despite the egalitarian bias and hostility to racialism these authors may reveal in their works, these still have research value for us because of the historical facts they provide.

[7] See for example the chapters “Life and Death of Civilizations” and “The Decline of Superior Races” in Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1995) and Krebs, Fighting for the Essence, pp. 23 ff. & 79 ff.

[8] Ibid., p. 25.

[9] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p. 57. On this matter, see also the chapter “The Beauty and the Beast: Race and Racism in Europe” in Tomislav Sunic, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).

[10] A number of Right-wing authors have already written much more on this matter. For the White Nationalist perspective in particular, see especially Ted Sallis, “Racial Purity, Ethnic Genetic Interests, & the Cobb Case,” 18 November 2013, Counter-Currents Publishing, http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/11/racial-purity-ethnic-genetic-interests-the-cobb-case. For the New Right perspective, see for example: the entries “Miscegenation” and “Race, Racism, Anti-Racism” in Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (London: Arktos, 2011), pp. 194 ff. & 227 ff.; Benoist’s commentaries in his “What is Racism?”; Tomislav Sunic, “Ethnic Identity versus White Identity: Differences between the U.S. and Europe,” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol.12, No.4 (Winter 2012/13), available online here: http://www.tomsunic.com/?p=444.; The articles in Sebastian J. Lorenz, ed., Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, No. 47, “Elogio de la Diferencia, Diferencialism versus Racismo,” (28 May 2013), http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/05/elementos-n-47-elogio-de-la-diferencia.html

[11] See the citations of Faye, Benoist, Sunic, and Lorenz in the previous note (# 10).

[12] Guillaume Faye, “La Sociedad Multirracial,” 13 Jul y 2007, Guillaume Faye Archive, http://guillaumefayearchive.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/la-sociedad-multirracial. Note that this article was republished in print in Escritos por Europa (Barcelona: Titania, 2008).

[13] On the matter of historical examples, see our previous citations of Isaac’s The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity and The Origins of Racism in the West. Dealing with the racial basis for the Indian caste system, see for example the preface to Arvind Sharma, Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Alain Daniélou, India: A Civilization of Differences: The Ancient Tradition of Universal Tolerance (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2003), the latter arguing that the caste system is not truly “racist” but a natural racial ordering. On the race-based case/class systems in Central and South America, one classic mainstream resource is Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). There are, of course, numerous other academic resources on this subject matter.

[14] See Alain de Benoist, “Nationalism: Phenomenology & Critique,” 16 May 2012, Counter-Currents Publishing, http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/nationalism-phenomenology-and-critique; Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, 2nd edition (London: Arktos, 2013), pp. 228 ff.; Edgar Julius Jung, “People, Race, Reich,” in Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870–1940, ed. & trans. by Alexander Jacob (Lanham, MD, USA: University Press of America, 2002); the overview of Evola’s position in the chapter “Nations, Nationalism, Empire and Europe” in Paul Furlong, Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2011).

[15] See Alain de Benoist, “The Idea of Empire,” Telos, Vol. 1993, No. 98-99 (December 1993), pp. 81-98, available online here: http://www.gornahoor.net/library/IdeaOfEmpire.pdf.

[16] Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002), p. 277.

[17] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, pp. 338-39.

[18] Identitarianism is founded upon the ideas of New Right intellectuals such Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Tomislav Sunic, Pierre Krebs, Dominique Venner, and Pierre Vial, who themselves are sometimes designated as “Identitarian.” However, we should also note that some of the basic ideas of the Identitarian Movement can be found in We Are Generation Identity (London: Arktos, 2013), although by itself this brief manifesto may be insufficient.

[19] Alain de Benoist, “What is Sovereignty?” Telos, vol. 1999, no. 116 (Summer 1999), p. 114. This work is available online here: http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_sovereignty.pdf . See also Benoist, “The First Federalist: Johannes Althusius,” Telos, vol. 200, no. 118 (Winter 2000), pp. 25-58, and the articles in Sebastian J. Lorenz, ed., Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, No. 37, “Federalismo Poliárquico Neoalthusiano,” (28 November 2012), http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2012/11/elementos-n-37-federalismo-poliarquico.html.

[20] Alain de Benoist, The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos Media, 2011), pp. 14-15. We should note that this book is one of the most essential resources on the matter of democracy, for the idea of an organic and ethnic-based participatory democracy and for defending the idea of democracy as a political system.

[21] See Chapter I. “The Ancients and the Moderns” in Ibid.

[22] Benoist, Problem of Democracy, p. 103.

[23] When we refer to the broader, more encompassing cultural identity of Europeans, it is better to refer to a general “European” culture rather than to “Indo-European” culture because not all White European peoples are entirely Indo-European, and there clearly are and have been non-Indo-European peoples in Europe who are of the same racial and general cultural type as Indo-European peoples (well-known modern examples including the Finns, Hungarians, Estonians, Livonians, and Basques, although there were also numerous white pre-Indo-European peoples in ancient times who had disappeared through mixture with Indo-Europeans).

[24] Along with our previous citations of Benoist’s essays on sovereignty, empire, and federalism, see also Faye’s entries “Empire, Imperial Federation” and “Democracy, Democratism, Organic Democracy” in Why We Fight, pp. 130-32 and 111-14.

 

——————–

Tudor, Lucian. “Ethnic & Racial Relations: Ethnic States, Separatism, & Mixing.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 20 March 2014. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/03/ethnic-and-racial-relations/ >.

Note: We have also republished on our website Lucian Tudor’s “Race, Identity, Community.” On the matters discussed in the above essay, see also a more complete exposition in Lucian Tudor, “The Philosophy of Identity: Ethnicity, Culture, and Race in Identitarian Thought,” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 83-112.

Translation note: This essay by Tudor has also been translated into Spanish as “Relaciones Etnicas y Raciales: estados etnicos, separatismo y mezcla” (published online 18 April 2014 by Fuerza Nacional Identitaria). We have also made this translated file available on our site here: Relaciones Etnicas y Raciales

 

La Nueva Derecha Europea en Español (The European New Right in Spanish)

La Nueva Derecha Europea en Español

(The European New Right in Spanish)

Note in English: Due to the fact that the Spanish is one of the most important languages (along with French, Italian, and German) in which many key works of the European New Right have been published, we have created this page to bring attention to some of the more significant Spanish-language resources on the European New Right which are available on the Internet and which we have chosen to republish on our website. These include certain selected issues of Sebastian J. Lorenz’s online journal Elementos which we have deemed to be the most important, along with Alain de Benoist’s and Charles Champetier’s “Manifesto of the New Right” (Spanish version).

Aquí vamos a poner en conocimiento de los recursos más importantes en el idioma español para el pensamiento de la Nueva Derecha Europea. El recurso más importante es la revista de Sebastián J. Lorenz: Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, que se ha anunciado y publicado en línea en su sitio web: <http://elementosdemetapolitica.blogspot.com.es/ >. Hemos seleccionado y publicado en nuestra página web lo que hemos considerado que son los números más esenciales de esta revista en lo que respecta a las ideas de la Nueva Derecha. En el espacio a continuación vamos a enumerar y enlace en el espacio por debajo de estos números de Elementos y sus contenidos, junto con el manifiesto de Alain de Benoist y Charles Champetier.

Aquí también queremos mencionar los libros más importantes de la Nueva Derecha en español que están disponibles en formato impreso: Alain de Benoist, ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013); Benoist, La Nueva Derecha: Una respuesta clara, profunda e inteligente (Barcelona : Planeta, 1982); Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, & Carlos Pinedo Cestafe, Las Ideas de la “Nueva Derecha”: Una respuesta al colonialismo cultural (Barcelona: Nuevo Arte Thor, 1986); Guillaume Faye, Pierre Freson, & Robert Steuckers, Pequeño Léxico del Partisano Europeo (Molins de Rei, Barcelona: Nueva República, 2012); Tomislav Sunic, Homo Americanus: Hijo de la Era Postmoderna (Barcelona: Ediciones Nueva Republica, 2008); Dominique Venner, Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010); Rodrigo Agulló, Disidencia Perfecta: La Nueva Derecha y la batalla de las ideas (Barcelona & Madrid: Altera, 2011); Jesús J. Sebastián Lorente (ed.), Alain de Benoist: Elogio de la disidencia (Tarragona: Ediciones Fides, 2015).

 

Manifiesto: La Nueva Derecha del año 2000 por Alain de Benoist y Charles Champetier

(Nota: Este libro también fue publicado en forma impresa como: Manifiesto para un renacimiento europeo [Mollet del Vallès, Barcelona: GRECE, 2000])

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 15 – “Moeller van den Bruck: Conservadurismo Revolucionario”  (publicado 1 Junio 2011)

Contenidos:

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck y la Nouvelle Droite, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

Moeller van den Bruck: un rebelde conservador, por Luca Leonello Rimbotti

Moeller van den Bruck: ¿un “precursor póstumo”?, por Denis Goedel

Moeller y Dostoievski, por Robert Steuckers

Moeller y la Kulturpessimismus de Weimar, por Ferran Gallego

Moeller y los Jungkonservativen, por Erik Norling

Moeller y Spengler, por Ernesto Milá

Moeller y la Konservative Revolution, por Keith Bullivant

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, por Alain de Benoist

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 16 – “Un Diálogo Contra la Modernidad: Julius Evola y Alain de Benoist”  (publicado 9 Junio 2011)

Contenidos:

Julius Evola, por Alain de Benoist

Posmodernidad y antimodernidad: Alain de Benoist y Julius Evola, por Marcos Ghio

Julius Evola, reaccionario radical y metafísico comprometido. Análisis crítico del pensamiento político de Julius Evola, por Alain de Benoist

Evola y la crítica de la modernidad, por Luisa Bonesio

La recepción internacional de Rebelión contra el mundo moderno, por Giovanni Monastra

Rebelión contra el mundo moderno, por Julius Evola

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 24 – “Europeismo Identitario”  (publicado 25 Mayo 2012)

Contenidos:

Hacia el reencuentro de Europa: Lo que piensa la Nueva Derecha, por Diego L. Sanromán

Europa a la búsqueda de su identidad, por Isidro J. Palacios

La cuestión europea: Bases ideológicas de la Nueva Derecha, por Carlos Pinedo Cestafe

Europa: la memoria del futuro, por Alain de Benoist

Una cierta idea de Europa. El debate sobre la construcción europea, por Rodrigo Agulló

La memoria en herencia: Europa y su destino, por Dominique Venner

Siglo XXI: Europa, un árbol en la tempestad, por Guillaume Faye

La identidad europea, por Enrique Ravello

Europa: no es herencia sino misión futura, por Giorgio Locchi

El proyecto de la Gran Europa, por Alexander Dugin

¿Unión Europea o Gran Espacio?, por J. Molina

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 26 – “Economía Orgánica. Una Alternativa a la Economía de Mercado” (publicado 11 Junio 2012)

Contenidos:

Salir de la Economía, por Rodrigo Agulló

La Economía no es el Destino, por Guillaume Faye

La Economía Orgánica en la Nueva Derecha, por Carlos Pinedo

Adam Müller: la Economía Orgánica como vivienca romántica, por Luis Fernando Torres

Friedrich List: Sistema Nacional de Economía Política, ¿proteccionismo?, por Arturo C. Meyer, Carlos Gómez y Jurgen Schuldt

Crear la Economía Orgánica, por A.L. Arrigoni

El principio de reciprocidad en los cambios, por Alberto Buela

¿Homo oeconomicus o idiota moral?, por Ramón Alcoberro

Por una Economía Mundial de dos velocidades, por Guillaume Faye

La Economía Local contra la Economía Global, por Edward Goldsmith

Dictadura de la economía y sociedad mercantilista, por Stefano Vaj

Crisis económica: aproximación a un modelo económico alternativo, por Juan P. Viñuela

La crítica de la Economía de Mercado de Karl Polanyi, por Arturo Lahera Sánchez

Por la independencia económica europea, por Guillaume Faye

¿Decrecimiento o barbarie?, por Serge Latouche

Decrecimiento: hacia un nuevo paradigma económico, por Luis Picazo Casariego

La Economía del Bien Común: un modelo económico alternativo, por Christian Felber

Charles Champetier: por una subversión de la lógica economicista, por Diego L. Sanromán

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 28 – “Contra el Liberalismo: El Principal Enemigo” (publicado 29 junio 2012)

Contenidos:

El liberalismo, enemigo principal, por Alain de Benoist y Charles Champetier

El liberalismo en las ideas de la “Nueva Derecha”, por Carlos Pinedo Cestafe

Liberalismo, por Francis Parker Yockey

Frente al Peligro de la Hegemonía Liberal, por Marco Tarchi

La esencia del neoliberalismo, por Pierre Bourdieu

El error del liberalismo, por Alain de Benoist

Liberalismo y Democracia: Paradojas y Rompecabezas, por Joseph Margolis

El liberalismo y las identidades, por Eduardo Arroyo

Dinámica histórica del Liberalismo: del mercado total al Estado total, por Tomislav Sunic

Neoliberalismo: la lucha de todos contra todos, por Pierre Bourdieu

La impostura liberal, por Adriano Scianca

Una crítica liberal del liberalismo, por Adrián Fernández Martín

Leo Strauss y su crítica al liberalismo, por Alberto Buela

Charles Taylor: una crítica comunitaria al liberalismo político, por Carlos Donoso Pacheco

El liberalismo norteamericano y sus críticos: Rawls, Taylor, Sandel, Walzer, por Chantal Mouffe

La crítica comunitaria a la moral liberal, por Renato Cristi

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 31 – “Armin Mohler y la “Konservative Revolution” Alemana” (publicado 12 Agosto 2012)

Contenidos:

El movimiento de la Revolución Conservadora, por Robert Steuckers

La herencia del movimiento de la “Revolución Conservadora” en Europa, por Ian B. Warren

La Revolución Conservadora, por Keith Bullivant

La crisis de la democracia en Weimar:Oposición ideológica de la Revolución

Conservadora,por José Ramón Díez Espinosa

La Revolución Conservadora en Alemania, por Marqués de Valdeiglesias

Ideas para Europa: la Revolución Conservadora, por Luca Leonello Rimbotti

Revolución Conservadora y nacionalsocialismo, por Andrea Virga

Evola y la Revolución Conservadora, por Giano Accame

La Konservative Revolution como doctrina de la decadencia de Alemania, por Miguel Ángel Simón

La influencia de Armin Mohler sobre la cosmovision de la Nueva Derecha, por Robert Steuckers

De la «Konservative Revolution» a la «Nouvelle Droite»: ¿apropiación o rehabilitación?, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

La Revolución Conservadora y la cuestión de las minorías nacionales, por Xoxé M. Núzez Seixas

El sinsentido de la Revolución Conservadora Historia de la idea, nacionalismo y habitus, por Henning Eichberg

Índice de los autores de la «Konservative Revolution”, según Armin Mohler

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 32 – “Imperio: Orden Especial y Espiritual” (publicado 11 septiembre 2012)

Contenidos:

La idea de Imperio, por Alain de Benoist

Translatio Imperii: del Imperio a la Unión, por Peter Sloterdijk

¿Hacia un modelo neoimperialista? Gran espacio e Imperio en Carl Schmitt, por Alessandro Campi

¿Europa imperial?, por Rodrigo Agulló

Imperialismo pagano, por Julius Evola

El concepto de Imperio en el Derecho internacional, por Carl Schmitt

Nación e Imperio, por Giorgio Locchi

El Imperium a la luz de la Tradición, por Eduard Alcántara

Imperio sin Imperator, por Celso Sánchez Capdequí

Imperio: Constitución y Autoridad imperial, por Michael Hardt y Antonio Negri

La teoría posmoderna del Imperio, por Alan Rush

El Imperium espiritual de Europa: de Ortega a Sloterdijk, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

 

ELEMENTOS N° 37 – “Federalismo Poliárquico Neoalthusiano” (publicado 28 Noviembre 2012)

Contenidos:

El primer federalista. Johannes Althusius, por Alain de Benoist

Carl Schmitt y el Federalismo, por Luis María Bandieri

Nacionalismo, Democracia y Federalismo, por Ramón Máiz

Europa federal y el principio de subsidiariedad, por Rodrigo Agulló

España, ¿federación o autodeterminación?, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

Plurinacionalidad, Federalismo y Derecho de Autodeterminación, por Jaime Pastor

El federalismo pluralista. Del federalismo nacional al federalismo plurinacional, por Miquel Caminal

Federalismo plurinacional, por Ramón Máiz

Estado federal y Confederación de Estados, por Max Sercq

De la Confederación a la Federación. Reflexiones sobre la finalidad de la integración europea, por Joschka Fischer

Federalismo versus Imperialismo, por Juan Beneyto

Europa. De imperio a federación, por Josep M. Colomer

Entrevistas imaginarias con el Presidente de Europa y el Jefe del Gobierno europeo

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 39 – “Una Crítica Metapolítica de la Democracia: De Carl Schmitt a Alain de Benoist, Vol. I” (publicado 23 Enero 2013)

Contenidos:

Democracia, el problema

Democracia representativa y democracia participativa, por Alain de Benoist

La crítica de la democracia, por Felipe Giménez Pérez

La democracia: Un análisis a partir de los críticos, por Eva Garrell Zulueta

La crítica decisionista de Carl Schmitt a la democracia liberal, por Antonella Attili

Rectificación metapolítica de la democracia, por Primo Siena

La crítica de Nietzsche a la Democracia  en Humano, demasiado humano, por Diego Felipe Paredes

Teoría democrática: Joseph Schumpeter y la síntesis moderna, por Godofredo Vidal de la Rosa

La crisis de la Democracia, por Marcel Gauchet

Democracia morbosa. Variaciones sobre un tema de Ortega, por Ignacio Sánchez Cámara

La democracia capitalista como forma extrema del totalitarismo. Entrevista con Philip Allot, por Irene Hernández Velasco

Sobre Nietzsche contra la democracia, de Nicolás González Varela, por Salvador López Arnal

La Democracia como Nematología. Sobre El fundamentalismo democrático, de Gustavo Bueno, por Íñigo Ongay de Felipe

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 40 – “Antonio Gramsci y el Poder Cultural. Por un Gramscismo de Derecha” (publicado 11 Febrero 2013)

Contenidos:

El gramscismo de derecha, por Marcos Ghio

Antonio Gramsci, marxista independiente, por Alain de Benoist

La estrategia metapolítica de la Nueva Derecha, por Carlos Pinedo

Un gramcismo de derechas. La Nueva derecha y la batalla de las ideas, por Rodrigo Agulló

El Poder Cultural, por Alain de Benoist

Gramsci, la revolución cultural y la estrategia para Occidente, por Ricardo Miguel Flore

El concepto de hegemonia en Gramsci, por Luciano Grupp

Gramsci y la sociología del conocimiento,por Salvador Orlando Alfaro

Antonio Gramsci: orientaciones, por Daniel Campione

Cómo Ganar la Guerra de las Ideas: Lecciones de la Derecha Gramsciana Neoliberal, por Susan George

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 41 – “Una Crítica Metapolítica de la Democracia: De Carl Schmitt a Alain de Benoist, Vol. II” (publicado 18 Febrero 2013)

Contenidos:

Democracia antigua y “Democracia” moderna, por Alain de Benoist

¿Es eterna la democracia liberal? Algunas opiniones al respecto,por Pedro Carlos González Cuevas

La democracia según la Escuela de Frankfurt y Carl Schmitt: ¿Opuestos y complementarios?, por Emmanuel Brugaletta

Carl Schmitt y René Capitant. Parlamentarismo y Democracia, por Xavier Marchand

La democracia federalista, por Sergio Fernández Riquelme

Tres modelos de democracia. Sobre el concepto de una política deliberativa, por Jürgen Habermas

Carl Schmitt y la paradoja de la democracia liberal, por Chantal Mouffe

Elitismo y Democracia: de Pareto a Schumpeter, por Mercedes Carreras

Democracia como sistema, democracia como ideología, por Pelayo García Sierra

Filósofos para una nueva democracia, por Braulio García Jaén

¿Hacia un nueva democracia? Habermas y Schmitt, por Ellen Kennedy

El invierno de la democracia, por Guy Hermet

Los enemigos de la democracia: la dictadura neoliberal, por Eduardo Álvarez Puga

Democracia sin demócratas, de Marcos Roitman, por Josep Pradas

 

ELEMENTOS N° 43 – “La Causa de los Pueblos: Etnicidad e Identidad” (publicado 18 Marzo 2013)

Contenidos:

La causa de los pueblos, por Isidro Juan Palacios

El etnocidio contra los pueblos: Mecánica y consecuencias del neo-colonialismo cultural, por José Javier Esparza

Etnopluralismo: las ideas de la Nueva Derecha, por Carlos Pinedo

El Arraigo por Alain de Benoist

La Europa de las etnias: nuestro único futuro posible, por Olegario de las Eras

La cuestión étnica: Aproximación a los conceptos de grupo étnico, identidad étnica, etnicidad y relaciones interétnicas, por Maria Cristina Bari

Visiones de la etnicidad, por Manuel Ángel Río Ruiz

Sobre la identidad de los pueblos, por Luis Villoro

La etnicidad y sus formas: aproximación a un modelo complejo de la pertenencia étnica, por Eduardo Terrén

El problema del etnocentrismo en el debate antropológico entre Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty y Lévi-Strauss, por Rafael Aguilera Portales

La negación de la realidad étnica, por Guillaume Faye

Etnicidad y nacionalismo, por Isidoro Moreno Navarro

Etnicidad sin garantías: contribuciones de Stuart Hall, por Eduardo Restrepo

Etnia y etnicidad: dos categorías en construcción, por Carlos Ramiro Bravo Molina

 

ELEMENTOS N° 47 – “Elogio de la Diferencia. Diferencialismo versus Racismo” (publicado 28 Mayo 2013)

Contenidos:

Identidad y diferencia, por Alain de Benoist

Sobre racismo y antirracismo. Entrevista a Alain de Benoist, por Peter Krause

Diferencialismo contra racismo. Sobre los orígenes modernos del racismo, por Gilbert Destrées

El racismo. Génesis y desarrollo de una ideología de la Modernidad, por Carlos Caballero Jurado

Hacia un concepto convencional de raza, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

Nihilismo Racial, por Richard McCulloch

El antirracismo como religión de Estado, por Guillaume Faye

Un asunto tenebroso: el problema del racismo en la Nueva Derecha, por Diego Luis Sanromán

El racismo como ideología política. El discurso anti-inmigración de la Nueva Derecha, por José Luis Solana Ruiz

Sobre viejos y nuevos racismos. Las ideas de la Nueva Derecha, por Rodrigo Agulló

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 54 – “La Falsa Ideología de los Derechos Humanos” (publicado 30 Agosto 2013)

Contenidos:

Más allá de los Derechos Humanos. Defender las Libertades, por Alain de Benoist

Reflexiones en torno a los Derechos Humanos, por Charles Champetier

El Derecho de los Hombres, por Guillaume Faye

Derechos Humanos: una ideología para la mundialización, por Rodrigo Agulló

En torno a la Doctrina de los Derechos Humanos, por Erwin Robertson

¿Derechos del hombre?, por Adriano Scianca

¿Son universales los Derechos Humanos?, por François Julien

Los Derechos Humanos  como derechos de propiedad, por Murray Rothbard

La religión de los Derechos Humanos, por Guillaume Faye

Derechos comunes y Derechos personales en Ortega y Gasset, por Alejandro de Haro Honrubia

Derechos Humanos: disyuntiva de nuestro tiempo, por Alberto Buela

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 61 – “La Condición Femenina. ¿Feminismo o Feminidad?” (publicado 28 Noviembre 2013)

Contenidos:

Visión ontológico-teológica de lo masculino y lo femenino, por Leonardo Boff

El ser oculto de la cultura femenina en la obra de Georg Simmel, por Josetxo Beriain

El feminismo de la diferencia, por Marta Colorado López, Liliana Arango Palacio, Sofía Fernández Fuente

La condición femenina, por Alain de Benoist

La mujer objeto de la dominación masculina, por Pierre Bourdieu

Feminidad versus Feminismo, por Cesáreo Marítimo

Afirmando las diferencias. El feminismo de Nietzsche, por Elvira Burgos Díaz

La mujer como madre y la mujer como amante, por Julius Evola

El “recelo feminista” a proposito del ensayo La dominacion masculina de

Pierre Bourdieu, por Yuliuva Hernández García

Friedrich Nietzsche y Sigmund Freud: una subversión feminista, por Eva Parrondo Coppel

Hombres y mujeres. Un análisis desde la teoría de la polaridad, por Raúl Martínez Ibars

Identidad femenina y humanización del mundo, por Rodrigo Guerra
Simmel y la cultura femenina, por Raquel Osborne

La nueva feminidad, Entrevista a Annalinde Nightwind

El hombre no es un enemigo a batir, Entrevista con Elisabeth Badinter

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 64 – “El Eterno Retorno de Mircea Eliade”  (publicado 20 Marzo 2014)

Contenidos:

Bibliografía comentada de Mircea Eliade, por José Antonio Hernández García

Antropología y religión en el pensamiento de Mircea Eliade, por Pedro Gómez García

Mircea Eliade y el ideal del hombre universal, por Ioan Petru Culianu

Mircea Eliade y la Revolución Conservadora en Rumanía, por Claudio Mutti

Paisaje espiritual de Mircea Eliade, por Sergio Fritz Roa

Ingenieros de almas. Cioran, Elíade y la Guardia de Hierro, por Luis de León Barga

La experiencia de lo sagrado según Mircea Eliade, por François Chirpaz

Muerte y religión en Mircea Eliade, por Margarita Ossorio Menéndez

El paradigma del mito-ontológico de Mircea Eliade y su significación metodológica, por Nataly Nikonovich

Eliade y la antropología, por José Antonio González Alcantud

Mircea Eliade: hombre histórico, hombre mítico, por Hugo Basile

Mircea Eliade: un parsifal extraviado, por Enrico Montarani

Las huellas de la ideología en el pensamiento antropológico. El caso de

Mircea Eliade, por Pedro Jesús Pérez Zafrilla

Mircea Eliade, el novelista, por Constantin Sorin Catrinescu

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 70 – “Alexander Dugin y la Cuarta Teoría Política: La Nueva Derecha Rusa Eurasiática” (publicado 29 Mayo 2014)

Contenidos:

Alexander Dugin: la Nueva Derecha rusa, entre el Neo-Eurasianismo y la Cuarta Teoría Política, por Jesús J. Sebastián

Más allá del liberalismo: hacia la Cuarta Teoría Política, por Alexander Dugin

Necesidad de la Cuarta Teoría Política, por Leonid Savin

La Cuarta Teoría Política y la “Otra Europa”, por Natella Speranskaya

El Liberalismo y la Guerra Rusia-Occidente, por Alexander Dugin

Alexander Dugin, o cuando la metafísica y la política se unen, por Sergio Fritz

La Cuarta Teoría Política, entrevista a Natella Speranskaya, por Claudio Mutti

El quinto estado: una réplica a Alexander Dugin, por Marcos Ghio

La Tercera Teoría Política. Una crítica a la Cuarta Teoría Política, por Michael O’Meara

La gran guerra de los continentes. Geopolítica y fuerzas ocultas de la historia, por Alexander Dugin

La globalización para bien de los pueblos. Perspectivas de la nueva teoría política, por Leonid Savin

Alianza Global Revolucionaria, entrevista a Natella Speranskaya

Contribución a la teoría actual de la protesta radical, por Geidar Dzhemal

El proyecto de la Gran Europa. Un esbozo geopolítico para un futuro mundo multipolar, por Alexander Dugin

Rusia, clave de bóveda del sistema multipolar, por Tiberio Graziani

La dinámica ideológica en Rusia y los cambios del curso de su política exterior, por Alexander Dugin

Un Estado étnico para Rusia. El fracaso del proyecto multicultural, por Vladimir Putin

Reportaje sobre Dugin (revista alemana Zuerst!), por Manuel Ochsenreiter

Dugin: de la Unión Nacional-Bolchevique al Partido Euroasiático, por Xavier Casals Meseguer

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 79 – “Contra Occidente: Salir del Sistema Occidental” (publicado 29 Agosto 2014)

Contenidos:

Occidente debe ser olvidado, por Alain de Benoist

Occidente como decadencia, por Carlos Pinedo

¿Existe todavía el mundo occidental?, por Immanuel Wallerstein

¿Qué es Occidente?, por Juan Pablo Vitali

Romper con la civilización occidental, por Guillaume Faye

Sobre Nietzsche y el masoquismo occidental, por Carlos Javier Blanco Martín

Hispanoamérica contra Occidente, por Alberto Buela

El paradigma occidental, por H.C.F. Mansilla

El decadentismo occidental, por Jesús J. Sebastián

Critica del sistema occidental, por Guillaume Faye

¿El ascenso de Occidente?, por Immanuel Wallerstein

René Guénon, ¿profeta del fin de Occidente?, por Antonio Martínez

Más allá de Oriente y Occidente, por María Teresa Román López

Civilización y hegemonía de Occidente, por Jaime Parra

Apogeo y decadencia de Occidente, por Mario Vargas Llosa
Europa vs. Occidente, por Claudi Finzi

Occidente contra Occidente. Brecha intelectual francesa, por José Andrés Fernández Leost

Civilización e Ideología occidentales, por Guillaume Faye

Occidente como destino. Una lectura weberiana, por Jacobo Muñoz

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 82 – “El Debate sobre el Paganismo de la Nueva Derecha (Vol. 1)” (publicado 11 Octubre 2014)

Contenidos:

¿Cómo se puede ser pagano? (I), por Alain de Benoist

La cuestión religiosa y la Nueva Derecha, por José Javier Esparza

¿Qué aliento sagrado puede salvarnos? Carta abierta a José Javier Esparza, por Javier Ruiz Portella

La tentación pagana, por Thomas Molnar

Paganismo, la nueva religión europea, por Guillaume Faye

¿Qué religión para Europa? La polémica del neopaganismo, por Rodrigo Agulló

La Derecha pagana, por Tomislav Sunic

Monoteísmo versus Politeísmo, por Alain de Benoist

El paganismo: religión de la vida terrenal, por José Vicente Pascual

La religión en las sociedades occidentales, por Alain de Benoist

El paganismo de Hamsun y Lawrence, por Robert Steuckers

El eclipse de lo sagrado, ¿o el sagrado eclipse?, por Paul Gottfried

La reacción contra la modernidad y la secularización del cristianismo, por Adolfo Galeano Ofm

El Paganismo como concepción del Mundo, por Ramón Bau

Contra Dawkins: qué esconden sus preferencias por el politeísmo, por Javier del Arco

Politeísmo versus monoteísmo: el desarrollo de la crítica a la religión cristiana en la obra de Friedrich Nietzsche, por Herbert Fre

El origen de la Navidad. Las raíces paganas de una fiesta cristiana, por Alfredo Martorell

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 83 – “El Debate sobre el Paganismo de la Nueva Derecha (Vol. 2)” (publicado 11 Octubre 2014)

Contenidos:

¿Cómo se puede ser pagano? (II), por Alain de Benoist

Lo sagrado en la cultura europea, por Carlos Martínez-Cava

Marx, Moisés y los Paganos en la Ciudad Secular, por Tomislav Sunic

Dioses y titanes: entrevista con Guillaume Faye sobre el paganismo, por Christopher Gérard

¿Es preciso ser cristiano? La Derecha tradicional, por José Javier Esparza

La religión de Europa, por Alain de Benoist

¿Qué religión para Europa?, por Diego L. Sanromán

Entre el paganismo y la derecha radical, por Stéphane François

Europa: pagana y cristiana, por Juan Pablo Vitali

Humanismo profano y neopaganismo moderno, por Arnaud Imatz

Del politeísmo al monoteísmo: los riesgos de los fundamentalismos, por Juan Antonio Estrada

El Frente Nacional de Marine Le Pen y la derecha pagana, por Fernando José Vaquero Oroquieta

La cuestión del paganismo. Entrevista a Alain de Benoist, por Charles Champetier

Paganismo y nihilismo, por Daniel Aragón Ortiz

El neopaganismo pessoano, por Antonio López Martín

El nuevo paganismo ¿triunfo del ilusionismo?, por José Miguel Odero

Paganismo y Cristianismo, por Eduard Alcántara

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 84 – Julien Freund: Lo Político en Esencia (publicado 31 Octubre 2014)

Contenidos:

Julien Freund: una introducción, por Juan Carlos Corbetta

Julien Freund, un politique para nuestro tiempo, por Jerónimo Molina

Julien Freund y la impolítica, por Alain de Benoist

Evocación de Julien Freund, por Günter Maschke

Julien Freund, por Dalmacio Negro Pavón

Conflicto, política y polemología en el pensamiento de Julien Freund, por Jerónimo Molina

Julien Freund, analista político: contextos y perspectivas de interpretación, por Juan C. Valderrama Abenza

Lo público y la libertad en el pensamiento de Julien Freund, por Cristián Rojas González

El realismo político. A propósito de La esencia de lo político, de Julien Freund, por Felipe Giménez Pérez

Julien Freund. Del Realismo Político al Maquiavelismo, por Jerónimo Molina

Situación polémica y terceros en Schmitt y Freund, por Jorge Giraldo Ramírez

Orden y situación política en Julien Freund, por Juan C. Valderrama Abenza

Las nociones de mando y obediencia en la teoría política de Julien Freund, por Jerónimo Molina

Julien  Freund: la paz como medio de la política, por José Romero Serrano

Julien Freund: entre liberalismo y conservadurismo, por Sébastien de la Touanne

 

Otros Ensayos:

“Alain de Benoist y su crítica del capitalismo” por Carlos Javier Blanco Martín

“La Nueva Derecha Criolla” por Francisco Albanese

 

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck – Tudor

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: The Man & His Thought

By Lucian Tudor

 

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was one of the most important, perhaps even the single most important, figure of what is known as the “Conservative Revolution” in early 20th century Germany. His influence on conservative German thought, despite its limitations, is deep and lasting, carrying on even into the present day. Indeed there may be some truth to the mystical declaration made by his wife: “In trying to account for the question who was Moeller van den Bruck, you are really addressing a question to Germany’s destiny.”[1] An examination of his life and philosophical thought is an examination of one of those great forces in the realm of ideas that moves nations. And it is for the value to any nationalist or conservative inherent in such an examination that we aim to accomplish that here concisely.

Early Life and Development

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was born on April 23, 1876 in Solingen in the Rhineland area of Germany. At the age of sixteen, Moeller van den Bruck (we will hereafter shorten his last name to Moeller) was expelled from the Gymnasium which he was attending at Dusseldorf due to the fact that he was indifferent in his classes, which was a result of his preoccupation with German literature and philosophy. This expulsion did not stop him from continuing his literary studies and he even attended lectures at several intellectual centers, despite not being able to enter a university.[2]

Friedrich Nietzsche’s (and to some extent also Paul de Lagarde’s and Julius Langbehn’s) philosophy had a powerful influence on Moeller’s thought in his youth, and shaped his views of Bismarck’s Second Reich, a state which he found disagreeable because of its “forced patriotism.” At this time, Moeller was extremely “un-political” and decided to leave Germany in 1902 for some time to avoid military service.[3] The first location to which he traveled was Paris, where he began the writing of an eight-volume work titled Die Deutschen: unsere Menschengeschichte (“The Germans: Our People’s History”), published from the years 1904 to 1910, which was a cultural history that classified significant Germans according to characteristic psychological types.[4]

Supplementing Die Deutschen, Moeller published in 1905 Die Zeitgenossen (“The Contemporaries”), which presented his concept of “old peoples” and “young peoples,” an idea which he would reassert in later notable works.[5] During this time he also acquired a fascination with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work and also an admiration for the “Eastern[Russian] spirit,” which motivated him to produce a German translation of Dostoevsky’s works with the help of Dmitry Merezhkovsky.[6]

From the years 1912 to 1914, Moeller had traveled throughout various nations, particularly through Italy, England, Russia, and Scandinavia, having originally planned to write books describing the prime characteristics of certain nations, but he ultimately only finished a book on Italian art titled Die Italienische Schönheit (“The Italian Beauty”) in 1913.[7]

World War I, Young Peoples, and Racial Theory

When the First World War began, Moeller returned to Germany due to a feeling of attachment for Germany and enlisted in military service. In 1916, after having been discharged from the army due to suffering from nervous disorders, he produced a key work known as Der preussische Stil (“The Prussian Style”). This book, although its primary focus was on Prussian architecture, presented Moeller’s view on the nature of the Prussian character, which he now praised, writing that “Prussianism is the will to the state, and the interpretation of historical life as political life in which we must act as political men.”[8]

In 1919, Moeller produced another of his famous works known as Das Recht der Jungen Völker (“The Right of Young Peoples”), which reasserted his idea of “young peoples” and “old peoples” in a new form. In this theory, peoples or nations (Völker, which is the plural form of Volk) differed in “age,” which means not age in years or actual time but rather in their character and behavior. “Young peoples,” which included Germany, Russia, and America, possessed a high amount of vitality, hard work, will-to-power, strength, and energy. “Old peoples,” which included Italy, England, and France, were saturated, highly developed, valued “happiness” over work, and generally had a lower amount of energy and vitality.[9]

According to Moeller, the destiny of peoples would be determined by the “law of rise and decline of nations,” which held that “all aging states relentlessly sink down from their hegemonial positions.”[10] However, “young peoples” could be defeated in war by a coalition of “old peoples,” as Germany had been in World War I, although this would not crush a “young people” if the resulting conditions would still leave that nation with the ability to exist and grow. Consequently, Moeller advocated an alliance between Germany, America, and Russia, hoping that with this effort Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” could be implemented and Germany would live under reasonable conditions. However, the resulting peace treaty was the Versailles Treaty and not the Fourteen Points.[11]

In Das Recht der Jungen Völker Moeller also included some earlier writing he had done on the subject of race. Moeller believed that humans could not be divided into races solely by anthropology because Man is “more than nature.” He had a peculiar idea of race which presented a dichotomy between Rasse des Blutes (“Race of the Blood”), which refers to the common biological concept of race, and Rasse des Geistes (“Race of the Spirit”), which refers to psychological or “spiritual” character which is not hereditarily determined.[12]

Moeller argued that because peoples of the same biological race could have significant differences between each other, the English and the Germans being an example of this, “race of the blood” was not as powerful or important as a “race of the spirit.” Conversely, it was also proven by the fact that a people could be made of up of a mixture of races, such as the Prussians (who were the result of an ancient Slavic-Germanic mix), yet still have a positive and unified form; although, of course, it should be noted that despite this commentary, Moeller would certainly have not approved of any European group mixing with non-European (i.e. non-white) races.[13]

The June Club and the Spengler Debate

In 1919, Moeller founded, along with Heinrich von Gleichen-Russwurm and Eduard Stadtler, the “neoconservative” (an alternative term for “revolutionary conservative”) group known as the Juniklub (“June Club”), an organization of which Moeller would soon become the key ideological leader.[14] In early 1920, the June Club invited Oswald Spengler to discuss his book The Decline of the West with Moeller van den Bruck. Moeller and Spengler agreed on some basic issues, including the basic division between Kultur (“Culture”) and Zivilisation (“Civilization”), but had some significant disagreements as well.[15]

Moeller asserted that Spengler’s “morphological” theory of culture cycles had certain key inaccuracies. Firstly, he disagreed with Spengler’s rigidly deterministic and fatalistic view of history, in which the rise and decline of High Cultures were “destined” and could even be predicted, because for Moeller history was essentially unpredictable; it is “the story of the incalculable.”[16]

Secondly, the nations which Spengler claimed constituted the “West” had powerful differences between each other, especially in terms of being “young” and “old,” which affected whether they would rise or decline, as well as cultural differences. Moeller wrote that due to these significant differences there was clearly no “homogeneous Occident” and “for that reason alone there can be no homogeneous decline.”[17]

Not only that, but history resembled a “spiral” rather than a “circle,” and a nation in decline could actually reverse its decline if certain psychological changes and events could take place within it. In fact, Moeller felt that a nation like Germany could not even be classified as “Western” and even had more in common, in terms of spirit, with Russia than it did with France and England.[18]

The Third Empire

In 1922, Moeller, along with his two friends Heinrich von Gleichen and Max Hildebert Boehm, published a collection of their articles in the form of a book titled Die Neue Front (“The New Front”), which was intended to be a manifesto for young conservatives.[19] One year later, however, Moeller would publish his own manifesto, Das Dritte Reich (“The Third Empire,” translated into English as Germany’s Third Empire), which contained the most comprehensive exposition of his worldview.[20]

He began the book with a declaration of the ideal of the Third Empire which Germany had the potential to establish while simultaneously giving a warning that Germany must become “politically-minded.” In the first chapter he discussed the German Revolution of 1918 which established the Weimar Republic, declaring that this revolution introduced un-German political ideas which were imposed by the foreign powers of France and England, and that it must be overcome by a new, conservative and nationalist revolution.

Here Moeller also repeated his concept of “young peoples” and “old peoples,” emphasizing that the English and French nations were “old” but shrewd and politically experienced, while Germany was “young” and vigorous but had behaved in an inexperienced and impetuous manner. If Germany could rise above the defeated situation in which it was placed into, its leaders would need caution and political experience. Moeller warned that if German leaders would not handle the political situation “with the utmost care and skill” and with wisdom, “her[Germany’s] attempt will plunge us once more into impotence, into disintegration, into a non-existence which will last this time not for decades but for centuries.”[21]

The succeeding parts of Germany’s Third Empire would examine the four typical ideological types – Revolutionary, Liberal, Reactionary, and Conservative – in Germany and their essential attitudes and ideas.

Revolutionaries, Socialism, and the Proletariat

The political type known as the “Revolutionary” or the “Radical,” which was represented primarily by the Marxists, held the mistaken view that a nation and its society could be entirely transformed through a revolution, rapidly creating a new world. Moeller believed that this was a naive view of the life of nations, because the past customs, traditions, and values of a nation cannot ever simply be totally brushed aside. “We may be the victims of catastrophes which overtake us, of revolutions which we cannot prevent, but tradition always re-emerges.”[22]

Moeller spent much time critiquing the materialist and rationalist ideological foundations of Marxism. He critiqued rationalism for failing to understand that “reason” had limits and was entirely separate from “understanding.” “Reason should be one with perception. This reason ceased to perceive; she merely reckoned. Understanding is spiritual instinct; reason became mere intellectual calculation.”[23] Materialism (which shared a link with rationalism) and rationalism “embraces everything except what is vital.” Like rationalism, materialism could not understand either history or the nature of man:

The materialist conception of history, which gives economics greater weight than man, is a denial of history; it denies all spiritual values. . . . Man revolts against the merely animal in himself; he is filled with the determination not to live for bread alone – or, at a later stage, not alone for economics – he achieves consciousness of his human dignity. The materialist conception of history has never taken cognizance of these things. It has concentrated on half man’s history: and the less creditable half. [24]

Thus Marxism, because it was founded upon such ideas, made the error of conceiving of man as a soulless animal guided merely by economic motives, while in reality higher spiritual forces and ideas guided his actions. Furthermore, Marx failed to understand that there could be no international proletariat because people, whether they were proletariats or not, were differentiated by belonging to different Völker (this is often translated as “nations,” but may also be understood as “ethnicities”).

Moeller believed that this failing was partly a product of Marx’s rationalistic thought as well as his Jewish background, which made him “a stranger in Europe” who yet “dared to meddle in the affairs of European peoples.” Moeller struck out: “Jew that he was, national feeling was incomprehensible to him; rationalist that he was, national feeling was for him out of date.”[25]

However, socialism itself was not limited to Marxism and in fact, “international socialism does not exist . . . socialism begins where Marxism ends.”[26] Moeller called for the recognition of the fact that “every people has its own socialism” and that a conservative “national socialism” of German origin existed which should be the foundation of the Third Empire.

This German socialism was essentially a form of socialistic corporatism, a “corporative conception of state and economics,” which had its foundations in the ideas of thinkers such as Friedrich List, Frieherr von Stein, and Constantin Frantz, as well as in the medieval guild system.[27] Other notable intellectuals who were contemporaries of Moeller, most prominently Oswald Spengler and Werner Sombart, advocated similar conceptions of “German socialism.”[28]

Moeller also defied Marx’s concept of the proletariat as well as his concept of class warfare, asserting that “the proletarian is a proletarian by his own desire.” Thus the proletariat in the Marxian sense was not a product of his position in capitalist society, but merely of “the proletarian consciousness.” Socialism is a “population problem,” which is the “the most urgently socialist question conceivable” and which Marx was incapable of giving proper recognition to.[29]

The problem of the proletariat was essentially the problem of a nation having too much surplus population due to a lack of “living space,” which meant that its people began to live in bad conditions. Because Germany was being prevented by foreign powers from solving its population problem, “the proletariat is learning that if oppressed classes suffer in body, oppressed nations suffer in soul.” German proletarians and non-proletarians were both German and would have to unite in order to free themselves from oppression, for “only the nation as a whole can set itself free.”[30]

Liberalism and Democracy

Liberalism was attacked by Moeller as a negative force which must be absolutely eliminated and which was the prime enemy of both the conservative Right and revolutionary Left. Liberalism, Moeller taught, is at its essence based upon individualism, meaning not simply the idea that the individual has value but a kind of egotism which refuses to recognize anything above the individual and which even puts total value upon self-interest. “The liberal professes to do all he does for the sake of the people; but he destroys the sense of community that should bind outstanding men to the people from which they spring.”[31]

Thus, liberalism is a degenerating force which weakens nations and atomizes society; it is an ideology tolerated only by nations which no longer have a sense of unity or “state-instinct.” Liberals consequently have no sense of responsibility towards their nation, being indifferent to both its past and its future and seeking only personal advantage. The disintegrating power of this ideology is obvious: “Their[liberals’] dream is the great International, in which the differences of peoples and languages, races and cultures will be obliterated.”[32]

Moeller concluded that liberalism had created a form of state – the republic – in which the old aristocracy was replaced by a “dangerous, irresponsible, ruthless, intermediate stratum” of corrupt politicians who were guided solely by self-interest. Moeller even maintained that liberals did not even have proper idea of freedom: “Freedom means for him[the liberal] simply scope for his own egotism, and this he secures by means of the political devices which he has elaborated for the purpose: parliamentism and so-called democracy.”[33]

In place of the liberal-republican concept of democracy, Moeller offered a new idea: “The question of democracy is not the question of the Republic” but is rather something that comes into being when the people “take a share in determining their own Fate.”[34] Germans had originally been a democratic people in ancient times, which had nothing to do with theoretic rights or even voting, but rather with the bond of peoplehood and with the monarch executing the people’s will.

Thus, even a strong monarchy could be a democracy. However, Moeller believed that the old monarchy of the Second Reich had lost touch with the people and a new kind of monarchical state should come into being, a “democracy with a leader – not parliamentism.”[35] This Leader would abolish the rule of the parties and institute a system in which leaders would “feel at one with the nation” and “identify the nation’s fate with their own.”[36]

Reactionaries and Conservatives

Reactionaries and Conservatives are often seen as interchangeable, but Moeller emphasized that there are important differences between the two groups. A reactionary is essentially someone who believes in a total reinstitution of a past form. That is, he seeks to reverse history and bring back into being all old practices, regardless of whether they are actually good or bad, because he believes that everything of the past was good. Moeller thus distinguished the reactionary from the conservative:

The reactionary’s reading of history is as superficial as the conservative’s is profound. The reactionary sees the world as he has known it; the conservative sees it as it has been and will always be. He distinguishes the transitory from the eternal. Exactly what has been, can never be again. But what the world has once brought forth she can bring forth again. [37]

What is meant here is that while a reactionary seeks to completely revive past forms, the conservative understands how the world actually functions. Societies evolve and therefore some values and traditions change, but at the same time certain values and traditions do not change or should not change. The conservative tries to preserve the values and customs which are good for the nation or are eternal in nature while simultaneously being accepting of new values and practices when they are helpful for the nation or when they replace older ones which were negative in effect. Therefore,

He [the conservative] has no ambition to see the world as a museum; he prefers it as a workshop, where he can create things which will serve as new foundations. His thought differs from the revolutionary’s in that it does not trust things which were hastily begotten in the chaos of upheaval; things have a value for him only when they possess certain stability. Stable values spring from tradition. [38]

What, then, is a “Revolutionary Conservative” or “Conservative Revolutionary”? In many ways, Moeller’s definition of conservative is basically equivalent to revolutionary conservative; one who values what is eternal or good while leaving behind what is no longer tenable or is bad. However, strictly speaking, for Moeller the revolutionary conservative is a conservative who merges conservative and revolutionary ideas for the benefit of the nation. Moeller wrote that “conservative-revolutionary thought” is the “only one which in a time of upheaval guarantees the continuity of history and preserves it alike from reaction and from chaos.”[39] It is thus a necessary development which recognizes and reconciles “all the antitheses which are historically alive amongst us.”[40]

Conservative Nationalism and the Third Empire

According to Moeller, conservatism and nationalism are linked, meaning that a conservative is now a nationalist. But how does he define “nationalism,” a term which often has contradictory definitions? Nationality (or alternatively, ethnicity) is not based simply on being born in a specific country and speaking its language, as has often been assumed in the past; a nation is in fact defined by “its own peculiar character from the manner in which the men of its blood value life.”[41] Thus Moeller wrote:

Consciousness of nationhood means consciousness of a nation’s living values. Not only those are Germans who speak German, or were born in Germany, or possess her citizen rights. Conservatism seeks to preserve a nation’s values, both by conserving traditional values, as far as these still possess the power of growth, and by assimilating all new values which increase a nation’s vitality. A nation is a community of values; and nationalism is a consciousness of values. [42]

It is of interest to note here that liberal-egalitarian intellectuals oftentimes claim that nationalists believe that a nation is a totally unchanging entity in terms of character, while Moeller’s concept of conservatism and nationalism, as explained above, entirely defies these anti-nationalist prejudices. Similarly, Moeller’s associate, the influential volkisch (“Folkish”) thinker Max Hildebert Boehm, held the view that a Volk was not an unchanging organism but always in a state of flux.[43]

Finally, Moeller declared that “The crumbling state threatened to bury the nation in its ruins. But there has arisen a hope of salvation: a conservative-revolutionary movement of nationalism.”[44] It will establish a “Third Empire, a new and final Empire” which would unite the German people as a whole, would be founded upon conservative values and the love of country, and would resolve Germany’s economic and population problems. However, Moeller emphasized that the aim was not to fight only for Germany’s sake, but in fact “at the same time he[the German nationalist] is fighting for the cause of Europe, for every European influence that radiates from Germany as the centre of Europe.”[45] Thus, the fulfillment of German destiny would mean the salvation of Europe.

Influence and Death

Moeller’s grand vision for the future of German nationalism and conservatism had much influence among right-wing groups in Germany and was critical in the development of “revolutionary conservatism.” However, his most prominent influence was on Hitler’s National Socialist movement, even to the extent that Moeller is oftentimes said to be a precursor of National Socialism.

Although the term “Third Reich” did not originate with him, it was he who popularized it during the Weimar Republic and was the source from which the National Socialists adopted it.[46] Furthermore, Moeller’s concept of a Leader who identifies with the nation, the concept of a “national socialism,” his anti-liberalism, and his belief in the importance of nationality all bear an obvious relationship to Hitler’s National Socialism.

However, on the other hand, these ideas are certainly not unique to either Moeller or Hitler, and in fact predate both of them. There are also conspicuous differences between Moeller’s worldview and Hitler’s. Moeller did not share Hitler’s anti-Slavism or his particular racial views, nor were his anti-Jewish attitudes as strong as Hitler’s, even though he recognized Jews as a problem.

When Hitler visited the June Club in 1922 and had a discussion with Moeller, Moeller believed that while Hitler clearly was fighting for German interests, he did not have the right personal qualities or tendencies: “Hitler was wrecked by his proletarian primitivism. He did not understand how to give his national socialism any intellectual basis. He was passion incarnate, but entirely without measure or sense of proportion.”[47]

According to Otto Strasser, another associate of Moeller, Hitler also did not understand Moeller’s phrase “We were Teutons, we are Germans, we shall be Europeans,” which meant that Germany should become “a member of the great European family”[48] Yet in spite of all this, Hitler still admired Moeller and a signed copy of his Das Dritte Reich was found in Hitler’s bunker in 1945.[49]

By the year 1925, Moeller began to despair over the political situation in Germany and various negative developments. He did not have any confidence in the right-wing political forces which emerged, and it has also been suggested that he had feared that the National Socialists abused or distorted his ideas. As he began to withdraw from political activism, Moeller became lonelier and more depressed, and was finally struck by a nervous breakdown, after which he committed suicide on May 30, 1925.[50] But as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck passed from this world he left behind his imposing vision:

German nationalism fights for the possible Empire . . . . We are not thinking of the Europe of Today which is too contemptible to have any value. We are thinking of the Europe of Yesterday and whatever thereof may be salvaged for Tomorrow. We are thinking of the Germany of All Time, the Germany of a two-thousand-year past, the Germany of an eternal present which dwells in the spirit, but must be secured in reality and can only so be politically secured . . . . The ape and tiger in man are threatening. The shadow of Africa falls across Europe. It is our task to be guardians on the threshold of values. [51]

 

Notes

[1] Lucy Moeller van den Bruck as quoted in Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), p. 184.

[2] Gerhard Krebs, “Moeller Van Den Bruck: Inventor of the ‘Third Reich,’” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 35, No. 6 (Dec., 1941), pp. 1085–86.

[3] Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism; Its History And Dilemma In The Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 154–55.

[4] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Die Deutschen, 8 vols. (Minden, Westphalia: J. C. C. Bruns, 1910).

[5] Krebs, “Moeller Van Den Bruck,” p. 1093.

[6] Kemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, p. 155–56.

[7] Ibid., p. 156.

[8] Moeller, Der preussische Stil (Munich, 1916), p. 202. Quoted in Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, p. 156.

[9] Moeller, Das Recht der Jungen Völker (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1919).

[10] Moeller as quoted in Krebs, “Moeller Van Den Bruck,” p. 1093.

[11] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 158–59.

[12] On Moeller’s racial views, see Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 142–43, 187, and Alain de Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: Une ‘Question a la Destinee Allemande,’” Nouvelle Ecole, Paris, 35, January 1980, http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/arthur_moeller_van_den_bruck.pdf, pp. 13 & 35.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, p. 103.

[15] Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” p. 28.

[16] Moeller, Das Recht der Jungen Völker, pp. 11–39. Quoted in Zoltan Michael Szaz, “The Ideological Precursors of National Socialism,” The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Dec., 1963), p. 942.

[17] Moeller as quoted in Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 239.

[18] Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” pp. 13, 27–30.

[19] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, p. 232 and Krebs, “Moeller Van Den Bruck,” p. 1087.

[20] Moeller, Germany’s Third Empire (Howard Fertig, New York, 1971). Note that a new edition of this work in English has recently been published by Arktos Media (London, 2012).

[21] Ibid., p. 24.

[22] Ibid., p. 223.

[23] Ibid., p. 212.

[24] Ibid., p. 55.

[25] Ibid., p. 43.

[26] Ibid., p. 76.

[27] Ibid., pp. 60, 74, 160.

[28] See Oswald Spengler, Selected Essays (Chicago: Gateway/Henry Regnery, 1967) and Werner Sombart, Economic Life in the Modern Age (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001).

[29] Moeller, Germany’s Third Empire, pp. 160–62.

[30] Ibid., p. 161.

[31] Ibid., p. 90.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid., p. 110.

[34] Ibid., p. 132.

[35] Ibid., p. 133.

[36] Ibid., p. 227.

[37] Ibid., p. 181.

[38] Ibid., p. 223.

[39] Ibid., p. 192.

[40] Ibid., p. 254.

[41] Ibid., p. 245.

[42] Ibid., p. 245.

[43] Max Hildebert Boehm, Das eigenständige Volk (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1932).

[44] Moeller, Germany’s Third Empire, p. 248.

[45] Ibid., p. 264.

[46] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 153, 161–62.

[47] Moeller as quoted in Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 238.

[48] Otto Strasser, Hitler and I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1940), pp. 39 & 217.

[49] Cyprian Blamires, World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, Volume 1 (Santa Barbara, Cal.: ABC-CLIO, 2006), p. 431.

[50] Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 266 and Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” p. 49.

[51] Moeller, Germany’s Third Empire, p. 264.

 

—————-

Tudor, Lucian. “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: The Man & His Thought.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 17 August 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/08/arthur-moeller-van-den-bruck-the-man-and-his-thought/ >.

Note: For a discussion related to Revolutionary Conservative thought, see also the Interview with Robert Steuckers on our site.

Additional Note: This essay was also republished in updated form in Lucian Tudor’s From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).

 

On Indistinction – Benoist

On Indistinction

By Alain de Benoist

 

The history of the last two millennia bears witness to a slow rise of indistinction — which began with monotheism. Indeed, the assertion of the existence of one single God implies the unity of the human family, not only at the level of biological species, but also from the viewpoint of spirituality. To argue that there is only one God means to assert at the same time that all men are part of only one family and that all other gods need to be discarded. This boils down to the instauration of a new regime of truth in which otherness becomes a source of falsehood or error. “The One was first the specificity of the Judeo-Christian culture” and later of modern culture, writes Michel Maffesoli. The One excludes the Other which threatens its exclusivity. The Other must be therefore rightly annihilated. Throughout the history of the West, the obsession with Oneness has never ceased to operate as the guiding principle. Historically, it has been the motor of intolerance, of exclusion and of separation, and later of fragmentation that gave birth to all kinds of inquisitions and justified all efforts to remove otherness.

In the modern age, Christianity itself transcends all cultural and ethnic differences: it does not deny them, yet it regards them as inessential. In God’s eyes, there is neither “Jew nor Greek,” neither man nor woman (Gal. 3: 28). God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17: 26). At the same time, just as the separation of the spiritual and temporal power had introduced a fateful division in the notion of sovereignty, the new religion began to separate the city of God from the city of Man, the generic man vs. the citizen, the universal religion vs. the local beliefs. It promotes humanity at the expense of patriotism. “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matt. 28: 19). This was the first directive that dismissed all borders.

The Ideology of Progress

This idea has not ceased to expand, that is, the idea that what makes individuals and peoples distinct must be therefore incidental, accidental, contingent, and in the last analysis negligible or harmful. In the modern age, transposed into the secular realm, it takes on the form of an assertion of the immediate (but not mediate) belonging of man to humanity. Accordingly, we are human beings before belonging to a specific people, or to a specific culture. In reality though, the very opposite is true: we are human beings insofar as we belong to a specific people or to a specific culture. It is by means of our specificity that we have access to the universality.

The ideology of progress claims that all peoples are called to achieve the same kind of society by following the same stages. As St. Augustine already argued, they must progress in a unitary manner (“Human reason is conducive to unity“). In the same vein the Enlightenment declared the futility of any heritage, which it conflated with a mishmash of superstitious customs and habits. In order to become “free” the past is depicted as a hurdle that needs to be rejected. The only choices admitted are those which are made downstream from One’s Self (“it is my choice”) whilst the choices conditioned by what is upstream from One’s Self are disqualified as illusory. From this derives the ideal of “autonomy,” patterned after the model of independence, the questioning of every status and of each authority experienced now as a humiliating deprivation of unrestricted freedom. This is the modern myth of the creation of the Self by means of the Self alone (and from scratch), which implies the rejection of both “nature” and of all inherited traits. Such a liberty conceived as an absolute commencement and not determined by anything, bestows upon man a prerogative that was once attributed to God.

The drive towards indistinction is based on reducing equality to Sameness; there is no way of being equal unless becoming identical; one can have the same value only when adopting the same roles. By contrast, any acknowledgment of differences, even the most glaring ones, would perpetuate inequality and oppression. This aspiration to Sameness (Auguste Comte rightly spoke of reductio ad unum)—also fueled by a mimetic desire—is a major characteristic of modern society. Man is supposed to be the same everywhere. What is good for one (for us) must be also good for all (the rest of mankind), regardless of whether this takes place in the political, economic, or social realm. Tocqueville had keenly identified this modern desire for resemblance; not empirical resemblance, nor similarity, which is at the basis of sociability, but a resemblance based on the idea of equal dignity of all human beings, and equally distributed to each human being, in a manner of an attribute of human nature, that is to say, prior to any political or social life.

Equality of conditions, a great theme of modernity, cannot be understood unless one takes into account economic transformation which has turned the mercantile exchange into the basic human bond. “Similar human beings”, of which Tocqueville wrote, are unable to connect to each other except by means of work and trade. Money appears as the general equivalent whereas utility becomes a corollary of equality. The labor force is not conducive to the homogenization in the amount of the wages; instead, it brings about the homogenization of humans by setting up the reign of homo economicus — a species exclusively focused on his immediate material gratification. As Christian Laval has noted, “Equality of conditions is the equivalence of the same individuals in a society fueled by economic and mercantile issues, i.e. a society in which the only legitimate differences are those that relate to the measure of their utility.”

Universalism and individualism march hand in hand. In the postmodern era indistinction has become widespread just as narcissistic individualism and the metaphysics of subjectivity have become major features of the dominant ideology. Everything becomes fluctuating, short-lived, transitory and “liquid”. The loss of reference points leads to social anomie, the widespread uncertainty of concepts (“anything goes”), the effort to erect each singular desire into a general law of “equality” with everybody else. Made up of individuals with no location, of single atoms from everywhere and therefore from nowhere, society turns into a semi-chaotic structure, a caravanserai deprived of any conscience of the common good. The more people separate from each other, the more mass conformism sets in. Individuals become slaves without masters, uprooted and without culture, interchangeable and vulnerable, as well as targeted preys of the double grip of the market and the state within a system that claims to be all the more tolerant in general as it is intolerant in particular.

Without Belonging, Without Identity

Any belonging or any collective specificity is described as incarceration, a misleading fiction, or as an illusory “construction.” Any concern to a sense of belonging is labeled “fanaticism” or “fundamentalism.” “In order to establish ‘real freedom of choice,’ one must therefore liberate students from any determination, be it family, ethnic, social, or intellectual,” declared Vincent Peillon, the new minister of education. Simultaneously, a catch-all concept of ‘discrimination’ is invading the judiciary and the penal language. While this word described originally a treatment unfairly applied to such and such individual (or a category of individuals), it has now begun to stigmatize all kinds of distinction among people. Tocqueville, again, notes that “in the age of equality nothing revolts humans so much as the idea of being subjected to the forms.” The forms are perceived as limitations and constraints. Contemporary art has already abolished aesthetic categories. The ultimate “deconstruction” is the deconstruction of elementary sexual differences, implemented by the “gender” ideology and gender studies. The reign of the “no-form” has set in.

Indistinction means also the negation of all frontiers and of all limitations. The bottom line is how to get rid of a measure. The One goes hand in hand with excess (hybris), just as the logic of over-accumulation of capital is itself a form of limitlessness which has turned into its own “raison d’être.” At all times cosmopolitanism has strived toward the erasure of borders. Today it has taken on the form of nomadic behavior. The leftist ideology of no-borders converges with the rightwing ideology of free trade, with both interpreting globalization as across-the-board social hybridization. The ideology of “no borders” is jointly espoused by the financiers, the smugglers and the mob. “No borders” and “the undocumented” — that is to say, no adherence and no identity.

Yet, borders are not barriers, but only locks in a waterway. In the era of globalization, they are primarily intended to regulate trade and protect the most threatened ones. (Régis Debray: “The poor has only his own pasture left to himself”).This is the reason why the Capital International — the only one that thrives — requires the removal of all borders.

The only thing remaining is what Freud called “the narcissism of petty differences” — differences that are unessential and that are being projected on the system of objects (one has the “choice” between Shell and Chevron, Windows or Apple, Renault and Peugeot, Coke or Pepsi). This is a fake diversity, based only on differential purchasing power. “Diversity,” as a form of euphemism, is in reality just another word for indistinctive mixture. The ideology of miscegenation, which has become widespread today, must be understood as going well beyond the mixing of bodies and cultures only. One could use the word “in-mixture” (mélangisme), in the promotion of general indistinctiveness as a moral imperative and as a normative project that must be achieved. Although “miscegenation” of any kind (be it cultural, ethnic, artistic, linguistic, and so on) and “diversity” completely contradict each other, the “miscegenation” is hailed as a method of salvation, lending itself thus to the redemptive fusion on its path toward the undifferentiated.

The apology of nomadic life everywhere, the deterritorialization of all problems, the dream of “world governance,” a systematic removal of all roots, the encouragement to all kinds of hybridization — the fantasy of the One who has finally landed in the field of mandatory in-mixing — becomes the rule. “The global hybridization, writes Pierre-André Taguieff, resembles the steamroller which brings about the homogenization, levels all cultures and finally abolishes every cultural diversity.” Shuffling and blending everybody with everybody and everything with anything – this is the final and ultimate form of indistinction today.

————-

De Benoist, Alain. “On Indistinction.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter 2012-2013). This is article, which was translated from French by Tomislav Sunic, first appeared in the quarterly Éléments # 145 (October-December, 2012). The text of this article was retrieved from: <http://eurocontinentalism.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/on-indistinction-alain-de-benoist/ >.

Commentary: We do not agree with the position that Christianity is necessarily responsible by itself for the rise of egalitarianism and modern ethnic-cultural indistinction. Because of the varieties of forms that Christianity has taken throughout history, some of them compatible with valuing ethno-cultural distinctions and even with nationalism, it is not reasonable to put so much of the blame on Christianity per se, but rather on certain interpretations of it and on egalitarian values and ideas in general (separate from religion). However, despite the hostility to Christianity in general in Alain de Benoist’s present article “On Indistinction” (although he takes a moderate stance towards Christianity in certain other works), this writing is valuable for all because it presents a strong and direct attack on the unlimited ethnic mixing in modern times from the author’s perspective.

 

Interview with Benoist on the New Right – Warren

The ‘European New Right’: Defining and Defending Europe’s Heritage

An Interview with Alain de Benoist

By Ian B. Warren

 

In the following essay and interview, Professor Warren takes a close look at the “European New Right,” a cultural-intellectual movement that offers not only an unconventional view of the past, but a challenging perspective on the present and future. This piece admittedly represents a departure from the Journal’s usual content and tone. All the same, we hope and trust that readers will appreciate this look at an influential movement that not only revives an often neglected European intellectual-cultural tradition, but which also — as French writer Alain de Benoist explains here — seeks to chart Europe’s course into the 21st century. — The Editor (IHR)

During the postwar era — approximately 1945-1990 — European intellectual life was dominated by Marxists (most of them admirers of the Soviet experiment), and by supporters of a liberal-democratic society modeled largely on the United States. Aside from important differences, each group shared common notions about the desirability and ultimate inevitability of a universal “one world” democratic order, into which individual cultures and nations would eventually be absorbed.

Not all European thinkers accepted this vision, though. Since the late 1960s, a relatively small but intense circle of youthful scholars, intellectuals, political theorists, activists, professors, and even a few elected parliamentarians, has been striving — quietly, but with steadily growing influence — to chart a future for Europe that rejects the universalism and egalitarianism of both the Soviet Marxist and American capitalist models.

This intellectual movement is known — not entirely accurately — as the European New Right, or Nouvelle Droite. (It should not be confused with any similarly named intellectual or political movement in Britain or the United States, such as American “neo-conservatism.”) European New Right voices find expression in numerous books, articles, conferences and in the pages of such journals as Eléments, Scorpion and Transgressioni.

No one has played a more important role in this movement than Alain de Benoist, a prolific French writer born in 1943. As the chief philosopher of the Nouvelle Droite, he serves as a kind of contemporary Diogenes in European intellectual life. According to the critical Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right, de Benoist is “an excellent stylist, cultivated and highly intelligent.”[1]

He has explained his worldview in a prodigious outpouring of essays and reviews, and in several books, including a brilliant 1977 work, Vu de Droite (“Seen from the Right”), which was awarded the coveted Grand Prix de l’Essai of the Académie Française. (His books have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, German, Dutch and Arabic, but none has yet appeared in English.)

For some years a regular contributor to the French weekly Le Figaro Magazine, de Benoist has served as editor of the quarterly Nouvelle Ecole, of the magazine Eléments, and, most recently, of a quarterly review, Krisis.[2] For some years he also played a leading role in the operation of the Paris-based group GRECE (“Research and Study Group for European Civilization”), which is sometimes described as an organizational expression of the Nouvelle Droite.[3]

De Benoist’s fondest wish, he once said, would be to see the “peoples and cultures of the world again find their personality and identity.” He believes that Europe has largely sold its soul for a mess of cheap “Made in the USA” pottage. American-style economic and cultural hegemony is a “soft” but insidious totalitarianism that erodes the character of individuals and the heritage of nations. To the peoples of Europe, de Benoist and the European New Right insistently pose this question: How can we preserve and sustain our diversity in the face a consumer-driven world based largely on a synthetic universalism and egalitarianism?

A dramatic indication of de Benoist’s importance came during a visit to Berlin in February 1993, when he was attacked and beaten by about 20 young “anti-fascist” thugs.

Few people on this side of the Atlantic know much about de Benoist and the intellectual movement he represents. The most cogent and useful overview in English is a 200-page book, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, by Tomislav Sunic, a Croatian-born American political scientist.[4]

The task of the European New Right, explains professor Sunic in his 1990 monograph, is to defend Europe — especially its rich cultural heritage — above all from the economic-cultural threat from the United States.[5] According to Sunic:[6]

The originality of the [European] New Right lies precisely in recognizing the ethnic and historical dimensions of conservatism — a dimension considered negligible by the rather universalist and transnational credo of modern Western conservatives …

The New Right characterizes itself as a revolt against formless politics, formless life, and formless values. The crisis of modern societies has resulted in incessant “uglification” whose main vectors are liberalism, Marxism and the “American way of life.” Modern dominant ideologies, Marxism and liberalism, embedded in the Soviet Union and America respectively, are harmful to the social well-being of the peoples, because both reduce every aspect of life to the realm of economic utility and efficiency.

The principle enemy of freedom, asserts the New Right, is not Marxism or liberalism per se, but rather common beliefs in egalitarianism.

In the intellectual climate of the postwar era, writes Sunic, “those who still cherished conservative ideas felt obliged to readapt themselves to new intellectual circumstances for fear of being ostracized as ‘fellow travellers of fascism’.”[7] The European New Right draws heavily from and builds upon the prewar intellectual tradition of such anti-liberal figures as the Italians Vilfredo Pareto and Roberto Michels, and the Germans Oswald Spengler and Carl Schmitt. Not surprisingly, then, Nouvelle Droite thinkers are sometimes dismissively castigated as “fascist.”[8]

In the view of the European New Right, explains Sunic, “The continuing massification and anomie in modern liberal societies” is a symptom “of the modern refusal to acknowledge man’s innate genetic, historical and national differences as well as his cultural and national particularities — the features that are increasingly being supplanted with a belief that human differences occur only as a result of different cultural environments.”[9]

Real, “organic” democracy can only thrive, contends de Benoist, in a society in which people share a firm sense of historical and spiritual commitment to their community. In such an “organic” polity, the law derives less from abstract and preconceived principles, than from shared values and civil participation.[10] “A people,” argues Benoist, “is not a transitory sum of individuals. It is not a chance aggregate,” but is, instead, the “reunion of inheritors of a specific fraction of human history, who on the basis of the sense of common adherence, develop the will to pursue their own history and given themselves a common destiny.”[11]

New Right thinkers warn of what they regard as the dangers inherent in multi-racial and multi-cultural societies. In their view, explains Sunic,[12]

A large nation coexisting with a small ethnic group within the same body politic, will gradually come to fear that its own historical and national identity will be obliterated by a foreign and alien body unable or unwilling to share the same national, racial, and historical consciousness.

Sharply rejecting the dogma of human equality that currently prevails in liberal democratic societies, these New Right thinkers cite the work of scientists such as Hans Eysenck and Konrad Lorenz.[13] At the same time, the European New Right rejects all determinisms, whether historical, economic or biological. Contends de Benoist: “In the capacity of human being, for man, culture has primacy over nature, history has primacy over biology. Man becomes by creating from what he already is. He is the creator himself.”[14]

Consistent with its categorical rejection of universalism, the European New Right rejects the social ideology of Christianity. In de Benoist’s view, the Christian impact on Europe has been catastrophic. Christian universalism, he contends, was the “Bolshevism” of antiquity.[15]

In spite of the formidable resistance of an entrenched liberal-Marxist ideology, the impact of the European New Right has been considerable. While its views have so far failed to win mass following, it has had considerable success in eroding the once almost total leftist-liberal intellectual hegemony in Europe, and in restoring a measure of credibility and respect to Europe’s prewar conservative intellectual heritage. In Sunic’s opinion, the merit of the European New Right has been to warn us that “totalitarianism need not necessarily appear under the sign of the swastika or the hammer and sickle,” and to “draw our attention” to the defects of contemporary liberal (and communist) societies.[16]

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Iron Curtain (perhaps most dramatically symbolized by the tearing down of the Berlin wall), the end of USA-USSR Cold War rivalry, as well as mounting political, economic and ethnic problems in Europe, a new age has dawned across the continent — an era not only of new problems and danger, but also of new opportunities. In this new age, the struggle of the European New Right takes on enormously greater relevance and importance.

One evening in June 1993, this writer had the opportunity to meet at length with Alain de Benoist in his Paris office. Amid a prodigious clutter of accumulated books, journals, and pamphlets, this prolific philosopher and influential intellectual “agitator” provided insights and observations in reply to a series of questions. (Our meeting had been arranged by Professor Sunic, who sat in on the discussion.)

* * * * *

Q: Let me first ask you how it happened that you became, in effect, the founder of a new intellectual movement. Exactly how did this come about?

B: I did not set out to do this. In 1968, when I was 25 years old, I had the idea of creating a new journal — a more or less academic or, better yet, a theoretical journal, which was given the name Nouvelle Ecole [“New School”]. At first it was not even printed, merely photocopied in a very primitive way. Still, it achieved a certain success, and after a while some friends wanted to try to organize the readership into a cultural association. So that was the beginning. This association later took the name of GRECE. I was not involved in actually founding GRECE, because I am not so much a man of organizations or movements, even cultural. I’m more what you might call a “closet intellectual.” Since that beginning more than 25 years ago, there have been many conferences, colloquia, books, booklets, papers, and journals. This movement has never been directly connected with politics; rather it has been cultural, philosophical, and theoretical. Of course, we are interested in politics, but, like all those who see themselves as intellectuals, only as spectators.

Q: What do see as the future of the movement? Do you see any particular end in view?

B: No, I have no intention of changing myself or to change what I do. But your question is, what is the destiny of ideas. Oh, sometimes it’s nothing at all, but you never know. It’s impossible to know. What you can say is that in world history, especially in the recent world history, in my opinion, there can be no political revolution, or even a major political event, if there had not already occurred some kind of change in the minds of the people. So I believe that the cultural revolution comes first, and the political revolution comes after that. But that does not mean that when you make something cultural, it is because you want, in the end, to make something political. This is not done by the same people, you see. If I can give an example, the French Revolution probably would not have been possible without the work of the Enlightenment philosophers. Yet, it was not these philosophers who actually made the revolution. Quite probably they had no idea of that possibility. But it came. So it’s very hard to know the destiny of what you do. I do it because I like what I do, and because I am interested in ideas and the history of ideas. I am not a utilitarian, so I don’t care to know if it is useful or useless; this is not my concern.

Q: Have you seen your ideas change, or have they remained the same?

B: They are always undergoing change. When we started this school of thought or trend, we had no literal catechism. It was not dogma, but rather it was a mixture of conviction and empiricism. So we have changed on some points. Some of the ideas we have developed have revealed themselves to be not very good, or perhaps what might be called “dead ends.”

Q: Can you give an example of a “dead end?”

B: Yes. For example, 20 or 25 years ago I was much more of a positivist than I am today. I remember that I devoted an issue of Nouvelle Ecole to the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, for example. And there appeared plenty of things against such strange people as Martin Heidegger and so on. But 20 years later I devoted an issue of Nouvelle Ecole to Heidegger, one that was very favorable to his philosophy.17 This is, of course, just one example. That doesn’t mean that we have changed everything; that would be stupid, of course. But it’s a living school, like a living organism. You have to retain something and to work deeper on those things, but some things you have to abandon because they are simply false. Well, we don’t want to repeat variations around the same theme year after year.

Q: How would you assess the significance of the Nouvelle Droite?

B: Well, first I have to spell out my concerns with some words — the very name: the New Right. I don’t like it for several reasons. First, you should know that we did not invent this name. It was given to us. About ten years after the first appearance of journals such as Nouvelle Ecole and Eléments, there was a very large-scale mass media campaign in which the expression, “The New Right,” was produced by people who were quite outsiders from our circle. We attempted to change it. We tried to say that it’s not “The New Right” but, “A New Culture.” Yet “new culture” is not a very clear term. And, in our modern society, when you have been given a wrong label, it just sticks.

I don’t like this term because, first of all, it gives us a very political image, because “right” is a political term. Therefore, when you speak about “the New Right,” the people who do know nothing about it immediately believe it is some kind of political party. Of course, it is not. We are a theoretical and cultural movement.
At the same time, there is something that is clearly political — particularly in America — with this “New Right” name. Even though it is in different countries, people thus start to believe that this is the same thing. Based on everything I know about it, the so-called New Right in America is completely different from ours. I don’t see even a single point with which I could agree with this so-called New Right. Unfortunately, the name we now have gives rise to many misunderstandings.

While I cannot say that, after these many years, the [European] New Right is accepted everywhere — that is obvious — I can say that, in ever wider circles, it is accepted in France as a part of the cultural-political landscape. Debate and discussion here during the last two decades could not be thought of without the contribution of the New Right. Moreover, it is because the New Right has taken up particular themes that particular debates have taken place at all. I refer, for example, to discussions about the Indo-European legacy in Europe, the Conservative Revolution in Germany, about polytheism and monotheism, or about I.Q. — heredity or environment (which is partly a rather false dichotomy), participatory democracy, federalism and communitarian ideas, criticism of the market ideology, and so forth. Well, we were involved in all these issues. As a result, I think, the situation in France today is a bit different.

When the New Right first appeared in France in 1968, the times were completely different. For me, the ideology of the extreme left was a kind of model or standard. Marxism, Freudianism and so on, were everywhere. In the years since then, all of those “ideological churches” have fallen apart. Very few people in France today would describe themselves as Marxists. Jean-Paul Sartre, a very famous philosopher, died [in 1980] without any particular ideological legacy. The landscape had already completely changed. I would say that there are no longer are any ready-made ideas. All of the grand ideologies or ideological characters have more or less disappeared. More and more the intellectuals have to look for something new; something original and beyond the ready-made solutions of the past.

We must accept, first of all, the fact that we are out of the post-World War II period, and that we have entered a new world epoch — that there are new frontiers, both in political and ideological terms. And we don’t want to impeach people simply because they come from different ideological starting points. So it is clear that the times have changed. And always when the times are changing, some people want to keep things as they were. Opposition to the New Right is often “wet” or undogmatic, which means more liberty for everyone. I mean, for example, that there are people in the leftist circles who are willing to discuss issues with me, or to be published in Krisis, the journal I started in 1988. (Of course, there are other leftists who absolutely refuse to do so).18

In the last several years, the New Right has produced numerous articles rejecting the ideal of the economy as the destiny of society and criticizing alike conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism — in short, all of the “productivistic” ideologies that see earning money and possessing wealth as the key to human meaning and happiness. All these ideologies fail to confront the main issue of individual and collective meaning: What are we doing here on earth? So we have published numerous books and articles against consumerism, the commodity-driven life, or the idéologie de la marchandise. Of course, such themes are more or less a bridge between people coming from the Right and coming from the Left. So you have also the new phenomenon of the “Greens,” which, again, is a bit different in France and America. For example, we have in France a “green” ecology movement — a political party, in fact — that describes itself as neither Right or Left.

Thus we have today in Europe numerous new political parties — ecological, cultural identity and region-oriented. While these are, of course, different options, each of them goes beyond the idea of Right versus Left. Each reflects the consequences of the decay of the traditional nation-state. Each is trying to find, beyond individualism, some kind of community. While each has a different base, of course, there is also a common idea, because we can no longer continue to live in an age of narcissism, consumerism, individualism, and utilitarianism.

Q: What would you say is the political importance today of the so-called New Right? Does it have any direct or tangible political significance?

B: No, I could not say that. I know people in probably every political party in France, ranging from the Front National to the Communist Party. The New Right does not have a direct influence. The influence that the New Right has had is clearly in terms of the theoretical and cultural. The discussions we have generated have had an impact on the new social-political movements. But you know, it is very difficult even to try to isolate these influences. Most of the time, I think, the ideas go underground. Nietzsche once said that ideas come “sur des pattes de colombe” — on the feet of a dove.

All the same, one can tell that there is currently some kind of influence by us on the new social or political movements in Europe, such as the identity parties, the regional parties, and the Green parties. Many of these people read what we produce, but it is hard to say just what they do with it. You never know not only just what influences your ideas have, but what becomes of ideas between their origin and their manifestation [in action]; they are always twisted. Even when you have people who say, “I agree with you, I like what you do,” the use they make of your ideas is, of course, sometimes not exactly what you had in mind.

Q: Can you give an example of where you feel the ideas of the movement have been misused? Does this bother you?

B: In a way. Yes. I could say the Le Pen movement [of the French Front National]. This doesn’t mean that the Le Pen movement grew primarily from New Right ideas, but it is clear that when the New Right spoke about the necessity of retaining collective identity, for example, this had an impact. So it might be confused a bit with quite a different philosophy, which is more xenophobic against immigrants, and so on. But this is not the position of the New Right. Our national identity is not in danger because of the identity of others. We say, instead, “Here we are. We have to fight together against the people who are against any form of any identity.” You see what I mean? Criticizing uncontrolled immigration doesn’t mean criticizing immigrants.

Q: So it is not so much a question of one identity in conflict with another, but a more fundamental question of whether it is possible to have any kind of identity?

B: Yes, I think it is possible to make a coalition of all kinds of people who want to retain identity against a world trend that dissolves every form of identity, through technology, the economy, a uniform way of life and consumerism around the world. People such as Le Pen say that, either way, we are losing our identity because of the immigrants. I believe that we are not losing our identity because of the immigrants. We have already lost our identity, and it is because we have already lost it that we cannot face the problem of immigrants. You see, that is quite a great difference of views.

Q: Isn’t this idea of forming a coalition a philosophical one? In reality, doesn’t the nation-state demand that one have citizenship and through this one is granted an identity? If you do away with the nation-state, your idea is possible, but is it possible within the nation-state? Doesn’t the nation-state require a competition or conflict between identities?

B: I think that the nation-state is slowly disappearing. It exists, of course, formally — I don’t want to say that France or Germany or Spain is going to disappear. But it is it not the same kind of society. First, you can see that every Western society lives in more or less the same way, whether it is a republic, a democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and so on. Second, we have unification through the media, television, and consumerism; so that’s the same way of life. After that you have the building of the so-called European Community or European Union. So the nation-state is slowly disappearing. This process is very complex, of course, because the nation-state retains authority in many fields. And sometimes it is good that it retains some authority. Still, it is clear to us that, to use a popular expression, the nation-state is too big for the little problems, and too little for the big problems.

Q: Are you saying that the nation-state is obsolete as a basis for responding to problems and for creating identity. Are you saying that it cannot exist in a healthy form?

B: You can’t retain a commonplace or, vulgar — as it were — attitude, or a mere identity on paper. It is necessary to really live organically, not in some theater. Thus, in France today, we need more small-scale organic units and regions. Historically, you must not forget, France is the very model of the nation-state. And the French nation-state was organized first through the kings, and then through Revolution [1789-1792], that is, through Jacobinism. (Of course this process existed before the Revolution; de Toqueville saw this very clearly.)

French unity was made on the ruins of the local traditions of local languages. In France today you have only one official language: French. In fact, though, eight different languages are still spoken, even if not by very many people, including Corsican, Flemish, German, Basque, and Breton.

Q: Are you saying that the idea of the nation-state today is an idea of decadence? What is the source of this decadence? Is it the nation-state itself?

B: No. I think the nation-state is just a by-product. You can have the same decadence in countries that are supposed to be more federal, such as the United States. It is not just a matter of the nation-state of the French model. I think that the decay began very early, quite probably at the end of the Middle Ages or even earlier. Of course you can always go back to some earlier roots. But it is the birth of modernity. Modernity was also the beginning of individualism; the rejection of traditions; the ideology of progress; the idea that tomorrow will be better than yesterday just because it is tomorrow; that is, something that is new is better just because it is new; and then the ideal of a finalized history; that all humankind is doomed to go in the same direction.

Along with this is the theory of “steps”: that some people are a bit advanced while others are a bit late, so that the people who are advanced have to help those who are not. The “backward” people are supposed to be “lifted up” in order to arrive at the same step. This is the Rostows’ theory of “development.”

With this comes an ever more materialistic attitude, with the goal of all people becoming affluent. This in turn means failure to build a socially organic relationship, of losing the more natural links between people, and mass anonymity, with everyone in the big cities, where nobody helps anybody; where you have to go back in your home to know the world, because the world comes through the TV. So this is the situation of decay. Political, economic and technological forces try to make a “One World” today in much the same way that the French state was built on the ruins of the local regional cultures. This “One World” civilization is being built on the ruins of the local peoples’ cultures. So it is that, in the wake of the fall of Communism, the so-called “Free World” realizes this, and that it is not so “free” after all. We seemed free when compared to the Communist system, but with the disappearance of that system, we no longer have a basis by which to compare ourselves.

In addition, to be “free” can mean different things: to be free for doing something, for instance, is quite different than to be free not to do something.

Q: In your writings you have mentioned that it is important to have an enemy. Were you implying that with the fall of Communism, because there is no longer a clear enemy, there can be no clear identity?

B: Not exactly. It’s clear that you can have an identity without an enemy; but you cannot have an identity without somebody else having another identity. That doesn’t mean that the others are your enemies, but the fact of the otherness can become in certain circumstances, either an enemy or an ally. I mean that if we are all alike — that we if there is just “One World” — we no longer have any identity because we are no longer able to differentiate ourselves from others. So the idea of identity is not directly connected to an enemy; the idea of an enemy is connected with the collective independence; that is, collective liberty.

There are many definitions of “the enemy,” of course. Traditionally, the enemy is a people that makes war against you. But today’s wars are not always armed conflicts. There can be cultural wars or economic wars, which are conducted by people who say they are your friends. You could say that a basic definition of the enemy is any force that threatens or curtails your liberty. Each nation must define this for itself. What is a good basis for determining this today? I think this must be done on the level of Europe itself, because the nation-states are too small for this. When Soviet Communism disappeared, it seemed to give way to a worldwide wave of liberalism. In the view of some, it means the “end of history.” I do not believe that history is finished. I believe that history is just at the point of a new beginning.

We have to organize the world, not on the basis of a “One World” logic, but in very large zones or areas, each more or less “self-centered” or self-sufficient. The United States has already understood this, I think, in creating a free trade zone with Canada and Mexico. Japan already has zones of influence in Southeast Asia. Here in Europe we must have our own way of life, which is not the way of life of the Japanese or the Americans, but is rather the European ways of life. I don’t think that these ways of life have to be hostile towards others. Hopefully not. But it has to be aggressive against those who intend to keep Europeans from living their our own way of life.

Q: Does Europe have the strength or the ability to resist such forces?

B: The ability, yes. But the will? In today’s world, you first of all have to resist from both an economic and a cultural point of view. By cultural I mean very popular mass media and its powers. Today, if you turn on your radio in France, nine times out of ten you will hear American music. In America, when you turn on your radio you will hear only American music. This problem, which is also true for the cinema, is a kind of monopoly; culture always from the same source, and so consistent. You may ask if it is possible to resist this kind of invasion. Considering the enormous budgets of these American films, to counter this we may have to act together, rather than in a single country.

Now I am not suggesting that in France we should hear only French music. This would be ridiculous. We have to be open to others. The problem is that there are more countries in the world besides France and America; I would also enjoy hearing other varieties as well. I am not for a closed society. I would be very malheureux — unhappy — to get only French films, French sounds. I very much enjoy foreign products. But I wonder why we do not see Danish, Spanish, Russian or Dutch cultural products in France, though those countries are quite close by. Instead we always have the same American imports. Sometimes they are good, but most of the time I would say that they are not. So what happens, for example, when the Japanese and the French, the people in South Africa and the villagers in Kansas, all receive the same Rambo message? Is that good for civilization or not? This is the question: the quality of the product.

Q: I have heard that in France one week is set aside each year when American films cannot be shown. Is that true?

B: No, you are referring to something quite different: by law in France, TV channels cannot broadcast too many films on Saturday night. This law is supposed to help the French film industry, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the origin of the films. This is a situation peculiar to France, even though we still have a good French film industry, which is greatly appreciated in other European countries. This means that television has not entirely killed the French cinema. The situation is quite different in Italy and Germany, which is very dramatic when you consider the former quality of the Italian or German films.

In another way, though, I think that “popular [mass] culture” in France is probably worse than in Italy, Spain, Germany, or other lands. I travel a great deal. I think that there is an Italian people, a German people, and that even with many foreign films, they are not affected in the same way as the French. When you are in Germany, or Italy, or Spain, or England, people in each country live a bit differently.

This is not so true in France, I think. The main reason is that so many more people live in large cities. Eighty-five per cent of the French people live in the main cities now. So the French countryside is a desert, a social desert.

Q: Are you saying then that France is more vulnerable to this cultural invasion from America then, for example, Italy or Germany?

B: I understand very well the market decision of the Disney company people to locate “Eurodisney” in France (even though this has proven to be a financial failure). The threat is that today every decision is a market decision. This is Americanism. A country has a right to make a decision that is not a market decision, and even against the market, because the laws of the market are not the laws of life.

Q: Although you have already indicated that this is not your primary concern, let me now go back for a moment to a question of practical politics. I want to know your ideas about how to strengthen resistance in this cultural war. What can be done that is not now being done?

B: In history you have always two kinds of factors. The first is the conscious will of the people to do something. I must say that in Europe this will is very weak today, and lacking in intensity. The second factor is that things happen outside of the will of anybody. Consider the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of course, the Russians had the will to say “Okay, you can tear it down now.” But in Germany, until that moment, nobody was really willing to tear down the wall. Some Germans hoped to see it come down, and others said that maybe after five, ten or 15 years a confederation [of the two German states] would arise. So if you consider the trend throughout Europe, it is more or less the same: the people and their governments talk and talk, and do nothing! The war in the former Yugoslavia is the best example of this I see.

A principle of conflicting interests is also involved here. Most European governments want to conclude a free trade agreement, based on the United States model. It is a fact, of course, that the interests of Europe, America, and Japan are no longer convergent. But there are common interests of each with regard to the Third World countries, where the people are paid so low that they can produce everything for almost nothing. If it is possible to manufacture a pair of shoes in the Third World for one franc, it is done. As a result, we now have all the problems of unemployment here. Experts predict that within two years there will be 24 million jobless people in the countries of the European Community. Never in the entire world history of capitalism have we seen that. In such a situation you cannot calmly sit in your chair and say, “Well, let’s wait a bit more.” You have to react, because the need to deal with such a situation becomes so great. Each nation must protect its own interests. Free trade agreements must be limited. It is the same, of course, for America, which protects its own industries while denying this same right to Europe.

I think that these forces will more likely produce a world of large-scale competing units than one in which each nation is preserved. I do not think this trend reflects the will of the people. I mean that the process seems to be going on as a result of certain factors that have nothing to do with what people want.

Q: This process of forming these new and larger entities is not just a natural accident of history. Doesn’t it require conscious organization of some kind? Or do you think it is a sort of natural historical development?

B: I don’t believe there is much natural development in history. You have to will something, and yet, will alone is not sufficient, of course. You must have the necessary pre-conditions; so it is an equilibrium between what is wanted and what is possible. Politics is, as the saying goes, “the realm of what is possible,” that is, between what is a necessity and what is a possibility. So, it is not natural. But of course, when you have a certain situation like today, you can predict that things are likely to take this or that direction. Change can also be reversed, of course.

For example, the main characteristic of the current state of world politics is that, in the minds of most politicians, that Berlin Wall has still not fallen. They still analyze the world on the basis of former conceptions, former ideas, because that view worked in the past. We have a new state of the world, but we haven’t yet adapted to it. So we continue to reason on the basis of the world order created in 1945 — as if that political, economic and cultural order will last forever. So, I think that while world conditions have begun to change, our mind-set and perceptions have not changed.

Q: Some analysts predict the overthrow of an obsolete “political class.” Do you see a new awareness regarding the need to replace the ruling class?

B: One thing that is quite new in the present period is this: in former times, when the people disagreed massively with the ruling powers, they would overthrow them, and there would be an explosion. Today, though, in the Western world we are in a period not of social or political explosion, but more in an epoch of implosion. The people disagree with the political class, but they do not try to overthrow it; they don’t try to change the regime. They merely turn away.

So this is a time of retreat, of flight, of withdrawal. People try to live and organize their own lives. They don’t participate in elections. That’s why you see so many new self-assertive social movements, which we in France sometimes call the “new tribes.” This term often has a pejorative meaning, but in general there is something positive here.

Before the emergence of the nation-state, people were, of course, organized into tribes. Tribes are now returning in the name of communities, or something akin to that. In France we do not have this phenomenon on the political level to the degree that it has been occurring in Italy, notably with the regionalist Lega Nord. Here in France, what you can see is that fewer people are voting. Now more than one-third of the electorate has stopped going to the polls. (The exception is presidential elections, because these are more personalized.) And another third of the electorate votes for non-conformist parties — the ecologists, Front National, regionalists, and so on — while only one-third still votes for the older, “classical” parties.

A problem in France is that our representative system provides no legal place for opposition political forces. Today we have a more or less conservative majority, which got 40 percent of the vote in the general election. But with 40 percent of the vote, they gained more than 80 percent of the parliament seats. The Front National, with three million votes, got zero seats, and the ecologists, with two million votes, likewise got zero seats. When you arrive at a point of such distortion, you realize that the political system no longer works. Of course, this is one major reason why people don’t bother to vote anymore. Why go to vote when you are sure that you will get no say at all?

Q: It appears to be very much the same in the United States.

B: For me, as a European observer, the American two major-party system always makes it difficult for any third party to arise. It is very strange. In Europe we have evolved a broader spectrum of options, I think. While it is sometimes difficult even for Americans to see any real difference between the Republican and Democratic parties, for me it is almost impossible. Each is really interested only in more business and economic efficiency — frankly, I don’t see any difference. For me it is a one-party system with two different factions.

Q. So you see this American monopoly or hegemony as the key problem? Are you implying that it is not so much the contact as such, which may have some good elements, but mainly that there is no choice?

B: These are two different problems. Of course, there is the problem of monopoly — that’s clear — but if the products were quite good — after all I like quality, too, even if it comes from the outside. The Romans took everything from classical Greece and it was not so bad, after all.

I enjoy visiting the United States, because it is always very interesting. Although I am very critical, of course, of the content of capitalist values, there are some things in America that I like very much: everything works much better than here in Europe! But is efficiency an ideal? And what price do you have to pay for this efficiency? You can be rich, but also have an empty life. Another problem, I think, is that American society — for us, America is more a society than a nation or a people — is to a large extent a product of its Puritan origins. This idea that all people are born free and equal, that America is a new promised land, with people quoting the Bible, can be seen in the spirit of the American Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

Q: Why don’t you consider America a nation?

B: It’s a special kind of nation, if you will. There is a very strong American patriotism, of course — and we have seen many examples of that in history. But because it is more a mixture of such different cultural and ethnic stocks, the United States of America is not what we in Europe regard as a traditional nation.

* * * * *

Throughout our conversation, de Benoist’s remarks left me with a certain ambivalence. He was identifying my own nation as the enemy of the very civilization from which America derived. Even when he tried to re-assure me that there was nothing personal in his critique of American culture, it was clear that he was marking out a battleground of antagonistic ideas. Those who value the cultural heritage of Europe would have to look beyond day-to-day political and economic disputes between the European Community and the United States to understand that much more is at stake here. Our discussion had touched on some of most critical issues of social identity and organization, with profound implications for cultural and collective survival.

Notes:

1. Philip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 30.
2. Krisis, 5 impasse Carrière-Mainguet, 75011 Paris, France.
3. GRECE is an acronym of “Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne. (“Research and Study Group for European Civilization.”). Address: GRECE, B.P. 300, 75 265 Paris Cedex 06, France. Established in May 1968, GRECE was formally organized in January 1969. It characterizes itself as “an association of thought with intellectual vocation.” Its avowed goals, writes Sunic (p. 12), “are to establish an association of thinkers and erudites sharing the same ideals, as well as organize its membership into the form of an organic and spiritual working community.” The name is not accidental. It suggests the French name for Greece — “Grèce” — calling to mind Europe’s Hellenic and pre-Christian cultural heritage.
4. Against Democracy and Equality (196 + xii pages), by Tomislav Sunic, with a preface by Paul Gottfried, was published by Peter Lang of New York in 1990.
5. See the preface by P. Gottfried in T. Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality (1990), p. ix.
6. T. Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality (1990), pp. 19, 20.
7. T. Sunic (1990), p. 7
8. Sunic comments (p. 99) that “The New Right contends that due to the legacy of fascism, many theories critical of egalitarianism have not received adequate attention on the grounds of their alleged ‘anti-democratic character’.”
9. T. Sunic (1990), pp. 104-105.
10. Sunic writes (p. 120): “Faced with immense wealth which surrounds him, a deracinated and atomized individual is henceforth unable to rid himself of the fear of economic insecurity, irrespective of the degree his guaranteed political and legal equality … . Now, in a society which had broken those organic and hierarchical ties and supplanted them with the anonymous market, man belongs nowhere.”
11. Quoted in: T. Sunic (1990), p. 107; In Benoist’s view, “People exist, but a man by himself, the abstract man, the universal, that type of man does not exist.” Moreover, contends Benoist, man acquires his full rights only as a citizen within his own community and by adhering to his cultural memory. (T. Sunic, p. 107); De Benoist also asserts that man can define his liberty and his individual rights only as long as he is not divorced from his culture, environment, and temporal heritage. (T. Sunic, p. 111.)
12. T. Sunic (1990), p. 103.
13. T. Sunic, pp. 103-105; From the perspective of the New Right, observes Sunic (p. 107), “Culture and history are the ‘identity card’ of each people. Once the period of the assimilation or integration begins to occur a people will be threatened by extinction — extinction that according to Benoist does not necessarily have to be carried out by physical force or by absorption into a stronger and larger national unity, but very often, as in the case today, by the voluntary and involuntary adoption of the Western Eurocentric or “Americano-centric” liberal model… . To counter this Westernization of nations, the New Right … opposes all univer-salisms.”
14. Quoted in: T. Sunic (1990), pp. 105, 106, 174 (n. 41).
15. T. Sunic (1990), pp. 65-70, 72.
16. T. Sunic (1990), pp. 153, 155-156.
17. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is one of this century’s most important philosophers. In several major works — especially Sein und Zeit [“Being and Time”] (1927) — he grappled with the spiritual basis of human experience, mounting a fundamental attack on what he termed “nihilistic rationalism,” which he saw as a product of an ever-advancing and dehumanizing technology. Because of his probing of the metaphysical issues of human existence, Heidegger is regarded as a major shaper of “post-modernism,” with its probing of the unconscious meaning and nature of human experience.
    Heidegger was a member of the National Socialist party from 1933 to 1945, while at the same time highly critical of National Socialist philosophy. The extent of his sympathy and support for the Hitler regime has been a subject of much debate.
18. In a much-discussed “Call to Vigilance” issued last summer, 40 French and Italian intellectuals warned of the growing acceptance of “right wing” views, particularly in European intellectual life. (Le Monde, July 13, 1993.) It was signed by such prominent figures as the “deconstructionist” Jacques Derrida. While it did not name names, this call was clearly aimed, at least in large part, at Alain de Benoist and the European New Right. It asserted the existence of a virtual conspiracy — “the extreme right’s current strategy of legitimation” — in which “the alleged resurgence of ideas concerning the nation and cultural identity” are promoted as a means of uniting the left and the right. “This strategy,” contend the signers, “also feeds on the latest fashionable theory that denounces anti-racism as both ‘outmoded’ and dangerous.” Many leftist intellectuals, it should be noted, publicly opposed this “Call to Vigilance,” regarding it as a new kind of “McCarthyism,” and ultimately this summer campaign proved utterly ineffectual.

 

——————–

De Benoist, Alain. “The ‘European New Right’: Defining and Defending Europe’s Heritage – An Interview with Alain de Benoist.” Interview by Ian. B. Warren. The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 14, No. 2 (March-April 1994), pp. 28-37. Published online here: <http://ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n2p28_Warren.html >.

Note: Another notable interview with Alain de Benoist was made by the organization American Renaissance, titled “We Are at the End of Something”. Readers should also note that another brief overview of the European New Right was made by Mark Wegierski in his essay “The New Right in Europe.”

 

New Right in Europe – Wegierski

The New Right in Europe

By Mark Wegierski

 

The European New Right (ENR) presents itself as a contradictory phenomenon. While many of its arguments sound radical and original, they owe a great deal to traditional European thought — especially Catholic organicism. Although the ENR has rejected the far Right, some questionable links remain. Despite this, it may become the ideology of choice for those intellectuals still opposed to capitalism — a possible place for that intellectually-honest part of the Left attempting to come to terms both with the collapse of “really existing socialism” and a triumphant Western consumerist society predicated on managerial-therapeutic capitalism.

The ENR cannot be understood independently of its history. As Marco Tarchi, a leader of the Italian New Right put it: “What we must do today is to illuminate the fundamental novelty of the New Right, to put the emphasis on the term ‘new’ and no longer on the term ‘Right.’ Otherwise we will still be clinging to the heritage of the decrepit and worm-eaten currents of thought of the 1950s and 1960s which, in the face of all opposition, are still churning out the same old slogans with their whole perception of reality built around bygone political divisions. The desire to restore chauvinistic nationalisms is part of this archaic way of thinking. . . . It is up to us, to our generation, definitively to surpass these outworn ideas.”[1]

The ENR has made a major effort to break with its far Right roots. In this sense, it is misleading to call a tendency strongly opposed both to Anglo-American conservatism (with its emphasis on bourgeois individualism, capitalism, and property rights) and traditional Continental conservatism (with its emphasis on monarchy and Church) “right-wing.” The conventional notion of “right-wing” in the Anglo-American context is so different from what the ENR represents that it is almost useless when it comes to describing the latter phenomenon.

The ENR came into being in the 1960s to provide a satisfactory analysis of what ails the West and the world, and to identity possible brakes for the ineluctable logic of “progress.” It saw as the primary feature of late modernity the tendency to shatter religious, cultural, and national traditions stretching back hundreds or even thousands of years, and to replace them with banal victimologies. It is explicitly opposed to American hegemony and, in Britain, it identities with the Celtic fringe. The ENR claims that England had diverged from the continent in its Calvinism, capitalism and Whiggery, and that America then diverged still further. European intellectual lite — Left, Right, and Center, particularly in France — revolves around a knee-jerk anti-Americanism. The ENR is no exception, and has developed a Left-sounding critique of American intervention in Vietnam and around the globe, American cultural imperialism in France, the problems of poverty and homelessness in America, the Calvinistic messianism and puritanism of the US, and so forth.[2]

The ENR has not yet worked out a precise genealogy of what it views as the Anglo-American deviation, though the outcome of the English Civil War and the later struggles which led to the exclusion of the Stuarts from the English and Scottish thrones have played a large part in determining the Anglo-American trajectory. Along with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism is also central to the ENR. Here “capitalism” is seen as the encroaching system of US-based media/corporate oligarchy: gross materialism and the homo ceconomicus, or the homunculus of Nietzsche’s Last Man. It also implies the whole burgeoning world of technology and its attempt to manipulate human and physical nature. Through anti-capitalism, the ENR links with the Left and various ecological movements. According to Perspectives, a leading ENR organ: “The collapse of communism is not only a political victory for the American New World Order but a moral triumph for the American Way of Life. We can all now look forward to a future of unbridled consumption, in which we will all be equal and free to buy the same things. However, there are those in Europe who still value the roofed diversity of its peoples, and all the qualities which make us more than mere units of consumption. These people actually oppose the liberal-capitalist system. They want an organically rooted society instead of more Disneylands, and they flout accepted political convention by talking about transcending the old notions of Left and Right in a new synthesis of radical thought. They are active in fields of culture and metapolitics, waging a war of ideas. They seek a European renaissance. This attachment to identity is an inconvenience to the multinationals, an insult to Ronald McDonald and a direct attack on Coca-Colonization.”[3]

This anti-capitalism is connected with the ENR’s opposition to Calvinism — something it shares with nearly all varieties of Catholic-derived Continental right-wing thought — but also with its opposition to Judeo-Christianity. This radical, anti-traditional aspect of the ENR is also shared by the anti-clerical Lett and Nazism. The ENR engages in biting anti-clerical polemics of an almost Voltairean style. It sees the roots of totalitarianism and persecution in European history as a result of Judeo-Christian values, notably the Old Testament, with its tales of ferocity and retribution. “The body count amassed by the servants of the God of love . . . is now incalculable . . . Had Nicolae Ceaucescu lived a few hundred years ago he would have made a not untypical prince of the Church-on frequent precedent, a saint. . . . The concept of totalitarianism, the evil seed of the Inquisition, Auschwitz and the Gulag, was brought to Europe and forced on it by the followers of Jesus Christ. . . . “[4]

A group calling itself the “Organisation de Defense Juive” violently protested against GRECE on December 9, 1979, claiming that opposition to “Judeo-Christian totalitarianism” was disguised anti-Semitism. (They seemed to forget that the criticism of Christianity as the seed of Auschwitz is common among Jewish and Left historians). GRECE’s response to these accusations was unequivocal: “Jewish monotheism became truly totalitarian only when it ceased to be Jewish and claimed to submit people who held different religious views to the law of a single God. . . . The children of Athens and of Jerusalem, the pagan and Jewish victims of religious intolerance, suffered as a result of Christian persecutions.”[5] However, this condemnation of Christianity and exculpation of Judaism is disingenuous. The ENR stresses the Near Eastern, alien origins of Christianity, implying that the Jews are also aliens in Europe. The tact that such views were prominent in Nazism contributes to the ENR’s ostracism from mainstream politics.

Although there is a long tradition of criticism of Judeo-Christianity from Voltaire to Nietzsche, the ENR creates problems for traditional conservatives. It is ironic to find laudatory articles on Joseph de Maistre and Nietzsche within a few pages of each other in Elements.[6] For a school ostensibly critical of modernity and its “disenchantment of the world,” these vitriolic attacks against traditional religion may be counterproductive. Clearly not all Christians are like Ceaucescu. It the problem of late modernity is the disappearance of all rooted, truly meaningful, and relatively stable belief-systems, then even from the ENR standpoint any traditional religion, even Christianity, must be better than no religion at all.

The ENR also takes its anti-Christianism further by recycling the most traditional European religion: paganism. This is quite a trick. It may even be dishonest: a ducking of the issue of the ENR’s atheism (a more difficult position to hold for alleged “restorers of the sacred”). What can this mean, thousands of years alter paganism has disappeared? This embrace of paganism may be an attempt to re-evaluate the relation between humanity and nature along Heideggerian lines, while vindicating particularity and locality.

For the ENR the Golden Age is the primordial Indo-European past. This is lifted straight out of German Romanticism and 19th century anthropology. The immediate suspicion is that “Indo-European” is simply a polite substitution for “Aryan.” Allegedly, in this pagan, tribal Indo-European paradise, there were no fratricidal wars between different branches of European peoples, and every member of the tribe lived a meaningful lite in relative economic prosperity. The spatial and temporal boundaries of this world are not precisely drawn — it could in-dude ancient India, Greece, Germanic tribal lite at the time of Tacitus, Slavic tribal lite around the 9th century A.D., and so forth.[7] The ethnographical work of Georges Dumezil, which identified the so-called “frifunctionality” of the Indo-European priest, warrior, and farmer, is often cited. This romanticized past is important because many of the ENR referents, such as paganism, naturalism, particularism, a sort of feminism, and ecology, are predicated on it.

This paganism fits well with Alain de Benoist’s “spherical” concept of time, according to which “(everything is in the instant) . . . the past and future consitute dimensions present in every actual moment. . . . The present actualizes all past moments and prefigures all future ones. To accept the present by joyously assuming the instant is to be able to enjoy all instants at the same time. Past, present, and future are three perspectives, equally actual now, that are given to every moment of historical becoming . . . [this] delivers to him the possibility of connecting with tradition, indeed in a cultural and ethnic sense. Tradition is not the past but is ‘beyond time’; it is ‘permanent’ and ‘within us,’ and it becomes ‘our tradition’ by being reactualized.”[8]

Despite such an elaborate metaphysics, this could be interpreted simply as a call for a return to one’s ethnic and cultural roots — a staple of traditional conservative thought. At any rate, there may be a contradiction in the ENR’s embrace of paganism. Is paganism meant to be a “manly,” “heroic” warrior-creed opposing the weakness of Christianity (allegedly a masochistic “slave-morality”), or a kind of sentimental nature-worship opposed to a savagely inquisitorial Christianity, with its crusades and witch-burnings?

The ENR’s “paganism” entails a naturalism towards mores and sexuality. Unlike still traditionalists, ENR members have a relatively liberated attitude towards sexuality. Thus Benoist had no qualms about giving an interview to Gaie France, which features homoerotic images as well as cultural commentary.[9] ENR members have no desire to impose what they consider the patently unnatural moralism of Judeo-Christianity on sexual relations. However, while relatively more tolerant in principle, they still value strong family life, fecundity, and marriage or relations within one’s own ethnic group. (Their objection to intraethnic liaisons would be that the mixture of ethnic groups diminishes a sense of identity. In a world where every marriage was mixed, cultural identity would disappear). They also criticize Anglo-American moralism and its apparent hypocrisy: ” . . . a video depicting a man and woman having sexual intercourse . . . is liable to confiscation by the [British] state. One graphically depicting teenage girls being disembowelled by razor blades affixed to the lingers of a repulsive ghoul, by contrast, tops the rental figures quite lawfully across the land, goes into tour editions, each more disgusting and genuinely obscene than the last, and is not indeed the most unpleasant revelling in blood and gore to sit lawfully on the video shops’ shelves.”[10] In this, they are closer to a worldly Europe than to a puritanical America obsessed with violence. According to the ENR: “Our ancestral Indo-European culture . . . seems to have enjoyed a healthy natural attitude to processes and parts of the body concerned with the bringing forth of new life, the celebration of pair-bonding love, and the perpetuation of the race.”[11]

In its desire to create a balanced psychology of sexual relations, the ENR seeks to overcome the liabilities of conventional conservative thought: the perception of conservatives as joyless prudes, and the seemingly ridiculous psychology implied in conventional Christianity. It seeks to address “flesh-and-blood men and women,” not saints. Since some of the Left’s greatest gains in the last few decades have been made as a result of their championing sexual freedom and liberation, the ENR seeks to offer its own counter-ethic of sexual joy. The hope is presumably to nourish persons of the type who can, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “make love alter reading Hegel.” This is also related to the desire for the reconciliation of the intellectual and warrior in one person: the reconciliation of vita contemplative and vita activa.

This naturalism leads the ENR to re-evaluate “the feminine” and reject what it sees as Christianity’s denigration of women. The ENR has begun developing a counter-ethic of feminism which, while respecting women and “the feminine,” rejects the US ideologization of gender by politically-correct feminism. These ideas promise to overcome the poisoned atmosphere of sexual relations and the neopuritanism of radical feminism. “In pre-Christian Europe, amongst the Celts and the Norse for example, women, without in any way renouncing their femininity or seeking to be ersatz men, enjoyed essentially equal rights.”[12]

The ENR’s naturalism also leads it to defend the supposedly natural and normative nature of ethnic or kinship links. Thus the ENR departs from traditionalism by emphasizing the small nations and the historical regions of Europe, rather than the large and homogenizing nation-states: “The emergence of the idea of nation-state in the 18th century is a phenomenon arising not from a consciousness of identity, but, on the contrary, from the bourgeoisie’s social and political conception of the state.”[13] Similarly,”. . . the Europe of the big states . . . is not, and never has been, a natural Europe. It is the product of rival imperialisms, of conquests, of aggressive and violent acts, both military and socioeconomic . . . . The real Europe, the natural Europe, is one of numerous small states, numerous national communities, principalities, and free cities which are united and brought together above the level of their differences and divergences by a common civilization, forged over the course of two millennia . . . . It was this natural Europe that the big imperialist states, and their conscripted supporters, destroyed and replaced with their own version. Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia were mainly to blame for this development.”[14]

The ultimate goal is the Europe of a Hundred Flags — a patchwork quilt of colorful, traditional principalities. The ENR does not emphasize national uniformity — the traditional right-wing position — but difference. This is part of the ENR’s overall anti-totalitarian stand. The emphasis is on philosophical pluralism: opposition to the reduction of life to any one variable or force (e.g. the class-struggle, economy, nation, or race), in favor of multiplicity and particularity. This is complemented by an aestheticism, in the tradition of the interwar German “Conservative Revolution” — a visceral reaction of “high taste” to the vulgarized modern world of “rubbish.” ENR publications are filled with finely-rendered reproductions of heroic art from Europe’s long history. The locus is on “romantic realism” — though they are not averse to some modernist painters. This is not only a trank celebration of European art, but also a deliberate attempt to vindicate the heroic aspects of life, for European people deadened by consumerism and Americanization.

In contrast to its emphasis on mythopoeia, the ENR tends toward what Ferraresi calls its scientism: “. . . in a cultural context which privileges science as the highest form of knowledge, one of the stated goals . . . is the propagation of scientific developments which will dissipate the prejudices and ‘taboos’ of the reigning ideology, i.e., egalitarianism and democracy. The ‘hard new’ sciences like anthropology, biology, genetics, ethology, sociobiology, psychology, psychiatry, etc. are thus systematically plundered, and those results are selected that support the notions of heredity, invariance, innateness, the biological determination of social and ethical attitudes . . . . The outcome is a set of savage rules, which are then put forward by right-wing ideologues as ‘laws of nature’.”[15] This scientistic locus was at one time very prominent, e.g., when the ENR sought to integrate the thought of the Vienna Circle and Bertrand Russell. This must be seen as intellectually jejune: it clashes with other proclivities for irrationalism and romanticism.

While the ENR’s “scientific” efforts are questionable, the accusation of lack of compassion is less plausible. Although the ENR unabashedly defends aristocracies or hierarchies, as both “natural” and organic, it also criticizes liberal-capitalist modernity as “soft in ideas, but hard in practice.”[16] The ENR argues that liberal capitalism conceals a crashing harshness behind its soft rhetoric of freedom and equality, a real “war of all against all.”[17] Summarizing his critique of late modernity, Benoist writes: “I am appalled by the remarkable capacity of the majority of people to adapt without complaint to a society which I estimate to be, and I mean what I say, the worst kind of society ever to have existed. The worst, because the most subjected to the tyranny of the economy; the worst, because the least organic and therefore the most inhuman.”[18]

Although some ENR members at one time advocated technocracy, they have now embraced ecology, as one of the most hopeful tendencies on the planet today. The 1993 GRECE colloquium was dedicated to ecology. To the extent that it sets limits not only on the physical exploitation of the planet, but also on the grotesque excesses of consumerism, ecology is seen as a hopeful development. The ENR hopes that ecology will continue to evolve a paradigm seeking to preserve cultural rootedness as well as the physical integrity of nature. Its preferences are for communitarian ecology. The ecological call for sacrifices in consumption would be much more meaningful if they were sacrifices for something more local, tangible, and particular than abstract ecological principles. It would apply to this land, this countryside, this country. Communitarian ecology calls for the careful shepherding of resources and stewardship of nature for the sake of a particular community deriving its sustenance from these resources. This also implies that either all communities will accept such policies, or that particular communities must be capable of repelling possible incursions from other communities refusing to accept this model. Such an ecological program cannot be based on wholesale de-urbanization, but rather on saner and more ecological management.

A central premise of this critique is that late capitalism is not a rational system of resource allocation. Enormous amounts of resources are wasted in advertising to inflame demand for unnecessary products, obsolescence is “built-in” to keep consumption high, etc. The personal and psychological rewards resulting from such a decrease in consumption, for a decrease in quantity will be an increase in the quality of life, the emergence of time for pause and reflection, as well as a sense of participation in and belonging to a genuine, friendlier, and safer community.

A large sector in the ENR subscribes to what they call le Gramscisme de Droite. The ENR (like Gramsci) reverses Marx’s idea of base and superstructure. It believes that changes in the ideological superstructure among the cultural and elite opinion-forming groups determine social change.[19] Gramsci called on intellectuals to change society in a socialist direction. The ENR adopts this approach tot their own programs. This is called metapolitics. The ENR also identifies with the appeal to populism in Gramsci, although it rejects the rest of the Marxist apparatus.

The ENR explicitly repudiates racism and searches for allies in the Third World against the US.[20] Although the ENR is a European phenomenon, it also seeks alliances with Islam, East Asian semi-authoritarian regimes, India; etc. against the Anglo-American world. This is an extension of the idea of pluralism in international politics — a multiplicity of power centers and cultural spheres instead of one militarily, economically, and culturally hegemonic power-center. One hegemonic power severely constricts the choices available to humanity, and moves it along one predetermined path. This fits well with the ENR view of itself as a kind of laboratory of ideas.[21] Thus it is proud of its intellectualism and its eschewing of raw political conflict. Nouvelle Ecole, one of the ENR’s main journals, refuses to endorse political candidates, and is opposed to Le Pen’s National Front. Finally, in terms of tactics, there is clearly the attempt to generate a mystique. ENR figures do not want to be perceived as stodgy, pet-it-bourgeois philistines, but as perceptive critics.

Try as it might, the ENR has not escaped Left-liberal criticism. Many routinely consider its members to be barely-disguised fascists, or part of “the eternal reactionary Right.”[22] The definition of “reactionary” here is peculiarly wrong. Intellectually, the stand “against all totalitarianisms” clearly entails the rejection of the Nazi reductionism of race. However, the ENR has a tendency to dance on the rim of the volcano by including certain politically risque imagery in its publications (e.g., photographs of Hitler in heroic poses) and questionable announcements.[23]

Although the ENR sees itself rooted in the 1968 revolutionary tradition, Pierre-Andre Taguieff has traced its origins to the classical French Right.[24] But to what extent can one be held accountable for positions held decades earlier and now strenuously rejected? Similarly, the ENR cannot be held responsible for the adoption of some of its ideas by groups such as Le Pen’s National Front, or the Anglo-American or German Right.[25]

The tendency to exaggerate in relation to the ENR is typified by Seymour Martin Lipset, who writes: “The best publicized European radical rightist tendency . . . has been the French ‘New Right.’ This movement . . . has, like the intellectual Right of pre-WWI France, focused its criticism on ‘alien’ anti-European forces, foreign immigrants, and radical and liberal forces. Supported by press lord Robert Hersant . . . once an overt anti-Semite and youthful collaborator with the Germans in WWII, the views of the New Right reach wide circles of the population, and may have helped stimulate widespread anti-Semitic violence in 1980.”[26]

Some of the ENR’s dabbling in politics, however, is problematic, although mostly in theory. Thus some ENR members support Zhirinovsky (or similar figures), Serbia, and a putative German-Russian alliance at the expense of most East European countries — all in the name of anti-Americanism.[27] The ENR also runs into problems with traditional religion and nationalism. Roman Catholicism is probably the only remaining serious traditional religious force (of historical duration) in Europe today. However strenuously the ENR rejects it, the similarities of some of its positions to those of traditional Catholic organicism are all too obvious (anti-capitalism, the stress on the social, and attacks on gross materialism and consumerism).[28] It is ironic that the ideas of Rene Geunon, and especially Julius Evola (such as the “political soldier,” considered pagan and terroristic in their implications by some dogmatic liberal critics[29]), are being taken up by a professedly Catholic tendency. As both C. G. Jung and Camille Paglia have indicated, Catholicism was clearly more “pagan” than Protestantism. One of the main Protestant accusations against Roman Catholicism was that it was a disguised paganism (with its worship of Mary and the Saints, its sumptuous churches, and its religious icons and relics). However, “the integralist French Catholic Right . . . considers the New Right as ‘Masonic adepts of the Satanic Revolution against the one true living God’. . . .”[30]

Relations to traditional nation-states are also problematic. To what extent should the regionalization and break-up of nation-states be encouraged? Is this not an invitation to community dissolution? What about countries such as Poland that will clearly not let go of their national identity? What about the threat of a Greater German),, perhaps lurking behind this proposed “regionalization,” possibly involving the reconstruction of a German-dominated East Prussia, Silesia, and Western Pomerania, as well as the weakening (or disintegration) of France by the secessions of Brittany, Provence, Normandy, etc.? What about relations with the US? Does the ENR realize that some of its most cherished ideas, i.e. ecology and even neopaganism, are very popular in the US, especially in California? Does it intend to expand its activities to the US, presumably among the libertarian Left or ecological and New Age circles?

The ENR has an extremely simplistic vision of the US — reducing it to Disneyland, Coca-Cola, etc. Clearly the US is more than New York, L.A., and San Francisco, more than “rap, crack et Big Mac.” It is a huge country of diverse regions and towns. Is the ENR more critical of “narrow-minded small–town America” (which American conservatives consider “the heartland”), or “big-city America” (which most American conservatives consider nightmarish, but Left-liberals defend as centers of progress)? Is it America’s Puritanism (of which little seems to be left in actual family mores), or a burgeoning decadence which is their target? At any rate, the center of anti-Americanism today is the US itself. Considering the fact that the US is being consumed by self-hatred and anti-Americanism, the ENR will have to rethink its position vis a vis the moral residues of contemporary American society. Because of the ENR’s violent anti-Americanism, it has hardly any relations with American paleoconservatives. The emphasis on federalism, cultural particularity and local autonomy, however, may pave the way for a new dialogue.

Two problems with ENR theory are rather obvious. First, there is the tension between elitism and populism. On the one hand, it identifies with the Olympian elitism of figures such as Nietzsche and Evola, harboring contempt for the masses. On the other, it wants to embrace an “organic democracy” rooted in Herder, German romanticism, the German Conservative Revolution and, to a certain extent, Carl Schmitt. Second, there is its over-reliance on the ancient Greek heritage, as reflected in the name of one of its main groups, GRECE. Even a superficial reading of Nietzsche betrays his condemnation of the influence of the Greek heritage in the development of Europe. Although “the gifts of the Greeks” can be considered multivalent, clearly traditions of both political democracy and science had their origins in Athens. Is it legitimate to trace the errors of contemporary Europe only to the Judeo-Christian heritage? Should not the classical heritage also come in for some careful scrutiny?

At any rate, the obsessive search for the origins of present European decline leads the ENR astray. One of the most obvious reasons for its adoption of a “metapolitical” position may be due to the fact that ideas such as neopaganism are difficult to relate to today’s sociopolitical realities. Consequently, the ENR is often accused of being a typical French salon phenomenon focused on German thinkers, in line with the old WWII “collaborationist” tradition (the ENR has sought to rehabilitate some of those figures), practising “Biedermaier” politics.

It is all too easy to overemphasize the ENR’s radicalism. In some sense it may be nothing more than an esoteric version of de Gaulle’s political program and an expression of Gallicism, with all of its cultural pride, joie-de-vivre, intellectual flashiness, and unabashed eroticism. After all, de Gaulle’s political genius has been consistently underestimated in the Anglo-American world. An anti-Nazi, anti-Communist, and anti-American (he led the Free French, dealt with Communist terror after the Liberation, and continued to oppose les deux hegemonies to the end of his life); a compassionate but strong nationalist, as well as a decolonizer; a champion of the unity of a “Europe of fatherlands” full of respect for tradition and the Catholic Church, while suspicious of progressivism, liberalism, and democracy, he is someone with whom the ENR could easily identity.

The ENR’s hopes for the future can be summarized as follows: 1) A return to meaningful politics (aiming at a restoration of the public sphere) against an apolitical, juridically-determined, economically-focused liberalism and formally egalitarian democracy. This politics would have to be both erotic and aesthetic, and predicated on “organic democracy.” 2) A restoration of community spirit. The ENR would like to see the dissolution of the US into regional and ethnic states. It prefigures a genuinely pluralistic global framework in opposition to American liberal universalism. (Pluralism of cultures across the planet requires some exclusivity of cultures in given areas and regions). 3) A braking of tendencies towards consumerism, commodification, commodity-fetishism, consumer-tribes, technologization, etc., by means of a “rooted radicalism” and “communitarian ecology.”

Following the recent victory in Italy of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, today a more dynamic Right seems to have some chance of succeeding in Europe. Although Berlusconi’s victory has little to do with the ENR, the Northern League’s regionalism is fully in line with ENR ideas, while the softening of doctrinaire positions which made possible the victory of the National Alliance in the South may also have something to do with ENR influence. Yet Berlusconi and many sectors of the conventional Right have placed a born-again capitalism at the center of their program. This leads to a harshness toward social problems and a contempt for anyone who cannot compete. This conventional Right ignores the fact that humanistically-trained, aristocratically-minded people who could lead a genuine cultural Right are probably the least able to prosper in the projected brave new capitalist world. The obsessive focus on “the discipline of the market” is antithetical to the rooted popular culture and ENR’s “high culture.”

The circulation of ENR journals is rather small, but intellectual influence can rarely be measured by circulation figures. By pursuing its “metapolitical” strategy, the ENR has created a new climate where some Right ideas can be voiced more freely and with less opprobrium. What makes the ENR arguments attractive is that often they are simply good, persuasive arguments. After all, the substitution of a particularistic “right to be different” for a belief in an innate, absolutistic white and European supremacy was a much-needed shift. The ENR has also understood that the orthodox Christian approach to sexual and family morality, in an extremely permissive and sexually-obsessed age, was untenable. The ENR has also renewed much of the criticism of capitalism from an organicist-aristocratic context at a time when the Left seems to have fallen silent on this matter in its uncritical and opportunistic embrace of liberalism. Only in today’s dessicated political landscape are people shocked by these positions, as the organic and Catholic Right — partially linked to various pre-Marxian socialisms as well as syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism — had traditionally been in the forefront of the critique of capitalism. (In the 19th century, John Ruskin could readily claim: “I am a Tory of the sternest sort, a socialist, a communist”). ENR ideas are also intimately intertwined with central aspects of French identity and national character. Thus the ENR is divided concerning European unification, perhaps because it sees it as a possible vehicle for the continuation of French hegemony through such archetypically French figures as Jacques Delors.

At any rate, under no circumstances can the ENR be characterized as a “neo-fascist” residue destined to play only a very limited role in the future of Europe. Despite certain obvious problems and inconsistencies, the ENR has clearly transcended its origins in the far Right. Its formulations on certain issues have been pioneering, though often, and ironically, coming out of nothing more than a reactivation of half-forgotten arguments in the great store of non-fascist organicist thought. The ENR today is very much in the forefront of key debates concerning personal and cultural identities, and “the sources of the self” The intellectually-honest Left could benefit by appropriating some of these ideas. On the whole, the ENR represents the most intellectual, sophisticated, least dogmatic and most positive element “on the Right,” engaged in the reconfiguration of the political landscape alter the collapse of communism and the terminal crisis of liberalism have rendered traditional categories hopelessly obsolete.

Notes:

1. See “The Italian ‘Nuova Destra’: An Interview with Marco Tarchi,” in Perspectives, No. 3 (Winter 1991-92), p. 23.
2. See Elements, Nos. 69, 70 and Perspectives, No. 4, devoted respectively to the theme: “Le Nouvel Ordre Americaine,” “Etats-Unis: Danger!” and “Beware the USA!”
3. Insert to Perspectives, No. 3 (Winter 1991-92).
4. The Scorpion, No. 13 (Winter 1989-90), p. 52
5. See Michalina Vaughan, “Nouvelle Droite: Cultural Power and Political Influence,” in David S. Bell, ed., Contemporary French Politics (London & Canberra: Groom Helm, 1982), p. 63.
6. Elements, No. 79 (January 1994), pp. 25-28.
7. See in particular the “Heritage” section of Alain de Benoist’s Vu de droite (Paris: Copernic, 1977).
8. Thomas Sheehan, “Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist,” in Social Research, Vol. XLVIII (Spring 1981), pp. 64-65.
9. The Sting, No. 12 (Autumn 1992), p. 4.
10. The Scorpion, No. 13 (Winter 1989-90), p. 52.
11. The Scorpion, No. 13 (Winter 1989-90), p. 51. Thus, at the end of a long interview, Benoist states: “There are other comforts: the arts, contemplation and, of course, women. I do not have to tell you of all people, moncher Michel, who loathes as much as I do the misogyny so common on the Right, that the pleasures of the flesh are one of the paths to the spirit, and that the best argument which was ever given for justifying the existence of frontiers is the profound joy we feel in crossing them.” See The Scorpion, No. 10 (August 1986), p. 32. This is a translation of an interview originally published in Elements.
12. The Scorpion, No. 13 (Winter 1989-90), p. 51. Another example of the ENR’s pagan feminism is Brigid Clarke’s “The Black Virgins of Europe,” which praises the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Roman Catholicism as a residue of pagan Goddess worship. See Perspectives, No. 3 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 25-27.
13. Ulric Smith, “Nationalism: A Poison,” in Perspectives, No. 7 (Winter 1993-94), p. 16.
14. Yann Fouere, “Towards a Natural Europe,” in Perspectives, No. 5 (Winter 199293), p. 18. Originally published in the Breton nationalist journal, Gwenn ha Du (August-September 1992).
15. Ferraresi, op. cit., p. 145.
16. According to Francois-Bernard Huyghe: “It is an ideology that fiercely denounces all manifestations of inequality, yet advocates horrendous economic inequality and ruthless individual survivalism.” See La “Soft-Ideologie” (Paris: Laffont, 1987).
17. See Benoist’s indictment of Hayek as a savage ideologue of the harshest capitalism, for whom social justice, trade unions, society, and politics are illegitimate concepts, in Elements, No. 68 (Summer 1990), pp. 5-14. Similarly, addressing the British context, Perspectives claims that: “The hidden agenda behind the Conservative government’s assault on trade unions has been revealed. Far from championing the freedom of individual employees, it clearly regards them as little more than slaves to be sold on the international labour market. A Trade and Industry Department publication called Britain — The Preferred Location, aimed at attracting foreign money, enthuses: ‘Employers are now under no statutory obligation to recognize a union. Many companies do not do so . . . Wages and salaries are markedly lower than those in the US, Japan or many countries within the European Community, and so too are the add-on costs of social security and other benefits’.” See Perspectives, No. 6 (Summer 1993), p. 5.
18. The Scorpion, No. 10 (Autumn 1986), p. 32.
19. See Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), especially the section “The Gramscism of the Right,” pp. 29-32.
20. See Alain de Benoist, Europe. Tiers Monde. Meme Combat (Paris, R. Laffont, 1986).
21. Thus Benoist has debated Thomas Molnar, an American paleoconservative and Catholic traditionalist. See Alain de Benoist (with Thomas Molnar) L’ Eclipse du Sacre (Paris, Lo Table Ronde, 1986). Similarly, it has made an opening to the Left and some of its eclectic thinkers, notably Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, etc. The ENR also finds Jean Baudrillard extremely invigorating, with his criticism of American “hyperreality.”
22. Ferrazesi, op.cit., p. 147.
23. Jean-Jacques Mourreau, “L’Europe Malade de Versailles.” in Elements, No. 69 (Fall 1990), p. 42. Consider the following two problematic examples in Perspectives. One is an obituary for Arno Breker attempting to dissociate his art from the people he served. See Perspectives, No. 2 (Summer 1991), p. 10. The other is a call in the previously cited Tarchi interview for the “normalization” of the experience of Italian fascism after the 1970′s. That may have already happened. Yet the suggestion that Nazism could be similarity “normalized” is another matter. See Perspectives, No. 3 (Winter 1991-92), p. 24. Worse yet, The Sting newsletter practically advertises the work of Ernst Zundel, a Holocaust revisionist and neo-Nazi, as follows: “Across the Atlantic maverick publisher E. Zundel has been having a rough time for daring to publish and broadcast his ‘revisionist’ ideas. There is irony in a ‘bigot’ being harassed by the ‘champions of free speech’ for his views. He broadcasts into Germany from a kind of pirate radio (shades of the 30′s -more irony!) Whether he is a “hate-monger” or not he is courageous: a small donation will get you info [followed by Zundel’s address and telephone number in Toronto].” See The Sting, No. 15 (Winter 1993), p. 1. The most recent issue of the same newsletter includes the following passage: “In Canada, Mr. Zundel’s publicity-catching gimmicks have unquestionably made doubt about the Nazi gassing claim more acceptable.” See The Sting, No. 16 (Spring 1994), p. 1. This raises the suspicion that certain ENR members are not so much “reactionaries” as outright neo-Nazis. In English-speaking countries, the ENR is often confused, even among some of its adherents, with the far Right.
24. See the interview with Pierre-Andre Taguieff “Origines et Metamorphoses de la Nouvelle Droite,” in Vingtieme Siecle, No. 40 (October-December 1993), pp. 3-22. The second part of this interview is translated in this issue of Telos. In his work, Sur La Nouvelle Droite, Jalons d’un Analyse Critique (Descartes, 1994), Taguieff traces the long march of the ENR from a pro-Western, white racialist position in the 1960′s, to its advanced, “differentialist” stance of the 1980′s, “from race to culture.” The first chapter of this book is translated in this issue of Telos.
25. The politically-correct Left in France, as typified by its “Appeal to Vigilance by Forty Intellectuals” against “the far Right” in 1993, adopts the mode of inquisitors and commissars, calling for blacklists, bannings, etc., and ironically targeting the ENR more vociferously than the National Front. Most of these documents are translated in this issue of Telos. The ENR has quickly responded to what it considers this “McCarthyism of the Left.” See David Barney, Charles Champetier and Claude Lavirose, La Nouvelle Inquisition: ses Acteurs, ses Methodes, ses Victimes (Le Labyrinthe, 1993).
26. Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Revolt Against Modernity,” in Per Torsvik, Ed., Mobilization, Center-Periphery Structures and Nation Building (Bergen: Universitetforlaget, 1981), p. 477. Bela Kopeczi, a leading Hungarian Communist Party intellectual (and Hungary’s Minister of Culture at the time), while condemning ENR tendencies, has at least given them philosophical credence: “This ‘third way’ of philosophy, idealist and subjectivist in principle, posits the epistemological dependence of being on consciousness, and places the subject at its center of interest, although, as it tries to base itself on science, and especially history, it tries to mask this. In accordance with this philosophical direction, life, as it were, mediates between subject and object. Life always becomes subjectified as feeling, while feeling objectifies itself as life, which creates the appearance of the elimination of the dualism. This role is also fulfilled by the category of myth, which was brought into the vocabulary of philosophy by Nietzsche. The mythical objectivity of the ‘philosophy of life’ (Lebensphilosophie) appears in the subject, which suggests a certain type of objectivity.” Bela Kopeczi, Neokonserwatyzm i Nowa Prawica, tr. into Polish by Ester Lawnik (Warsaw: Ksiazka i Wiedza, 1986), pp. 25-26.
27. In this, they follow Ernst Niekisch and the “National Bolsheviks” of interwar Germany, who proposed an alliance of Germany with Stalin’s “workers’-state,” at the expense of “reactionary” East European societies. Niekisch is often pointed to as a prototypical ENR hero for his resistance to Nazism, but the main point of his daring attack on Hitler in 1938 was that Nazism was a disguised Catholicism and therefore a “death-wish philosophy” — hardly the most devastating criticism. See Francois Lapeyre, “Ernst Niekish, Un Destin Allemand,” in Elements, No. 73 (Spring 1992), pp. 32-33. The strong rhetorical opposition to the Versailles Treaties (and affection for a big Germany) in some of their historical articles could also be interpreted as a further threat to Eastern Europe. See Jean-Jacques Mourreau, “L’Europe Malade de Versailles,” op. cit., pp. 23-42.
28. This would be close to Derek Holland’s “Third Position” in England, which attempts to synthesize “Catholic traditionalism, European nationalism, and the ENR.” See “Polityczni Zolnierze,” in Stanczyk, No. 17 (1992), pp. 39-44.
29. Ferraresi, op. cit., pp. 137-140, links the ENR to far Right terrorists.
30. Cited in Jarosiaw Tomasiewicz, “Przeciwko Rownosci i Demokracji: Nowa Prawica we Francji,” in Mysl Polska (November 1-15 1993), p. 5.

 

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Wegierski, Mark. “The New Right in Europe.” Telos, Vol. 1993, No. 98-99 (December 1993), pp. 55-69.

Note: The text of this article was obtained from its online republication at: <http://www.amerika.org/texts/the-new-right-in-europe-mark-wegierski/ >.

Additional notes: While this essay by Wegierski serves as a good overview of some of the major features of the New Right, in order to more adequately understand the concepts and reasoning behind New Right philosophy, it is important to read certain key works by Alain de Benoist. See the works listed at the “Manifesto of the New Right”.

 

Interview with Alain de Benoist – American Renaissance

“We Are at the End of Something”

The American Renaissance Interview with Alain de Benoist

 

American Renaissance: You have said that modernity is the enemy of identity. Could you explain this idea further?

Alain de Benoist: When one considers modernity, one must consider two meanings of the word. The first is known to everyone: It is the changes of life that come with more material wealth. But modernity is also the product of an ideology that appeared in the 17th and 18th century with the Enlightenment. It is an ideology of progress, of which the basic idea is that mankind will always be better. The future will be better than the present and the present is better than the past. For this ideology, the past has nothing to teach us. The past is a graveyard of archaic customs and irrational constraints. Instead, man must use his reason to decide by himself what he wants.

Modernity also takes a unitary view of history. History is not cyclical, as it was for the Greeks, but is a straight line. This idea comes from Christianity and Judaism, which posit that there is an absolute beginning and an absolute end to history. Mankind is likewise unitary. All peoples must go through the same stages, and reach the same level of development. This is the myth of development, of technological progress.

Thus, everything that is new has value because it is new. There is a fetishism of the novel. So when you speak of modernity you must consider not only the material dimension but also the ideological dimension. Modernity is intrinsically antagonistic to collective identities because such identities are an obstacle to the march of progress towards a unitary mankind.

Of course, modernity has a strong economic component. In Europe it was linked to the rise of the bourgeois class and its commercial and merchant values. This is the problem of capitalism. It wants to organize more markets—a world market, a planetary market—and collective identities fragment this market.

Europeans have frequently criticized the United States as a materialist society, but is not every society materialist? Is it not part of human nature to always to want more?

You are right. In that sense I would say that today we are all Americans. And it is true that the desire to have more is part of human nature. The difference is that much of European religion and philosophy are based on values that are more important, on the belief that for moral or religious or philosophical reasons, we must not submit to greed and to the appetite for wealth. This was different in America because of the protestant Calvinist idea of the elect—God shows his approval by giving wealth. You know Max Weber’s theory of the link between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. I think these things make a big difference.

In Catholic countries money is always suspect—even though everyone wants more of it rather than less. You can see that in the fact that in France it would be impossible for a wealthy man to be elected head of state. No one would vote for a millionaire. The idea would be repulsive. But in America if a candidate is a millionaire it shows he is a success and has ability.

So in Europe people hide what they have. They don’t say how much they earn. In America there is a passion for numbers, and everything is a calculable quantity. Americans know how much they paid for everything. When American tourists go to the Eiffel Tower they ask, “How many steps to the top?” They do not understand the difference between quantity and quality.

Is there anything besides Catholicism that has protected Europe from the same levels of materialism?

No longer. Today, everyone looks at the same films, listens to the same music, lives in the same kind of houses. This is something that greatly concerns me. I have traveled a great deal, and every year I see the world becoming more similar. I call this the ideology of sameness. This ideology can take religious and not-at-all religious forms, but the central idea is that we are all part of mankind, that we are brothers of the same family. There may be differences but they are unimportant and should be either eradicated or transformed into mere folklore. American Indians do their dances for the tourists but this is not traditional life.

What is the solution to this problem of sameness?

To see solutions we must conceive of globalization as a dialectic. The more the world is homogenized, the more there is rebellion. Thus, the impulse that homogenizes the planet creates new kinds of fragmentation, new kinds of divisions. Sometimes this resistance can be excessive—it can take the form of terrorism, for example.

The solution is to work locally. I strongly believe in localism. Localism means more direct democracy, it means working to create liberated spaces. That’s why I don’t believe so much in politics. I believe that the time of political parties is over. Parties take each others’ places, but they are not real alternatives. In France it is the Right or the Left, or the Left or the Right, and everything remains the same.

That is the reason why so many people are fed up with what we call the “new class” of politicians, financiers, media. There is a widespread feeling that this class does not understand the daily life of the citizens, that it is remote, not committed to a particular nation, that it has common interests instead with an international new class. This is one of the reasons for the rise of the so-called populists parties, which is the most interesting political phenomenon in the last 10 or 20 years.

What are some other examples of this resistance to globalization?

Some countries resist very well. China, for example. I was in China not long ago. Of course you can see young people fixated on their video games, their iPods, iPads, and BlackBerries, but I think the Chinese leaders have a very clear view of the state of the world. Few countries really try to think about the future. The United States, yes, certainly. Russia and China as well, but in Europe, there is nothing.

You think Americans are thinking seriously about the future?

Not the American people, but the think tanks and government agencies think very seriously about the future.

More so than in Europe?

Yes, certainly. We have politicians but nothing like your think tanks. Maybe some political clubs, but nothing else. The politicians just want to be reelected, so the future for them is next year. They don’t think globally about the world.

If global capitalism is the enemy of identity, can you describe a type of economic organization that would be a friend of identity?

Economic life must not be reduced to free exchange and to commercial and market values. An economy must take social realities into consideration, and must not be free from political authority. It is perfectly possible to have an economy of social solidarity that includes a private sector, a public sector, as well as a sector for voluntary associations, such as workers’ cooperatives. The dictatorship of the financial markets must be destroyed. An economy must be based on real production and not on financial speculation. We must fight against the de-localization caused by globalization, which results in labor-market dumping, and harms the working classes by putting downward pressure on salaries. Free exchange between nations is good for everyone only if those nations are at approximately identical levels of economic development.

In Europe there must be reasonable protectionism that guarantees salaries and revenue. We must also promote, to the extent possible, consumption of goods where they are produced, with an emphasis on local transport and economies of proximity. The re-localization of economies is a way to maintain collective identities and also to restore social ties and local democracy in a public space in which citizenship is expressed.

Would you hope for a Europe that is more locally autonomous?

I am personally in support of a politically unified Europe, but this would be a Europe in which as many decisions as possible are made locally. We speak of the principle of “subsidiarity” according to which, as much as possible, and at the lowest possible level, people decide the matters that concern themselves.

That was the original idea of the United States. Every state was to have great autonomy.

But in the history of the United States the meaning of the word “federalism” has changed. Now when we say “federal” it means the central government, even though things were different in the beginning. The history of states’ rights is complex.

But that is my point. The European Union shows the same tendency. A central government always wants more power. Switzerland seems to be one of the few exceptions to this rule.

I like Switzerland very much. I would like the Swiss model extended to the whole of Europe. Do not forget that the difference between the central power in Europe (the so-called European Commission) and in the United States is that in Europe it is not even elected by anybody. There is no democratic legitimacy to it. I don’t have any illocutions about the value of the kinds of elections you have in the United States, but at least there is an election. Not in France. We elect a European parliament that has almost no power, and the only reason people take an interest in that election is because it is an indication of which parties are most popular within your own nation.

Do you think it is possible to have a politically united Europe that really does leave local decision-making to local people?

Yes. You see that in Switzerland. Of course, it is a small country.

But in the history of Europe you have two competing models. One is the nation-state, of which France is the perfect example, but of which England and Spain are also examples. The other model is empire: Italy, Germany and so on. I think the model of empire is much better because it does not concentrate power. It leaves rights and political autonomy to the different countries and regions. A recent model would be the Austro-Hungarian empire. It contained 35 different nationalities, but it worked pretty well. Of course, it was implicated in all the troubles in the Balkans.

For many countries, the United States is an unpleasant presence, but is this simply a reflection of its power? Is this just our version of the French mission civilisatrice or British empire-building, or is there something different about the way America imposes its ideas on the world?

Certainly England, France, and Spain had great influence on the world, but the difference is that they are old countries. They have behind them 2,000 or 3,000 years, and in such a long period of time you have many different conceptions of politics. Not so in the United States. From the beginning, you have the myth of the City on a Hill, that you were the new chosen people, that you fled corrupt Europe with its monarchies and that you would build a new society that would be the best in history.

This goes hand in hand with American optimism. There may be many problems but in the end technology will solve them. Technology creates problems and yet more technology will solve them. This feeling, which is shared by so many Americans, can lead to isolationism or Wilsonianism, in which you want to colonize, though not in the old way. You want all people to be Americanized.

I notice that when I am in America I always hear music—music or television—even in restaurants. But it is always American music. I never hear any singer or music that is not American. In a few restricted circles you may see a French film, and people may know of Edith Piaf or Maurice Chevalier. But if you go to Europe or anywhere else you will hear the same music! Not only, but mostly. When it is not French, it is American music. Why don’t the French listen to Chinese music or African music or German music or Spanish music or Danish music? And it is the same for films. We see all the American films. We do not see all the German or Italian films, even though those countries are very close to France.

Globalization is the vehicle for all this. English becomes the universal language; if you don’t understand English, you can’t really use the Internet. So here are two reasons for the impact of America. One is the ideological reason but the other is the effect of pure power. This is normal.

From the European point of the view, surely someone like George W. Bush must have been impossible to understand because he was not Machiavellian or even sophisticated.

To us he looks like a moron. In Europe a good politician or statesman is someone who is cultivated in matters of political philosophy and literature, who has a deep knowledge of the world, who sees history as tragedy. He is someone who is a realist in politics, who doesn’t try to hide his interests behind the smokescreen of moral discourse. Americans are completely different. They put their hands on their hearts and speak of freedom and democracy.

Yesterday I was at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, where I saw a quotation from President Reagan that went something like this: “There are no limits to growth or human happiness if people can freely choose their dreams.” What does that mean? Nothing. But you can see that sort of thing everywhere.

I was recently in New York and visited Rockefeller Center. There you have tablets with quotations from Nelson Rockefeller. “I believe in humanity. I believe in love. I believe in the pursuit of happiness but nothing is more important than love.” This man’s life was making money, but he says there is nothing more important than love. He was not a lover, he was a financier. This sort of thing is very strange for Europeans.

And there are so many things that have come from America to Europe and settled there, such as gender studies—people like Judy Butler, who are completely mad. The crazy kind of feminism. I am not against feminism. There is a good kind of feminism, which I call identitarian feminism, which tries to promote feminine values and show that they are not inferior to masculine values. But this American version of universalist egalitarianism says there is no difference between men and women. It concedes there is a small difference: you are born with one sex or the other, but it’s not very important. What is important is that gender is a social construct, and you can make the parallel with race. Race and sex, they don’t exist because they are social constructs; they are only what your mind says they are.

You may know that last May the French government decided—it is the law now—that the French Republic “does not recognize the existence of any race.” Race does not exist, but racism exists. We must fight racism, which is presumably a hatred of something that does not exist. Curiously, these people claim to value diversity, but how can there be diversity if races do not exist? Many of these ideological fashions came from America.

Many Americans and Europeans who are frustrated with the direction in which their country is going speak of the possibility of systemic collapse. Do you foresee such a collapse?

I don’t foresee that because it is impossible to foresee anything. The main characteristic of history is that it is always open, therefore unpredictable. All the important events of the last decades were not foreseen, beginning with the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet system. Some people with a catastrophic and pessimistic view do not realize that history is open. They think nothing can change, yet change is always possible because human history is open. I don’t foresee any collapse but I believe that there is a strong possibility of a general collapse.

At least in Europe we have the impression that the political system has exhausted all its possibilities. There is also the financial crisis, which is, for me, a structural rather than contingent crisis of capitalism. You cannot live forever on credit. Look at the public debt of the United States—my God. We always add a bit more, a bit more, a bit more. But “more” and “better” are very different things. No tree can reach the sky, so it will certainly collapse.

At the same time, there are ecological, demographic, and immigration problems. We are clearly at the end of something. Probably at the end of modernity. Never in my life can I remember a time in which all possibilities were as open as they are today. We are in a world of transition. During the cold war, things were simple—two blocs—but not anymore. What will become of Russia? What will become of China? In Africa we will have demographic growth—like the public debt in the US!

So I think collapse is possible and it may be necessary, but you cannot rely on it. You cannot sit in your chair and say, “Well, dear friends, I am waiting for the apocalypse.” That would be like the Jehovah’s Witnesses: “The end of the world is nigh.” One world may be ending, but not the world.

Collapse may be necessary for what?

For change. Americans have lived ever since the beginning of their country under more or less the same system, so it is very easy for them to believe that theirs is a natural system. In Europe we have known so many systems, so many revolutions, so many conflicting opinions. I refuse to be constrained by inevitability.

Under the current system only marginal reforms are possible. In France, the National Front is rising in a very interesting way. It is becoming the leading political party, which is very strange when you remember that because of the electoral system it has only two members in the Chamber of Deputies. But even if Marine Le Pen were elected president—I do not think it will happen but I cannot exclude it—there would be no great changes. We would live in the same kind of society, looking at the same films, playing with the same electronic games, and so on.

You have spoken about how complex and multiple identity is. It is composed of language, history, profession, ethnicity, sex, etc. but why can race can never be part of a collective identity—at least for white people?

You mean in Europe?

I mean anywhere.

It is even more forbidden in Europe. In the United States, it is accepted by most people that races exist—and in my mind to accept race is very different from racism—but in Europe that is not so. In the United States you have racial statistics. You can go to the government and find race statistics on everything, including crime and social patterns. The collection of these kinds of statistics is forbidden in Europe—certainly in France.

In France you may categorize people as foreigners or French citizens but many immigrants have French citizenship. Sometimes they receive it automatically when they are born there. So sociologists who want to study a racial question must look indirectly at such things as medical statistics. No one knows how many blacks there are in France. We have an idea, of course, but officially race statistics are forbidden because race does not exist. Such race statistics might be used by racist people. They could use findings about crime, for example.

But to return to the question of identity, I am concerned that the people in France who want to defend identity seem to be the first not to know what identity means. They give only a negative definition of it: “I’m not an immigrant.” Alright, you are not an immigrant, but what are you? “I am French.” But of course you are so many other things as well. You are a man or a woman, you are a journalist or a producer, you are gay or straight, born in a particular region, etc. Identity is complex.

How do you see yourself as different from Identitarians?

If I compare you and me, the first difference is that I am aware of race and of the importance of race, but I do not give to it the excessive importance that you do. For me it is a factor, but only one among others.

The second is that I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. I am a philosopher, a theoretician, and I fight to explain my world view. And in this world view, Europe, race, culture, and identity all have roles. They are not excluded. But mainly I am working in defense of a world view. Of course, I am very interested in the future and destiny of my own nation, race, and culture, but I am also interested in the future of every other group.

Immigration is clearly a problem. It gives rise to much social pathologies. But our identity, the identity of the immigrants, all the identities in the world have a common enemy, and this common enemy is the system that destroys identities and differences everywhere. This system is the enemy, not the Other. That is my basic credo.

Is there anything in particular you would you like to say to an American audience?

What I would say to America is to try to be a bit more open to the rest of the world. Try to know other countries and not just to visit them as tourists. As tourists you don’t see much. You need to understand that throughout the world people can think differently. I don’t say they are better or worse, but accept these differences, because a world of difference is a richer world. The wealth of the world is diversity — its genuine diversity.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “We Are at the End of Something.” Interview by the American Renaissance Staff. American Renaissance, 22 November 2013. <http://www.amren.com/features/2013/11/we-are-at-the-end-of-something/ >.

Note: For a listing of certain major works of the New Right by Alain de Benoist in various languages, see Benoist’s and Champetier’s Manifesto along with the further reading section:  <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/manifesto-of-the-new-right-benoist-champetier/ >.