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Full download Key Thinkers Of The Radical Right: Behind The New Threat To Liberal Democracy Mark J. Sedgwick file pdf all chapter on 2024
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i
Edited by
MARK SEDGWICK
1
iv
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Contributors vii
vi Contents
Contributors
viii Contributors
Modernity (2013), The World through Soccer: The Cultural Impact of a Global
Sport (2014), and Beyond Soccer: International Relations and Politics as Seen
through the Beautiful Game (2017).
Seth Bartee is an Assistant Professor of History at Guilford Technical
Community College in Jamestown, North Carolina. Currently, Prof. Bartee
is serving as a New City Fellow in Raleigh, North Carolina and a Visiting
Scholar at The Kirk Center in Mecosta, Michigan. Bartee is an intellectual
historian and an active member of The Society for US Intellectual History.
Jean-Yves Camus is director of the Observatoire des radicalités politiques
(ORAP) at the Jean Jaurès Foundation (Paris) and a Research Fellow at
the Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques (IRIS). His last
book (with Nicolas Lebourg), Far Right Politics in Europe, was published by
Harvard University Press in 2017. He has also written extensively on the
European New Right and the links between Russia and the European Far
Right. On those topics, he contributed to Marlene Laruelle’s Eurasianism
and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe-Russia Relationship (2015)
and to Les Faux-semblants du Front national: Sociologie d’un parti politique
(2015), edited by Sylvain Crépon, Alexandre Dézé, and Nonna Mayer.
David Engels is professor of Roman history at the Université libre de
Bruxelles, Belgium. He has published numerous articles and books on
Roman Religion, Hellenistic Statecraft, the Reception of Antiquity, and
the Philosophy of History. Among his best-known works is Le déclin: La
crise de l’Union européenne et la chute de la République romaine: Analogies
historiques (2013), translated since then into numerous languages. He also
edited a survey of cyclical theories in the Philosophy of History titled Von
Platon bis Fukuyama (2015).
Stéphane François has a PhD in political science and is an associated
member of Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (CNRS/ Ecole Pratique
des hautes Etudes). He is a specialist on the French extreme Right. His
most recent books include Histoire de la haine identitaire: Mutations et
diffusions de l’altérophobie (with Nicolas Lebourg, 2016), L’Extrême droite
et l’ésotérisme: Retour sur un couple toxique (2016), Le Retour de Pan:.
Panthéisme, néo- paganisme et antichristianisme dans l’écologie radicale
(2016), Les Mystères du nazisme:. Aux sources d’un fantasme contemporain
(2015), and Au-delà des vents du Nord: L’extrême droite française, le Pôle nord
et les Indo-Européens (2014).
ix
Contributors ix
Matthew Lyons has been writing about right- wing politics for more
than twenty-five years. His work focuses on the interplay between social
movements and systems of oppression. He is coauthor with Chip Berlet
of Right-Wing Populism in America (2000) and lead author of Ctrl-Alt-
Delete: An Antifascist Report on the Alternative Right (2017). His essays have
appeared in many periodicals and on the radical antifascist blog Three
Way Fight.
Graham Macklin is an Assistant Professor/Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Center for Research on Extremism (C- Rex) in Oslo, Norway, and an
Honorary Fellow, Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish
Relations, Southampton University, United Kingdom. He has published
widely about extreme right-wing politics in Britain in both the interwar and
postwar period including “Very Deeply Dyed in Black”: Oswald Mosley and
the Resurrection of British fascism after 1945 (2007). His forthcoming mon-
ograph White Racial Nationalism in Britain in Britain will be published
by Routledge in 2019 as will two coedited collections, Transnational
x
x Contributors
Extreme Right-wing Networks and Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method
and Practice. His research has been funded by local and national govern-
ment as well as the European Union (H2020). He is also coeditor of the
Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right book series.
Reinhard Mehring is professor of political science at the University
of Education Heidelberg. He has a PhD in political science from the
University of Freiburg and a Habilitation from the Humboldt University of
Berlin. His books include Carl Schmitt zur Einführung (1992, 5th ed. 2017),
Carl Schmitt: Aufstieg und Fall: Eine Biographie (2009, translated as Carl
Schmitt: A Biography, 2014), Kriegstechniker des Begriffs: Biographische Studien
zu Carl Schmitt (2014), and Carl Schmitt: Denker im Widerstreit: Werk–
Wirkung–Aktualität (2017).
Elliot Neaman is professor of modern European intellectual history
at the University of San Francisco, where he has taught since 1993. He
specializes in European political thought, ideology, and theory. His first
book, A Dubious Past: The Politics of Literature after Nazism (1999), was
on the writer Ernst Jünger. His latest book features the West German
student movement, Free Radicals (1999). Neaman has also written exten-
sively about other major European thinkers, including Martin Heidegger,
Carl Schmitt, Georges Sorel, and Jacques Derrida. He also publishes in
European newspapers on contemporary issues, particularly geopolitics
and economics. His current research project focuses on espionage in the
Federal Republic. Neaman teaches courses in intellectual history, modern
German history, world history after 1945, and in the USF Honors Program.
Russell Nieli received his PhD from Princeton University where he spe-
cialized in political philosophy and the interface between religion and pol-
itics. He is a lecturer in Princeton University’s Politics Department, and
is a senior preceptor in Princeton’s James Madison Program in American
Ideals and Institutions. Nieli is the author of Wittgenstein: From Mysticism
to Ordinary Language, and in recent years has written extensively on race
relations in the United States, which he approaches from the perspective
of classical liberalism and what he calls “theocentric humanism.” In his
book Wounds That Will Not Heal (2012), he takes up the continuing con-
troversy over racial preference policies in the United States with a spe-
cial focus on American universities. He is currently working on a book
that explains the forces that can hold America together despite its vast
xi
Contributors xi
Introduction
Mark Sedgwick
xiv Introduction
“neo-Nazism” are also widely used but refer to political parties that rose
and fell in historical circumstances very different from today’s, and so
have limited value in a contemporary context. Nazi symbolism may some-
times be used for its countercultural shock value, but there is no serious
movement to reestablish the Nazi Party, and it is hard to imagine what real
neo-Nazism would look like. Among contemporary thinkers of the radical
Right, only one of any importance (Greg Johnson) expresses any sympathy
for Nazism.
The radical Right, too, has its own terminology. The term “New Right”
is often used, and the term “Alt Right” has recently come into prominence.
There are also nationalists, identitarians, libertarians, neoconservatives,
paleoconservatives, counter-jihadists, and neoreactionaries. These differ
in important ways, but all have something in common.
The approach taken by this book is to avoid questions of definition
and classification by focusing on thinkers who are widely read in all these
circles, in the US and in Europe. The thinkers who are discussed have been
selected on a number of bases. The selection reflects the editor’s own view
of the significance of different thinkers, and also the views of American
and European scholars working on the right who were consulted by the
editor. Reference has also been made to authors promoted on important
rightist websites such as Arktos, which has a European emphasis, and
Counter-Currents, which has an American emphasis, both of which are
discussed in the book, and to the views of selected participants in the rad-
ical right scene. The key question has been whether a thinker is widely
read today, whatever the period in which he (or, occasionally, she) wrote.
Only thinkers with a major current international audience have been in-
cluded. Many interesting contemporary thinkers writing in French or
German who have a primarily national audience have thus been excluded.
Thinkers who are also widely read outside the radical Right, and who for
that reason are already widely known, have also been excluded. In some
ways this is unfortunate, as the exclusion of Nietzsche and Heidegger
implies a greater divide between the radical Right and the more general
intellectual scene than actually exists. But many excellent discussions of
Nietzsche and Heidegger are already available elsewhere.
Like all such selections, this book’s choice of key thinkers is somewhat
arbitrary. In the end, it is representative rather than exhaustive. This is es-
pecially true when it comes to younger thinkers. It is easier to identify the
now classic thinkers who wrote in the early and middle twentieth century
than it is to identify more modern thinkers,1 and harder still to identify the
xv
Introduction xv
key thinkers who are emerging today, as there are many more of them,
and it is impossible to predict which will remain important.
Despite these limitations, this book gives a good idea of the thought
of the “radical” Right—a term that is used as it carries somewhat less
baggage than most alternatives. The book deliberately avoids making po-
litical judgments or value judgments. Its contributors write as scholars,
not activists, and its purpose is likewise scholarly. Attempts were made to
contact all the living thinkers covered, who were offered the opportunity
to suggest corrections of any errors they found. Not everyone responded
to these attempts, and not everyone then agreed to read and comment, but
the comments of those who did provide them were all taken into account.
Each chapter, however, is the responsibility of the author concerned.
The book is divided into three sections. It starts with four “classic”
thinkers: Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and Julius Evola.
These four are classic in the sense that, along with Nietzsche and Heidegger,
they are required reading for today’s intellectual radical Right. Three of
them were German (as, of course, were Nietzsche and Heidegger), part
of the informal group that was later identified as forming a “Conservative
Revolution,” a group to which the fourth classic thinker, Evola, an Italian,
was close. All save Spengler were active in the period in which their coun-
tries were under Nazi or Fascist rule, but only one, Schmitt, was an active
member of the Nazi Party. Jünger was courted by the Nazis, but neither he
nor Spengler supported them, Evola at times supported both the Fascists
and the Nazis, but he was never a member of the Fascist Party. It is im-
portant, then, to distinguish between this group of classic thinkers of
the radical Right and the historical Nazism and Fascism with which they
were contemporary. Only one of the classic thinkers of the radical Right
(Schmitt) was ever really a Nazi or Fascist, though one other (Evola) did
have a strong relationship with both Nazism and Fascism.
All of these classic thinkers save Spengler wrote their most important
work during the interwar period, and were thus marked by the First World
War, either directly or indirectly. Spengler wrote his most important work,
The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), during the war,
when a German victory was still possible. Schmitt was also marked by the
troubles of the Weimar Republic, in which, as a constitutional lawyer, he
was personally involved. All save Spengler, who died in 1936, also wrote
in the postwar period, but only Evola’s postwar work equals his interwar
work in importance. There were, of course, many other comparable
thinkers in the same period, from the official ideologists of Nazism and
xvi
xvi Introduction
Introduction xvii
xviii Introduction
very different circumstances, and addressing not the interwar but the
postwar world. All are explicitly political.
Two of the book’s modern thinkers—de Benoist and Faye—are French,
major figures in the so-called New Right (Nouvelle Droite) that emerged in
the 1960s in parallel to the better-known New Left of the same period, and
responding to similar stimuli. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian neo-Marxist
of the interwar period whose thought was so important for postwar neo-
Marxism and the New Left, was also of great importance for the French
New Right, which embraced his view that political revolution starts with
intellectual revolution: once the way people think about certain issues
changes, political and social change inevitably follows. This idea, known
as “Metapolitics,” became central to the French New Right and then to
other parts of the radical Right. The French New Right became a reference
point for the radical Right elsewhere in the West, and especially for the
single Russian thinker covered in the book, Dugin.
De Benoist drew on Nietzsche and Heidegger and on the classic
thinkers of the radical Right, especially Jünger (whom he knew, and whose
concept of the Anarch inspired him), Schmitt (whose distinction between
friend and enemy he used), and Spengler. Like Evola, de Benoist is a self-
declared pagan. He echoes Spengler’s understanding of cultures, though
he is interested in smaller communities than Spengler was. Like Jünger,
he is alarmed by what he saw as a homogenizing “ideology of sameness”
promoted by egalitarianism.2 Against this he pitches the “right to be dif-
ferent,” which he developed into “ethnopluralism,” the idea of communities
based on ethnicity rather than territory, called “ethnospheres” by Faye.3 De
Benoist and Faye were concerned about threats to European traditions and
culture during the Cold War, and initially saw both the Soviet Union and
the United States as a threat. Faye, but not de Benoist, then came to see
Muslim immigration and Islam as the threat, and the pairing of Muslim
immigration and ethnopluralism became characteristic of radical-Right
thought, one of the main bases of identitarianism, which stresses the im-
portance of protecting ethnic identities. Muslim immigration was not the
only threat that Faye saw in an apocalyptic “convergence of catastrophes,”4
which in effect constituted Schmitt’s State of Exception and required a
dictatorial response, but it was one of the most urgent.
Three other “modern” thinkers in this section of the book—Gottfried,
Buchanan, and Taylor—are American, men who in different ways estab-
lished intellectually sophisticated positions to the right of mainstream
Republicanism, the space that had previously been occupied by the
xi
Introduction xix
*****
He soutivat vaieten! —
— Terve Judas! —
Häntä huumasi, sydän löi niin oudosti, tunne oli sekava puoleksi
iloa, puoleksi tuskaa. — — —
*****
Pieni Johannes oli nostanut ruusun lattialta, mutta sen puna oli
käynyt valkeaksi, ainoastaan Jesus-lapsen suudelmien jäljet
näkyivät punaisina veripilkkuina sen valkoisilla terälehdillä, ja Jesus
puhui:
*****
IV.
ZEMZEM'IN JOUSI.
— Ilta läheni.
Oli jo miltei pimeä, kun iloinen nauru herätti surevan äidin, pieni
kauniskasvoinen Mohamed juoksi surevan äitinsä luo, ja häntä
seurasi heidän ainoa perintönsä Omm Aimân orjatar.
*****
Eräänä varhaisena aamuna nousi pyhä äiti lapsensa kanssa
kameelin selkään, ja uskollinen Omm Aimân seurasi heitä. He olivat
kotimatkalla Medinasta Mekkaan sukulaisensa Banû'Adij'an luota.
*****