Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Read online

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  Key Thinkers of the Radical Right

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  Key Thinkers of the

  Radical Right

  Behind the New Threat to Liberal

  Democracy

  Edited by

  MARK SEDGWICK

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  Contents

  Contributors

  vii

  Introduction— mark sedgwick

  xiii

  PART I: Classic Thinkers

  1. Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West— david engels

  3

  2. Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel— elliot y. neaman

  22

  3. Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Identity— reinhard mehring

  36

  4. Julius Evola and Tradition— h. thomas hakl

  54

  PART II: Modern Thinkers

  5. Alain de Benoist and the New Right— jean- yves camus

  73

  6. Guillaume Faye and Archeofuturism— stéphane françois

  91

  7. Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism— seth bartee

  102

  8. Patrick J. Buchanan and the Death of the West— edward ashbee 121

  9. Jared Taylor and White Identity— russell nieli

  137

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  Contents

  10. Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism— marlene laruelle

  155

  11. Bat Ye’or and Eurabia— sindre bangstad

  170

  PART III: Emergent Thinkers

  12. Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction— joshua tait

  187

  13. Greg Johnson and Counter- Currents— graham macklin

  204

  14. Richard B. Spencer and the Alt Right— tamir bar- on

  224

  15. Jack Donovan and Male Tribalism— matthew n. lyons

  242

  16. Daniel Friberg and Metapolitics in

  Action— benjamin teitelbaum

  259

  Select Bibliographies

  277

  Index

  293

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  Contributors

  Edward Ashbee is director of the International Business and Politics BSc

  and MSc programs at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He has

  had articles published in journals such as Political Quarterly, Parliamentary

  Affairs, Global Discourse, Society, Journal of Political Power, and Journal of

  American Studies. His recent work includes The Right and the Recession

  (2015) and The Trump Revolt (2017). He also coedited The Obama Presidency

  and the Politics of Change (2017).

  Sindre Bangstad is a Norwegian social anthropologist with a background

  in ethnographic studies of Muslims in South Africa and Norway, and a

  researcher at KIFO (the Institute for Church, Religion, and Worldview

  Research) in Oslo. Bangstad, who has published extensively on secularism,

  racism, Islamophobia, right- wing extremism, hate speech, and right- wing

  populism in Norway, holds a cand. polit. degree from the University of

  Bergen in Norway and a PhD from Radboud University in Nijmegen in the

  Netherlands. He is a columnist at Anthropology News and has published in

  popular outlets such as Boston Review, The Guardian (UK), Open Democracy,

  the SSRC’s The Immanent Frame, and in leading anthropological journals

  such as American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Anthropological

  Theory, Anthropology Today, and Social Anthropology. Among his books are

  Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (2014), The Politics of Mediated

  Presence: Exploring the Voices of Muslims in Norway’s Contemporary Mediated

  Public Spheres (2015), and Anthropology of Our Times: An Edited Volume in

  Public Anthropology (2017).

  Tamir Bar- On received his PhD from McGill University. He is a

  professor- researcher in the School of Social Sciences and Government,

  Tec de Monterrey (Mexico). A member of Mexico’s National System for

  Researchers since 2015, Bar- On is the author of Where Have All The

  Fascists Gone? (2007 ), Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to

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  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 Rel
igion, 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).

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  Contributors

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  Hans Thomas Hakl is the founder of Gnostika, a German academic- esoteric

  magazine where he serves as coeditor. He has edited works by Julius

  Evola, Eliphas Lévi, Gérard Encausse (“Papus”), Maria De Naglowska,

  Hans Freimark, and others. He is a contributor to the Dictionary of Gnosis

  and Western Esotericism (2003) and to the new edition of the Encyclopedia of

  Religions (2005). His main work, Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History

  of the Twentieth Century, was published by McGill- Queen’s University

  Press in 2013. Hakl has translated four books of Evola into German and

  written more than thirty articles (including introductions, reviews, and

  dictionary entries) on various aspects of Evola in German, Italian, English,

  and French. Hakl met Evola shortly before his death.

  Marlene Laruelle is an associate director and research professor at the

  Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott

  School of International Affairs, The George Washington University.

  Laruelle is also a codirector of PONARS (Program on New Approaches to

  Research and Security in Eurasia), director of the Central Asia Program

  at IERES and a researcher at EUCAM (Europe- Central Asia Monitoring),

  Brussels. Laruelle received her PhD in history at the National Institute of

  Oriental Languages and Cultures (INALCO) and her postdoctoral degree

  in political science at Sciences- Po in Paris.

  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

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  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

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  Contributors

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  demographic diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and collective

  achievement.

  Mark Sedgwick was born in England and studied history at Oxford

  University before emigrating to Egypt. He did a PhD at the University

  of Bergen in Norway, taught history at the American University in Cairo,

  and then moved to Denmark to teach in the Department of the Study of

  Religion at Aarhus University. He was secretary of the European Society

  of the Study of Western Esotericism, and first became aware of the

  connections between esotericism and radical politics while working on

  his PhD.

  Joshua Tait is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of North

  Carolina. His dissertation explores
the intellectual origins of conserva-

  tism and right- wing engagement with the “American Political Tradition.”

  Originally from New Zealand, he lives in Chapel Hill, NC.

  Benjamin R. Teitelbaum is assistant professor of ethnomusicology

  and affiliate in International Affairs at the University of Colorado. His

  commentary on Western ultraconservatism, culture, and politics has

  appeared in Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal

  as well as on Swedish Radio, and his academic essays have appear

  in Ethnomusicology, Patterns of Prejudice, Scandinavian Studies, Arkiv,

  and Current Anthropology. His first book, Lions of the North: Sounds of

  the New Nordic Radical Nationalism, was published in 2017 by Oxford

  University Press.

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  Introduction

  Mark Sedgwick

  T H E R A D I C A L R I G H T was once generally imagined in terms of skinheads,

  tattoo parlors, and hooligans. While all of these do play a role, there is

  much more to the contemporary radical Right than this. There is also an

  intellectual radical Right, little known to most, but increasingly important.

  The central purpose of Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New

  Threat to Liberal Democracy is to explore it.

  The existence of an intellectual radical Right is not a new phenom-

  enon. Many prominent thinkers from the French Revolution to the Second

  World War could be put in this category. The horrors of the war and of the

  Nazi camps, however, contributed to a general reaction against the radical

  Right that led to its disappearance from mainstream politics and to its

  eclipse in intellectual life. For many decades, a new liberal orthodoxy ruled

  across the West, apparently unchallenged.

  Since the start of the twenty- first century, the mainstream has been

  shifting. In Europe, “populist” political parties have pulled the mainstream

  in their direction, and the liberal orthodoxy of the postwar period is ever