Georges Duhamel: Civilization 1914-1917. E. S. Brooks translation. New York: The Century Company, 1919.

Georges Duhamel: America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future. Charles Minor Thompson translation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931.

Tomislav Sunic: Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age. Self-published, 2007.

 

For the European Right, the United States of America has loomed as a menace for a long time, held up as the embodiment of modernity—modernity seen as dehumanization, as the extension of the technological conquest of nature to human nature itself, an extension animated by misconceived notions of equality and liberty. But while Georges Duhamel criticized America for on the grounds of traditional European humanism, the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem, the New Right criticizes it in large measure for adhering to that heritage itself, especially to ‘Jerusalem.’

Georges Duhamel served as a French army surgeon throughout the First World War. In Civilization 1914-1917— a title of bitter irony—he begins with a soldier whose face he saw only for a moment, in the light of a match on a train at night, moving toward the front in 1916. Recalling that he had been in action twelve times to this point, the man said, “I’m always in luck: I have never been wounded but once.” The flare of the match “gave me a fleeting glimpse of a charming face”; “his whole presence radiated a sane and tranquil courage.” This was the “face of France.” This is no chauvinism on Duhamel’s part. The French fought with unremitting valor in that war. Those who deride supposed French poltroonery, along with France’s losses to Germany in 1871 and 1940, forget that the Germany of those years was no longer the Germany Napoleon rolled through at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, the thirty-seven sovereign German states had been united by Prussia into one powerful, militarized country, outnumbering the French by much more than three-to-two by 1914. In wars fought by mass armies, sheer population counted, as indeed the French in 1814 and the Germans in 1944 both learned during their invasions of Russia. “The world knows too little,” Duhamel rightly says, of “those Frenchmen of…grandeur of soul, indomitable intelligence, and touching naivete.”

“Will there ever be a night black enough to rob me of the image glimpsed in that flash of light?” Yet that face was disfigured in the war, where Duhamel “inhaled the fetid breath of fields thickly sown with corpses” in a “kingdom of dust” and mud, punctuated by field hospitals, where a “mass of human larvae writh[ed] on the floor,” larvae themselves covered with the larvae of the flies, feeding on the suppurating wounds of men in agony. “At times, overcome by all this suffering, I would beg for duty outside the camp, in order to let some fresh air in upon my mind and renew the tenor of my reflections,” which turned to “those people in the interior of the country” who “fill[ed] the cafe-concerts, the exhibitions, the moving pictures, the brothels—shamelessly enjoying themselves, the world and the season—and, sheltered by this trembling rampart of sacrifice, refuse to share in the universal distress.” War duty gave Duhamel “the opportunity to know men better than I had known them until then; to know them under a purer light, naked before death, stripped even of those instincts which disfigure the divine beauty of simple souls.” Even in the misery of war, “our race of workers has remained vigorous, pure, worth of the noble traditions of humanity”—men like Rebic, hideously wounded but weeping because he saw “all the trouble I am causing you,” his caregivers. Or the mortally wounded Réchousset, who looked at his “thin, ulcerated legs” and asked, “What’s the meaning of all this?” Or the doctor who told Duhamel, “The very idea of God seems to be something apart” from this “great catastrophe,” adding that the men must be told, “very simply,” that “there are some wounds that we cannot heal,” that only “when people stop making such wounds” will “the problem no longer exist.” “I owe to the war the knowledge of a new anguish—that of living beside a human being whom I knew, in spite of his strength and beauty, to be living under the threat of a terrible doom, and who had no future save that which hope and ignorance gave him.”

And then there was Rabot, a small man, his growth stunted by poor diet as a child, suffering “fearful, interminable dressing, repeated every day for months.” A well-born French lady, accompanied by “handsome, well-dressed,” and “very attentive” officers, entered the hospital, evidently on a fine mission to elevate the morale of the patients. “Rabot,” she told him, “You know already the greatest recompense of all: Glory! The rapturous ardor of combat!” Your suffering is “divine, because it is endured for all”; your wound is “holy,” making a hero a “god,” Christlike. At this, “a religious silence reigned in the ward.” Except for Rabot. He “ceased to resemble himself. All his features drew together, violently agitated in a manner that was almost tragic. A hoarse voice issued in jerks from his skeleton-like chest, and all the world could see that Rabot was laughing.” He laughed for nearly an hour, long after the lady and her retinue had departed. “After that it was as if something had changed in Rabot’s life.” Whenever his dressing was changed and he was “on the point of weeping and felt pain, one could always make him forget it and extort a little smile from him by saying in time: ‘Rabot! They’re going to send for the lady in green.'”

Another time, a train ran over a guard at a crossing called “La Folie.” “We picked up the debris, here and there, on all sides, fragments of bleeding flesh, entrails, and I remember finding a hand closed over a cheese. Death had surprised the man while he was eating.” Duhamel and his comrades carried the body parts from place to place, but no office in the army would accept them. He ended by taking the bloody mass back to his barracks, placing it next to his bed that night. “For a long moment,” listening to the sound of blood dropping from the stretcher to the floor, “I occupied myself with counting the drops while I reflected on many dreary things, the times we live in, for instance.” This was but one among “the uninterrupted file of human bodies” that entered the field hospital. “Sacred human flesh—holy substance that serves thought, art, love, all that is great in life—you are nothing but a vile, malodorous paste that one rakes in one’s hands in disgust, to judge whether or not it is fit for killing.”  As for those officials, reluctant to accept corpses, their type is seen in a civilian bureaucrat, M. Perrier-Langlade, who “was what is called a great organizer.” He keened to interfere in everyone else’s business, entering an office and “at once chang[ing] the position of every object and the function of every man,” his orders falling “like a rain of hail.” “An organization upon which his genius had been exercised would take several weeks to return to its normal functioning,” proving that “men of power who have ideas will never admit that simple mortals can have any.” Another such fellow “seized a fountainpen and was covering the walls with schemas,” “showing us in precise formulas how he wished us to think and act henceforth.” As he put it, “personal experience must abdicate before discipline.”

Consequently, Duhamel writes, “I hate the twentieth century, as I hate rotten Europe and the whole world on which this wretched Europe is spread out like a great spot of axle-grease.” The machines “that used to amuse me once, when I knew nothing about anything…now fill me with horror, because they are the very soul of this war, the principle and reason of this war.” Escape to a primitive society? No use: “I had thought of going to live among the savages, among the black people, but there aren’t even any real black people now. They all ride bicycles and want to be decorated,” decorated for their service in—the war.

There is nothing about America in Civilization 1914-1917. The Americans themselves had only begun to arrive in Europe in June 1917, to be readied for action at the front in October. But Duhamel turned his attention to France’s ally, detesting what he saw. 

Scenes from the Life of the Future (retitled America the Menace by its enterprising American publisher) begins where Civilization left off. “Of all the tasks common to the men of my time none is more urgent than of incessantly reviewing and correcting the idea of civilization,” “that burden of servitudes that is called independence.” Before the Great War, “the ideal of a universal civilization, built up by all that which the arts, the sciences, the philosophies, and even the religions had bountifully contributed to it, knew a period of great breadth and of almost insolent vogue”; “under an apparent pessimism, all the realistic and naturalistic literature of France was a paean in praise of civilization, the redeemer.” This “universal civilization” was to be “both ethical and scientific,” an engine of “both spiritual and temporal progress.” It was “at the height of its fortune when the war attacked it.” 

Universal civilization dissolved quickly because it harbored a contradiction at its core. It is one thing to understand civilization morally, as a means to “make people more human.” It is another thing to understand civilization as the realm of intricately designed machines, a civilization “that may be described as Baconian, since it is wholly based on the applications of the inductive method.” Baconian induction can tell you how to make machines, but it cannot tell you what to use them for. The teleology of modernism was supplied by historicism, in particular by various sorts of historicist progressivism. Historicism takes the results of empirical observation, facts recorded in history, then draws a general conclusion from those acts respecting ‘where history is going.’ Duhamel regards the war as the empirical refutation of this theory—a sort of malign but revealing Baconian experiment—while seeing that the war might be dismissed as a horrible but temporary setback, a sharp dip in the overall upward trend. The example of America is a much better indication of what ‘the end of history’ will look like.

“No nation has thrown itself into the excesses of industrial civilization more deliberately than America.” It began as a sort of tabula rasa, “free of traditions, of monuments, of a history,” a people “with no other ties than their redoubtable selves,” a land of industriousness and of industriousness alone. “American, then, represent for us the future”; because its deck started out cleared, it hasn’t needed to clear out any Old World and Old Regime debris. This is why “in material civilization, the American people are older than we,” a people “who even now are enacting for us many scenes of our future life.” But “before twenty years have passed” (i.e., by midcentury) “we shall be able to find all the stigmata of this devouring civilization on all the members of Europe.” Just as Tocqueville saw Europe’s future in American “democracy”—that is, in the condition of civil-social equality—so Duhamel sees it in American industrialism, American ‘machinism.’

And like Tocqueville, Duhamel voyaged to America. After boarding the ship that took him across the Atlantic, he fell into a conversation with the captain, who described a fantastic ‘potential’ scheme for diverting the Gulf Stream for some purpose he thought good: “What makes the strength and greatness of America is that there are always Americans who think seriously about everything.” Among those things Americans had thought of and enacted was a thoroughgoing inspection of Duhamel’s person and property at his port of entry, including an explanation of laws prohibiting alcoholic beverages, a health exam, and a plethora of customs rules, minutely enforced—fully two hours of “administrative fuss,” the institutionalization of M. Perrier-Langlade. The ship itself, a technological marvel, speeds the traveler comfortably to his chosen destination, but these “astonishing facilities offered by science to the traveler are thwarted by the dictator who speaks in the name of that same science,” holding that science “does not admit of doubt.” “Faith in science,” a new religion, is the faith of America. A physician justifies Prohibition by saying that while “that law is irksome to me sometimes…I am thankful to the State for protecting me, if necessary, even from myself.” 

American culture, such as it is, partakes of the same “new barbarity.” The movie theater “had the luxury of some big, bourgeois brothel—an industrialized luxury, made by soulless machines for a crowd whose own soul seems to be disappearing.” American soullessness reveals itself in the music it tolerates in such a place, “a sort of soft dough of music, nameless and tasteless,” a pastiche of fragment from European classics—the wedding march from “Lohengrin,” a bit of Haydn’s “Military Symphony,” the first allegro of Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony,” a few bars of Wagner’s “Tristan” and Shubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” (“Poor symphony! It had never been worse ‘unfinished’ than it was here.”). All polished off with a round of…jazz, that “triumph of barbaric folly.” “Was there no one to cry murder? For great men were being murdered. All those works which from our youth we have stammered with our hearts rather than with our lips, all those sublime songs which at the age of passionate enthusiasms were our daily bread, our study, and our glory, all those thoughts which stood for the flesh and blood of our masters, were dismembered, hacked to pieces, and mutilated. They passed by us now like shameful flotsam and jetsam on this wave of warm melted lard.” “The cinema is a pastime for slaves, an amusement for the illiterate, for poor creatures stupefied by work and anxiety,” a “spectacle that demands no effort, that does not imply any sequence of ideas, that raises no questions, that evokes no deep feeling, that lights no light in the depths of any heart, that excites no hope, if not the ridiculous one of some day becoming a ‘star’ at Los Angeles.”

And then there was vaudeville, The Ziegfield Follies, with its bare-legged showgirls, pop vocalists, and “young comedians in flaring trousers and short jackets, who raced upon the stage, spouted four jokes and raced off again”; they “seemed like living symbols of the young American—likable, uneducated, taking what comes, without initiative or individuality.” The ‘acts’ “succeeded one another in a dizzy jostle.” “Hurry, hurry! Faster, faster!” No boredom must be permitted, but neither must anything rouse the American citizen from “his bovine slumber.”  Above all, American entertainment rejects thought. “A people stupefied by fugitive pleasures that are only skin-deep, and that are obtained without the smallest mental effort, will some day find itself incapable of doing any task that requires sustained resolution, or of advancing even a little through the energy of its thought.” Do not cite American manufacturing achievements against me, as counter-evidence. “A building rises two or three stories a week. Wagner needed twenty years to put together his Tetralogy, Littré a lifetime to build his dictionary.” Indeed, the greatest European buildings, the cathedrals, took many decades to complete.) American arts, the arts of the machine age, of the forward rush of Progress, “subject our hearts and minds to no tests,” striving to “gratify us to the limit” while “procur[ing] for us always a painful sensation as of unquenched thirst.” Although “its essence is motion,” it “leaves us dull and motionless, as if paralyzed.” Duhamel remarks to one American, you are poor because “Time is the greatest wealth, and you never have any.” 

Still another form of American self-entertainment may be found in the football stadium, a structure “belong[ing] to that sort of architecture which is cynically frank about its utilitarian purpose.” That purpose is, once again, to rev up a “plebeian crowd, without distinction and without authority” with glee clubs, bands, songs, and shouts organized by the captain of cheerleading squad. “With a megaphone in her hand, and with her skirts flying in the wind, she screamed, flounced about, gave play to leg and haunch, and performed a suggestive and furious dance de ventre, like the dances of the prostitutes in the Mediterranean ports. From time to time she reassembled her aviary”— her cheerleading subordinates—and “encouraged it to a fresh outburst of shrill screaming.” The sound of America is not music; the sound of America is noise.

The result is what Tocqueville called soft despotism, attained partly by political means but mostly through culture. “This slavery has established itself so stealthily and advanced with such caution that men could hardly keep from accommodating themselves to it.” Who can argue against “obviously reasonable principles of hygiene, morality esthetics, and social civilization”? When enacted, such principles provide a sense of security to each citizen and “quickly assume the character and strength of organic habits.” “In the modern state, most men good-humoredly recognize their incompetence in a multitude of things, and modestly delegate every power to specialists whose zeal is all the greater because it rarely goes unpaid.” The modern states “go beyond their rights,” but citizens do not notice that they are on the road to serfdom. They travel that road on automobiles, with “rouged and powdered young girls pilot[ing] mastodons to and from school.” Those mastodons will soon end up in the elephant graveyard of the automobile junkyard, emblems of “the great country that does not produce in order to enjoy in moderation and in reason, but that enjoys as it acquires—feverishly and without sense—so that it may be able to produce a little bit more.” On the highway, Duhamel saw in the interior of a car “a symbol of the world of the future,” a “charming woman with manicured nails and beautiful legs, who smoked a cigarette while traveling between fifty and sixty miles an hour, while her husband, seated on the cushions of the rear seat, with a set jaw scribbled figures on the back of an envelope.”

In the middle of America is Chicago, “the tumor, the cancer, among cities,” a place of noise and “tainted fogs,” where gargantuan buildings are thrown up in months only to be torn down tomorrow, “putting into its place something else, bigger, more complex, and more expensive.” In such a city, “the artist “must fall into step,” obey, “either hurry or quit.” “All the ideas that animate” Chicago architecture “smell of fashion and of death.” Its slaughterhouses only add not only to the physical but to the spiritual stink, lending the city “the natural and intimate odor of American luxury” in sanctuaries of “carnivorous humanity, the realm of scientific death.” “You have put into practice a sort of bourgeois communism,” he tells one Chicagoan,” with the “same suppression of the individual.” Before seeing it, who could have imagined Chicago, “the ant-hill, the city that is not even ugly, but that is haggard and inhuman as a drunkard’s nightmare”? “I gazed through the window of the nocturnal city, unbridled and shaken with all the furies and with all the lust that seemed to me to be seeking everywhere, even in the rain-sodden clouds, the phantom of joy, pure human joy, forever driven from the world.” The “genius of America” does “not know the soundest ambition of all: the ambition to defy time.” In America, “everything is too big; everything discourages Apollo and Minerva.” Nature itself is tyrannized, as “the greatest river in the world,” the “legendary Mississippi,” which begins not far from Chicago, can barely be seen for the docks, oil tanks, and levees that crowd its banks. 

In a sense, America opposes time’s ravages not by making monuments that will last but by idolizing statistics, by following the law of averages. Duhamel includes his dialogue with an American businessman, a manufacture of mattresses, “a genius in the field of trade.” They discussed insurance. Railroad crossings, they agreed, are dangerous. To reduce the danger, the railroad owners could invest in modifying the crossings but insurance against injuries and deaths is less expensive. When Duhamel ventured to suggest that numbers “do not cover every aspect of the question,” Mr. Stone (Duhamel isn’t above naming him that) dismisses such “sentimental considerations,” considerations which would falsify the arithmetic “without helping anyone.” But does this not “lower the standard of public morals?” No, Mr. Stone replies, because insurance “settles a loss that otherwise might have no chance of fair compensation.” To put it more systematically, Stone argues that railroad accidents will be more numerous than they would be if the railroad companies fixed the crossings, but those accident victims who would be injured at the improved crossing would go uncompensated. Duhamel suggests that it would be better, morally, if the number of accidents were reduced. Stone may well think that the companies would be sued by the (less numerous) victims, so they will need insurance anyway, although presumably their premiums would be lower. In his own business, he wants insurance against employee theft because he prefers not to “spy on my employees to find out whether they are honest” nor to “trust to their conception of good and evil, to scruples of their conscience.” He would rather insure each of them “for a sum corresponding to the harm he can do me.”

Duhamel observes that Mr. Stone has drifted into moral language, despite his attempt to brush it off as mere sentiment. He then brings down a rather heavy hammer, Henri Bergson, who distinguishes “the extensive,” which can be measured, translated into numbers, and “the intensive,” which “is subject to no measure.” “To that question insurance makes an answer that I find disquieting, but that all the rest of the world is beginning to approve: according to the insurance people, the common measure between the extensive and the intensive is money.” Stone replies that this is “one of the greatest achievements” of the insurance industry: it permits disputants to resolve their conflicts peacefully, “conflicts that threaten to perpetuate themselves in anger and hatred.” That is, qualitative/”intensive” disputes, if pressed, must lead to violence, precisely because they admit of no worldly measure. To this, Duhamel can only say that modern civilization oversimplifies, “pretend[ing] to harmonize the universe” by “commercial[ing] certain moral values.” Insofar as it does this, modern civilization becomes uncivilized, reducing acts of faith, hope, and contrition to a cash nexus.” Thus, “almost all scientific discoveries”—in this case, the “law of compensation”—are “big with a certain amount of good and with a notable quantity of evil.”

A more sinister example of the cash nexus in America was slavery. As did Tocqueville, Duhamel reserves a place for the dilemma of race in America. The slavery his predecessor saw is gone, but racial segregation remains. When another of his dialogic partners calls this problem insoluble, Duhamel meets his interlocutor with irony. “Until this moment I have never had any assured belief in immanent justice,” in the conviction “that every fault is punished in the end.” But now I see that “the unnumbered crimes of the slave-trade and of slavery that were the foundation of American prosperity cannot be expiated, and that those crimes have pierced the side of American happiness with an incurable wound—do you not find that, from the moral point of view, the idea is consolatory, and, all things considered, beautiful?”

Duhamel does not expect that this incurable wound will kill America, and in a way that is the problem. America prospered with slavery but it continues to prosper, to an even greater degree, without it. This makes it a menace. In Alabama, Duhamel asks a bull breeder why one of the bulls is “so bad-tempered.” He wasn’t always that way, the breeder recalls, but after he fought another bull and killed it, “he has been crazy with pride”; now knowing “what conquering is,” the bull “wants to conquer everything he sees.” For his part, Duhamel “thought sadly of the great peoples who glory suddenly intoxicates”—his own France, under Napoleon, cannot be far from his mind—peoples “who, alas, have no rings in their noses” with which they can be restrained, like the bad-tempered bull. America was not so much intoxicated by its victory in the Great War but at “the moment when the home market became too small for the United States,” and it took its commercial and manufacturing way of life worldwide.

Tocqueville saw the future of Europe, of the world, in the democracy he saw in America. Duhamel undertakes the same attempt. “By means of this America I am questioning the future; I am trying to determine that path that, willy-nilly, we must follow.” He invokes Maurice Maeterlinck’s comparison of modern life to the nests of ants and termites—the “same effacement of the individual, the same progressive reduction and unification of social types, the same organization of the group into special castes, the same submission of everyone to those obscure exigencies which Maeterlinck names the genius of the hive or of the ant-hill.” Human beings differ from insects, however, in their inventiveness. They will find new ways to subject themselves to inhuman tyranny. And so, “if steel machinery refuses to make profitable progress, nothing remains except to turn to man and modify the human machine” by means of “scientific human breeding and selection,” to “create a body of people, sexless, devoid of passion, exclusively devoted to the instruction, the feeding, and the defense of the city?” Eugenics had already been proposed and assembly lines implemented in Duhamel’s lifetime.

Those who have emigrated to America are dupes, “miserable multitudes” drawn to the light of Liberty’s torch like insects to the flame. “What has their new country given them in exchange for their sacrifices? It has given them new needs and new desires. The whole philosophy of this industrial dictatorship leads to this unrighteous scheme: to impose appetites and needs on man.” But “the supreme luxury is silence, fresh air, real music, intellectual liberty, and the habit of joyous living,” “delicate riches” for which no one in America cares. Americans only want “to keep selling, even on credit, above all, on credit!” pushing back “the limits of the market, unceasingly to put off till the morrow the threatening saturation point.” Immigration homogenizes, lending itself to the same thoughts, the same desires to produce and consume; with commercial and personal credit, faith in money has replaced faith in God. “Spread everywhere with infinite variations, the American system now has the whole world for its field,” seemingly “compatible with every political system,” turning even the Soviet Union “into a colony” of American materialism. And it is inescapable, since “there are no revolutions among the insects.”

The only hope is in collapse, unpredictable collapse: if “someday without anyone’s knowing why, without anyone’s foreseeing it, without anyone’s succeeding in explaining it after the event, the incredible machine foes off the track, collapses, and falls in cinders. For in the case of man, you never know.” 

Duhamel’s wrote his jeremiad in the name of the old European civilization, against modernity and its attempt to conquer nature with the technologies generated by Baconian science. The Croatian New-Right political scientist, Tomislav Sunic detests that civilization as well, hearkening to a certain conception of pre-Biblical, pre-Socratic Europe. But unlike Duhamel, he sees in America and “Americanism” the nadir of the West, biblical and philosophic. “The former European conservative palaver needs to be reexamined.”

But New-Right neopaganism is not his initial stance, although he does devote a few sentences, early on, to conjecturing that “Americanism…could have become a true motivating force of creativity for a large number of people of European extraction” in the United States had it “renounced Biblical moralism and adopted instead a neo-Darwinian, evolutionary, and racialist approach in its domestic and foreign policy” (as indeed Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century). “Racialism and eugenics had numerous supporters in America and both fields were well combined with early American liberalism,” that is, progressivism.” For the most part, however, in his early chapters he limits himself to deploring America as the product of Enlightenment—that is to say, modern—notions, especially equality and progress. 

Egalitarianism and progressivism made Homo americanus and Homo sovieticus “twin brothers.” The difference was that the American elites were smarter than the Soviet elites, preferring an easygoing soft despotism, the ideology of “fun,” to the “physical terror” wielded by the Leninists, which provoked resistance. “Communism kills the body, in contrast to Americanism which kills the soul,” but most people would rather let their souls die than have their bodies die. Sunic assigns the cause of the twinship of American and Soviet man to “the same principles of egalitarianism, however much their methods varied in name, time and place.”

The problem is obvious: the equality described as a self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence is founded on natural right, the Soviet principle of equality on historical right. The American Founders hold that all men are created equal, but only with regard to their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and not on the ’empirical’ grounds of equal intelligence or moral character. Few if any of the American Founders themselves supposed themselves the moral equals of George Washington, to take one example. The founders of the Soviet Union held not that all men are created equal (as atheists, they denied that men were created, in the first place), but that ‘history,’ conceived as the conflict between socioeconomic classes, proceeds ‘dialectically’ toward an inevitable outcome in egalitarian communalism. Further, the effort to hurry ‘history’ along to that consummation was utterly unrestricted by any regard for life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or, of course, property, which was held to be the shibboleth of the hated ‘bourgeoisie’ and its ‘capitalism.’ It is simply not true that “discourse about the end of history has been a standard theme in America over the last two hundred years.” The Americans argued not from ‘history’ but from natural rights, holding democratic and commercial republicanism to be the best regime for securing natural rights.

Despite his animus against the Declaration of Independence and his esteem for the racialist Southern writer, George Fitzhugh, Sunic more or less sees this, although he prefers not to admit it openly. He argues, rather, that once the flood gates of egalitarianism open—however modest this may appear at the beginning—the logic of equality will gather momentum and will end up eventually in some protean form of proto-communist temptation.” That is, Sunic avails himself of the same logic of historicism that he deplores, although in this case it is a logic of inevitable decline, not of progress. He equally partakes of the relativism of historicism, dismissing Thomas Jefferson as merely “a man of his epoch” whose “intellectual legacy can only be understood within the spirit of his time, ” who “certainly did not consider native Indians or Africans to be his equals”—a claim that ignores the actual understanding of equality Jefferson propounded. But to the historicist, it doesn’t really matter what Jefferson thought. “What Jefferson and his likes had in mind is of little importance; what is important is what his successors and non-European American interpreters had in mind two centuries later,” namely, “justification for copying paleo-communistic practices,” such as thought-policing on the basis of ‘political correctness.’ Historicism commits him to the perilous strategy of political prediction. There are, he claims, “looming inter-racial riots in America, which will likely break up America,” he claims, without explaining why such riots, were they to occur, would ruin the country any more than the ones that actually happened in the last century did. 

Sunic blames the epidemic of political correctness on the post-World War II effort to sustain the regime change in western Germany in the aftermath of Nazism. “Although Fascism, as an organized political system, no longer poses a threat to Western democracies, any criticism—however mild it may be—of egalitarianism and multiculturalism can earn the author or politician the stigma of ‘fascism,’ or even worse, of ‘anti-Semitism.'” Thus, “principles of vilification of an intellectual opponent or a political adversary have become the rule in postmodernity.” One must ask, when has vilification of intellectual opponents and political adversaries not been the rule? Ancient Athens, whether pre- or post-Socratic? Rome? China, ancient or modern? Have intellectual opponents and political adversaries often been subject not merely to vilification but death, more or less throughout human history? 

At the end of World War II, “the liberal and communist tenets of free speech and freedom of expression did not apply at all to the defeated side which had earlier been branded as ‘the enemy of humanity.'” But when were freedom of speech and of expression tenets of communism? And was fascism not in principle an enemy of humanity, being based, in its Nazi version and in its later Italian version, upon a doctrine of biologically-based racial superiority, a superiority so pronounced that it claimed to entitle its proponents to enslave and kill members of the inferior races? 

“The entire West, including America itself, has become a victim of collective guilt which, strangely enough, is induced more by intellectual self-denial and by Christian-inspired atonement, and less by state repression,” since the despotism remains ‘soft,’ needing not “to resort to violent means” for its enforcement but by “a cultural smearing campaign.” One might reply to this, that does not need to subscribe to that soft despotism, which has indeed prevailed in many sectors of intellectual and political life in the West, to blame it on influences other than regime change in postwar Germany or on Christianity. It is indeed to a substantial extent true that “post-communist and post-Marxist intellectuals” “relentlessly avocat the ideology of multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and globalism.” It is silly to blame this on “Judeo-Centric modern historiography.” But that is what Sunic proceeds to do in the second half of the book.

The argument runs as follows. The real founding date of America was 1619, not 1776 or 1789, when the Constitution was ratified. “Biblical vocabulary has played a much stronger role in American public affairs than the much-lauded American constitutionalism or the praised rule of law” because “despite the fact that America’s founding fathers were men of the Enlightenment, opposed to religious fanaticism of any sort, the Calvinist heritage continued to have the upper hand in formulating the American political character and American society at large.” Sunic offers no proof of this, and no proof of his charge that America’s “obsession with moralistic preaching borders on mass delirium,” unbeknownst to “most Americans.” As for religious freedom, “what is the point of talking about tolerance in a system where Biblical conformism” in the form of Bible-established moral convictions, even among ‘secularists,’ “is considered a norm by all”? Worse still, “of all Christian denominations, Calvinism was the closest to the Jewish religion and…the United States owes its very existence to Jews,” some of whom bankrolled the American Revolution. “From its inception, America was an ideal country for Jews.” More, “Jewish influence in America is not only the product of Jews; it is the logical result of Gentiles’ acceptance of the Jewish founding myths that have seeped over centuries into Europe and American in their diverse Christian modalities,” with “postmodern Americanism” being “just the latest secular version of the Judean mindset.”

This was understood by “the best anti-Semitic brains” of the 1930s, who were harnessed by “the government in National Socialist Germany” to “document every nook and cranny of Judaism in the Soviet Union and America.” But alas, Sunic sighs, “at the beginning of the 21st century, these books are either banned or derided as unscientific and anti-Semitic prose.” It is not clear why anti-Semitic brains would not produce anti-Semitic prose, or why those opposed to anti-Semitism are wrong to describe their prose as anti-Semitic. But to be fair to Sunic, what he wants to say is that almost all anti-Semitism is ill-founded because it is Christian, or Christian-derived, and “Was Jesus not a Jew?”  His point is to formulate a way “to counter strong Jewish influence in Americanism without lapsing into anti-Semitism” of the sort that Christianity-ladened anti-Semites uphold. Sunic is, strictly speaking, anti-Judaic and therefore anti-Christian. [1] “The West, and particularly America will cease to be Israelite once it leaves this neurosis” of “yearning to become Israelite” and “returns to its local myths,” the myths that predated the arrival of Judaism and Christianity in Europe, when the anti-Semite of Europe and America ceases “lug[ging] behind himself a Levantine deity that is not of European cultural origin.” 

Sunic does not expect a revival of ancient paganism, preferring a “modern version of it, “a certain sensibility and a ‘way of life.'” The effort to construct this sensibility will include recurrence to “ancient myths, fairy tales, and forms of folklore that bear the peculiar mark of pre-Christian themes,” but much more “forging another civilization, or rather, a modernized version of scientific and cultural Hellenism,” with the polytheism of the ancients translated into a moral code that “stres[ses] courage, personal honor, and spiritual and physical self-surpassing”—that is, a warrior ethic that acknowledges hierarchy against egalitarianism, including the hierarchy of “biological Darwinism. “In pagan cosmogony, man alone is considered a forger of his own destiny (faber suae fortunae), exempt from historical determinism, from any ‘divine grace,’ or economic and material constraints.” At the same time, Sunic claims that the polytheism of pre-Christian religions “offers homage to all ‘gods’ and, above all…respects the plurality of all customs, political and social systems, and all conceptions of the world—of which these gods are sublime expressions”—well, except for the God of the Bible. “Democracy and independence—all of this existed among the early predecessors of Americans in ancient Europe, albeit in its own unique social and religious settings.” Avoiding such severe Biblical dichotomies as good and evil, the pagans were so much more tolerant than Western civilization became, under the Bible’s baleful influence. 

This is, of course, rubbish. Human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, was practiced among ancient Europeans (including the Greeks) as well as by ancient Americans. And indeed it was practiced by the best (and worst) anti-Semitic brains in Germany and Russia during the 1930s. Judaism prohibits it. Nor did the ancients regard themselves as masters of fate; fate may favor the bold, favor the ‘makers,’ but no one in pre-Socratic Greece or in the ancient world generally denied its ultimate authority. As for toleration, religious or otherwise, the Greeks killed Socrates and the Romans killed Christians. “Who can dispute that Athens was the homeland of European America before Jerusalem became its painful edifice?” Who can dispute that pre-Biblical Athens was every bit as warlike and intolerant as post-Biblical Athens? 

Sunic attempts to leverage these claims into a critique of U. S. foreign policy. He dissents from Europeans who claim that American military interventions in the post-World War II decades have “had as a sole objective economic imperialism.” (He does, however, praise the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer, who “had some influence on the views held by National Socialist Germany”; actually, he tutored Hitler and Rudolf Hess during their imprisonment in the early 1920s. Haushofer claimed that “American economic imperialism [was] irreconcilable with the notion of Germany’s self-sufficient large spaces (Grossraum), i.e. an international regime best suited for co-existence with different states and cultures”— a capacious and tolerant place, indeed, had it not entailed genocide and enslavement of ‘inferior races,’ at least in its Nazi version.) The intention has rather been “the desire to spread American democracy around the world,” an ambition that military challengers to America “ran the risk of being placed outside the category of humanity or labeled as a terrorist.” He fails to produce an example of American policy makers who have placed military “challengers” to America as outside the category of humanity. As for the terrorists, well, they are terrorists. “Why not point out that Bible-inspired American ideology can be as intolerant as Islamism”? I can only answer: probably because it isn’t.

Sunic doesn’t limit his complaints to the postwar era, however. Pre-war Germany “was on the way of becoming a major Euro-Asian steam-roller ready to challenge America’s access to energy sources in the rimland countries of the Middle East and the Pacific Basin.” If so, why were Americans not at war with the biggest empire in the world at that time, Great Britain? As Sunic would have it, America was really to blame for Hitler’s declaration of war, since the United States had engaged in “illegal supplying of war material to the Soviet Union and Great Britain” before that declaration; had fought German submarines in the Atlantic; and, horror of horrors, had permitt[ed] “incessant anti-German media hectoring by American Jews.” He quotes with approval the assessment of “German scholar Giselher Wirsing, who had close ties with propaganda officials in the Third Reich,” who wrote, “In degenerated Puritanism lies, side by side with Judaism, America’s inborn danger.”  But never mind, regimes and policies aside, even if “there were some replica of America, with the same geographical size, the same military capability, and sharing the same democratic values—it is very likely that present day American would sooner or later find itself on a collision course” with it. Why does Sunic think so? Because, for all his interest in culture, Sunic prefers not to notice the importance of political regimes and the obvious fact, understood since Montesquieu, that commercial republics don’t make war against each other. 

Sunic concedes that it might, realistically speaking, be “preferable to have American-staged security to some vague notions replete with fear and violence.” Unfortunately, ‘Judaic’ America instead sets for itself “absolute foes that merit total annihilation,” as seen, he alleges, in the American Civil War, the “firebombing of defenseless European cities during the Second World War,” and the overall “destruction of Germany.” The argument founders on the observation that the secessionist states were scarcely annihilated, the defenseless European cities were the sites of the German military industries, and Germany wasn’t destroyed. In fact, West Germany, as distinguished from Soviet-controlled East Germany, became the economic powerhouse of Europe within a generation, thanks in part to American aid and protection from the Soviet empire. “Nobody knows the exact number of Germans killed by American forces during and after World War II,” although one must observe that is likely to be considerably fewer than 11 million—the generally accepted number of innocents murdered by the Nazis, quite apart from the deaths inflicted in the wars they started. Predictably, Sunic calls that number exaggerated. Sure, maybe it was only seven or eight million.

As for ‘postmodernism,’ Sunic follows the French scholar Christian Ruby in distinguishing it from “neo-modernity.” The latter is “more convivial and more egalitarian in its sources, having its philosophical root in the philosophy of Kant and universal reason,” all of which Sunic despises. Postmodernity “has its inspiration in nihilist and pro-fascist philosophers, Nietzsche and Heidegger.” (Nietzsche, who died two decades before Mussolini invented fascism, utterly despised German nationalism, but let that pass.) Sunic has a good old time ridiculing Leftists for appropriating postmodernism for egalitarian causes (“they abhor every aspect of fascism yet, on the other, their theories are inconceivable without the extrapolation of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s prose”). Postmodernity’s only good aspect is that “it is self-destructive.” In his characteristically desultory fashion, he soon turns to lauding George Fitzhugh, the pro-slavery author of Cannibals All! “Black slavery was to Fitzhugh a matter of fact; a social bond necessary for black Americans, who due to their incapacity to equally participate in free trade and cut throat competition, are far better off in farm bondage in the South supervised by a paternalistic white farmer, than working for a Northern white crook who pontificates about human rights and strips them of human dignity. In what sense are 21st century blacks in America better off than their predecessors?” (They aren’t enslaved, for starters, and exhibit no inclination to return to either slavery or post-slavery Southern segregation.) Blacks, according to Sunic, along with “other races and individuals,” lack “the stamina and the genes to compete in the free market.” “Only a true aristocratic society, where leaders are role models, can have lasting legitimacy.” 

“In the near future, Americanism, similar to the former system of communism, will only function as an elementary form of mass survivalism in which interracial wars will be the norm.” Or so Sunic hopes.

 

Note

1. That anti-Semitism has its origins not fundamentally in racism but in anti-Judaism is the argument of Dennis Praeger and Joseph Telushkin: Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. For a review, see “Anti-Jewish Malice” on this website under “Bible Notes.”

 

 

 

 

Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier: Manifesto for a European Renaissance. 1999. In Tomislav Sunic: Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right. Third edition. London: Arktos Books, 2011.

 

“The French New Right was born in 1968,” the annus mirabilis of the French New Left, which it in some ways resembles, not the least of which being its utopianism. Unlike the New Left, however, which began as a political movement and ended up in think-tanks and universities, the New Right took the path in reverse, beginning as “a think-tank and a school of thought,” aiming at what Benoist and Champetier call “a metapolitical perspective.” By this, they mean a stance “rest[ing] solely on the premise that ideas pay a fundamental role in collective consciousness and, more generally, in human history.” Human will and action shape “History,” but “always” do so “within the framework of convictions, beliefs, and representations which provide meaning and direction.” This begins with calling their movement the French New Right, despite the call for a European renaissance; that renaissance will resist universalisms of all kinds, even any universalism limited to Europe, as seen in such notions as Jean Monnet’s “United States of Europe” or its real-world would-be precursor, the European Union.

The Manifesto‘s first half consists of a critique of the modern West. “The major crisis” of this “age” is “the end of modernity,” modernity as constituted by individualism, massification, desacralization, rationalism in the sense of instrumental reason, the cult of efficiency, and the attempted universalization of all those features or “processes.” Modernity dates from 1700. “In most respects, it represents a secularization of ideas and perspectives borrowed from Christian metaphysics.” That is, Christianity already encouraged individuality “in the notion of individual salvation and of an intimate and privileged relation between an individual and God that surpasses any relation on earth.” Massification or egalitarianism also has a Christian origin “in the idea that redemption is equally available to all mankind, since all are endowed with an individual soul whose absolute value is shared by all humanity.” Christianity promoted desacralization in the sense that it denied the divinity of the cosmos, now relegated to the status of a mere creation of the holy God, a god entirely separate from and superior to that creation. Instrumental rationalism at the service of ‘progress’ imitates the Christian idea of Providence, “that history has an absolute beginning and a necessary end, and that it unfolds globally according to a divine plan.” And, obviously, Christianity is a universalist religion, seeking converts among Jews and Gentiles alike, worldwide. Thus, “today Christianity has unwittingly become the victim of the movement it started,,” “the religion of the way out of religion,” as “modern political life itself is founded on secularized theological concepts,” with its political-philosophic schools “agree[ing] on one issue: that there is a unique and universalizable solution for all social, moral and political problems” whereby humanity, “understood to be the sum of rational individuals,” is “called upon to realize their unity in history,” in the process overcoming unity’s “obstacle,” diversity. Modernity “attempts by every available means to uproot individuals from their individual communities, to subject them to a universal mode of association.” Although the several kinds of socialism, including fascism, communism, and social democracy, have attempted this, “the most efficient means for doing this” in practice, not in ‘theory,’ “has been the marketplace.”

Although “the imagery of modernity is dominated by desires of freedom and equality,” “these two cardinal values have been betrayed” by “the dominance of the global marketplace,” technology, and modern statism. Proclaiming human rights, modernity provides no “means to exercise them” in the face of these ruling forces, all wielded by a small elite, ‘progressing’ by means of pseudoscientific “management of global society” towards ever-increasing soft despotism, while wrecking humanly scaled communities and sucking nature dry. Still worse, “modernity has given birth to the most empty civilization mankind has ever known: the language of advertising has become the paradigm of all social discourse; the primacy of money has imposed the omnipresence of commodities; man has been transformed into an object of exchange in a context of mean hedonism; technology has ensnared the life-world in a network of rationalism,” a world “replete with delinquency, violence and incivility, in which man is at war with himself and against all,” that is, “an unreal world of drugs, virtual reality and media-hyped sports, in which the countryside is abandoned for unlikeable suburbs and monstrous megalopolises, and where the solitary individual merges into an anonymous and hostile crowd, while traditional social, political, cultural or religious mediations become increasingly uncertain and undifferentiated.” One might object that this portrait is more than a little exaggerated, but, then, the document is, after all, a manifesto. Writing in 1999, before the rise of the hypermodern Chinese state had become noticeable to many intellectuals, the authors identify liberalism as “the main enemy,” liberalism as the doctrine of the primacy of quantity over quality, of market economics, and of individualism justified by the assertion of unalienable rights drawn from the falsely claimed asociality of human nature. Market economics especially inserts Darwinism into social thought—incoherently, since Darwinism “says absolutely nothing about the value of what is chosen” by means of social competition. “But man is not satisfied with mere survival.” Marxian socialism, capitalism’s rival, “belongs to the same universe” as an heir of Enlightenment thought (rationalism, universalism, primacy of economics, the labor theory of value, faith in progress towards and imagined “end of history,” a progress won over the dead bodies of competitors). Liberalism undermines genuinely political life, self-government, by reducing representative democracy “to a market in which supply becomes increasingly limited (concentration of programs and convergence of policies) and demand less and less motivated (abstention).” “In its economic, political and moral forms, liberalism represents the central bloc of the ideas of a modernity that is finished.” 

Postmodern life, now upon us, has seen the return of social violence and the multiplication of intra- and supra-state conflicts, including religious warfare, all of which liberals expected to disappear. But postmodernism also sees an increasing concern for the quality of life, the revival of communities, growing opposition to the elites, the politic of group identities, and what to the authors is the welcome decline of established religions, especially of Christianity, modernity’s archē. The New Right would build on these latter trends. 

Benoist and Champetier identify nine “foundations” of modernity. The first two amount to elements of a false anthropology. Modernity either denies the existence of human nature altogether, as seen in Rousseau but also to a more limited extent in Locke’s claim that the human mind is a tabula rasa, or makes it amount to nothing more than “abstract attributes disconnected from the real world and lived experience.” Such notions conduce to thinking of human beings as “infinitely malleable,” things to be remade into the ‘new man’ by means of “the brutal and progressive transformation” of the human social environment, living in a utopia made real by ‘totalitarian’ tyranny and its concentration camps. Liberalism is the same thing, but milder and more gradualist. These moderns are wrong. Human individuals bear the general characteristics of a natural species, along with specific hereditary dispositions which decisively influence their “attitudes and modes of behavior,” blocking the radical transformations moderns envision. Moreover, “man is not just an animal,” one species among many, but a being conscious “of his own consciousness,” capable of “abstract thought, syntactic language, the capacity for symbolism, the aptitude for objective observation and value judgment.” These capacities do “not contradict his nature” but rather extend it “by conferring on him a supplementary and unique identify” conferred upon him by is “social and historical life,” a life shaped by moral and political choices. “The New Right proposes a vision of a well-balanced individual, taking into account both inborn, personal abilities and the social environment,” rejecting “ideologies that emphasize only one of these factors,” whether biological—presumably, such a thing as Nazism—economic (liberalism, socialism) or mechanical (meaning, perhaps, utilitarianism).

Human nature is “neither good nor bad,” but capable of being either, thanks to the openness of choice available to human being and their vulnerability both to chance disaster and to the consequences of their own bad choices. “As an open and imperiled being,” man “is always able to go beyond himself or to debase himself,” and hence needs to construct social and moral rules, along with “institutions and traditions” that “provide a foundation for his existence,” physically, and “give his life meaning and references.” That is, neither human nature nor nature as a whole nor the divine provide such meaning, inasmuch as human nature has no innate moral content and any referent beyond the understanding of the limited human intellect “is by definition unthinkable.” And indeed, although human nature is discernible, it never presents itself except within a given socio-cultural “context.” “In this sense, humanity is irreducibly plural: diversity is part of its very essence,” with various social and political groups living within those contexts, which exist “prior to the way individuals and groups see the world” as “concretely rooted people.” “Man is rooted by nature in his culture,” and cultures themselves change over time, from epoch to epoch. “Thus, the idea of an absolute, universal, and eternal law that ultimately determines moral, religious, or political choices appears unfounded,” an invitation to totalitarianism. These diverse “cultures” exhibit both cooperativeness, even altruism, and competition, including aggression. What the authors call the “great historical constructions” have established “a harmony based on the recognition of the common good, the reciprocity of rights and duties, cooperation and sharing,” all in a tragic (because impermanent, mortal) “tension between these poles of attraction and repulsion.” 

Moving to the aspects of ‘culture’—social, political, economic—the authors deny the existence of any original ‘state of nature’ in which individuals joined to form a social contract. With Aristotle, they regard human societies as resulting from extended families. Societies are indeed consented to, but as ‘givens,’ not as inventions. “Membership in the collective does not destroy individual identity; rather, it is the basis for it,” the way in which individuals think of, feel about, themselves. In such family-derived communities, a “vertical reciprocity of rights and duties, contributions and distributions, obedience and assistance” prevails (as in the family, with its husbands and wives, parents and children), along with “a horizontal reciprocity of gifts, fraternity, friendship, and love.” Diversity thus exists not only from one society to another but within each society, a diversity “constantly threatened either by shortcomings (conformity, lack of differentiation) or excesses (secession, atomization).” In a society, “the whole exceeds the sum of its pats and possesses qualities none of its individual parts have,” a fact now “defeated by modern universalism and individualism, which have associate community with the ideas of submission to hierarchy, entanglement, or parochialism.” Modernity thereby hasn’t “liberated man form his original familial belonging or from local, tribal, corporative or religious attachment” so much as subordinating him with “harsher” and more remote “constraints,” “impersonal and more demanding,” most notably its “statist bureaucracies.” This makes of human societies collections of “individuals who experience each other as strangers,” lacking the “mutual confidence” that would enable them to live without subjection to the supposedly neutral “regulatory authority” of the administrative state, with its market exchanges, habit of submission to “the all-powerful state,” and the “abstract juridical rules” which govern both the market and that submission. “Only a return to communities and to a politics of human dimensions can remedy exclusion or dissolution of the social bond, its reification, and its juridification.”

Genuine politics “cannot be reduced to economics, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, or the sacred.” The moral orientation of politics aims at “a common good…inspired by the collectivity’s values and customs,” not the “individual morality” of one or some of the polity’s members. Political communities have regimes, ways of ruling and of being ruled, but “regimes which refuse to recognize the essence of politics, which deny the plurality of goals or favor depoliticization, are by definition ‘unpolitical.'” That is, they deny Aristotle’s principle, that politics consists of ruling and of being ruled, in turn. Modernity propounds “the illusion of politics as ‘neutral,’ reducing power to managerial efficiency in ruling, and therefore reducing most residents of the polity to the status of being ruled, efficiently. This reduces the government of men to the administration of things, pretending that the public sphere has no “particular vision of the ‘good life.'” But politics is no science, a vehicle for supposedly value-free rationalism and its technologies, but “an art, calling for prudence before everything else,” acknowledging the perennial “uncertainty,” the “plurality of choices” and “decision[s] about goals” that must be arbitrated by rulers wielding ruling offices or institutions with powers understood to be means serving the ends set by the political community. Tellingly, however, the New Rightists endorse the claim of that arch-modern Thomas Hobbes, that “the first aim of all political action is civil peace,” that is, “security and harmony between all members of society” and “protection from foreign danger.” (In this, they follow the thinking of one of their intellectual heroes, Carl Schmitt.) Subordinate to civil peace, such “values” as liberty, equality, unity, diversity, and solidarity” are not self-evident but arbitrary. But New Rightists do not endorse Hobbes’s solution to the political problem, the regime of monarchy for a centralized, if economically liberal, state, the mighty Leviathan whose blood is money.

They prefer democracy, “the only form of government that offers [the individual] participation in public discussions and decisions, as well as the ability to make something of himself and to excel through education.” The democratic regime must exist within a federal state, or a loosely organized empire of the ‘ancient’ sort, consisting of “organized communities and multiple allegiances” which can resist the tyranny of centralization. In such a democratic and variegated state, animated by “the spirit of subsidiarity,” the rulers “are above each citizen individually, but they are always subordinate to the general will expressed by the body of citizens,” the will of the nation. In this regime and state, “politics is not reduced to the level of the state” because “the public person is defined as a complex of groups, families and associations, of local, regional, national or supranational collectivities” existing in “organic continuity.”

Similarly, the economic character of both liberalism and Marxism, and indeed the ‘economism’ they share, cannot sustain “the infrastructure of society.” Economic life rightly understood is useful, but “only that.” Under aristocratic conditions, “one was rich because one was powerful, and not the reverse, power being thus matched by a duty to share and to protect those under one’s care”—by noblesse oblige. “The market is not an ideal model whose abstraction allows universalization,” nor is socialism; on the contrary, “in all pre-modern societies, the economic was embedded and contextualized within other orders of human activity.” Market exchange must always be balanced with reciprocity and redistribution, and vice-versa, avoiding the limitless consumerism of capitalism and the iron cage of socialism. Properly understand, ‘economy’ means oikos-nomos, the law or rule of the household; political economy should reflect that understanding, particularly with respect to, and for, “the harmony and beauty of nature.” That is, the New Right propounds political democracy on an aristocratic civil-social and economic foundation, with the reciprocity of political life pervading all dimensions of the nation.

The reason for this may be seen in the way the authors conceive of ethics (with seeming ‘modernism’) as “the construction of oneself.” But this construction turns out to be no existentialist project but rather an acknowledgement that “the fundamental categories of ethics are universal” (noble and ignoble, good and bad, admirable and despicable, just and unjust, distinctions that “can be found everywhere) are “an anthropological consequence” of human freedom. However, these categories universally develop in non-universal, specific and concrete circumstances of one’s own place and time. “The adage ‘my country, right or wrong’ does not mean that my country is always right, but that it remains my country even when it is wrong,” my home, however misguided it may be. The good citizen “always tries to strive for excellence in each of [the] virtues,” which are universal—generosity, honor, courage, cowardice, moderation, duty, rectitude, unselfishness—and “this will to excellence does not in any way exclude the existence of several modes of life” that find “their place in the city’s hierarchy”—the life of contemplation or philosophy, the life of activity or politics, the life of production or economics. The New Right prefers Aristotelian ethics to such individualist moralities as utilitarianism (Bentham) or ‘deontology’ (Kant), much less the nihilism of Nietzsche. While it is true that “all men have rights,” they “would not know how to be entitled to them as isolated beings; a right expresses a relation of equity, which implies the social,” which gives definition to the right. 

Unlike Thomas Aquinas, the Christian Aristotelian, New Rightists utterly reject the Bible. The modern scientists’ ambition to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate and the consequent “technological explosion of modernity,” bespeaks “the disappearance of ethical, symbolic or religious codes,” but this project finds its origins in “the Biblical imperative” to “replenish and subdue the earth,” which, according to the Manifesto, eventually issued in the Cartesian imperative to master and own nature. But mastery for what? “Technology has given humanity new means of existence, but at the same time it has led to a loss of the reason for living, since the future seems to depend not only on the indefinite extension of the rational mastering of the world” but on the extension of that mastery to human nature itself. “Man is becoming the simple extension of the tools he has created.” This must “reduce men to what they have in common,” a leveling that will bring not self-mastery, but the sniveling Last Man Nietzsche warned against. Politically and militarily, this may be seen in modern Western imperialism, “the Westernization of the planet” animated “by the desire to erase all otherness by imposing on the world a supposedly superior model invariably presented as ‘progress.'”  This has backfired, as “new civilizations are gradually acquiring modern means of power and knowledge without renouncing their historical and cultural heritage for the benefit of Western ideologies and values.” 

The New Rightists hope that this will lead to “a multipolar world of emerging civilizations, civilizations that “will not supplant the ancient local, tribal, provincial or national roots” while nonetheless recognizing “their common humanity.” This may strike one as utopian. One cannot simply acquire modern means of power and knowledge while maintaining tradition in any fundamental sense. Modern technology rests on modern science, modern science on modern philosophy, anti-traditional to the core. “The ‘paganism’ of the New Right articulates nothing more than sympathy for [the] ancient conception of the world” that prevailed in Europe before Christianity and indeed before Socrates—before dualisms religious and philosophic. Sympathy is one thing, practice another.

Accordingly, the authors turn to policies, identifying thirteen points of resistance to modernization and its sham egalitarianism. The first is the opposition of “clear and strong identities” to “indifferentiation and uprooting.” Globalization, they claim, has caused overreactions (“bloody irredentisms, convulsive and chauvinistic nationalism, savage tribalizations”), as the thin universality of a proffered, spurious ‘citizenship of the world’ offends, irritates, and threatens without offering the satisfactions of a real community. “Modernity has not been able to satisfy this need for identity.” Accordingly, the French New Right “affirms the primacy of differences, which are neither transitory features leading to some higher form of unity, nor incidental aspects of private life” but are rather “the very substance of social life.” Politically, this means federalism or subsidiarity within France, which will include the exercise of native ethnic, linguistic, and religious practices—no enclaves for observance of Islamic law in France, therefore. In foreign relations, “the French New Right supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism,” although their principles would seem to require support of peoples struggling against any imperialism (on the basis of “the right to difference”), including those nations which have a tradition of imperialism (China, Russia). Not all traditions support traditionalism.

The French New Right opposes racism, “a theory which postulates that there are qualitative differences between the races, such that, on the whole, one can distinguish races as either ‘superior’ or ‘inferior; that an individual’s value is deduced entirely from the race to which he belongs; or, that race constitutes the central determining factor in human history.” That is, just as the New Left rejected Marxism-Leninism’s scientific socialism, preferring a softer-edged ‘cultural’ Marxism, the New Right rejects the ‘race science’ of the older Nazi Right (and of the early ‘Progressive’ Left). The authors correctly identify the source of ‘scientific’ racism as “scientific positivism”—the very doctrine that has also produced the technologies that menace humanness, worldwide. They also oppose, however, “a universalist” anti-racism in defense of their own “differentialist” anti-racism. “Universalist anti-racism only acknowledges in peoples their common belonging to a particular species,” tending “to consider their specific identities as transitory or of secondary importance,” thus pursuing policies aimed at overcoming, assimilating particular human identities into one mass of ‘humanity.’ Differentialist anti-racism holds to the contrary, “that the irreducible plurality of the human species constitutes a veritable treasure,” refusing “both exclusion and assimilation,” both “apartheid and the melting pot” but instead accepting “the other as Other through a dialogic perspective of mutual enrichment.” This raises the question of the criteria for “enrichment,” which can only mean the enhancement of the universally held virtues already enumerated. 

This enrichment will occur over and via a certain distance, as the New Right opposes immigration “such as one sees today in Europe,” an “undeniably negative phenomenon” consisting of “forced uprooting” by economic necessity, as poor and overpopulated countries send their people to rich countries; there is also a corrupt attraction, as “the attraction of Western civilization and the concomitant depreciation of indigenous cultures” wax “in light of the growing consumer-oriented way of life” that impoverished peoples see from afar and want for themselves. That is, the claim of capitalism’s defenders—that everyone wants more stuff—is at least partially correct. To meet this crisis, the New Right proposes restrictive immigration policies “coupled with increased cooperation with Third World Countries where organic interdependence and traditional ways of life still survive.” The authors do not specify what forms this cooperation will take—presumably, some form of foreign aid that will induce foreigners to stay where they are. They acknowledge that existing foreign populations cannot be deported, and so they offer “a communitarian model,” consistent with subsidiarity, “which would permit them to keep the structures of their collective cultural lives” while “observ[ing] necessary general and common laws”—thereby dissociating “citizenship from nationality.” Obviously, this would not work with serious Muslims, for whom the Sharia law is comprehensive, all other laws abhorrent.

The New Right also opposes ‘sexism,’ albeit not in the way of contemporary feminists. “The distinction of the sexes is the first and most fundamental of natural differences, for the human race only ensures its continuation through this distinction”; “humanity is not one, but rather two.” And “beyond mere biology, difference inscribes itself in gender—masculine and feminine. The authors maintain that “the modern concept of abstract individuals, detached from their sexual identity, stemming from an ‘indifferentialist’ ideology which neutralizes sexual differences, is just as prejudicial against women as traditional sexism which, for centuries, considered women as incomplete men.” (It should be noticed that there are limits to their traditionalism.) The belief that gender differences derive from “a social construct” only reproduces the masculinist-modern adherence to allegedly universal and actually abstract “values.” The New Right accordingly “upholds specifically feminine rights,” including “the right to virginity to maternity, to abortion.” (Why the right to virginity is a specifically feminine right is not clear.) They evidently prefer the specifically feminine “right” to abortion to the universal right to life. [1] Not for them the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

It goes almost without saying that the New Right opposes rule by the ‘New Class,’ the class of professional managers identified and described by James Burnham in the United States and Miloslav Djilas in the communist regimes. “This New Class produces and reproduces everywhere the same type of person: cold-blooded specialists, rationality detached from day-to-day realities,” guided by “abstract individualism, utilitarian beliefs, a superficial humanitarianism, indifference to history, and obvious lack of culture, isolation from the real world, the sacrifice of the real to the virtual, an inclination to corruption, nepotism and to buying votes,” all aimed at “the globalization of world-wide domination by themselves. This results in the depersonalization of rulers, lessening “their sense of responsibility” for those they rule even as it widens the scope of that rule and augments the power of it. Meanwhile, “the public feels indifferent toward or angry at a managerial elite which does not even speak the same language as they do,” preferring a technical jargon to ordinary words. The solution, again (as it was for the New Left), communitarianism. Local communities should “make decisions by and for themselves in all those matters which concern them directly, and all members would have to participate at every stage of the deliberations and of the democratic decision-making,” refusing to “cede to State power to intervene except in those matters for which [those communities] are not able or competent to make decisions.” Because that would obviously lead to a finally irreconcilable tug-of-war between localities and states, the result would likely be either the reimposition of statism or the breakup of modern states—the latter being the presumed goal of New Rightists.

Like all Rightists, the authors look with disfavor at “Jacobinism,” by which they mean the modern nation-state. They observe that the nation-state predated the Jacobins themselves, originating in the Treaty of Westphalia, which settled “the first Thirty Years’ War,” the great European war (sparked by the Protestant rebellions against Roman Catholicism) and “marked the establishment of the nation-state,” and specifically of the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of European states, “as the dominant mode of political organization.” The second Thirty Years’ War, consisting of the twentieth century’s world wars, “signaled, to the contrary, the start of the disintegration of the nation-state,” demonstrating that “the nation-state is now too big to manage little problems and too small to address big ones.” Human beings must therefore not only maintain their human identities in small communities, but those communities must be protected politically by associating in “large cultures and civilizations capable of organizing themselves into autonomous entities and of acquiring enough power to resist outside interference”—a civilization-based Westphalianism. Thus, European civilization “can remake itself, not by the negation, but by the recognition of historical cultures,” within and without. This new, federal Europe should ally itself with Russia, presumably in order to resist the United States on the one side, China on the other. (The rulers of Russia and China evidently have other ideas.) “The existing states must federalize themselves from within, in order to better federalize with each other.” The federal government would govern diplomacy, military affairs, “big economic issues” (assisted by a central bank managing a single currency), “fundamental legal questions,” and environmental matters. That is, the New Right aims at Gaullism without the nation-state: a European federation consisting not of modern states but of largely self-governing localities and allied with Russia (although De Gaulle’s message to Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin: “Come, let us build Europe together,” implied that Russia would separate into a European sector and an Asia sector, the former part of the envisioned European federation, the latter abandoned to Asians). 

This leaves the regime question as the seventh, central policy consideration. The authors reiterate their support for “democracy” or popular sovereignty on the grounds that democracy is “the system best suited to take care of a society’s pluralism” by peacefully resolving conflicts. Democracy inclines to resolve conflicts peacefully because every citizen knows that today’s minority may be tomorrow’s majority. New Rightists caution that democratic equality “is not an anthropological principle (it tells us nothing about the nature of man) but rather the true principle of civic equality, “the idea of a body of citizens politically united into a people.” Their presumed objection to America’s “all men are created equal” (apart from the suggestion of a Creator-God) must be its abstract character, as distinguished from the “substantial equality” of democratic citizenship. “The essential idea of democracy is neither that of the individual nor of humanity, but rather the idea of a body of citizens politically united into a people,” governing itself “through its representatives” with “the opportunity to be politically present through its action and participation in public life.” 

Further, political revolution or regime change is now “obsolete,” inasmuch as “political parties are almost all reformists,” not revolutionaries, and “most governments are more or less impotent,” anyway, scarcely worth the effort it would take to seize control of them. “In a world of networks,” of globalization, “revolt may be possible, but not revolution.” And so, as with the New Left, the New Right advocates “participatory democracy” beneath the modern state, undermining the modern state—a “radically decentralized form of democracy, beginning from the bottom, thereby giving to each citizens a role in the choice and control of his destiny.” This decentralized democracy must “impose” the “widest separation possible between wealth and political power.” This sounds like a rather formidable task, and the authors therefore turn to policies governing the conditions of work, which is the basis of wealth.

The French word for work, travail, derives from the Medieval Latin trepalium, torture. It “never occupied a central position in ancient or traditional societies, including those which never practiced slavery”; “it is modernity which, through its productivist goal of totally mobilizing all resources, has made of work a value in itself, the principal mode of socialization, an illusory for of emancipation and of the autonomy of the individual.” Work has been commodified, its measure now being money. “The possibility of receiving certain services freely and then reciprocating in some way has totally disappeared in a world where nothing has any value, but everything has a price,” a “salaried society” in which technological advances cut workers off from their frayed lifeline. The Biblical punishment of laboring by the sweat of your brow will no longer hold, however, if technology is used to release workers from the daily grind, “to gradually dissociate work from income” by establishing a fixed minimum income “for every citizen from birth until death and without asking anything in return.” One might ask, why is this not the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate? But evidently, this repurposing of technology is intended by the New Rightists to open people to the active political life that in antiquity was largely reserved for the aristocracy. They do not envision a society of couch potatoes, although (absent strict penalties for non-participation in civic affairs) that is the likely result.

Following Aristotle’s distinction between economics, the management of material goods for “the satisfaction of man’s needs,” and chrematistics, production for the sake of money-making, the New Rightists reject the prevailing chrematistic model for political economy, as it gives over such economies “uncertain and even precarious” financial markets. Moreover, “economic thought is couched in mathematical formulas which claim to be scientific by excluding any factor that cannot be quantified,” thereby telling us “nothing about the actual condition of a society.” To reverse this, they would tax all international financial transactions, cancel the debt of Third World countries, and end the international system of the division of labor whereby some countries produce raw materials to be sold for refinement or use elsewhere. International environmental laws should be strengthened. If this would lead to the ruin of capitalism, that is the point. In its place, partnerships, mutual societies, and cooperatives “based on shared responsibility, voluntary membership,” and a spirit of non-profit should be encouraged.

Lest their communitarianism seem implausible, the authors point to “the existence today of a whole web of organizations supportive of deliberative and well-functioning communities which are forming every level of social life: the family, the neighborhood, the village, the city, the professions and in leisure pursuits,” apart from the “gigantism” of globalization. “Only responsible individuals in responsible communities can establish a social justice which is not synonymous with welfare.” Families and local communities that seek to revitalize “the popular traditions that modernity has largely caused to decline,” traditions “inculat[ing] a sense of life’s cycles,” can “nourish symbolic imagination” and “create a social bond.” Such traditions will not be identical to those of the past, but those of the past themselves metamorphosed over time, constantly renewed. Such a renewed humanism, linking morality, society, politics, and a sense of beauty will resist “the aesthetic of the ugly” that pervades the modern “megalopolis,” the “urban environment” now “spoiled by the law of maximum financial return on investment and cold practicality.” And human structures would be integrated into a respect for nature animated by the principle of “immanent transcendence” that “reveals nature as a partner and not as an adversary or object,” denying the Christian and classical-humanist claim that man enjoys “unique importance” in the cosmos, a claim that opened the dystopic vista of the “economic hubris and Promethean technology” which ruined any “sense of balance and harmony” of man in nature. The same principle of human social diversity should be extended to all of nature, to a respect for “biodiversity.” 

The New Right concludes with a call for a concomitant intellectual diversity against those “whose purpose is to excommunicate all those who diverge in any way from the currently dominant ideological dogmas,” a “new form of treachery” relying upon “the tyranny of public opinion, as fashioned by the media,” taking “the form of cleansing hysteria, enervating mawkishness or selective indignation” aimed at ‘exclud[ing] the possibility of radically changing society or even the possibility of an open discussion of the ultimate goals of collective action,” reducing “democratic debate” to nothing: “One no longer discusses, one denounces. One no longer reasons, one accuses. One no longer proves, one imposes.” “The traditional rules of civilized debate” disappear, along with civility generally. “The New Right advocates a return to critical thinking and strongly supports total freedom of expression.”

It is then fair to say that the New Right wants the benefits of ‘closed’ or traditional political societies with the benefits of ‘open’ or modern liberal societies. It is also fair to call this utopian, as it was fair to call the New Left utopian, decades ago.

 

Note

1. For a discussion of abortion, see “Abortion Wrongs” on this website under “Bible Notes.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume I, Part II, chapter 9: “Principal Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States.”   Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

 

Founding a democratic republican regime is one thing. The American Founders had done that. Maintaining it is another, as Benjamin Franklin famously remarked upon emerging from the final session of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and as a sober young American attorney named Abraham Lincoln considered in his “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois, some two generations later.

Writing a couple of years before Lincoln spoke, Alexis de Tocqueville understood that his fellow European hesitated to found democratic republics because they did not see how such regimes could sustain themselves in Europe, where geopolitical, constitutional, and civil-social circumstances differed substantially from those prevailing in North America. By then, Tocqueville remarked, Americans faced no formidable enemies, needed to fight no major wars, and consequently afforded no opportunities for some native Napoleon to hunger for military glory and move against republicanism. The American capital was no Paris, no Rome; a centralized government can fall prey to mobs, with ‘the democracy’ threatening the government—whether monarchic, as Parisians had seen in 1789 and would see again in 1848, or republican, as the Romans had seen in the military coup of Julius Caesar. And North America is much bigger than Europe; on such a large continent, “nature itself works for the people,” giving them an outlet for their restless ambitions. Dissatisfied with your lot in life? If you’re an American, go West, young man; set yourself up as a farmer, there’s no future in revolution. 

Europeans enjoyed none of these advantages. Politically, they enabled the American Founders to constitute their national government as a federation, not as a centralized state. America’s strong township institutions, established long before the founding, had taught the people “the art of being free,” habits of mind and heart consistent with self-government from the village to the nation. Americans had anchored their civil and criminal courts in the counties, close to the people, who could be confident that they would be judged by their peers. And in democratic America, everyone was your peer.

Most important, American hearts were animated by the principles of a “democratic and republican religion”; as he had earlier maintained, the first movement toward equality of condition was Christianity itself, teaching human equality before God. At the same time, American minds were enlightened by an education that was eminently practical, with the ‘Three Rs’ enabling citizens to read their Bibles for moral guidance, to read their newspapers for political information and for expressing their own opinions, and to calculate sums in business.

In all, “American legislators had come, not without success, to oppose the idea of rights to sentiments of envy; to the continuous movements of the political world, the immobility of religious morality; the experience of the people, to its political ignorance, and its habit of business, to the enthusiasm of its desires.” It was true that American confronted one potentially ruinous dilemma absent from Europe: race-based slavery, the theme of the final section of Tocqueville’s first volume—one distinct from the problem of the overall civil-social equality, the democracy, in America. Europeans, however, faced the reverse problem: no slavery, but no obvious solution to the questions raised by democracy.

On that front, Europeans enjoyed none of the advantages Americans possessed. Democracy was advancing in their societies as aristocracies weakened. But democracy, social and civic equality, need not issue in republicanism, in the protection of natural and civil rights. Napoleon had demonstrated this, only a quarter-century before Tocqueville ventured to the United States. “The organization and establishment of democracy among Christians is the great political problem of our time.” Indeed, “the question I have raised,” the question of what regime democracy will have, “interests not only the United States, but the entire world; not one nation, but all men.”

Why? Under the civil-social condition of democracy, with no aristocrats standing between the people and the centralized state, one could see not only an absolute monarchy along the lines of Louis XIV’s France, but a new form of absolutism, a new despotism “with features unknown to our fathers.” The old absolutist monarchies retained a still-formidable aristocratic class. Firstborn sons inherited the estate, ruling but also protecting the peasants who worked their land, as their ancestors had done or centuries. Second-born sons entered the clerical aristocracy, the Roman Catholic Church, exerting influence on peasants, monarchs, and their fellow aristocrats alike. Under the old regime, wealthy merchants in townships and cities also commanded their own sources of revenue and manpower, independent of monarchs and aristocrats alike. Even under the rule of the Bourbons, then, there was “a love of freedom in souls,” among honor-loving monarchs, aristocrats, and merchants, all jealous of their prerogatives and capable of defending them. They ruled peasants and urban workers who understood that they, too, could one day see the face of God.

But in the ever-advancing European civil-social democracy of Tocqueville’s century, the Enlightenment philosophes and their intellectual heirs had undermined faith in God; “nothing above man any longer sustains man.” And democratic men find themselves in a leveled society in which all classes mix together, as “the individual disappears more and more into the crowd,” readily “lost in the mist of the common obscurity,” and therefore no longer held responsible for his actions.” (In America, not long afterwards, Edgar Allan Poe would write his satirical short story, “The Man of the Crowd.”) 

“When each citizen, being equally powerless, equally poor, equally isolated, can only oppose his individual weakness to the organized force of the government,” a regime of despotism would take on the harshness of late Roman imperialism, “those frightful centuries of Roman tyranny, when mores were corrupt, memories effaced, habits destroyed, opinions wavering, and freedom, chased out of the laws, no longer knew where to take refuge to find an asylum; when nothing any longer stood guarantee for citizens and citizens no longer stood guarantee for themselves,” where “one would see men make sport of human nature.”

In the event, many Europeans would come under tyrannies even worse than those Tocqueville foresaw, regimes in which making sport of human nature meant hunting it down in death camps and world wars, resulting in tens of millions dead, killed by regimes where the modern state, armed with technologies permitting surveillance of its subjects, ended civil and political liberty for those who survived the onslaught, spurring the invention of a new word, ‘totalitarianism.’

“Is this not worth thinking about? If men had to arrive, in effect, at the point where it would be necessary to make them all free or all slaves, all equal in rights or all deprived of rights; if those who governed societies were reduced to this alternative of gradually raising the crowd up to themselves or of letting all citizens fall below the level of humanity, would this not be enough to overcome many doubts, to reassure consciences well, and to prepare each to make great sacrifice readily?” For “if one does not in time succeed in founding the peaceful empire of the greatest number among us, democratic republics instead of democratic despotisms, “we shall arrive sooner or later at the unlimited power of one alone.”

Against atheist ideologies, Tocqueville therefore called upon Europeans to renew their respect for Christianity. Against overbearing military and political ambition, he commended a spirit of peaceful commerce, of the ‘bourgeois’ life detested by aristocrats and socialists alike. Against the “sentiments of envy” he opposed the idea of individual and civil rights. Against government centralization, he urged praised federalism and the practical experience that local self-government provides to citizens. Against the threat of foreign wars, a strong executive, a constitutional monarch empowered to defend the realm could meet the threats without extinguishing civil and political liberty. And against the alienation of his fellow aristocrats, many of them resentful of the rise of democracy, Tocqueville warned against futile dreams of reinstituting feudalism, urging them rather to guide democracy, advise the new citizens, moderating their passions by teaching them how better to govern—as Tocqueville himself did in writing Democracy in America.