Society https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00691-2 BOOK REVIEW Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right Yale University Press, 2021, 196 pp., ISBN: 978-0-300-24311-6 Aurelian Craiutu 1 # The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022 Riding the Tiger ‘We are living in a postliberal moment,’ writes Matthew Rose at the beginning of A World After Liberalism. But what does that mean and where are we heading? As he reminds us, we know what came before liberalism: arbitrary power, oppression, ignorance, violence, poverty, superstition, and coercive authority. But we are at a loss when trying to figure out what might replace liberalism in the future. This topic would have been inconceivable three decades ago, when the Berlin Wall fell, and a new world was opening up. Today, things look very different. Liberal democracy is in retreat around the world, and books announcing its death are best sellers. Comparisons with the Weimar era in Germany have become commonplace. Given this troubling situation, it is important to reexamine how we got here and what we may be able to do to find a way out of the present labyrinth. This is what Rose’s book seeks to do. Consisting of six chapters preceded by an introduction, it is one of the most interesting and well-written books in intellectual history that I have read lately. Informative and devoid of academic jargon or ideological zeal, Rose’s book wears its scholarship lightly (it has only 157 pages of main text followed by notes). It addresses timely and important questions and covers a wide range of rarely explored authors who contributed to many fields from philosophy of culture, religion, and esotericism to political philosophy, journalism, and politics. Chapters one through five are devoted to key figures that have had significant influence on the language of the radical Right in Europe and the USA. They are, in the order of * Aurelian Craiutu acraiutu@indiana.edu 1 Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA appearance, Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), the author of The Decline of the West (1918), considered the intellectual godfather of the radical Right; Julius Evola (1898–1974), the author of The Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), often known as the “Italian Spengler”; Francis P. Yockey (1917– 1960), whose Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948) influenced the American far Right in the 1950s; Alain de Benoist (1943–), a founding member of the New Right in France, who became the primary source of inspiration for identitarian movements in Europe; and, finally, Samuel Francis (1947–2005), author of Leviathan and Its Enemies published posthumously in 2016, arguably the most prescient theorist of Trumpism before Trump. The final (sixth) chapter examines the “Christian Question” considering the challenges posed by the possibility of a post-Christian Right. Provocative without being doctrinaire, passionate but not rigid, the book ends with a call to combine the need for roots, transcendence, and solidarity with the requirements of dignity and liberty in our postmodern world. It is not easy to summarize the contributions made by the individual authors covered in this book. Each chapter can be read on its own, as a separate intellectual vignette, but there are certain intellectual affinities between the five authors that justify their selection in a single tome. One thing that they all share is the capacity to surprise and shock our liberal sensibilities. Prior to reading this book, I had never heard of Francis Yockey and was only vaguely familiar with the name of Samuel Francis. Both are intriguing if deeply unsettling figures whom we cannot afford to ignore because they mounted vigorous challenges to liberal democratic principles. Yockey, who became America’s preeminent fascist theorist, read Spengler’s The Decline of the West and was marked for life by its ideas. His own Imperium offered an ambitious revisionist history of the twentieth century that, he believed, would be appropriate for readers living in 2050. A defender of cultural vitalism attracted to fascist ideas, Yockey was a man of Society paradoxes. He believed that everything that the West squandered could still be found in Russia, whose unique civilization could serve as a necessary alternative to the decadent Western world. Closer to us, Samuel Francis was ‘a pathologist of American conservatism’ (p. 112) which he saw as ‘terminally ill’ because it had uncritically accepted too many liberal bromides. A critic of the conservative establishment, he turned out to be the forefather of today’s revolt against the elites that found in Donald Trump its most vocal representative. Influenced by James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, Francis emphasized the centrality of power and foresaw the emergence of a new electoral base, the middle American white voters, energized by a long list of grievances, humiliations, and frustrations. The new base, Francis wrote, resembles a strong body without a head; it is only a matter of time until a charismatic figure will arise that would give voice to its fears and hopes. Francis predicted that the new leaders would use mass rallies instead of town hall meetings and would place majorities and the native-born citizens over minorities and recent immigrants. Sounds familiar? The two giants discussed in the book are Spengler and Evola, two of the strangest and most powerful intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century still rarely studied in academia. As Rose points out, their understanding of human identity was profoundly illiberal. While they believed that the West had become confused and uncertain about its civilizational mission, their rejection of liberal ideas took them into different directions. Spengler was simultaneously a conservative and a multiculturalist open to cultural relativism, a precursor of what we call identity politics and the struggle for recognition. A convinced nationalist who did not believe in race theory, he rejected Nazi ideas and opposed anti-Semitism (the Nazi press called him a traitor); the ideas of single party and racial purity were anathema to him. The morphology of cultures he outlined in The Decline of the West opposed all attempts to evaluate non-Western cultures by Western standards. Spengler belonged to the Conservative Revolution in post1918 Germany that included other prominent thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. What they had in common was the desire to carve out a path beyond Western liberalism and Bolshevism. They emphasized the irrational aspects of human nature and celebrated danger and risk, along with the need for heroic elites and extraordinary devotion. Most of these thinkers did not want to reverse modernization; they were rather interested in accelerating it, so that new possibilities could emerge. Their influence eventually waned, but their attacks on parliamentary democracy and liberalism as a political ideology became entrenched in the vocabulary of the anti-democratic Right. Unlike Evola, Spengler was a self-proclaimed realist who did not seek to defend timeless principles that transcend all political regimes. While he predicted in The Hour of Decision (1933) the rise of democratic Caesars, he remained unimpressed by Hitler whom he dismissed as a plebeian idiot as early as 1923. Spengler’s aristocratic disdain for the NationalSocialist party went deeper than his antipathy for Hitler. “A ship is in a parlous state,” he wrote in 1932, “if the crew are drunk in a storm.” In private, Spengler referred to the National-Socialist party as “the organization of the unemployed by the workshy.”1 Unlike him, Evola embraced fascism with its racist doctrines in which he saw a chance to rejuvenate a decadent world. In Italy, he emerged as a leader of a movement that criticized the modern world for its embrace of individualism, personal autonomy, progress, hedonism, and toleration. Evola and his like-minded friends were not impressed with the prosperity brought by the postwar period and believed that it hid major structural weaknesses. It accelerated the displacement of individuals from organic communities, uprooted traditional ways of life, and promoted an immoral vision of life. The culprit was liberalism that leveled everything and subverted the foundations of hierarchical social order. Worse, for people like Evola, liberalism obscured “primordial facts” along with fundamental distinctions such as between right and wrong, higher and lower, or good and evil. Evola’s utopian vision—“a fantastic world of his own imagination” in Rose’s words (p. 41)—has become fashionable today among some members of the alt Right (Steve Bannon, Trump’s former associate, is a fan). But we should remember that Evola was much more than a conventional conservative thinker revolting against the modern world. He grew up under the influence of René Guénon’s mysterious and seductive traditionalism. Eventually, he became more interested in understanding and curing the anomie of modernity than unveiling the “Primal Tradition” at the heart of (or beyond) all religions. In Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), Evola inveighed against secular values such as freedom and equality and denied that genuine political legitimacy is ever based on consent. In Ride the Tiger, he offered a “survival manual for the aristocrats of the souls” (the subtitle of the book), a set of spiritual guidance for future elites in a world where God has been proclaimed dead.2 Evola distinguished his views not only from Spengler’s, whom he found lacking a profound understanding of metaphysics and transcendence, but also from Guénon’s ideas that emphasized spiritual inwardness at the expense of action, the focus of Evola’s concerns. It might come as a surprise to learn that the radical Right harbored a profound suspicion of Christianity, unlike postwar conservatism that sought to harness religion for political goals. Spengler and Evola believed that it was wrong to argue that there is no western civilization without Christianity (the opposite held true for them!). The skepticism toward the political 1 2 Spengler Letters, 1913–1936. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966, p. 18 1961; English edition: Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003 Society effects of Christianity is also present in the writings of Benoist, who believes that Christian values and practices tend to deform our natural impulses and weaken social relationships. In his view, neither Christianity nor secular ideologies like liberalism can protect Western civilization from its enemies. The readers of this book might also be surprised to learn that it is possible for conservatives to be concerned with protecting minorities, indigenous peoples, regional cultures, and non-Christian religions. All these topics are at the heart of Benoist’s theory of “folk democracy” and identitarianism that have influenced the French new Right. Rose is right to remind us that the main contemporary challengers of liberalism do not come from outside the liberal world—that is, from regimes like China or Russia or illiberal democracies like Hungary—but from within Western democracies. The type of conservatism that is on the rise today differs from older forms that defended principles such as individual liberty, limited government, immigration, and free trade. The new conservative universe is populated by populists and nationalists, futurists and religious traditionalists who believe that the classical tenets of conservatism have become obsolete or dangerous, because they drew upon the very liberal principles responsible for our present crisis. So, what does the future hold in store for us? Some members of the radical Right would want us to return to ancient paganism or propose a new form of Benedictine retreat; others prefer a new Inquisition or advocate radical changes in education and culture. Many of these actors can be found on the dark web, podcasts, and obscure websites, and only rarely in mainstream publications and media. Some have espoused theories of inequality and racial biopolitics that are open invitations to authoritarianism, violence, and xenophobia. Should we be worried? The question seems rhetorical. The hard Right may lack political representation or a solid institutional base for the time being, but its thinkers will not be deterred. Their ambition is to chart a new radical path among the ruins, much like Evola tried to do decades ago. They believe that the serious problems faced by the West exist not because liberalism has failed, but because it has triumphed. They are convinced that the end of liberalism is near, and the dawn of a new postliberal era is upon us, when new forms of political life will again be possible. It would be an understatement to say that Rose’s book challenges us to widen our imagination and learn new things. ‘Almost everything written about the alternative right,’ he writes, ‘has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious’ (p. 137). It is tempting to compare Rose’s sophisticated account with the reductionist assessment offered by Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind (Oxford University Press, 2011), a polemical book that seriously misrepresented the intellectual core of conservatism. To characterize all the thinkers that inspired the radical Right as stupid, nihilist, evil, or irrelevant would be a terrible mistake. Rose believes that for us to effectively oppose the enemies of liberalism, we must begin by understanding without zeal and anger what these thinkers attempt(ed) to do. ‘We cannot know what we affirm without knowing what we deny, and we cannot know who we are if we do not know what other ways of life are possible’ (p. 153). Rose’s book invites us to entertain radically alternative views of what it means to be a human being and live a good life. He challenges us to go beyond the presence of the alt Right on social media and reflect on the radical “others” in our culture and the moral quality of their protests. He insists that the eccentric and exotic authors discussed in his book were engaged in a serious and often lonely struggle to save wisdom and civilization from those who, in their view, were intent on destroying them.3 They not only sought to awake others’ minds to the corruption and contradictions of liberal ideas and institutions. They also believed they had discovered truths that could rectify the ills of the suffering world. This may be an overstatement, but it is true that the temptation and presumption to save the world will always be present among us. This is one additional reason why we need to pay close attention to thinkers like Spengler, Evola, or Benoist. As John Maynard Keynes once claimed, “madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”4 The books written by the latter contain powerful arguments of seductive power along with grandiose statements, personal idiosyncrasies, and attacks. Because their ideas can mobilize people to act and may be used as weapons to build new political movements, the writings of Evola, Spengler, Yockey, Benoist, and Francis represent “a perennial possibility in our political life” (p. 153), especially in times of accelerated technological change like ours today. Their thoughts and fantasies, exotic and extremist as they may be, “do not cease to animate human minds when they cannot be openly expressed and debated” (p. 153). As Quassim Cassam’s recent book on extremism shows, we must study extremist mindsets, their style and thinking patterns, so that we know how to fight back against them.5 That is why it is possible (and prudent) to think that the philosophers of the radical Right can serve as signs of future political possibilities that we ignore only at our peril. To use J.S. Mill’s words, we must develop “a large tolerance for oneeyed men, provided their one eye is a penetrating one: if they saw more, they probably would not see so keenly, nor so eagerly pursue one course of inquiry. Almost all rich veins 3 A fuller discussion of the Traditionalists can be found in Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2004 4 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York; Harcourt, 1964), p. 383 5 Extremism: A Philosophical Analysis (London: Routledge, 2021) Society of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-minds.”6 We must familiarize ourselves with their insights and “fractional truths” even when we reject their political implications. This is how, to use a phrase coined by Evola himself, we learn to “ride the tiger,” the only path to salvation open to us when a cycle of civilization comes to an end (Evola, Ride the Tiger, p. 10). As I was finishing Rose’s book, I was reminded of the words of Isaiah Berlin from a conversation with Steven Lukes. “I am bored by reading people who are allies,” Berlin confessed, “people of roughly the same views, because by now these things seem largely to be a collection of platitudes because we all accept them, we all believe them. What is interesting is to read the enemy, because the enemy penetrates the defenses, the weak points, because what interests me is what is wrong with the ideas in which I believe—why it may be right to modify or even abandon them”.7 Berlin and Mill were right. The prayer of every openminded person ought to be: “Lord, enlighten our enemies!” 6 John Stuart Mill, “Bentham” in Essays on Politics and Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1963), p. 96 7 “Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes” Salmagundi, 120, Fall 1998, p. 90 so that they can sharpen our wits and improve our reasoning powers. If we truly believe in the principles of an open, tolerant society, then we might want to begin by learning how “to ride the tiger.” This means reading and engaging with those with whom we disagree, perhaps radically disagree, provided they are clever and spirited. Matthew Rose’s excellent book offers a great example and encouragement to do just that. Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Reviewer: Aurelian Craiutu is professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His new book, Letters to Young Radicals: How To Be a Principled Moderate, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.