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Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
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Key Thinkers of the
Radical Right
Behind the New Threat to Liberal
Democracy
Edited by
MARK SEDGWICK
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Contents
Contributors
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Introduction— mark sedgwick
xiii
PART I: Classic Thinkers
1. Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West— david engels
3
2. Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel— elliot y. neaman
22
3. Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Identity— reinhard mehring
36
4. Julius Evola and Tradition— h. thomas hakl
54
PART II: Modern Thinkers
5. Alain de Benoist and the New Right— jean- yves camus
73
6. Guillaume Faye and Archeofuturism— stéphane françois
91
7. Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism— seth bartee
102
8. Patrick J. Buchanan and the Death of the West— edward ashbee 121
9. Jared Taylor and White Identity— russell nieli
137
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Contents
10. Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism— marlene laruelle
155
11. Bat Ye’or and Eurabia— sindre bangstad
170
PART III: Emergent Thinkers
12. Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction— joshua tait
187
13. Greg Johnson and Counter- Currents— graham macklin
204
14. Richard B. Spencer and the Alt Right— tamir bar- on
224
15. Jack Donovan and Male Tribalism— matthew n. lyons
242
16. Daniel Friberg and Metapolitics in
Action— benjamin teitelbaum
259
Select Bibliographies
277
Index
293
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Contributors
Edward Ashbee is director of the International Business and Politics BSc
and MSc programs at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He has
had articles published in journals such as Political Quarterly, Parliamentary
Affairs, Global Discourse, Society, Journal of Political Power, and Journal of
American Studies. His recent work includes The Right and the Recession
(2015) and The Trump Revolt (2017). He also coedited The Obama Presidency
and the Politics of Change (2017).
Sindre Bangstad is a Norwegian social anthropologist with a background
in ethnographic studies of Muslims in South Africa and Norway, and a
researcher at KIFO (the Institute for Church, Religion, and Worldview
Research) in Oslo. Bangstad, who has published extensively on secularism,
racism, Islamophobia, right- wing extremism, hate speech, and right- wing
populism in Norway, holds a cand. polit. degree from the University of
Bergen in Norway and a PhD from Radboud University in Nijmegen in the
Netherlands. He is a columnist at Anthropology News and has published in
popular outlets such as Boston Review, The Guardian (UK), Open Democracy,
the SSRC’s The Immanent Frame, and in leading anthropological journals
such as American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Anthropological
Theory, Anthropology Today, and Social Anthropology. Among his books are
Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (2014), The Politics of Mediated
Presence: Exploring the Voices of Muslims in Norway’s Contemporary Mediated
Public Spheres (2015), and Anthropology of Our Times: An Edited Volume in
Public Anthropology (2017).
Tamir Bar- On received his PhD from McGill University. He is a
professor- researcher in the School of Social Sciences and Government,
Tec de Monterrey (Mexico). A member of Mexico’s National System for
Researchers since 2015, Bar- On is the author of Where Have All The
Fascists Gone? (2007 ), Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to
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Contributors
Modernity (2013), The World through Soccer: The Cultural Impact of a Global
Sport (2014), and Beyond Soccer: International Relations and Politics as Seen
through the Beautiful Game (2017).
Seth Bartee is an Assistant Professor of History at Guilford Technical
Community College in Jamestown, North Carolina. Currently, Prof. Bartee
is serving as a New City Fellow in Raleigh, North Carolina and a Visiting
Scholar at The Kirk Center in Mecosta, Michigan. Bartee is an intellectual
historian and an active member of The Society for US Intellectual History.
Jean- Yves Camus is director of the Observatoire des radicalités politiques
(ORAP) at the Jean Jaurès Foundation (Paris) and a Research Fellow at
the Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques (IRIS). His last
book (with Nicolas Lebourg), Far Right Politics in Europe, was published by
Harvard University Press in 2017. He has also written extensively on the
European New Right and the links between Russia and the European Far
Right. On those topics, he contributed to Marlene Laruelle’s Eurasianism
and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe- Russia Relationship (2015)
and to Les Faux- semblants du Front national: Sociologie d’un parti politique
(2015), edited by Sylvain Crépon, Alexandre Dézé, and Nonna Mayer.
David Engels is professor of Roman history at the Université libre de
Bruxelles, Belgium. He has published numerous articles and books on
Roman Rel
igion, Hellenistic Statecraft, the Reception of Antiquity, and
the Philosophy of History. Among his best- known works is Le déclin: La
crise de l’Union européenne et la chute de la République romaine: Analogies
historiques (2013), translated since then into numerous languages. He also
edited a survey of cyclical theories in the Philosophy of History titled Von
Platon bis Fukuyama (2015).
Stéphane François has a PhD in political science and is an associated
member of Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (CNRS/ Ecole Pratique
des hautes Etudes). He is a specialist on the French extreme Right. His
most recent books include Histoire de la haine identitaire: Mutations et
diffusions de l’altérophobie (with Nicolas Lebourg, 2016), L’Extrême droite
et l’ésotérisme: Retour sur un couple toxique (2016), Le Retour de Pan:.
Panthéisme, néo-
paganisme et antichristianisme dans l’écologie radicale
(2016), Les Mystères du nazisme:. Aux sources d’un fantasme contemporain
(2015), and Au- delà des vents du Nord: L’extrême droite française, le Pôle nord
et les Indo- Européens (2014).
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Contributors
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Hans Thomas Hakl is the founder of Gnostika, a German academic- esoteric
magazine where he serves as coeditor. He has edited works by Julius
Evola, Eliphas Lévi, Gérard Encausse (“Papus”), Maria De Naglowska,
Hans Freimark, and others. He is a contributor to the Dictionary of Gnosis
and Western Esotericism (2003) and to the new edition of the Encyclopedia of
Religions (2005). His main work, Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History
of the Twentieth Century, was published by McGill- Queen’s University
Press in 2013. Hakl has translated four books of Evola into German and
written more than thirty articles (including introductions, reviews, and
dictionary entries) on various aspects of Evola in German, Italian, English,
and French. Hakl met Evola shortly before his death.
Marlene Laruelle is an associate director and research professor at the
Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott
School of International Affairs, The George Washington University.
Laruelle is also a codirector of PONARS (Program on New Approaches to
Research and Security in Eurasia), director of the Central Asia Program
at IERES and a researcher at EUCAM (Europe- Central Asia Monitoring),
Brussels. Laruelle received her PhD in history at the National Institute of
Oriental Languages and Cultures (INALCO) and her postdoctoral degree
in political science at Sciences- Po in Paris.
Matthew Lyons has been writing about right- wing politics for more
than twenty- five years. His work focuses on the interplay between social
movements and systems of oppression. He is coauthor with Chip Berlet
of Right- Wing Populism in America (2000) and lead author of Ctrl- Alt-
Delete: An Antifascist Report on the Alternative Right (2017). His essays have
appeared in many periodicals and on the radical antifascist blog Three
Way Fight.
Graham Macklin is an Assistant Professor/ Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Center for Research on Extremism (C- Rex) in Oslo, Norway, and an
Honorary Fellow, Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/ Non- Jewish
Relations, Southampton University, United Kingdom. He has published
widely about extreme right- wing politics in Britain in both the interwar and
postwar period including “Very Deeply Dyed in Black”: Oswald Mosley and
the Resurrection of British fascism after 1945 (2007). His forthcoming mon-
ograph White Racial Nationalism in Britain in Britain will be published
by Routledge in 2019 as will two coedited collections, Transnational
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Contributors
Extreme Right- wing Networks and Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method
and Practice. His research has been funded by local and national govern-
ment as well as the European Union (H2020). He is also coeditor of the
Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right book series.
Reinhard Mehring is professor of political science at the University
of Education Heidelberg. He has a PhD in political science from the
University of Freiburg and a Habilitation from the Humboldt University of
Berlin. His books include Carl Schmitt zur Einführung (1992, 5th ed. 2017),
Carl Schmitt: Aufstieg und Fall: Eine Biographie (2009, translated as Carl
Schmitt: A Biography, 2014), Kriegstechniker des Begriffs: Biographische Studien
zu Carl Schmitt (2014), and Carl Schmitt: Denker im Widerstreit: Werk–
Wirkung– Aktualität (2017).
Elliot Neaman is professor of modern European intellectual history
at the University of San Francisco, where he has taught since 1993. He
specializes in European political thought, ideology, and theory. His first
book, A Dubious Past: The Politics of Literature after Nazism (1999), was
on the writer Ernst Jünger. His latest book features the West German
student movement, Free Radicals (1999). Neaman has also written exten-
sively about other major European thinkers, including Martin Heidegger,
Carl Schmitt, Georges Sorel, and Jacques Derrida. He also publishes in
European newspapers on contemporary issues, particularly geopolitics
and economics. His current research project focuses on espionage in the
Federal Republic. Neaman teaches courses in intellectual history, modern
German history, world history after 1945, and in the USF Honors Program.
Russell Nieli received his PhD from Princeton University where he spe-
cialized in political philosophy and the interface between religion and pol-
itics. He is a lecturer in Princeton University’s Politics Department, and
is a senior preceptor in Princeton’s James Madison Program in American
Ideals and Institutions. Nieli is the author of Wittgenstein: From Mysticism
to Ordinary Language, and in recent years has written extensively on race
relations in the United States, which he approaches from the perspective
of classical liberalism and what he calls “theocentric humanism.” In his
book Wounds That Will Not Heal (2012), he takes up the continuing con-
troversy over racial preference policies in the United States with a spe-
cial focus on American universities. He is currently working on a book
that explains the forces that can hold America together despite its vast
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Contributors
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demographic diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and collective
achievement.
Mark Sedgwick was born in England and studied history at Oxford
University before emigrating to Egypt. He did a PhD at the University
of Bergen in Norway, taught history at the American University in Cairo,
and then moved to Denmark to teach in the Department of the Study of
Religion at Aarhus University. He was secretary of the European Society
of the Study of Western Esotericism, and first became aware of the
connections between esotericism and radical politics while working on
his PhD.
Joshua Tait is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of North
Carolina. His dissertation explores
the intellectual origins of conserva-
tism and right- wing engagement with the “American Political Tradition.”
Originally from New Zealand, he lives in Chapel Hill, NC.
Benjamin R. Teitelbaum is assistant professor of ethnomusicology
and affiliate in International Affairs at the University of Colorado. His
commentary on Western ultraconservatism, culture, and politics has
appeared in Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal
as well as on Swedish Radio, and his academic essays have appear
in Ethnomusicology, Patterns of Prejudice, Scandinavian Studies, Arkiv,
and Current Anthropology. His first book, Lions of the North: Sounds of
the New Nordic Radical Nationalism, was published in 2017 by Oxford
University Press.
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Introduction
Mark Sedgwick
T H E R A D I C A L R I G H T was once generally imagined in terms of skinheads,
tattoo parlors, and hooligans. While all of these do play a role, there is
much more to the contemporary radical Right than this. There is also an
intellectual radical Right, little known to most, but increasingly important.
The central purpose of Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New
Threat to Liberal Democracy is to explore it.
The existence of an intellectual radical Right is not a new phenom-
enon. Many prominent thinkers from the French Revolution to the Second
World War could be put in this category. The horrors of the war and of the
Nazi camps, however, contributed to a general reaction against the radical
Right that led to its disappearance from mainstream politics and to its
eclipse in intellectual life. For many decades, a new liberal orthodoxy ruled
across the West, apparently unchallenged.
Since the start of the twenty- first century, the mainstream has been
shifting. In Europe, “populist” political parties have pulled the mainstream
in their direction, and the liberal orthodoxy of the postwar period is ever
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