Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
Page 4
example, President Trump’s former “chief strategist,” Steve Bannon, has
referred to Evola and Dugin only obliquely, and has only once mentioned
his appreciation of Guénon, the French esotericist who inspired both
Evola and Dugin.13 These key thinkers of the radical Right, then, matter
everywhere that the Right is resurgent, in America as much as in France,
Greece, Russia, and Hungary.
Notes
1. One of the inspirations of this book has been Kurt Lenk, Günter Meuter, and
Henrique Ricardo Otten, Vordenker der Neuen Rechten [Key Thinkers of the New
Right] (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1997). This work by three German scholars,
which has been translated into French but not into English, discusses six key
thinkers, three of whom are also discussed in this book. The three that are not
discussed are Heidegger, for reasons given earlier, Georges Sorel, and Hans
Freyer. None of these, though undoubtedly important, especially in a German
context, is now widely read internationally.
2. Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite (Arpajon: Editions du Labyrinthe, 2001), xii.
3. Guillaume Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons: manifeste de la résistance européenne
(Paris: L’Æncre, 2001), 119.
4. Guillaume Corvus, La convergence des catastrophes (Paris: Diffusion International
Éditions, 2004).
5. Paul Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
6. Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro- Arab Axis (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Press,
2005), 20.
7. Mencius Moldbug, “OL9: How to Uninstall a Cathedral,” UR, June 12, 2008,
https:// unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/ 2008/ 06/ ol9- how- to- uninstall-
cathedral.html.
xvi
xxvi
Introduction
8. Greg Johnson, “November 9, 2016,” accessed December 14, 2017, https:// www.
counter- currents.com/ 2016/ 11/ november- 9– 2016/.
9. He rejects the label “gay.”
10. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der
Weltgeschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1922), 1:107– 108.
11. Jack Donovan, The Way of Men (Milwaukie, OR: Dissonant Hum, 2012), 139.
12. Donovan, “Anarcho- Fascism,” Jack Donovan, March 3, 2013, archived March 3,
2017, https:// web.archive.org/ web/ 20170331060008/ http:// www.jack- donovan.
com/ axis/ 2013/ 03/ anarcho- fascism/.
13. Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists,”
New York Times, February 10, 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/ 2017/ 02/ 10/
world/ europe/ bannon- vatican- julius- evola- fascism.html; Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising
(New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 204– 207.
1
PART I
Classic Thinkers
2
3
1
Oswald Spengler and the Decline
of the West
David Engels
“ I N T H I S B O O K is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining
history, of following the still untraveled stages in the destiny of a culture,
and specifically of the only culture of our time and on our planet which is ac-
tually in the phase of fulfillment— the West- European- American.”1 These
are the bold first words of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West ( Der
Untergang des Abendlandes), the aim of which was to sketch the potential
future of the West on the basis of the method of cultural comparison, and
to provide the blueprint for each and every human high culture. Spengler
often considered himself one of the last representatives of the bourgeois
society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and felt deeply un-
happy with the twentieth century, an impression of “untimeliness,” which
also characterized several of his contemporaries, such as Thomas Mann
and Herrmann Hesse. This explains the nostalgic overtones in Spengler’s
writings as well as his (unconvincing) attempts at overcoming his mel-
ancholy by posing as a dogged advocate of technology, imperialism, and
mass civilization.
Oswald Spengler’s fame is based on his The Decline of the West, a
monumental historical study that endeavored to show that all human
civilizations live through similar phases of evolution, roughly equivalent
to the different ages of a biological entity. During the 1920s, Spengler’s
ideas were much debated not only in Germany but everywhere in Europe
and America, and though the academic world remained generally skep-
tical, Spengler’s prophecy of the impending decline and ultimate fall of
4
4
C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S
Western civilization influenced many writers and artists, then and now.
Spengler also dabbled in politics and attempted, in a series of smaller
essays such as Prussianism and Socialism, Political Duties of German Youth,
and Building the German Empire Anew, to promote the idea of a conserva-
tive renaissance in Germany.2
The rise of National Socialism gradually put Spengler in a situation
of ideological opposition, illustrated by his The Hour of Decision, which
criticized Hitler’s racial theory and made him persona non grata.3 After
the Second World War, Spengler’s elitism and his expectation of the ad-
vent of a German- dominated Europe as a modern equivalent of the
Roman Empire overshadowed the reception of his work until the 1990s.
This somewhat masked the complexity of his thought, which prefigures
such modern debates as the criticism of technology, ecological issues,
interreligious questions, the rise of Asia, and prehistoric human evolu-
tion. However, since the end of the Cold War, Spengler’s work has been
gradually rediscovered and discussed, and gives an intriguing— if highly
controversial— perspective on the numerous challenges the Western world
has been confronted with since the beginning of the twenty- first century.
Life and context
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was born on May 29, 1880, at
Blankenburg, Harz, in Germany, the son of Bernhard Spengler, a stern
and anti- intellectual official in the post office, and Pauline Grantzow, the
somewhat depressive descendant of an artistic family.4 Oswald was the
oldest surviving child of their union, which also brought forth three girls,
Adele, Gertrud, and Hildegard, the youngest of whom later lived with her
brother as his housekeeper. In 1891 the family moved to Halle an der Saale,
where Spengler was educated as a pupil of the Francke Foundations, a reli-
giously motivated educational institution strongly influenced by Protestant
Pietism. The siblings later on remembered their childhood as difficult and
sad, and Oswald, also suffering from severe headaches, tried to secure
some form of inner autonomy by keeping away from his schoolmates,
indulging in the most diverse autodidactic studies, describing, in great
detail, imaginary world empires,5 and writing, at seventeen, a drama titled
Montezuma.6
Exempted from military service because of a severe heart problem,
Spengler took courses in mathe
matics, natural sciences, and philosophy
at the universities of Halle, Munich, and Berlin, and received, in 1904,
5
Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West
5
his PhD with a thesis on Heraclitus, “The Fundamental Metaphysical
Thought of the Heraclitean Philosophy.”7 In 1905 he also submitted the
secondary dissertation ( Staatsexamensarbeit) needed to become a high-
school teacher, this time on the evolution of the eye, “The Development
of the Organ of Sight in the Higher Realms of the Animal Kingdom.”8
Despite his loathing for teaching (he reportedly suffered a nervous break-
down merely from looking at his first school), Spengler seems to have
been appreciated by his pupils, though not by his colleagues, and he suc-
cessively worked as a teacher in Saarbrücken, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg
until 1911, when the small inheritance he received on the death of his
mother (his father had died in 1901) enabled him to retire from teaching
and live as an independent writer.
Spengler moved to Munich and started to write, alongside numerous
smaller contributions for various journals and several (abortive) novels,
his major scholarly work, The Decline of the West. The composition of this
work, taking almost seven years, was particularly difficult, as is shown by
Spengler’s diaries from this period, Eis heauton (“On himself”), which
permit valuable insights into his tormented personality and his perma-
nent self- doubts.9 The first volume of the Decline of the West appeared in
1918, shortly before the end of the First World War, and instantly made
him a celebrity. While writing the second volume (published in 1922,
followed by a revised edition of the first, varying marginally in style
but not in content), Spengler also began to reflect on the German de-
feat and to actively engage with contemporary political questions. The
first result was the publication, in 1919, of Prussianism and Socialism,
followed by numerous shorter texts, which only marginally added to the
positions developed in The Decline of the West, such as Political Duties of
German Youth and Building the German Empire Anew. A confirmed bach-
elor and a man permanently riddled with deep psychological issues,
Spengler never started a family but lived with his sister Hildegard, who
had moved to Munich after her husband’s death and acted as Spengler’s
housekeeper.10
After becoming something of a celebrity and, given his growing in-
terest not only in political but also in economic and financial politics,11
Spengler endeavored to get involved in politics in a decidedly conserv-
ative and elitist way.12 His attempts, including his support in 1924 for
General Hans von Seeckt’s unsuccessful run at power, only demonstrated
his personal shortcomings when it came to understanding the intrigues
of everyday politics and to dealing with opponents and rivals. Over the
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C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S
following decade, Spengler slowly dropped his political ambitions and
concentrated instead on reassessing questions that The Decline of the West
had left open, though he was severely hampered in his work by health is-
sues, which included a cerebral hemorrhage in 1927. In 1931 he published
Man and Technics, a visionary reflection on the history and environmental
shortcomings of technology from earliest times to the predicted end of
the West.13
Unfortunately, the major monograph Spengler had started to sketch
after the publication of The Decline of the West never reached comple-
tion and remained a collection of shattered fragments and aphorisms.
However, the material, edited posthumously,14 is substantial enough to in-
dicate the outlines and general content of the project.15
Spengler’s last years were overshadowed by the rise of Hitler. While
Spengler, on the basis of his comparative method, had considered
the transformation of ultracapitalist mass democracies into dicta-
torial regimes as inevitable, and had expressed some sympathy for
Mussolini’s Fascist movement as a first symptom of this development
(a sympathy returned by Mussolini, who favored the translation of
Spengler’s writings into Italian),16 he took a much more critical view of
National Socialism. As admirer of the spirit of the old Prussian aristoc-
racy, he loathed what he saw as the proletarian and demagogic character
of Hitler’s party and, given his own assumption of a radical parallelism
between all past and present civilizations, considered the Aryan racial
doctrine to be nonsense.17 Despite a personal and deeply unsatisfying
meeting with Hitler himself and the regime’s initial endeavor to win
him over in order to benefit from his international standing, Spengler
gradually expressed his open contempt for the alleged “national up-
rising,” culminating in his publication of The Hour of Decision ( Jahre
der Entscheidung) in 1933, in which he openly criticized the new regime,
though from the antiliberal perspective resulting from his belief in the
inevitable trend of history.18 In 1934 Spengler even pronounced the fu-
neral oration for one of the victims of Hitler’s crushing of the (alleged)
Röhm Putsch and, in 1935, he retired from the board of the highly in-
fluential Nietzsche Archive because of its outspoken support for the
new regime. After having predicted the end of the Third Reich within
the next ten years,19 Spengler died of a heart attack on May 8, 1936.
The Festschrift devoted to him by some of his admirers was published
quietly;20 a contribution promised by Mussolini was retracted,21 prob-
ably in order to avoid diplomatic frictions.
7
Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West
7
Inspirations
In the introduction to The Decline of the West, Spengler felt the urge “to
name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and
Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty.”22
Although the influence of Goethe’s vitalism— mostly his interest in bo-
tanic sciences and what he called the “primordial plant” as the blueprint
for all other living entities— and of Nietzsche’s cultural criticism can in-
deed be felt everywhere,23 Goethe and Nietzsche (neither of whom was a
proper historian) were not Spengler’s only sources. Spengler himself, as
like every self- declared genius, generally insisted on the absolute “novelty”
of his theory:
The system that is put forward in this work . . . I regard as the
Copernican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no
sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture
as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs,
Mexico— separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass
count for just as much in the general picture of history as the
Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual great-
ness and soaring power.24
This assertion, however, is not unproblematic. The scholarly literature
cited by Sp
engler in his footnotes shows the wide array of the works he
consulted, many of which prefigured some key features of his theory,
including the universal and cyclical approach of world history, which
was taken from the distinguished German academic historian Eduard
Meyer, whom Spengler greatly appreciated. It is also clear that large
parts of Spengler’s personal worldview were deeply influenced by con-
temporary concepts in the philosophy of vitalism,25 the belief that all
living organisms as well as their social creations are fundamentally dif-
ferent from inorganic entities and submitted to their own set of laws
characterized not merely by the mechanics of action and reaction but by
the fate of birth, blossom, decline, and death. Furthermore, the idea that
civilizations broadly follow the evolutionary steps of a living being and
can thus be compared with reference to this common pattern goes back
to classical antiquity and even beyond, although we cannot be sure to
what extent Spengler himself was aware of this.26 Cato the Elder, Cicero,
Seneca, Florus, and Ammianus Marcellinus had all compared the rise,
8
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C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S
maturity, and decline of the Roman state to the different ages of man, an
approach which exerted a tremendous influence on many later historians
including even Francis Bacon, who used the biological analogy in order
to compare different empires with each other. To some extent, this pat-
tern also underlay another, equally influential interpretation of history,
that of the dialectic approach first formulated in the theologico- historical
speculations of Joachim of Fiore, who compared the history of salva-
tion to the three persons of the Holy Trinity, and the philosophy of his-
tory of Hegel, who compared not only the three dialectical phases of
human evolution to the three ages of man but who also tried, rather like
Giambattista Vico, to show how the spirit of every people ( Volksgeist) in
itself evolved in a dialectical and biological way.27
Nevertheless, Spengler is right in claiming that nobody in Western
thought had pushed historical comparatism to such a degree as him-
self. Although he engaged for the most part with the classical, Arab,