Translated by Roger Adwan
Arktos
London 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Arktos Media Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Arktos.com | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Gab.ai
Original title
Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines
(Paris: Copernic, 1977)
ISBN
978-1-912079-98-8 (Paperback)
978-1-912079-37-7 (Hardback)
978-1-912079-35-3 (Ebook)
Translator
Roger Adwan
Editor
Martin Locker and Roger Adwan
Cover and Layout
Tor Westman
Translator’s Preface
When it comes to politics, very few books ever manage to stand the test of time. This is because in an ever-changing world, most thoughts are revealed to be obsolete and are, more often than not, proven inaccurate and sometimes even completely wrong. This, however, does not apply to Alain de Benoist’s masterpiece, View from the Right. There are some, of course, who may still find themselves wondering what — and how much — readers stand to gain from a book that was written more than forty years ago.
The global landscape has, after all, changed dramatically since its original publication and many, if not most, of the figures mentioned and quoted in it have long since passed away. Furthermore, what the educated Rightist seeks is a book that will contribute to determining his own position and role in our contemporary Western world, a world that now stands on the edge of an abyss. And yet, upon initiating the reading process, one quickly realises that View from the Right has lost none of its relevance and that the four decades that have passed since French readers first caught sight of its contents have failed to rob it of its undeniable significance.
Considering the fact that Alain de Benoist is known to have been one of the founders of the New Right, a movement that still exerts great influence upon the Rightist spectrum nowadays, it should hardly come as a surprise to anyone that View from the Right comprises the very thoughts and views that helped shape and define the movement itself. Far from being a mere factual description of past political realities, a political manual, so to speak, it delves deep into several other topics as well, all of which are expressed in a manner that renders their pertinence timeless. The themes range from political and social ones to religious and spiritual considerations and analyses; for being truly Right-oriented is synonymous with an entire mental disposition and cannot be restricted to a mere political inclination. And despite the fact that the author covers all of these subjects from a Rightist point of view, he succeeds in remaining quite objective throughout, which is a huge feat by any standards.
The result is a book that is intellectually stimulating and extremely thought-provoking and that will continue to fascinate readers for a long time to come. As for my translation of its contents, it should be noted that, regardless of how much the world has indeed changed since the late 1970s, I have chosen to retain the original information included by the author when penning the French text, so that 21st-century readers may perceive the past through Alain de Benoist’s eyes and appreciate how much his great mind, which can only be described as having been genuinely ahead of its time, contributed to making the real Right what it is today.
Roger Adwan
Chief Translator and Editor
May 30, 2018
Systems
On Politics
The Great Political Ideas
Oswald Spengler1 used to complain that students were taught to ‘dissect dead things’. ‘Into young people boiling with vigour, the nation’s future, one has instilled a taste for autopsy and cadavers’, he wrote. ‘And yet no mention is ever made of the world’s destinies, historical morphology, peoples in motion and Western civilisation’.
The least that one could say is that the work authored by Mr Jean Rouvier (a professor at the Faculty of Law in Paris)2 on The Great Political Ideas — From Their Origins to Rousseau is beyond any such reproach, as already confirmed by its chapter headings, which, among others, include the following: ‘The Gentleman and the Intellectual’, ‘The Political Symphony’, ‘The Elite Man and the Assassins’, and ‘The Great All or Deception’.
What could never have been more than a mere manual Rouvier attempted to turn into a fresco. His work does, however, remain open to the Orient’s political ideas.
The Resistance
The Egyptian pharaoh impacts his subjects in the very same manner that the sun affects the grains of sand in a desert: they are both a source of trituration. The sovereign’s grip is absolute. Should the latter be loosened, anarchy would immediately spread. The Egyptian god-king is echoed by the Iranian one: ‘This formula turns all subjects into slaves, and the latter must, at all times, proclaim their own slavery’.
At the end of the 6th century BC, Darius the Persian3 undertakes to conquer Greek Asia4 : ‘He suddenly transforms autonomy into servitude and proceeds to increase the annual levy and impose garrisons that spread terror and surround tyrants whose establishment he thus generalises. Inverting the secular policy of the Lydian kings, the Great King, far from importing Hellenism into Anatolia, intends to export the entire Orient into Greek Asia’.
A resistance soon surfaces. A revolt breaks out in 499, in Ionia. Rouvier states: ‘Everything took place as if, beyond the obscure ventures of the tyrants ruling Miletus5 , this uprising — which enjoyed the support of all Athenian brethren- were the expression of a phenomenon of rejection stemming from any and every political graft that a certain ethnic group is unable to tolerate: in this case, the graft in question turned out to be the totalitarian formula imposed upon Westerners from the outside, acting as a permanent precept for people who were naturally inclined to embrace an entirely different current of political ideas, one that was characterised by balance and moderation’.
On the other side of the Aegean, it is indeed ‘under the sign of liberty, diversity and moderation that Greece, the outpost of the Occident, stood out’.
The philosopher Heraclitus6 , who was the first of all great Greek prose writers, writes: ‘A small and orderly city built high upon a rock is preferable to Niniveh’s7 senseless disorder’.
Solon, the great legislator whose archontate lasted from 594 to 592 BC, refused to resort to any sort of demagogy and declared: ‘I dislike both the fact of remaining idle in the face of tyrannical violence and the fact of giving the good and the wicked an equal share of our fatherland’s rich soil’. This very principle would, at a later point, govern the Roman Republic.
Solon was then driven out by the mediocre and envious. Peisistratos’ tyranny8 would subsequently last from 560 to 527 BC. It enabled the transition from the harmonious democracy established by the founder of the Athenian city to Cleisthenes’ ‘false tabula rasa democracy’.9 Aristotle10 would then state that it was under the latter’s rule that ‘hereditary familial sacrifices were replaced by those where all men were accepted and the relations between men were conflated’. Simultaneously, ‘the greatest care was taken to shatter any and all previous associations’.
The following statement was, however, made by Heraclitus, the theoretician behind the harmony11 of opposites: ‘Provided that he is the greatest, a man is, in my eyes, worth 10,000 persons’.
After Pericles,12 the ‘ancient titanic nature’ mentioned by Plato in his Laws13 was once again unleashed, as hubris (or immoderation) triumphed within the ecclesia (the assembly).
‘It is a time of terror, a period that witnesses the totalitarian dictatorship of a minority population practicing public majority voting. Drunk on blood and having excluded, through their uniquely repugnant presence and hideous violence, more than nine tenths of the citizens from the ecclesia, the scoundrels trample all rights underfoot…’.
Shrugging his shoulders, Alcibiades (450–404 BC), Pericles’ stately nephew, once made the following declaration: ‘Reasonable men know all too well what democracy is worth, and there is nothing new to be said about this extravagance’.
By the 5th century BC, the scene had thus been set. It was marked by a succession of different ideas, as demonstrations and refutations clashed among the spectators. A single continuity characterises the period that stretches from Peisistratos to Machiavelli,14 and from Heraclitus to our own age. No new ideas have surfaced at all. All that is experienced are the inexhaustible variations of fundamental ideas that man has borne within himself since the dawn of time.
Against All Forms of ‘Illusory Paradise’
‘Political ideas’: the author has intentionally opted for the vaguest of terms so as to include thoughts and doctrines, tendencies and opinions, as well as themes and formulas. In other words, the term entails both theory and practice, comprising the conscious and the unvoiced alike.
In every classification, what is arbitrary stems from the criteria. In this case, the latter are defined as moderation and immoderation, mental aptitude, and the elite’s position.
Throughout his work, Mr Rouvier makes a vibrant plea in favour of the elite, ‘which one can only join and remain part of at the price of a constant effort to improve oneself’. Faced with egalitarianism and ‘democratic totalitarianism’, elite men are ranked ‘above the apparent contradiction between law and nature’. The human elite is ‘superior to thousands of other men through both its spirit and heart, as well as through love, courage, and wisdom’.
As the reader progresses from page by page, ‘great authors’ affirm their respective presence. They share their feelings towards the current world with us, and we reciprocate. And it is from this age-old dialogue that a lively and graphic reflection emerges.
It is ‘liberal realists’, meaning those who prefer flawed, yet achievable societies to any kind of illusory paradise, that Mr Rouvier sympathises with. He mentions Solon, Xenophon, Aristotle, Epicure, Virgil, Horace, Erasmus, and Montaigne, contrasting them with Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes and Calvin.
He reproaches Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)15 for having ‘introduced into the Christian Occident Cleisthenes’ formula, a formula whose corrosiveness was exacerbated on all possible levels through centuries of oriental exegesis’.
Indeed, Thomas Aquinas, who was ‘a fervent supporter of majority rule’, wrote that ‘every man is endowed with the inner light of reason, which, through his own actions, guides him towards the end’ (De Regno). Vox populi, vox Dei: God’s own will is expressed through the will of the majority. The scriptures state that ‘all power comes from God’, a notion which Thomas Aquinas expanded on when he declared that all power came from God through the people (nulla potestas nisi a Deo per populum). Arguing against the Angelic Doctor, Mr Rouvier then quotes Pascal’s words: ‘For who would want to be angelically virtuous...’.
Two centuries later, Bellarmin the Jesuit (1542–1621) affirmed: ‘Power has been given to the people and through it, all men are of equal standing’ (De Membris Ecclesiae).
Marsilius of Padua (1275–1343), the Paris university rector who then became Rome’s imperial vicar under antipope Nicolas V, took Thomas’ reasoning to the extreme: ‘It is the community of citizens that is entitled to correct the prince or depose the latter should such an action seem expedient in order to promote the common good’.
The prince was therefore compelled to defend himself. And it is Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), a partisan of renewed realism, that showed him how. Adopting Callicles’16 response to Socrates17 (a process that Nietzsche18 would complete), he founded both legality and the power to govern upon virtù, a creative energy and exceptional political capacity that is rather reminiscent of Aristotle’s arete.
In his Prince, Machiavelli writes: ‘There are two methods of fighting, the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts. But as the former is often insufficient, one must have recourse to the latter. It is therefore necessary for princes to be skilled at acting as both beast and man. […] The lion cannot protect himself from snares, just as the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognise snares, and a lion to frighten away the wolves’.
A Willingly Consented Obedience
Faced with Rousseau (1712–1778),19 professor Rouvier comes out bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, having exerted himself across 300 pages. All to deal the ultimate blow.
With regard to the Genevan thinker, he detects ‘a fundamental perversity’ that would have stunned Aristotle or Lucretius.20 Jean-Jacques is a weakling, a hypocrite, a liar, a subversive man and a decadent person. We all know how this pedagogue chose to abandon his progeniture at the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés. The rest is in keeping with this. Mr Rouvier describes Rousseau as ‘an adolescent who refuses to acknowledge his own vices, one that longs to put at ease whatever moral conscience he has kept, without, however, reforming himself’. His system serves as his alibi: once everyone has adopted it, his divergence will no longer burden him so much’.
‘It seems to me’, says Rousseau, ‘that had I lived alone, I would have neither vice nor virtue and would thus be good by means of the absolute goodness through which every single thing is the way it must naturally be. I also feel that I have now lost this very goodness under the impact of a multitude of artificial relationships, all of which are the work of society’.
‘What a good apostle!’ exclaims Jean Rouvier. ‘He transposes the infantile: “I would be so good-natured if you all did what I want you to!”’
In order to ‘liberate’ this good nature from the ‘alienations’ generated by society, Rousseau proposes that we purge ourselves from the past and start anew, with a clean slate, abolishing all existing structures. Man would thus gain the ability to communicate with the ‘great all’, and perhaps even manage to identify with this universal homeland.
All the themes advocated by utopian socialism flourish in this proposition. ‘It was with Rousseau — a man who combines Antiphon of Rhamnus21 with the first Plato and brings together Marsilius of Padua22 and Hobbes,23 and then Robespierre,24 who followed the exact same reasoning as Rousseau himself — that the new dawn of our age’s great totalitarian fallacy began’.
Saint-Just25 would then go on to say: ‘Every people has but one enemy: its own government’.
To which Goethe26 would respond, stating: ‘Every form of grandeur and wisdom is the prerogative of minorities. One must not even dream of having reason become popular someday. Passions and sentiments are what could be popular, but reason shall always remain the possession of rare, elite personalities’.
Willingly consented obedience would subsequently be celebrated by Stefan George27 in his Teppich des Lebens:28 ‘You speak of pleasures that I do not yearn for / I feel my Master’s love pounding in my heart / It is tender love that you experience, whereas I feel the noble kind / It is my noble master that I live for’.
In turn, Mr Rouvier also proceeds to denounce the notion of majority rule, describing it as a ‘majority principle that places moral, courageous, sensible and intelligent beings under the rule of a 51 % rate of amoral, cowardly, brutish and imbecilic individuals’. He then concludes: ‘Far beyond the powers of the earth and the idols, a voice resounds, addressing elite men with the following words: “You are the light of the world”’.
***
The Great Political Ideas — From Their Origins to Rousseau, an essay by Jean Rouvier, Bordas, 360 pages.
***
The Concept of the Political
Carl Schmitt29 is among
the authors and theoreticians of the German Right whose attitude towards National Socialism was, at the very least, subtle. In his now classic work entitled Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918–32 (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1974), which he dedicated to the various German nationalistic currents of the interwar period, Doctor Armin Mohler30 mentions Schmitt as one of the leading figures of the ‘conservative revolution’, alongside five others ‘outsiders’: Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg, Hans Blüher, Oswald Spengler and Thomas Mann.
With his wide forehead, thin lips, and wilful wrinkles around the outer corners of his eyes, Carl Schmitt, now eighty-nine, evades all categorisation.
This Westphalian man is a native of the Trier region and has some additional family ties to the Lorraine area. He was once the disciple of sociologist Max Weber and taught at the university in Greifswald, Bonn and Berlin. In addition to this, he participated in the political life of the 1930s. In 1936, having been criticised by certain factions of the National Socialist movement, he renounced all non-professorial activity.
In 1945, he was targeted as a scapegoat by certain compromised academics and arrested by the allies. His case was, however, dismissed. He now leads a withdrawn life in his native town of Plettenberg and continues to publish.
His first works were of a legal nature. Nevertheless, from 1918–1920 onwards, he gradually became known as a political thought specialist. Just like Max Weber, Schmitt was, at the time, openly opposed to the Weimar republic and targeted the Versailles Treaty with sharp criticism. Translated into French with a delay of more than forty years, Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political) is a text that dates back to this very period. Shortly after its publication in 1927, it resulted in intense controversies involving notable personalities such as Leo Strauss, Martin Buber and Karl Löwith, and has since remained one of the fundamental works of German political science.
Systems and Debates Page 1
