For the past five centuries almost to the very year — from the time that Machiavelli scribed his Principe up to the cusp of the present moment — political philosophy, no matter the specific forms it has adopted nor the peculiar goals it has posited, has bent its sights on the polestar of Enlightenment ideals. I do not say, of course, that this has been the exclusive practice of politics in the West, for that practice has been, as all political praxis, a mottled mutt of a beast, and has often had to struggle against its impure heritage to catch up with its longer-legged theoreticians. But they, for their part, and with all artistic insouciance and freedom, have never tired of whistling it on. Indeed, all of modernity sometimes seems to be nothing other than this drama, this experiment, unfolding over the course of these five centuries — the long attempt to establish Enlightenment ideals on Earth. And looking back, how can one avoid the impression that the attempt has been successful? For never before, not even in the good old days of Christendom, have so many societies of so many men fallen under the sway of a single idea.
To be sure, there have been voices as well in this half millennium to cry out against the modern course and project, to show forth its contradictions and shortcomings, to object, atimes passionately and trenchantly, to its precepts and its consequences, to seek to turn it around, to turn it away. But when they were not, as Rousseau or Marx, but the masked devotees of the very ideals they denigrated, they were either demonized and marginalized, or else their words were hitched to the modern project like so many unwilling asses, and made to plod on eternally toward that same poxed star which these men had scorned. Such men, such enemies of the Enlightenment — at least to us, we disillusioned and “disenlightened” of these latter days — appear not so much rebels and profligates to our eyes, as preparers for the morrow, and prophets of a new dawn.
For despite all, history proceedeth apace; these heavens above us yet gyre and turn, and even what seems firmest thereabove, even that humanistic polestar itself, has slowly rolled off its pin, twisting our courses to wild lands and mad ideals, perchance to unendurable and inhuman climes — leading us farther away even from the end it once seemed to propose and promise — leading us astray.
Enough. The political landscape around us is changing, is changed, though we, tardy as ever, still seek to reckon it in the old terms and by the old waypoints and merestones of our forefathers. A rift has opened at the very heart of the modern project, due to nothing but the tensions within its first principles, and in this rift new and exotic possibilities begin to crop up like the forms of strange undocumented life, slowly making themselves visible in the shadows. A veritable cleft of Pandora is opened at our feet, and from it issues — even now, if we are but keen-eyed to see — new alternatives to modernity, new courses for humanity, even new stars to guide us in this uncharted wilderness which gazes deep into our hearts, and — beckons —
The present book is dedicated to precisely such cartological and astronomical work. It is a book ever “toward” something, a book which strives without arriving, a work which would humbly join the labors of greater men who have perceived the need for a new political vision in our day. It is therefore a work of hope and preparation — in its way, an introduction, or better say a propaedeutic, to borrow a fine high-falutin’ old word from one of the hoary fathers of German idealism — which would like nothing more than to become the fertilizer and fallow field in which a new generation of wiser and readier men might seed their sounder crops.
A few remarks, then, on the nature of this work — first on the name of the political form it seeks to comprehend, and to whose arising it seeks to contribute, and second, on the method with which it goes about this business.
I have adopted without long hesitating what seems to me the most felicitous designation for the political vision even now emerging around us — the Deep Right. Other possibilities abound, as Alt Right, Neoreaction, Ethnic Nationalism, &co. But here we already encounter a problem: these few examples alone reveal a variety of views on a variety of issues; they are not perfectly compatible with each other, they appear to disagree on any number of subjects of present, and pressing, concern. For they are in point of fact political movements. Yet every political movement is the incarnation of a certain wider political vision by which it is defined and through which its principal features are determined. The wider vision which all these movements, and others yet, share as their common point of departure cannot be reduced to the conventional left and right of political thought today, for two basic reasons. First, because these movements often hold to principles which are despised by the entire gamut of conventional thought; and second, because they seem to mix principles, which by the conventional understanding would seem to be strictly incompatible — as, “environmentalism” with “traditionalism,” or “conservatism” with “social activism,” to take but a few relatively innocuous examples present in several such contemporary movements. The wider vision which these movements have in common must then stand beyond the traditional political poles: and it is this new vision which we call the Deep Right.
The Deep Right is then a wide, a panoramic vision, and not a particularistic view. It is, as it were, a style of thought, an approach to the world and to the human being, an approach to political things. It is not a philosophy — for it is characterized by an adherence and commitment to certain visible “ideals,” which it will neither look upon from behind, nor indeed overlook — but it is the progeny of certain definite philosophies, certain specific philosophers, as much, indeed, as of certain artists. It is neither a movement nor a party, for it contains movements and parties, just as the conventional left and the conventional right do. In the present work, I refer to it as a worldview — a certain stance and manner of outlook and of life, a certain tendency of thought and action directed by certain “values,” principles, precepts, and goals. It might better and more fruitfully be called a worldvision — even a worldspirit.
The name “New Right,” which is also used in these pages, is often connected to a recent European intellectual tradition associated with the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE) in France. Whatever might said about that movement — and there is much to be said — it does not concern us at present; suffice it to say that we are in many ways the intellectual heirs of that effort. Yet the name “New Right,” or Nouvelle Droite, was largely unsought and even unwanted by many of the members of the group, who did not wish to be associated with the political right at all, nor the political left for that matter. The name has lived a life of its own since their time, and has come to mean something fundamentally other than what they might have intended. We here adopt it in full consciousness and in full will, and it is essential to note that in point of fact the New Right of which we will speak in these pages, as we shall have ample opportunity to discuss, is not merely the “new right side of the traditional political spectrum,” some improvised replacement of a withered branch of the old left-right dichotomy. Essentially and fundamentally it does not derive its name from that dichotomy at all.
The “New Right” is so called primarily because it proposes a new human right, a new sense and measure of human things, a new ideal of human justice. Or rather, since the New Right has learned to mistrust this featureless, generalized, neutered and denatured creature called the “human being,” better to say it proposes a new Occidental Right, a new idea of what is right, fair, meet, just, for Occidental Man. But Occidental Man is an ideal which is being born; he has not even donned his first swaddling clothes. Then the New Right is an attempt to constitute the new ideal of Occidental Man, together with the political forms rightly fit for his special nature.
The New Right is new with respect to what is conventional in the modern day; it is new insofar as it proposes ideals unheard of today. Yet this should not mislead. In many ways the New Right is the oldest of all political views, for it takes its bearings by what is old, very old: it is in point of fact the audible or visible portion of the Deep Right; it is the scented fruit to the Deep Right’s hidden root. It is so traditionalist that even the modern conservatives appear to be but outmoded revolutionaries by its standards. It has reverence in its heart, it is built on reverence, and so far from being a firebrand call to arms, is rather a summons carrying us back to the distant past, and to a kind of society long since “overcome” and buried in mud and rubble. Yet it is a strange thing, but that which is eldest brings us ever to that which is newest, as though there were something deep-buried in our very Western soul which mandated and demanded creativity of us — as if the way forward and the way back were somehow one and the same... The New Right, the newest political worldview, appears by an incredible paradox to be also the oldest. Not for nothing has it been said that Prometheus gave mind to man; not for nothing has it been said that “all the arts of man come from Prometheus.”
By a most fortuitous coincidence — our English tongue is really unfairly rich in such coincidences — this word “right” happens to echo the name of the political “right” in the conventional sense, even though this conventional right itself owes its name to a mere historical accident: the supporters of King Louis XVI, in the period preceding the Revolution, happened to gather themselves at the right hand of the Assembly’s president, and we have never since ceased gossiping on it. This intriguing lexical mirror between the Deep Right (ἡ δίκη, ἡ ἀρχή, ἡ δυναστεία) and the conventional right (θέμις, ὁ νόμος, δεξιός) is not altogether the product of an accident of the English language — neither for the older etymology to which both senses of “right” owe their existence, nor for the connection this coincidence indicates between the New Right and the conventional right: for we shall have due reason to note, and more than a single time, that there is a certain base kinship between the conventional right and the New Right, despite all their fierce disputes and ever wider divergences — despite the fact, even because of the fact, that one is dying, even as the other is being born.
Given that the present work sets out to comprehend a wide, a macroscopic worldview, the reader can expect to find in these pages but few concrete proposals to address our specific present difficulties. This will no doubt exasperate, and with good reason: we are in dire and urgent need of precisely such proposals. It is fortunate, then, that men better prepared than I are providing as much in our day. But I will not blush if I tarry in what some men will certainly scorn as “abstractions”; for I say that until we grasp the essential or characteristic features of our era, by which possibility is meted out to us, together with the principal form and outline of our own vision, by which we might meet that possibility in some morrow, all specific prescriptions for confronting any concrete problems in our epoch will always have the character of but treading water and idle chatter.
I also warn my readers from the outset not to hope for scientific nor still less scientistic data from these pages — no graphs, charts, models, equations, statistics; no “studies” nor their “abstracts”; no “newest discoveries,” “latest findings,” “most innovative inventions,” nor even many “well-documented facts” — nay, not so much as a single great name from the honorable field of scientific endeavor, brought forth to serve as comely pedestal for this or that statuesque scientistic argument. I may not proceed in such blithe disregard of such “information,” were I not quite certain that my negligence will be everywhere supplemented by the unstinting efforts of countless others. But as I perceive that modern science is the fruit of the modern project — and as the New Right can and will be nothing, if it does not break that worn orbit — it seems to me we are in wont of an equally independent form of investigation into political things, which does not reduce to the questionable premises of science — and certainly not to the “scientific understanding of man” which contemporary scientism purports to offer — or presumes to impose. What form the New Right might one day physically assume in this world, or what that might entail, can hardly be distilled into a single sentence, particularly as the entire present work is but a merest gesture in that direction: but I can with confidence affirm what neither it, nor this work, will exclude: namely, the aesthetic —
Having said so much on the present work — which seems to me but my duty given the idiosyncrasy, the anachronism, of the tone and the style, not to say the method which characterizes these pages — I leave all further explication of this project where it rightly belongs, to the work itself, as well as to the work of its diligent reader.