Counter-Currents
Counter-Currents Radio No. 619
Alain de Benoist’s Against Liberalism
Counter-Currents Radio
256 words / 57:46
You can buy Alain de Benoist’s Against Liberalism here.
Greg Johnson was joined by F. Roger Devlin in this edition of the Counter-Currents Radio Book Club. It is now available to download or listen to online.
Topics Include:
0:57 – Intro and welcoming Roger Devlin
1:40 – Donations acknowledged
3:11 – Roger’s summary of De Benoist’s book; Locke, liberalism and libertarianism; the market as a model for society. Individualism
5:00 – The “progressive” Left has transitioned to neoliberalism and the market model
6:00 – Failure of Communism; Mitterand’s failed experiment with socialism in the 80s
7:00 – The market as a model; individualism as a metaphysical claim
7:55 – Translating preferences into economic terms; what does this leave out of human life? Preferences are not just given by nature but must be evaluated: what should we want? Individual and society: Robinson Crusoe is a myth; Gilligan’s Island is a sitcom, not a guide to life
18:00 – De Benoist as a reader’s guide; Liberalism versus Communitarianism
21:00 – Hegel on civil society. State, family, market
22:10 – What is De Benoist’s alternative?
22:30 – Roepke: society with a market versus market society
23:10 – Gary Becker’s economic model. Overlapping realms
24:00 – Dialectic: Plato & Hegel’s method for articulating a complex whole like society
25:40 – A polemic, not a treatise
26:30 – De Benoist’s positive vision. The common good. Normative values not just given
28:30 – What is sovereignty?
30:00 – Democracy
30:45 – Aristotle’s “mixed regimes”
34:10 – Populism
35:30 – Representative versus participatory democracy
38: 20 – Critique or treatise?
39:00 – Subsidiarity
41:00 – Political correctness and Thatcher. Liberalism and technocracy seek to eliminate decisions and thus depoliticize society
44:00 – The rise of the bourgeois class; has it disappeared or become all-pervasive?
48:00 – Arendt on public versus “social”
49:00 – Questions
50:00 – The example of Singapore. Multiracial but not multicultural
54:00 – Wrapping up. Upcoming books and podcasts
To listen in a player, click here or below. To download, right-click the link and click “save as.”
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4 comments
Superb discussion!
Thank you both.
I sum it up this way: First, do no harm. (Not original, but true.) The social corollary is: Be willing to leave others alone.
Only a beginning, as the old song goes.
Happy New Year, comrades!
Eleatic Cavalier
I’ll be ordering this one in the new year.
On gold and shiny and, perhaps, rare things in general, its appeal is both conventional and, to some extent, natural. Thomas More shows this by having his Utopians use it for shackling prisoners of war and as the material for chamber pots and letting their children play with it.
I enjoyed this conversation. It increased my already substantial respect for the knowledge and intellect of Greg Johnson and F. Roger Devlin.
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