3,658 words
You can order Alain de Benoist’s Against Liberalism here
Critique of Contemporary Ideologies
For the ND, the principal enemy [1] is bourgeois liberalism and Atlantic-American West, of which European social democracy is merely one of its most dangerous derivatives. The existence and persistence of this system, the ND argues, entails for peoples the deepest form of decadence: the ultimate social disintegration, the collapse of collective identities, and the consummation of the end of history.
This position leads the ND to a critique of that system. There are, in essence, two ways of understanding society and man. One values the individual, and therefore humanity as the sum of all individuals. This is the Christian, liberal, and socialist idea. The other emphasizes peoples and cultures, conceiving humanity as the totality of popular communities. This is the holistic—or organic—conception. In the first view, nationality rests on individual choice and on the notion of a contract that can be unilaterally revoked. In the second, nationality is founded on cultural and historical inheritance. European civilization was holistic—communities were understood as organic wholes to which one belonged by inheritance and affinity—until Christianity introduced individualism. According to this new conception, man is a moral being, capable of salvation on an individual basis. As a moral being connected to a creator God “outside the world,” it becomes possible to replace man as a social being with the individual as bearer of an otherworldly character. Furthermore, the notion of humanity derives from the equal filial relationship of all men with God. From that point onward, this new abstract relationship linking all members of the human species replaced the ancient communal ties.
The history of Christian Europe thus becomes the history of the progressive diffusion of the otherworldly individual. With the secularization of Christian values in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, individualism, egalitarianism, and universalism became concrete notions of profane life. This process culminated in Calvinism, where the otherworldly element was concentrated in individual labor and effort as means of glorifying God in the world. Once belief in God began to wane, individualism changed its sign—it expressed itself as pure hedonism, the pursuit of economic happiness.
Liberalism inherited the individualist, egalitarian, and universalist conception of Christianity. Liberal society is nothing more than an aggregate of equal atoms, a contractual society in which members are bound by a kind of commercial pact—negotiable and revocable at any moment. At the same time, liberalism inherits from the Judeo-Christian metaphysical conception the idea of an ideal society without conflict, a spontaneously harmonious society, provided that one adheres to the natural order of things or is free to exercise reason. Liberalism asserts the existence of natural rights that all men possess by virtue of their very existence, independent of their particular affiliations. As for the rights of peoples, liberalism simply ignores them. Marxism, whose theory is the reverse of the liberal one, nevertheless affirms a similar conception. For Marxism, peoples and nations are merely accessory entities relative to this potential humanity—conceived as a simple sum of individuals forming the class.
Furthermore, in liberalism, economy and morality appear inseparably linked. The economy is considered a moral activity since it contributes to material well-being, the supposed objective of society, identified with the good. This conception of man as an economic animal defines both bourgeois capitalism and Marxist socialism. In both systems, the determining function of society is the economy—the primacy of economic laws, which allow the assessment of human activity and the prediction of behavior. For Marxism, as is well known, history is nothing more than the result of a struggle between classes defined by their position in relation to the modes of production. In both theories, man is essentially defined as an economic agent: man is naturally good and rational, and his natural tendency leads him to discern his economic interest and the means to achieve his maximum advantage and well-being. In this system, the general interest is merely the sum of a certain number of individual interests, arbitrarily considered non-contradictory. This theory of Homo oeconomicus parallels the emergence of economics as a science, with its own laws, whose knowledge supposedly reveals the meaning of history. In this way, economism manifests itself as a secularization of the Judeo-Christian theory of the meaning of history.
Liberalism is also founded upon the idea that power is a necessary evil, liable to degenerate when taken to its extreme; therefore, counter-powers must be established, and even its eventual disappearance may be envisaged. This hostility toward power stems from egalitarianism: power is the founder of hierarchies and cannot adapt to a non-conflictual model of society. In this conception, the political man can only be an entrepreneur or an administrator. The State becomes merely an instrument of the economy—a minimal State whose function is to guard the material property of citizens, arbitrate in cases of conflict, ensure that the law is respected, and contribute to general welfare. This critique of the State is rooted in biblical thought. From the moment God is conceived as entirely distinct from the world, the political function loses its sacred character. The sovereign no longer makes the law but speaks in the name of the law.
Two other principles of liberal politics are the omnipotence of law and the separation of powers. The first, underlying the constitutionalism of the Rechtsstaat, leads to a juridical fetishism and procedural formalism wholly incompatible with the needs of the state of emergency (Ernstfall). The second principle, the separation of powers, guarantees impotence in times of crisis. The division between the executive and legislative branches ignores the fact that only the executive can enforce laws; and as for the separation of the executive and the judiciary, control cannot be separated from execution.
The liberal plea for economic globalism culminates in the political globalism of a “world state,” which is thoroughly Western-centric, being nothing more than the extension of the liberal market model and the Western demo-liberal form of government. The advent of such a world state, far from bringing about general peace, would only multiply the occasions for conflict. External wars would become mere episodes in a vast universal civil war. For liberalism, peoples and nations are secondary realities, subordinate to the ever-expanding market that ignores power relations and national specificities.
For the ND, economic activity must be placed at the service of the nation, since it is a means of politics. Above all, it must ensure national independence—something free trade fails to do, as it not only tends toward the monopolistic regulation of markets but also weakens national economies through the international division of labor. The ND advocates the creation of self-centered zones of development that unite countries of comparable economic levels and shared geopolitical and strategic interests. In short, it calls for the abandonment of free trade in favor of a model based on national structural preferences rather than international demand, with optimization determined by both political and economic variables.
A society and a people are “in form” when they are conscious of their cultural and historical origins, when they rally around a mediator capable of concentrating their energies and catalyzing their will to destiny, or when they preserve the courage to designate an enemy. None of these conditions are fulfilled in liberal-mercantile society, which dissolves collective memory, suffocates what is sublime, and destroys passion. It refuses to have an enemy and believes it possible to do without one.
Social decadence begins at the moment when a society loses its inner sense of meaning. Liberal individualism fosters the anarchic proliferation of subjectivities to the detriment of collective values. Communal solidarity disintegrates, as individuals no longer feel bound to those around them, having nothing in common with them. Liberal societies promote individualistic narcissism and presentism. The individual can no longer project himself forward, since every project presupposes a clear awareness of heritage and origin—realities graspable only in the collective dimension. The suppression of all collective meaning leads to the dissolution of cohesion and group consciousness, signaling the end of history. In liberal ideology, the anti-historical myth of the post-industrial society (the society of leisure or of non-work), combined with the theme of the death of ideologies and the creation of a pacified universal republic, is comparable to another anti-historical myth: the Marxist idea of the classless society.
Liberalism, as the most typical representative of the ideology of individual happiness and of Judeo-Christian egalitarian universalism, manifests itself as socially disintegrative. It dismantles communities while preventing man from surpassing himself toward the superhuman—by desolidarizing him from every great project deemed dangerous to equality and security. By freeing man from the demands that would allow him to build himself, it subjects him to others that drag him below his own potential. In sum, liberalism provides man with the means to exist, but deprives him of his reason to live and his possibility of destiny.
A threat is all the more formidable the less it is perceived. Classical tyrannies at least provoke resistance, but liberal tyranny establishes itself as freedom precisely as it oppresses. The liberties granted to individuals by liberalism are a simulacrum of real freedoms. It is not enough to be free in order to do something; what is done must also have a consequence on the course of things. Freedom cannot be reduced to the feeling one has of it. A slave or a robot may very well believe themselves free—it is enough that they have lost the ability to conceive what their freedom might truly be. The consciousness of freedom is inseparable from an anthropology that founds man as the craftsman of his own destiny, as the builder of his individual and collective being. Dictatorships martyr individuals, but they do not destroy peoples. Decadence, on the other hand, makes peoples disappear gently.
Post-1968 social democracy stands in the moral and economic lineage of advanced liberalism and merely perfects and renders more credible the management of a system that the liberals themselves had already begun to steer toward the present welfare state. This social democracy of the 1980s is, in its own way, the heir to the liberal ideologies of consumption and well-being. Contrary to popular belief, these ideas were never fundamentally challenged by the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School, who criticized them only in their external form, considered incompatible with the great egalitarian principles. This post-’68 social democracy now represents a kind of neo-conservatism [2] characteristic of societies in the process of being ejected from history. Its spread coincided with the crystallization of the great wave of “reincorporation” of the French May dissenters. May 1968 was, in the final analysis, merely a manifestation of reaction against the modern world—a rejection of the challenges that modernity had posed to the societies of the 1960s. The entire spirit of ‘68 was nothing more than the inability of a generation to embrace the values of adventure that the technological world of the late twentieth century had excluded.
Post-’68 social democracy does not seek to manage the capitalist system nor to condemn it, but rather to optimize consumption while preserving the social and economic structures that generate abundance, merely adjusting slightly the distribution of goods. Its goal is to translate into political institutions the values underlying the consumer mentality: material security, the illusion of absolute free choice, the delegation of all problems to the technostructure, and the elimination of external stimuli. Social democracy thus proceeds to bureaucratize mercantile society, compensating for the deficiencies created by the impotence of the welfare state through the distribution of benefits and handouts which, despite their insignificance, maintain voter favor by creating the illusion of generosity.
One of the most interesting reflections of the ND is its revision of the overused concept of totalitarianism.
For both liberalism and Marxism, economic activity is regarded as the essential expression of human aspiration and as the principal driving force of historical becoming. This economism does not aim so much to satisfy needs as to homogenize them, and thus to equalize individuals who are called to participate in the consumption of identical goods. Claude Polin has demonstrated the relationship linking economism with egalitarianism and totalitarianism. [3] This relationship is implied in an economic practice that demands the equality of economic agents yet, by its very operation, continually introduces inequality among them. The transition from liberalism to socialism occurs when the inequality generated by an activity based on the demand for equality becomes unbearable. Totalitarianism is the only means of escaping this contradiction—it is the sole way to continue the egalitarian imperative of the economy while eliminating the inequality-generating effects inherent in free enterprise. Totalitarianism thus results from forms of power that are merely the expression of an economic infrastructure. And if to this we add an ideology that bears the essential traits of biblical thought—messianic prophecy, historical necessity, and the assertion of absolute good and evil—we arrive at the communist system.
Liberalism, being the regime that simultaneously generates inequality while making its detestation the theoretical foundation of its legitimacy, displays a schizophrenic character and a constitutive impotence in the face of totalitarianism. This is why liberal politicians can oppose their socialist critics only by claiming greater efficiency in achieving the same ends.
The classic liberal distinction between liberal-parliamentary and totalitarian regimes is inadmissible. This distinction conceals the common egalitarian inspiration of both socialist and liberal doctrines. Moreover, it hides the fact that communist society is nothing more than the radical intensification of a desire for equality, which also constitutes the foundation of liberal democracies. It likewise obscures the historical and ideological responsibility of liberalism in the birth and development of socialism, while silencing the truth that liberalism and communism, just like Christianity, represent different moments of the same egalitarian discourse. [4]
As Talmon demonstrates, modern totalitarianism was ideologically constituted on the same premises as liberal democracy. It represents merely a second possible variation on the theme of democratic ideology. It originates, like demo-liberalism, from a certain number of religious or metaphysical ideas that were secularized during the Enlightenment. The first is the primacy of reason. History is transformed into a process—a form of social determinism—toward which men move inexorably. History takes the place of theology. Eschatology becomes an ideology of progress. Revolution is declared inevitable because it is identified with the obligatory course of history, which follows a teleological evolution.
This ideology also postulates a single and valid system that will emerge once everything that reason and utility can no longer justify has disappeared. Man, moreover, is considered per se, stripped of all attributes that do not belong to his common humanity. To reach this “man-in-himself,” all differences and inequalities that hinder the rational future society must be eliminated. Another fundamental idea is the existence of a natural order, upon which society must be modeled. It is believed that through proper social action, the second nature—the corruption of the first, the authentic one—can be uprooted from every individual.
What distinguishes totalitarian democracy from liberal democracy is its impatience. Totalitarian democracy is too demanding; it wishes to proceed too quickly and, for this reason, does not hesitate to resort to the very methods of power it condemns. For Marxists, dictatorship is admitted only as a provisional means that will more rapidly lead to the realm of freedom, where all authority will have vanished. Whether liberal democrats see the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, or totalitarian democrats believe it necessary to use power one last time to immediately realize civil society, both share the same messianic conviction that humanity will one day attain a general state of peace and harmony—an equivalent to the end of history.
The almost demonological use of the concept of totalitarianism as the antagonist of liberalism functions as a pretext. It serves to preserve the “good conscience” of the West by persuading it that it bears no relation to such aberrations. In reality, what best characterizes totalitarianism is the reduction to the same—to the one—through the forced (communism) or surreptitious (liberalism) standardization of human types, behaviors, and modes of thought. Totalitarianism is the attribute of egalitarian regimes. Non-egalitarian regimes may display authoritarian, even dictatorial, forms, but since they are holistic, organic systems founded on the recognition of diversity, they cannot evolve toward totalitarianism without renouncing themselves.
Rather than interpreting liberalism as something opposed to totalitarianism, it must be understood rather as its preface. Only liberal countries become communist, for only nations that have embraced the egalitarian ideal of liberalism can be led to see in communism the sole means of realizing that ideal. Far from immunizing societies against communism, liberalism ends by making it acceptable in three ways: first, by propagating an egalitarian ideal that it is incapable of realizing in practice; second, by generating values of individual enjoyment that annihilate all capacity for resistance and tend to weaken the creative forces of power capable of opposing the rise of communism; and third, by distilling an ideology of technomorphic conditioning that deprives men of their sense of authentic freedom and predisposes them to accept socialism out of an irrepressible desire for equality and security. A liberal society becomes socialist when the passion for equality grows so strong that it is willing to sacrifice its liberty to satisfy it.
The liberal system efficiently produces the egalitarian ideal: the exit from history, the weakening of politics, and the suppression of borders—all characteristics of Marxist socialism as well. Liberalism realizes theoretical Marxism more effectively than socialist systems themselves. If by communism we mean Marx’s worldview, it must be admitted that Western society is the most communist society in the world. Liberalism and socialism thus manifest themselves in their systolic and diastolic interplay—each serving as the guarantor, the good conscience, and the relative antithesis of the other within the same ideological field.
To designate liberalism as the principal enemy is not to play into the hands of communism. On the contrary, it is to affirm that the only effective way to fight communism is to fight what produces it. When liberals denounce the rise of communism, they are in fact lamenting their own inability to prevent it. They lament what their ideas and deficiencies have made possible—the seductive guise in which communism can appear thanks to them. They lament the expansion of a system for which they alone work effectively.
The ND is hostile to communism for the same reasons that lead it to oppose liberalism—namely, out of a consistent anti-egalitarianism. However, it recognizes that in realizing egalitarian aspirations, liberalism proves more efficient and therefore more dangerous. Moreover, socialist systems, insofar as they push egalitarianism to its ultimate consequences, rendering it inapplicable, are capable of evolution. Communism has proven in fact impossible to realize, and those nations that have attempted it have had to betray it. Liberal countries, on the other hand, can persist in their essential characteristics without having to betray them. Beneath its apparent agitation, liberal society exhibits a terrifying macro-stability.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Against Imperialism here.
The ND does not share the primary anti-communism of conventional right-wing thought, for such an attitude has lost its reason for being; it is instinctive and fails to recognize that certain doctrines—not strictly communist—may be worse than communism. The ND criticizes communism and liberalism alike, but also Christianity as the founder of the common matrix from which both arise in secular form. It criticizes liberalism and communism not to oppose them artificially, but to compare them from an anti-egalitarian perspective, for both are phases of the egalitarian discourse.
The ND also considers the possibility that contemporary liberal democracy may lead to a new and hitherto unknown form of totalitarianism.
If it is admitted that a totalitarian society annihilates human and spiritual diversity in favor of a homogeneous standard, it can be said that Western liberal societies generate a new totalitarianism, [5] since they establish a standardized type of human being by homogenizing social attitudes and opinions through mass media and consumer habits that uniformize social behavior. The transformation of political discourse into managerial discourse leads to the recreation of a single-party regime, in which political formations are merely tendencies within that party, their differences limited to the choice of means for achieving identical ends. The use of computerized surveillance and data collection allows for the control of citizens’ activities as effectively as classical police methods. Opponents are not deported or executed but marginalized—that is, relegated to fictitious spaces of freedom where their actions have no effect. The pressure of public opinion, avid for slogans and stereotypes, intensifies the effect of the spiral of silence, which eliminates dissent as surely as imprisonment or deportation. This can be seen in the fact that an event unreported by the media is perceived as never having occurred, and that freedom of opinion leads to indifference, for one may say whatever one wishes, yet it serves no purpose.
At the same time, the egalitarian impulse, founded on resentment, establishes the tyranny of all against all—characteristic of totalitarianism—within the framework of a liberal parliamentary system that institutionalizes sectoral conflicts of interest and partisan confrontations, fostering the atomization of the social body and creating the conditions for a permanent civil war. The multiplication of counter-powers deprives the political sphere of its specific authority and brings about the fusion of public and private realms. The economization of public life amounts to its depoliticization, increasingly unable to conceal the expansion of an omnipresent bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Western societies are governed by a monopolistic ideology—unperceived as such, yet real—resulting from the extension of the same quantitative aspirations, tied to the same bourgeois values, across all social strata.
Translated into English by Francisco Albanese.
Notes
[1] Benoist, Alain de: Orientations pour des amées décisives, Le Labyrinthe, Paris, 1982, pp. 29-78.
[2] Faye, Guillaume: “D’une sociale-démocratie à l’autre,” in: Eléments no. 42 (june-july 1982), pp. 17-20.
[3] Benoist, Alain de: Orientations pour des anées décisives, op. cit, pp. 61-63.
[4] Ibid., pp. 63-76.
[5] Benoist, Alain de: “Un totalitarisme peut en cacher un autre,” in: Eléments no. 46 (summer 1983), pp. 21-27.