Ideological Foundations of the Nouvelle Droite

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Translator’s Note: In 1986, a compilation of texts by Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye entitled Las Ideas de la Nueva Derecha: Una respuesta al colonialismo cultural (The Ideas of the Nouvelle Droite: A Response to Cultural Colonialism) was published in Spain by Ediciones de Nuevo Arte Thor. The texts were translated from the French language by Carlos Pinedo Cestafe, who, in addition to the translation, produced an introductory essay (Bases Ideológicas de la Nueva Derecha) of about 140 pages that examined the ideological landscape of the Nouvelle Droite. The following is the first part of that introduction. For the purposes of this translation, the term Nouvelle Droite will be retained instead of New Right, in order to preserve a direct link with the French movement.

Ideological Foundations of the Nouvelle Droite

Theoretical Foundations of the Nouvelle Droite

The worldview of the Nouvelle Droite (ND) is nominalist. For the nominalist there is no existence in itself; hence, he stands in opposition to all philosophical universalism and essentialism. Every existence is particular. From this idea derives its anti-egalitarianism and its assertion that diversity is the fundamental fact of the world.

Two great conceptions of history appear in European culture: the linear and the cyclical [1]. The linear conception arises with Judeo-Christianity. It envisions historical becoming as a line connecting a pre-historical state (the original paradise) and a post-historical state (the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth). This primordial existence was harmonious until man committed a fault (the hereditary original sin), for which he was expelled from paradise and entered history (the valley of tears). This conception introduces the possibility of salvation through the coming of the Messiah—Jesus—to earth. After the Final Judgment, humanity will return once more to the primitive paradisiacal state, and that will mark the end of history.

We find this same structural scheme secularized in Marxist theory. The ideologeme of original communism corresponds to the idea of paradise. The sin was the division of labor, which gave rise to private property and domination among men—the birth of classes. Thus man enters history, a history characterized by conflict and domination represented by the class struggle. The idea of salvation is embodied in the proletariat, instituted as the collective Messiah of humanity. At the end of time, after the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, the classless society will restore the conditions of the original communism. The end of history will occur with the disappearance of the State and of property. The linear conception confers upon history a unidimensional character, a necessity and a purpose. Man is not free to make history; he must conform to Revelation (God in the Judeo-Christian scheme) or to Science (in the Marxist scheme), which reveal the meaning and direction of history.

The cyclical conception belongs to pre-Christian antiquity. History has neither beginning nor end; it is the stage for a series of analogous repetitions. Nevertheless, this conception is linear in a certain sense—a line arranged in a circle. The cycles unfold according to an immutable and inexorable order.

Nietzsche replaces this view with a spherical conception, equivalent to the idea of the indeterminacy of history. It is a voluntarist conception of history, for it takes shape through the movement imparted to it by human will. Man makes history. Furthermore, the past, the present, and the future are not distinct points along a unidimensional line, but rather perspectives that coincide at every present moment. Every present actuality is a crossroads. Each instant of the present actualizes the totality of the past and potentializes the totality of the future. There is a tridimensionality of historical time. This conception implies a new, post-Christian Faustian Philosophy of History [2], based on Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return of the identical, which entails the reappropriation and transfiguration of the past in every present epoch, in relation to ever-renewed projects of the future. It implies the conjunction of traditionalism and futurism—that is, the possibility of regeneration within history.

The Nouvelle Droite therefore rejects all determinism and the idea of a natural order that can be apprehended by reason. It observes the general relativity of forms of life and of cultural diversity. From this attitude derives its positive conception of tolerance, which has nothing at all to do with the egalitarian permissiveness of liberalism. Its critique of totalitarianism as a reduction of human diversity also proceeds from this idea. The historical origin of totalitarianism, according to this view, is Christian monotheism, for the idea of a single God implies the idea of a single absolute truth. Moreover, monotheism has equally generated reductionism, egalitarianism, and universalism.

For the ND, man is born as the heir of a culture. This inheritance entails a certain number of values. To identify the proper values of a culture, one must adopt a genetic attitude—that is, trace the genealogy of a culture’s values, and go back to its most distant past to identify its most genuine historical inheritance and what was added afterward (the ND’s problematization of Indo-European and Judeo-Christian values). For the ND, the world is a chaos without predetermined meaning. Man is the animal that gives meaning to things. The norms of societies are conventions created by men. In the face of the disappearance of norms and of a global meaning for society, the ND proposes the creation of new norms—that is, the institution of a certain collective subjectivity strong enough to appear as a natural norm, functioning as an absolute. This heroic subjectivism is the foundation of an over-humanist attitude of creating new norms—that is, the establishment of a new collective destiny capable of confronting the challenges of the near future.

Man is a being open to the world. His non-specialization is one of the most evident characteristics of his constitution. He continually adapts to new situations and is also capable of creating them. He exists in a state of permanent malleability, a state of neoteny or constant youth, expressed as a greater capacity for learning. Determinism is only potential: our constitution defines the limits of what we can do, but it tells us nothing about what we will do. In man, instincts are not programmed toward a determined goal. The determination of goals belongs to man himself, who must always choose and act according to his own criteria. His nature is a base upon which he must ceaselessly build, for it provides him only with very broad directional frameworks. Thus, man is not born with a culture, but with the capacity to assimilate one. Gehlen [3] explains human non-specialization by the fact that man is organically deficient and full of gaps at the organic level. For Lorenz, man is an unfinished being whose capacity for adaptation remains virtually active throughout his life. This persistent youth is a source of both power and fragility. According to Gehlen, he is a being of risk, who at every moment can lose himself or surpass himself. Faced with an external stimulus, he must choose among different possible behaviors.

Man perceives the world as an excess of sensations; therefore, he feels the need to surrender himself to successive experiences that, through a process of elimination, transform a multivocal environment into a momentarily univocal one. Corresponding to this excess of external impressions in man is an excess of impulses, formalized by a self-reflective consciousness that enables him to face changing and exceptional situations. This selective operation is called “discharge” and consists, when confronted with a given situation, in activating certain impulses to the detriment of others. According to Gehlen, such inhibition of certain impulses is a sign of normal human activity; on the contrary, the anarchic liberation of all impulses (as in Freudianism) deprives man of his humanity. Thus, the Nouvelle Droite understands freedom [4] as the capacity to multiply man’s power of action upon reality and to liberate himself from the determinisms of the species through discipline—that is, self-control exercised by the will. This definition stands opposed to the individualist and leveling conception of freedom, which regards it as a passive license, as an absence of demand. Freedom is not a right; it is a conquest—the privilege of the strong, both in peoples and in individuals.

Therefore, man constructs himself by giving himself form. For the ND, the meaning of Nietzschean overhumanism is the surpassing of oneself, the foundation of a new type of man according to the norms one has set for oneself. Honor will then be nothing other than fidelity to the norm one has self-imposed, to the image one has formed of oneself. To give oneself a form is to establish a style. The manner of doing things matters as much as the things themselves. The hero is the one who enriches existence through his contribution to life. The bourgeois, on the other hand, always seeks to extract profit from life. That is the difference.

From this perspective, the tragic arises from the perception of a double contradiction: our smallness and brevity in contrast to the immensity of the world. Yet the creative intensity of man compensates for his existential brevity. This tragic sense of life rests on the idea of destiny, which impels us to attempt to alter the course of our existence when it does not correspond to the norms we have established for ourselves; and once we have struggled against adverse destiny, we must not only accept what has happened but also will it. This is the precise expression of Nietzsche’s amor fati.

As we have seen, man is condemned to experimentation. Everything he learns will come either from his personal experience or from the experience of others, formalized and transmitted. Hence the necessity of education and institutions. Man in a state of nature does not exist. What characterizes him is his culture, which does not annul the premises of his nature but, by building upon it, constitutes another level of fully human reality. Man, therefore, is a cultural being—a historical being. His historicity is his ever-evolving culture, whereas his nature is immutable.

For Judeo-Christianity, humanity [5] is a homogeneous whole in which ethnic and cultural divergences are secondary and transitory. For the ND, what defines humanity is not the similarities of the human species, but rather the capacity to diverge culturally and anthropologically, escaping the determinisms of the species through different cultural responses that constitute as many meta-natures. Humanity would thus be a state to be conquered, not a given condition. Man always tends toward what is most human—overhumanism. Man is at once a product of evolution and a being of action who actualizes his biological inheritance through his openness to the world. Historical consciousness, the will to power, and modern technology are thus factors of overhumanism.

Man is not a static being, created once and for all, but one who continues to create himself perpetually. Man is not, he becomes: here lies another of the main characteristics of the philosophy of the Nouvelle Droite—its conception of becoming. The being that becomes changes, yet does not abandon its identity. It remains the same, though under new forms. Becoming realizes the synthesis of opposites. Hence, the continuity of tradition requires its renewal.

This philosophy of becoming leads to a rejection of Aristotelian monovalent logic [6] and the irreconcilable antinomies of Christian theology, both arising from its constitutive dualism. This logic has profoundly influenced Western thought, in which opposites exclude one another and the principles of incompatibility and contradiction have been institutionalized.

The Nouvelle Droite opposes to this binary logic of exclusion the synthesis of opposites. To the partisans of absolutes and capitalized concepts, it opposes reality itself—ceaselessly changing and relative—striving to think simultaneously what has until now been conceived separately.

Against dualistic and exclusionary approaches, the ND proposes a synthetic and globalizing one. To reconcile conceptual antagonisms is not only to affirm the complementarity of such notions but also to give birth to new notions through their fusion.

This third position is not the way of centrist compromise, not the mediocre path of placing oneself halfway between all opinions, but rather their transcendence. The realization of this third position must crystallize at a point of tension, whose mastery requires both power and authority.

Such a stance leads to the rejection of false alternatives: that between materialism and metaphysics, conservation and revolution, liberalism and socialism. Against individualism and collectivist totalitarianism, the ND chooses the organic popular community. Against xenophobia and assimilationism, it upholds the right to difference. Against borderless humanism and Western ethnocentrism, it defends the cause of peoples. Against the logic of power blocs, it calls for European independence. Against free trade and protectionism, it advocates the constitution of large, self-centered spaces.

One of the most interesting aspects of the ND’s philosophical conception is its analysis of the problem of rationality [7]. For the ND, it is with Judeo-Christianity that the problem of reason first appears, understood as the sense or meaning of the world. Reason appears in a double form: as eschatological reason, which gives meaning to universal history according to God’s design, and as individual calculation, which leads the believer to adopt a codified morality in order to attain salvation—that is, happiness in the hereafter.

Hegel secularized Christian eschatology by transposing divine reason into political reason, acting within human history. Marxism replaced this abstract Enlightenment reason with revolutionary reason, which became its continuation. The Marxist idolatry of scientific rationalism is the key to Marxist totalitarianism, since all who do not recognize the revelation of reason (reason identified with progress and liberation) are declared outside the law. Moreover, its supposed scientific legitimacy places it, like every revealed Truth, beyond critical discussion.

The contemporary debate distinguishes between objective reason and subjective reason. Objective reason is the belief in a teleological order of the world. It refers to a hyperreality virtually present behind the real world—a reality that, though not yet in conformity with the first, will necessarily bend to it in a teleological fulfillment— the end of times (the end of history)— toward a homogeneous norm that is the natural essence of all things. This implies that there exists a universal type of civilization valid for everyone, as the expression of this natural order toward which the progress of reason tends. Subjective reason, on the other hand, designates individual free will—the Homo oeconomicus of liberal and Marxist anthropology—presumed to be rational and capable of calculating his interests.

The goal of political action thus becomes to render society rational and transparent. It must be predictable, assimilable to a rationally divisible mechanism: universality of laws, equivalence of rights, and so forth. The unforeseen—deemed irrational—must be eliminated (power, national destiny). The present managerial State continues the ecclesiastical work of egalitarian rationalization. The Church sought to moralize society in the name of “Good” and “Justice.” Just as Christianity attempted to reorder the world according to the universal logic of the one God, modern ideologies attempt to reorder the life of peoples according to abstract and universal principles that imply the abolition of differences. In Christian philosophy, the nature of the world below—life itself—is perceived as illusory and provisional, as a source of disorder and evil. Only through reason can one reach the natural order, so that peace replaces conflict, the free individual replaces the groups, and identity replaces differences. Yet this abstract and homogenizing super-nature entails the end of history—that is, the abolition of the divergent destinies of peoples, the construction of a planetary civilization, and the uniformization of the social world.

Another of the basic postulates of all rationalist doctrines of the social contract is the idea that societies are aggregates of individuals who possess identical needs; therefore, the purpose of the social contract is to convince individuals that there exist socially acceptable aims mechanically suitable for everyone. Society is conceived as if it were transparent and free from all irrationality—myths, beliefs—in short, everything that does not depend on a calculable interest. Behind this economistic model of Western rationality lies the Christian inheritance: the interest and need of each man are universalizable because they are reduced to salvation. Every man can be converted—that is, convinced that his calculable interest is to conform, for his salvation, to the rational law of the Church.

Western democracy itself is founded on a rational legitimation—not the classical one of the rational participation of individuals in sovereignty, but the technocratic one of the consumer society, which justifies its domination through the ideological neutrality of its decisions and the authority of technical knowledge. This doctrine claims that there exists only one possible technical solution. Such philosophical unilateralism and this pretense of neutrality derive from the core principles of Enlightenment objective reason, outside of which there exist only false opinions—ideologies. From the revelation of the Christian God to the scientism of technocratic governance, passing through the scientific objectivity of dialectical materialism or the market law of the liberals, the continuity is evident.

Enlightened reason, in seeking to explain the world and unveil its mechanism, has dispensed with the realistic and varied observation of life. It has attempted to compensate for its ignorance of a troubling reality by offering a globalizing explanation—falling, paradoxically, into a kind of magical thinking.

With the perfection of scientific research, the clarity of the world is no longer self-evident. The terrain of reality admits the irrational and the non-logical. The paradox of the ideologies derived from Christian rationalism is that they neither recognize nor master their own irrational dimension. They are those most based on the scientific spirit, yet those most opposed to the concrete sciences—biology, genetics, ethology. Moreover, their attempt to portray reality as rational leads them to construct simulacra of it and to fall into irrational practices (as in the case of socialist regimes forced to fabricate the results of their praxis, or the enchantments of communist governments regarding the state of socialist society). On the other hand, ideologies whose values and messages are consciously recognized as irrational prove to be more realistic overall. From the conflict between objective rationality and the practical rationality of politics emerges a kind of social schizophrenia—a separation between ideal and practice—characteristic of Western societies. Naturally, the ND prefers the Greek definition of reason, which recognized life as an ascending game and struggle. For Nietzsche, the reasonable man was a tragic being, for he said yes to the problematic, to the terrible, to the Dionysian. As ethology suggests, our abandonment in the world, our physiological solitude, impels us to give meaning to our surroundings and to project upon the world the laws that govern our acts (the purpose of action) or our body (its organic logic). Within our organism there exists a limited rational order, with no other end than its own survival. According to modern sciences, nature is organized according to multiple levels of integration and presents itself as sequential and non-encompassing. There is not one single order but several partial orders in conflict with one another. Thus, the universe would be composed of a conflictive combination of limited rationalities, organized according to a hierarchy of levels (macrophysical, biological) or orders (spatial logic versus chronological logic, entropic logic of energy loss versus negentropic logic of energy acquisition). The overall irrational disorder would arise from the contradiction among these limited rational subsystems. The conflict between these rational structures would constitute the very essence of the world. This vision is close to the intuitions of Indo-European cosmogony, in which the gods are at war to impose their own reason.

On the other hand, the most recent works in neurobiology confirm the profound irrationality of man. Our cerebral physiology unites a neocortex oriented toward rational apprehension of the world and an animal cortex, divided into reptilian and mammalian brains, the seat of affective and instinctive behavior. The irrationality of our general behavior would result from the dissociation of these two brains—from the imperfect encounter between two kinds of rationality: that of the neocortex, seat of logical and classificatory attitudes, and that of the paleocortex and mesocortex, seat of programmed animal behavior (the rationality of nature).

This explains why reason so often disguises passion. Our immediate apprehension of the world is of an affective and unconscious nature. Within it operate biological programs specific to the species, structuring the collective unconscious of groups. Upon this foundation, rational thought constructs intellectual formalizations intended to materialize our irrational perception of the world. Hence, ideologies are the rational formalization of an illusion, whose distinctive feature is to present its message as rational, even though its ultimate meaning is an irrational belief.

All these considerations on the nature of reason lead the ND to reflect on the possibility of conferring meaning upon the social and the political beyond classical rationalism. For Marxism, Christianity, and liberalism alike, destiny is grounded in reason, safeguarded from all risk (absolute rationality). In the pagan conception of the world, destiny is not based on reason but on passion and chance. The world is full of shadows and mysteries. Destiny is experienced as a call toward the unknown, as a world-surprise. Moreover, Nietzsche’s conception insists on the indeterminacy of every future. The sense of “enchantment” of the pagan consciousness presupposes that no external meaning predetermines history, nature, or individual destiny. In the Judeo-Christian conception, every true act of creation or of grasping the world is devalued, for everything is already written.

It is a matter, then, of abandoning all forms of objective reason and replacing them with a vital reason—a meeting point of indeterminacy, of vital unpredictability (its Dionysian flash), and of human will, which confront one another in a creative struggle that, instead of ending history, becomes the eternal source of energy for creating history. It is a matter of a subjective reason, to be understood as an organizing force subjected to our vital impulse—in short, a demiurgic or Faustian conception of reason. The demiurge is he who confronts the enigma of the world and wills it as such; who faces the risks and adventurous challenges of this enterprise and embraces them as such. His reason is tragic because, being solitary, it follows no truth imposed from outside, and expects no final salvation from its confrontation with reality, from which he may emerge provisionally victorious or defeated. His condition is risk. From this condition may arise the religious bond that unites the men of a single community—those ready to face it together.

Translated into English by Francisco Albanese.

Notes

[1] Benoist, Alain de: Les idées à l’endroit, Editions Libres-Hallier, París, 1979. pp. 31-48.

[2] Vouloir (monthly supplement of the Orientations magazine), no. 7 (June-July 1984), p. 3, Wezembeek-Oppem (Belgium).

[3] Benoist, Alain de: op. cit., pp. 94-97.

[4] Vouloir no. 10 (November 1984), p.2.

[5] Vouloir no. 7 (June-July 1984), p. 3.

[6] Benoist, Alain de: “Les fausses alternatives,” in: Actes du XVII colloque national du GRECE (La Troisième Voie), Le Labyrinthe, Paris, 1984, pp. 47-61.

[7] Faye, Guillaume: “La problematique moderne de la raison ou la querelle de la rationalité,” en Nouvelle Ecole no. 41 (Literature et ideologie 2), pp. 64-89.