A World After Liberalism, a fascinating new book by Yale scholar Matthew Rose, considers the thought and influence of five thinkers beyond the political and academic mainstream who have played a significant role in establishing the intellectual framework for the movement, which Rose refers to as the ‘Radical Right’.
Justin Reynolds
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has supercharged the already well established debate on whether the world is entering a new Cold War, the division drawn this time not between competing economic systems but liberalism and conservative authoritarian nationalism. Nationalisms of various kinds and degrees have come to power and in some cases consolidated their hold in countries including Russia, China, Hungary, Turkey, India, Brazil and the US, but have made significant gains elsewhere, notably in France, Italy and the UK.
Some manifestations, notably in Russia and China, are plain authoritarian. But it is too simple to label even these regimes as simple dictatorships. They, like the others, enjoy significant popular support, appealing to broad coalitions of social and religious conservatives, patriots, and romantics nostalgic for a pre-modern golden age. They all hold out the promise of order against the perceived decadence of a post-religious West.
Putin’s invasion is the ideology’s most visceral assertion so far, understood by its protagonists as a ‘holy war’ waged in the name of the ‘Russkii Mir’, a Russian Orthodox civilisation standing against liberal degeneracy. For Putin and his acolytes, Ukraine’s rightful place is not with the NATO alliance, but with Russia and Belarus, an integral part of an ancient Christian Orthodox motherland standing as a bulwark against the West.
A World After Liberalism, a fascinating new book by Yale scholar Matthew Rose, considers the thought and influence of five thinkers beyond the political and academic mainstream who have played a significant role in establishing the intellectual framework for the movement, which Rose refers to, for convenience, as the ‘Radical Right’.
Rose notes that the intellectual luminaries for many of today’s younger conservatives are no longer those that inspired the turn against social democracy in the late 70s: ‘Instead of William Buckley it is Curtis Yarvin. Instead of Milton Friedman it is Peter Thiel. Instead of George Will it is Angelo Codevilla. Instead of Richard John Neuhaus it is Adrian Vermeule. Instead of Irving Kristol it is Steve Sailor. … In congressional offices, Republican politicians won’t know them all either, but their young aides will. At conservative magazines, senior editors don’t read them, but their junior staff do.’
Like the Christian conservatives who formed a critical part of that earlier movement, the Radical Right is viscerally hostile to liberalism. But far from pining for a return to some kind of theocracy the subjects of Rose’s study are overwhelmingly hostile to Christianity, ‘the original wound of our civilisation’, which, by asserting the rights of the individual against the timeless communitarianism of the ancient world, planted the seed from which the weed of liberalism grew.
Rose studies three European writers, Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist, and two from the United States, Francis Parker Yockey and Samuel Francis. Spengler is included as a bridge to an earlier generation of thinkers including Carl Schmitt, Ernst Junger and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck who emerged in Germany after 1918, the ‘new conservatives’ whose work laid the groundwork for Rose’s subjects, most of whom were active in the middle of the 20th century.
Julius Evola’s world of Tradition
I was particularly intrigued by Evola and de Benoist, whose work is startlingly different from mainstream political literature, offering a worldview that both disturbs and fascinates. For Rose, Evola had ‘a remarkable imaginative capacity to think about the world beyond the boundaries liberalism has assigned it’. During his life the Italian writer won a narrow but devoted audience, notably through his 1934 book Revolt Against the Modern World, an essential outline of his thought which ‘dreamed of a world of absolutely fixed and certain meanings, where human identities, in all their forms, bore the indelible chrism of sacred destiny.’ His influence has grown in the half century since his death.
Evola contrasted what he saw as the disenchanted world of secular modernity with that of ‘Tradition’, the rich ways of life described in Norse poetry, Hindu scripture, Roman religion, Celtic legend, Mesoamerican myth and Arthurian legend, in which every act, no matter how mundane, is saturated with meaning, and which promise every person, no matter how lowly, a life of dignity within an society ordered according to a sacred hierarchy patterned after a celestial order. Work, worship, music, war, relationships, everyday household duties — all are transfigured through observance of rituals handed down by the gods. The world of Tradition ‘offers protection from the terrors of time, creating islands of unchanging order in a sea of flux and decay.’
Evola asserted that these strictly ordered societies were summoned into being by aristocracies that perceived the need to impose ‘form’ on the raw ‘matter’ of life. Each new generation of these elites secures its authority not through force but rather the admiration and awe of the masses, grateful for their deep wisdom in safeguarding the venerable ways of life that offer meaning, the lodestar guiding the community ‘from the lower order of reality to the higher’. Evola here echoes the Aristotelian concept of ‘natural slavery’, asserting that freedom ‘can only exist when there are masters opposed to slaves, when there are proud leaders and followers that boldly and generously put their lives and destinies in their hands.’…
After the truth-shower 