The Dangerous Thinkers of the Right
Brilliant. Necessary. Maligned.
Their great books were forbidden, to make room for liberalism.
Now we need them to understand the crisis of liberalism.
"We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live." -Victor Davis Hanson
Are we living in a revolutionary time?
You must have noticed that strange things are happening in...
- domestic politics
- foreign politics
- how citizens see their governments
- how governments treat their citizens
- and how people treat each other
You read news headlines that are so preposterous in their stupidity that you can hardly believe they're real, and yet they are.
At the same time, you see stories on your newsfeed that are so compelling that they must be real, and yet they are not.
It's getting harder to know what to believe, but a crisis of common rationality is pushing you to believe something, to make sense of the world, somehow.
And you must make sense of it, because a lot is at stake.
Your future. Your children's future. Your world.
Decency, liberty, security, order.
Is the floor going to give out from under our feet as we fall into one nightmare scenario or another? Or can we find our footing somewhere firm?
What are foundational ideas and basic concepts that can help us understand not only what's going on now but the bigger picture of what we can expect from politics altogether?
The Long Shadow of the World Wars
By most accounts, we still live under the long shadow of the world wars. Just think about it. How much political discourse would you completely erase from the public conversation today if you banned the words "communist" and "fascist," "Nazi" and "antifa"? But talk of communists, fascists, and Nazis, like liberals, belongs to our recent past, and although it lets us see some things, it also blinds us to others.
It's a Closed-Circuit Language
Must it be true that whoever is neither a liberal nor a communist is automatically a fascist, and (as the logic goes) therefore evil? That kind of "thinking" is nothing more than an obstacle if you're trying to understand the nature, and hence also the limits, of today's liberalism. It's a closed-circuit language that has been designed to stop thought, not to facilitate it.
Between Persecution and Complacency
But we abandon all hope of developing a meaningful, insightful, and, in the best case scenario, true interpretation of things, if we forgo thoughtful consideration of political life, whether because we have been frightened into a stupor by the threat of persecution for heterodoxy or whether because we have been dulled into complacency by the weight of orthodoxy.
The Crisis Impels Us To Think
In short, the contemporary crisis impels us to THINK, and we have (arguably) no better resource for starting to think clearly than the good books of intelligent, perceptive, and in some cases epoch-making authors, whether they wrote thousands of years ago like Plato and Aristotle, hundreds of years ago Rousseau, or in recent decades, like Strauss and Dugin.
But There's A Problem
Postwar liberalism treated thinkers on the Right as a dangerous, slippery slope. Plato was seen as a proto-Fascist. Dugin's books are banned on Amazon and getting harder to find. New attacks come out every day on the followers of Leo Strauss, while other authors are completely taboo. It's almost like thinking itself is being called fascist.
And a Solution.
This is a place that exists to help you understand the world without censorship, bias, or persecution. It offers insights you won't find anywhere else.
"Reading right-wing philosophers is the first step toward understanding what amounts to the most radical rethinking of the American political consensus in a generation." -Foreign Affairs
Carl Schmitt
Best known as the author of books like The Concept of the Political, Constitutional Theory, Dictatorship, Political Theology, Legality and Legitimacy, and Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt remains an indispensable reference point on the Right.
Martin Heidegger
The preeminent philosopher of the 20th century, about whom Leo Strauss once said the following: "I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort to find a solid basis for rational liberalism. Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But here is the trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger."
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck
Van den Bruck wrote Das Dritte Reich, Germany's Third Empire, in 1922/1923. He stated the case for right-wing anti-liberalism in terms of the German Conservative Revolution. Whatever his faults, his analysis helps us to distinguish conceptually the liberal, democrat, socialist, proletariat, reactionary, and conservative. Keep in mind that there are good reasons to study Germany in particular in relationship to the more general issue of the crisis of the West. As Voegelin wrote, "There can be no doubt that the Western crisis has reached particularly grave forms in Germany, and an inquiry into the peculiarities of German intellectual history would be, for that reason alone, of the first importance."
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Leo Strauss
No one penetrated more deeply into the history of political philosophy than Leo Strauss, whose studies of "Platonic Political Philosophy" are a pillar of the Millerman School and indispensable works for anyone serious about understanding the nature of politics and law.
Alexander Dugin
He's been called "Putin's Brain" and "The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the World." Banned from Amazon, sanctioned by America and its allies, Dugin continues to intrigue and fascinate readers around the world with his "Fourth Political Theory," challenging us to think beyond the ideological cliches of the 20th century.
Plato
Yes, it is anachronistic to talk of Plato as a right-wing anti-liberal, if we treat liberalism as a modern political ideology unknown to this ancient philosopher. But modern liberalism partly defined itself in opposition to Platonic political philosophy, and Plato, who understood more about the nature of political life than we imagine, can teach us a serious alternative to our habitual ways of thinking, one that is highly relevant on the right and more generally. Western philosophy has been called a serious of footnotes to Plato. Every genuine attempt at thoughtfulness eventually returns to him.
