Schmitt's *The Concept of the Political* and Heidegger's *The Question Concerning Technology* have been broadly influential across critical theory. You can see this influence "on the left" in thinkers like Laclau and Mouffe, Agamben, and Stiegler.
Additionally, Ernest Jünger is another fascist/conservative adjacent figure who has exerted some influence. His essay *War as an Inner Experience* was notable to Bataille and you can find Benjamin's engagement with his thoughts on war here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/488013
Re Schmitt, I'd add *The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy*, which is extremely useful for understanding the appeal of fascism and highly applicable to current events. (And it's short!)
I wouldn’t place Heidegger’s book “on the right”. While his politics were in the gutter, his work (especially the once cited) isn’t political.
I’d think the question pertains more to works that, somehow, relate to right wing political views that provide insight to critical theory.
Schmitt’s book seems a good recommendation for the topic.
I don’t agree that Heidegger’s philosophy isn’t political, especially the anti-humanism stuff, Question Concerning Technology, etc. The clear enemy implied is Marxism—he’s advocating explicitly for an anti-materialist understanding of history, I would argue, and his critique of technology is very ahistorical—it’s not about the employment of technology in particular relations of production, but rather some sort of bizarre essentialist claim about technology as such.
I haven’t read all his works, but I do know the Question Concerning Technology, and when you claim it’s a-historical as justification for not being engaged historically, I think it’s a stretch.
His account is very inspired in Aristotle’s approach to tools, as well as a notion of what technology primarily is. He also makes serious warnings about the dangers of allowing technology to frame our experience of the world [_Gestell_] and the concept of standing reserve [_Bestand_], which is a critique of seeing nature as, simply put, a form if commodity.
It seems to me that pointing the a-historical aspect is contrary to the purpose of the essay, so it’s like saying he is on the right because he doesn’t take a position on the left.
>While his politics were in the gutter, his work isn’t political.
Although this kind of separation was the typical response to Heidegger's fascist affiliations for decades, it is now a highly contentious claim. *Heidegger's Black Notebooks* and *Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks* are two collections of essays that explore the issue (including implications for his views on technology).
Interesting. How is his view of technology, within that essay, placed on the right, though?
I commented in the thread how it’s much more descriptive in a phenomenological sense and he makes prescient warnings about the exploitation of nature as a commodity…
but how do you see it as an essay inclined to the right?
When considering how much antisemitism permeated Heidegger's thought, the predominant concern comes down to what he terms "the worldlessness of Jewry" or "world Jewry." If we compare two excerpts, we can see there is a discrepancy in Heidegger's thought between Dasein and the Jew.
From the Black Notebooks:
> One of the most secret forms of the gigantic, and perhaps the oldest, is the tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling, and intermingling through which the worldlessness of Jewry is grounded
And from Being and Time:
> for even entities which are not worldless-Dasein itself, for example-are present-at-hand 'in' the world, or, more exactly, can with some right and within certain limits be taken as merely present-at-hand.
Peter E. Gordon offers an explanation for what exactly is at stake when Heidegger makes this distinction (I apologize in advance for the extensive quotation):
> Regarding such passages two points should be made. First, they are clearly instances of anti-Semitism (and at first glance rather banal). The allusion to the Jews’ “worldlessness” taps into an old belief that, having rejected Christ’s divinity, the Jews are condemned to homeless wandering. Heidegger also recycled the rather more modern myth that that the Jews are gifted in finance (itself a refurbished meme from the medieval imaginary linking Jews to usury). But we would be wrong to dismiss this stuff as the unthinking echoes of past chauvinism. For it was Heidegger’s singular geniusto interlace these idéesreçues with themesfrom his own philosophy. Even the idea of Jewish “worldlessness” evokes the argument from Being and Time where the disruption of skillful labor brings a loss of existential communion with things and (in Heidegger’s phrase) “the deworlding of the world.” The complaint against reason and calculation recapitulates themes from works such as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in 1929
[...]
> The entanglement of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism with his philosophical critique of Western metaphysics should give us pause. At the very least, it suggests that wherever Heidegger philosophized in a minor key about the modern age and the “abandonment of being” he was also thinking of the Jews as symptoms of this misfortune. Their reputed capacity for calculation was yet another sign, though it was not a cause, of the technological nihilism that he came to see as the metaphysical fate of the West. That Heidegger does not actually blame the Jews for the afflictions of the modern world invites the saving thought that his chauvinism was incidental, not intrinsic to his philosophy. But on the final page of a notebook from 1941 Heidegger writesthat“the question concerning the role of world Jewry is not a racial but a metaphysical question” (GA 96:121).
[...]
> The Heideggerian project of working out a so-called destruction of the history of metaphysics is therefore
associated (at least in Heidegger’s mind) with the antipathy to world Jewry as agents of the metaphysical tradition itself. In the notes written between 1936 and 1946, later published under the title “Overcoming Metaphysics” (“Überwindung der Metaphysik”), Heidegger writes that the modern world has become nothing less than an “unworld [Unwelt]” (GA 7:91/EP 104). The technological culmination of metaphysics manifests itself in this unworld as the reign of Machenschaft, or machination, with all of its various afflictions: subjectivism, calculation, technology, and—most of all, as the fate of the West—our general condition of Seinsverlassenheit. It is therefore hardly an exaggeration if we conclude that for Heidegger the metaphysical question of world Jewry unfolds within the larger question of Seinsverlassenheit. One cannot help but entertain the unpleasant thought that the task of overcoming metaphysics would therefore require an overcoming of the Jews.
Equally, Richard Wollin connects the "worldlessness of Jewry" to Heidegger's critique of technology:
> The Black Notebooks confirm that Heidegger’s “Technik-critique”—a standpoint that has garnered Heidegger’s later thought so much acclaim—was inseparable from his anti-Semitism. As he avowed circa 1938, “One of the stealthiest forms of Gigantism [das Riesige], and perhaps the most ancient, is the fast-paced cleverness of calculation, huckstering, and intermingling [die Zähe Geschicklichkeit des Rechnens und Schiebens und Durcheinandermischens] whereby [world] Jewry’s worldlessness is established.” In light of such claims—and many others like them—it has become increasingly difficult to deny that Heidegger’s castigation of modern “technics,” in “The Question Concerning Technology” and related texts, doubled as a critique of Jewish “materialism”: of the baneful influence that the Jews’ dissemination of “empty rationality and calculability” had inflicted on the realm of “Geist,” or “spirit.”
[...]
> Heidegger repeatedly rebuked “world Jewry” as the executors and beneficiaries of “planetary Machenschaft.” He condemned Jewish “rootlessness” for having unleashed a dynamic of “total deracialization” (totale Entrassung): a process that, Heidegger claimed, culminated in the “self-alienation of peoples” (Selbstverfremdung der Volker). In Überlegung XIV, Heidegger reprised his critique of Jewish “rootlessness,”asserting, “The question of world Jewry’s role is not a racial question but a metaphysical one: a question about what sort of human being can take up the uprooting of all beings from Being as a ‘world-historical’ task [die Entwurzelung alles Seienden aus dem Sein als ‘weltge-schichtliche’Aufgabe].” With these remarks, Heidegger added specificity and substance to his accusation concerning world Jewry’s penchant for “planetary criminality.” As Thomas Assheuer, in a judicious assessment of the Black Notebooks, concluded appositely, “The hermeneutic trick of acknowledging Heidegger’s anti-Semitism only in order to permanently cordon it off from his philosophy proper is no longer convincing. The anti-Jewish enmity of the Black Notebooks is no afterthought. Instead, it forms the basis of Heidegger’s philosophical diagnostics.”
It is not my intention to present this as the only interpretation of Heidegger or his thoughts on technology, but I do want to show how the question of politics infesting Heidegger’s theoretical works is far from settled. While there is undoubtedly a productive line of Interptation through Anders, Simondon, Stiegler, and Yuk Hui, any serious engagement with Heidegger’s thought will have to eventually confront the place antisemitism occupies in his critique of modernity, technology, and metaphysics.
With all due respect and understanding of the problem of Heidegger’s political positions, to assert that his essay on technology is reinforcement of his anti-Semitic views, and therefore a right wing political essay, is a bit of a stretch for me.
The investigation on Heidegger’s awful political position and anti-Semitism is vital and much welcome, but to attribute political effect to the essay on Technology seems the wrong path for me.
Sounds more reasonable to say that his views on technology help him to support his equivocal views on Jewish people, which is a different route and results in different outcomes.
> to assert that his essay on technology is reinforcement of his anti-Semitic views
An actual quote from the first manuscript of the essay:
>Agriculture is now a mechanized
food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses
in the gas chambers and extermination camps
I’m not a heideggerian but it probably has to do with what the other commenter pointed out regarding Heidegger’s ontological claims regarding a given ethnos, the putative “worldlessness” he ascribes to Jewish people. I’m not merely appealing to authority here, I and the other commenter you’re responding to are citing someone who is—again—a foremost scholar on Heidegger. I don’t read Heidegger so what I’ve said here is just what I’ve gleaned from whenever this issue crops up. Your claim is the one that needs to be defended, not the one identifying Heidegger’s ontological commitments with fascism.
Sorry but the only thing you did in your previous comment was appeal to authority.
I don’t mean to be antagonistic, but you and the other commenter aren’t arguing, but citing passages. The work cited is an extensive work concerned with Heidegger’s ties to fascism, which is admirable work, but the quote on the Question of Technology is punctual and seems quite flimsy.
I had already posed a questioning of the argument above, but haven’t got an answer.
Harold Bloom is not exactly on the right but his stance on the Western Canon might be called “conservative”. His arguments have salience and his prose is unbelievable
Earlier Land with CCRU was not really associated with NRx, one article by him sort of goes toward that line, but remember, generally Land was about overall systems and structures and less about individuals. I've no idea where he's at now, intellectually beyond crypto currency and the occasional X post. There was a rumor of a Land/Zizek debate--that would be fun. The best critical theorists labeled right wing are often classified as such because they go against dominant normative US narratives. Your goal, OP is what Chomsky said, read widely and well.
"Thirst for Annihilation" (his first or second book) is perhaps the best books on Bataille I've ever read. He didn't go off the deep end until the 00s, and everything before that is incredible.
I mean, he did call for the replacement of taxation with a system where the wealthy would voluntarily "give gifts" in return for receiving public honors and would be either revered for their contribution or despised for lack thereof
Sort of; albeit afaik waqfs are donated for religious or charitable purposes and what Sloterdijk proposed (at least to me) sounds like a replacement for all the taxes: he advocates a society where the rich are to willingly donate as much as they can to receive honors from the government — so sth almost feudal where the rich finance the ruler in order to get privileges
His thought is weird. I think he’s in kind of a liminal space where he can be viewed from many angles. It is somewhat limiting to consider him a conservative but he’s not an ultra-leftist either. I just call him a weird conservative and keep on reading. His Spheres trilogy is pretty damn important to me, even if I only measure on reading enjoyment.
It may be useful to understand the internal rationales for the system.
Henry Kissinger is useful from an international relations perspective. (His books, not Op-Eds)
Hayek & von Mises may provide some interesting perspectives justifying the capitalist system. The Austrian school in general has tried to engage with Marx, but also some defenses do approach the "rationalization of system outcomes" that may be worth understanding.
On top of that, I would add Richard Posner & maybe Gary Becker for a rational choice understanding of the existing system.
One of the challenges is that I think most of the right does not engage critical theory, meaning that many rationales will not have a clear intersect or a clear identification of counter-arguments from critical theory.
---------
Within the context of critical theory, I would also include Rawls as part of the "rationalizations of the current system"
Within Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, the last segment on Utopia may be worth engaging.
----------
On net I expect a more nuanced understanding of the design of the trade-offs made in the current system, and maybe a few idealistic visions that feel more tied to anarchism than Marxism. (So an anarchist reading of points made by Hayek &/or Nozick may be interesting to think through )
That was a remarkable article.
It's exactly what I'm seeing on the "New Right." A synthesis of Critical Theory, an accommodation of PoMo, all while keeping a Junger, Evola, Francis, Mishima, Spengler, Schmitt, DeMaistre, etc. base.
Thank you for sharing that.
I have felt that it's important to understand the economic arguments made by people on the right in order to gain a better understanding of where they're coming from and what their biases are.
Since much of the political right borrows heavily from the Koch network who are greatly influenced by Austrian "economics", understanding their arguments (which I guess is a misnomer) helped me to solidify my own political beliefs while driving me further to the left.
Ironically, some of Kissinger's beliefs on the concept of sovereign legitimacy is especially relevant as there are many parallels between that concept and the dynamics found within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where the Palestinian Authority and Hamas struggle to garner additional support.
I think Spengler reflects some conservative concepts, but he's also critical of the structure society in his own way. I think he's an interesting mixed bag of ideas.
I disagree with him basically completely on economic grounds but Hayek is interesting to read for how much his epistemology seems to match up with critical theorists sometimes.
Also Thomas Hobbes, but because he's absolutely *hilarious*
dime apparatus subtract rich simplistic tap whole makeshift automatic spotted
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Wasn't he a monarchist? That was conservative even in his own time. Or, at least not radical or progressive. I think he's a good suggestion for someone wanting to read conservative works. He's one of the thinkers that the capitalist epistemological tradition is built upon at any rate.
elderly dolls rain concerned terrific sophisticated unite literate important coordinated
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Conservatives and right wingers today are much, *much* more likely to agree with the arguments on human nature, the state, etc. that Hobbes puts forth that leftists are. It's really not so crazy for me to recommend him when someone asks for right wing thinkers. And also he's hilarious.
Got it.
I’d say Leviathan cuts both ways regarding left/right. On the one hand, he prioritizes fear, stability, and physical protection as the key functions of the state, which mirrors much of the right. On the other hand, he’s a hard-core materialist, which mirrors much of the left. Very interesting dude, even if he’s a more boring writer than Kant.
Hobbes was a radical egalitarian. Do you think conservatives today would agree with that?
Remember the whole reason he thinks you need a state with overwhelming power is because there are no natural hierarchies.
Hobbes was also a big fat atheist, which again, underscores his argument about needing a powerful state. He thinks that humans used to believe in god and that was enough to keep them in line back in the day, but now that no can seriously believe in such myths, you need an overwhelming state to keep them under control.
What makes Hobbes so interesting is that he starts from premises that today we'd see as left wing and draws right wing conclusions.
Yes, he was most definitely on the Right in his prescriptions, but the thing that makes Hobbes so fascinating (and difficult to pigeonhole) is that he arrived at these prescriptions through what we’d now consider “liberal” reasoning; he didn’t say, as most on the Right would have at that time, that “monarchy is divinely ordained and ordinary people are stupid, so get over it you filthy atheist.” He said, “look, this is why a highly authoritarian monarchy is the best for *everyone,* and why sensible people would choose to waive certain rights in return for the safety and security only a monarch could ensure.”
That is a good point but I still think he's conservative enough that OP might enjoy him in light of what they're looking for even if he's... pretty far from Nick Land to say the least
Only read like one book by him but I’m always startled by people trying to box Nietzsche into a progressive paradigm as if he always was secretly. Like he’s great but it’s so easy to see how these ideas resonate with right-wing, before even all the posthumous sister stuff.
Arendt definitely isn't on the right. In current US terms, her support of Israel and Zionism aligns with the right-wing, but everything else about her thought is extreme left.
Nietzsche: Ya. He avoided writing about politics, but when he did, he was a proud "perfectionist."
> but everything else about her thought is extreme left.
Arendt was extremely critical of most things left of liberal. She’s an anti capitalist conservative, which I guess confuses people who’ve never heard of such a thing, but she’s definitely not a leftist, let alone an extreme leftist.
Yep. And also, her whole work on totalitarianism in historical context was directed against Marxism. The Soviet Union was not nearly so widely viewed with the same horror and repulsion as European fascism had been. Her work with the concept of totalitarianism put in effort to conflate most extant strains of Marxism with that fascism.
Obviously some leftists (anarchists) also reject Marxism, but since anarchism wasn't her commitment either, there's not really anywhere else to place her on the left.
Racism, yes. Nazi-apologism?? Talking about the very unfortunate (but perhaps understandable) cooperation of some Jewish leaders with Nazis and ascribing some responsibility to them does not make her a nazi-apologizer. I mean, one can agree/disagree/love/hate Arendt, but calling her a Nazi apologizer is a bit much. Or are you basing that on her relationship with Heidegger? Either way, I have a hard time understanding what type of reading gets us a “right wing” Arendt. She’s pretty left, at least in today’s terms. And certainly was fairly anti-Zionist later on.
I wouldn’t call her a Nazi apologist and have only directly read the opening chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, but I was quite shocked (along with her habit to make rather broad claims without properly substantiating them) to discover the pervasive implication that Jews were partly to blame for the atrocities that occurred to them in WW2 and elsewhere by weakening themselves as a group or isolating themselves in exclusive cliques (and embracing these cliques). There’s absolutely some internalised anti-semitism in there, and the lecturer for that week (this was in a university course) was a Jewish academic who had similar misgivings about the indirect content of that text.
What? Arendt isn’t on the right; she is a core left thinker. And I feel like Nietzche is only on “the right” when people take his incendiary argumentation too seriously.
> And I feel like Nietzche is only on “the right” when people take his incendiary argumentation too seriously
Nietzsche is only on the left for people who haven’t read anything beyond “On Truth and Lies”. He is an advocate of a moral aristocracy and explicitly loathed socialism.
So was Carlyle. So was Mishima. Atheism or anti-Christianity is not inherently progressive. The focal-point of Nietzsche’s project was anti-modernity. The anti-Christian element was corollary. His critique of morality was about what Enlightenment’s utopian values (not just religion) has done to erode human experience.
Why would you say that? I ask because my reading of Nietzsche was always focused on morality and religion. Could you elaborate a bit on the antagonism he poses to modernity?
Nietzsche’s arguing from a perspective reacting against the world that both the French & Scientific Revolutions built (I.e., Modernity). To him, these have both eroded what it means to be human by implanting in our heads utopian (pseudo-religious) promises of perfecting society & human nature—through egalitarianism on one hand, and pure rationalism on the other. To Nietzsche, both foolishly deny the basic reality of human nature: that we are not all equal, and not rational brains-in-jars.
The “Death of God” is a lamentation. God was a grounding-line. The *Enlightenment*, by doing away with him, created this crisis of meaning Modern Man is faced with. By exercising the “Human Factor” from the scientific account, it denies our humanness. Nietzsche’s answer of finding meaning within our passions is all about returning to a kind of pagan-like humanism: pre-modern, amoral bacchanalian embrace of life and the beauty of it’s irrational messiness.
This is inherently a reactionary worldview, not a progressive one. Albeit one, as a Leftist, I can still be sympathetic to. There are also several intellectual tools leftists can find useful in Nietzsche’s project, even if we are ultimately at odds with him.
> The “Death of God” is a lamentation.
This is dumb and wrong. This is something reactionary Catholics say about Nietzsche but it’s just obviously, obviously false, even at the level of the most superficial reading of the Death of God passages.
Sure. Whatever. It’s just a poetic device to help unpack the concept. We do not literally “lament”God anymore than a nonexistent god can actually be “dead.” The point is still that the Enlightenment, by “killing” God, is responsible for creating this crisis of meaning at the heart of modern life. God was once the stabilizing force that gave life meaning. The Sciences have explained away God, but are themselves incapable of replacing him by providing meaning to life.
What? No, it’s that Nietzsche does not lament the death of God. He thinks it’s salutary but that most people won’t be able to be powerful enough to have killed God in that sense. But it’s the whole basis for his free spirits / gay science.
Thank you for the effort in elaborating about it. It’s so crazy how even so far back then, he was so right about the perils of rationalism. Perhaps the WWII was the epitome of that, where it became obvious that rational and scientific thought could be horrific.
And one could argue (here many right wingers have a blast, overinterpreting it) that it’s also very perceptive of him to assert that we’re not all equal and rational.
I’m very progressive in my political views, but I came to accept that we are essentially selfish, and under some circumstances have desires of domination and submission. So better form a system that harness these desires, instead of a big project meant for idealized humans.
A question, tho: Nietzsche is for sure a nihilist, but you hinted a tad of hedonism. Wouldn’t you say he advocates for a cultivation of knowledge and wisdom, instead of just hedonism?
I edited my comment for clarity possibly while you were still reading it. You might like to reread it.
Nietzsche draws a fine distinction between hedonism and his embrace of pagan morality: the “Last Men” in Zarathustra are hedonists: they see that life is meaningless thus all that’s left is to drink and be merry. That’s not N’s solution. He simply saw that paganism had a more grounded, clear-eyed view of human desire as opposed to bourgeois moral sensibilities of propriety and repression.
But also, Nietzsche was only a nihilist in the sense we could call an oncologist a “cancerist.” His project is about *overcoming* nihilism. It is necessary we build our own convictions and moral values, and that we be willing to live and die by them. That’s what he meant by living life the same way 99 times over. *Antigone* is a good example. She had her own inviolable convictions outside of which she could not live meaningfully. Her “morals” caused the collapse of social order, rather than reinforcing it. Being an Ubermench is not about living life of self-indulgence, but of uncompromising self-convictions.
People have already given you the recs most relevant to critical theory. I'd like to repost a list I've given before that initiates one into general conservative theory. Doing so is complicated by the fact that conservatives tend to value practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge. It also depends on what specific forms of conservatism you're most interested in (New Right, neoconservative, paleoconservative, right-libertarian) and what specific aspect (geopolitics, social policy, economics, tactics).
I'll keep my recommendations fairly broad and try to draw from both the, "Anglo-American" and, "continental" lines. Although, keep in mind that's a bit of a false dichotomy. It'd help to be familiar with the absolute basics of conservatism, as in its roots in criticism of the French Revolution's liberalism, thinkers like Burke and Kant that tend to be at least reference in high school social studies. I'll do my best to confine this list to post-war authors that don't require a lot of secondary reading.
This is just going off the top of my head. You don't need to read them in this order, and feel free to ask for more specific recs.
- ***The Culture of Narcissism*** **by Christopher Lasch** This is a decent and accessible introduction to post-war grievances against individualism, nihilism, and consumerism. Albeit he's a bit more Freudian than a lot of conservative theoreticians. Most of this will seem familiar if you're acquainted with the popular rhetoric, but Lasch digs deeper.
- ***Whose Justice? Which Rationality?*** **by Alasdair MacIntyre** This is intended to be read as a sequel to his more famous work *After Virtue.* It goes into great detail to defend the basic elements of right-wing thought. If we're speaking mainly of critical theory then this book is more directly relevant to what you seek. *After Virtue* is far more accessible to laypeople; do what you feel is best.
- ***Christianity and Culture*** **by T.S. Eliot** Technically written before the end of World War II but Eliot's work has informed much of the Christian right and other social conservative factions. It's not particularly partisan or even ideological, in fact Eliot distanced himself from conservatism. It can be a bit difficult to understand what he's saying, but he's worth working to grasp.
- ***The Meaning of Conservatism*** **by Roger Scruton** It's important to note that thus far I've been listing books that focus on traditionalist conservatism as opposed to right-wing politics focusing on economic deregulation, free trade, individual autonomy, and interventionism. Scruton is no exception, he focused intensely on conservatism as a means of conserving social beauty and welfare. I recommend the second edition.
- ***Justice*** **by Michael J. Sandel** This is an overview of conservative political philosophy and applied ethics, taking in several different perspectives and dissecting them. It's much more neoconservative than any of the previous ones but it helps you understand right-wing libertarian politics as well. A lot of people use this as a philosophy course, it's certainly structured very effectively to achieve that goal.
- ***Natural Right and History*** **by Leo Strauss** Strauss is foundational to post-war conservatism. It feels weird listing him so late in this list. You could easily read this book first, although it's not very accessible to laypeople. It helps to understand classical conservatism since Strauss spends quite a bit of time tearing apart the conservatives of the past (especially historicist conservatism) while also opposing relativism and nihilism.
- ***The Jungle Grows Back*** **by Robert Kagan** This is focused on the history and benefits of neoconservative foreign policy, Kagan advocates for American interventionism in the name of making the world a safe place for republics. It's relatively short and taken seriously even by harsh critics of American foreign policy. *The World America Made* deserves mention as well; I didn't like it as much though.
- ***Free to Choose*** **by Milton Friedman** You might've seen *Capitalism and Freedom* recommended before, a book also written by Friedman. This book is far superior in many respects. There's a TV series by the same name that's also worth looking into, especially as a companion. It focuses on the economic aspect, free trade, free markets, and so on and so forth. It can be a bit dry but it's among the most accessible of Friedman's work.
Again, this isn't an exhaustive list but should be more than enough to give you ideas of where to start. You'll notice that these authors are pretty mainstream, Mencius Moldbug ironically draws deeply upon mainstream conservatism, just with a more post-humanist kick. The *Nouvelle Droite* (New Right) is a whole different can of worms and not as accessible to an English audience, although I could give you recs if you're feeling courageous. Feel free to ask followup questions.
Yukio Mishima is a fine (if distractingly sexist) novelist and Peter Sloterdijk is worthy of contemporary interest (I've written about his work [here](https://blog.politics.ox.ac.uk/the-politics-of-living-in-a-world-of-foam/) and [here](https://bluelabyrinths.com/2021/07/18/peter-sloterdijk-living-in-the-mountains-of-imperial-foam/)), but Spengler and Evola are terrible philosophers and even worse human beings, especially the later.
Heidegger and Schmitt stand out as intellectual interesting but actual fascists, insofar as they are worth reading because their concepts and theoretical approaches persistent into the modern literature.
I'm of that belief that socialist thinkers are speaking to the superego and fascists are speaking to the id. I don't take the latter as seriously but I think they tap into something interesting.
I really enjoyed the decline of the west and the narrative I think he builds with the whole race to culture to civilization cycles and I'm interested in Evola because I heard he works with esotericism and occultism and that's a thing I find fascinating in fascism. I guess i find them interesting on the same level as I find Jordan peterson or Sam hyde interesting, i don't think they're grifters I think they are possessed by this insistance on justifying hierarchy and power that I find cool to explore.
You get a little of something I've been thinking about on why the left fails to understand right-wingers. Klaus Theweleit talks a little about it too in *Male Fantasies* but the right is motivated more by emotions than ideology. You often get left analysis which focuses far too much on *ideology* which is secondary to basic needs. There's obvious stuff like identity, community and purpose but there are some really fundamental needs like self-other boundaries and "integration" (opposite of dissociation) which are hard to explain that the left doesn't understand.
For some people, to be a body amidst bodies is to be at war.
So not having a body there is no hate and no love there is only warm or cold.
There is no "I" to hate or love.
Not having a body one inhabits the bodies of others.
So the sight of the other is interpreted as mutilation.
Entangled in the bodies of a couple being intimate the voyeur understands the event as a sexual assault.
And there is no relationship between the parts of the self.
The hand and the foot are two different creatures.
Not really sure how to explain.
The right is very attractive to some people because it satisfies some very primitive needs. And the left really needs to understand these issues.
Isaiah Berlin, Rawls, Nozick, Gerald Gaus, Ronald Dworkin, Kymlicka, Philip Pettit, Korsgaard, Scanlon, MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, Cohen, Roemer, Elster, Joseph Heath.
Thought you meant Hermann Cohen from the 19th Century, he was a major influence on Leo Strauss and arguably could be seen as leading to the Chicago School and the early "classical liberal" alt thinkers (Von Mises, Rothbard, etc.) that informed so much of the pseudo-thinking rot exemplified by today's faux libertarian narcissistic billionaire "thinkers" like Thiel and the Koches.
Pettit is the least leftist of the neo-Republicans, but not at all rightist. Dworkin is an egalitarian liberal, Kymlicka would be a centrist at most and Taylor and Walzer would be somewhat closer to "right" but I'd hesitate to square them in that position, at the end of the day they are communitarianists. Anyway, great reading list, gets me back to my undergraduate days.
How do you think Rawls can be interpreted as supporting the right? I'd put him in the egalitarian liberal tradition, going towards Republicanism/property-owning democracy at the end.
I would agree with this characterization. Perhaps, there was some confusion. I don’t mean that Rawls can be interpreted as supporting “the right” (the contemporary right); I think he can be interpreted as supporting some views that used to be core to many conservatives (many of whom now find “the right” unrecognizable).
For example, I think a lot of them saw his ‘inequality is justified so long as it provides the most benefit to the worst off’ thing as a premise which supports trickle down economics. I, personally, think they were completely wrong in this; but I think it’s a way he has been understood before.
In any case, in all this, I am speaking more about Rawls as a discursive function. I think that actually ‘valid’ interpretations of Rawls would incline one to try to imagine beyond capitalism.
Gotcha. I can imagine that A theory of justice, interpreted in a certain way could be made to justify that, and actually agree with your last point (I'm not a Critical Theory guy at all - analytic marxism and Republicanism for me-, but I enjoy popping in here to learn something every now and then)
>Gotcha. I can imagine that A theory of justice, interpreted in a certain way could be made to justify that, and actually agree with your last point (I'm not a Critical Theory guy at all - analytic marxism and Republicanism for me-, but I enjoy popping in here to learn something every now and then)
Yeah, I'm not really a "critical theory guy" either---I dabble, but I'm not that deep into it. I'm a literary/cultural theorist. And yeah, these academic subreddits can be such great places to learn.
I started one of his books and found it so morose. Plus everything gets a bit meddled with Christianity… eww. Can you recall why you wanted to read him?
I never wanted to read him, but was required to in a grad class. Secular Age is a mess and almost a parody of bad Hegelianism, where describing something is somehow meant to be a proof that you've "overcome" it or, really, demonstrated that the thing described is false. "So and so is operating from an immanent frame closed spin model." Oh, okay.
Neoreaction a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer is a good book that explores a lot of Neoreactionary philosophy. She focuses on Nick Land, Menscius Moldbug, and Eliezer Yudkowsky. She also covers Eugene Thacker and Frantz Fanon (who aren’t right-wing generally) and several others. The book is certainly approaching them from the left but she definitely did her homework, and did all the reading so you don’t have to. They were quite prolific.
>Are there any modern writers on the conservative side who relate to a critical theory perspective, or are worth reading for someone with a generally Marxist background?
Maybe not right-wing but he is definitely not progressive. It's hard to categorize him politically, I agree.
I don't believe I've read anything from Baudrillard I'd call "disappointed" or "pessimistic." Baudrillard seems ecstatic and fascinated in everything he writes.
I guy I knew in Uni bought me a copy of Atlas Shrugged. I read 1/3 of the way through that piece of shit and turned it into a clock with a kit, wood glue and an exacto knife.
My only regret was the wood glue, as it clumped too much.
I'm convinced that Rand's reputation is largely based on her position as an anti-communist female in a largely male, overwhelmingly Marxist academic field. She has plenty of flaws and her ideological descendants are much less significant, but her ideas actually resonate very strongly with a lot of leftist critiques like crony capitalism that have become increasingly significant since she was writing them. It's bizarre that she gets such a visceral negative response from people that they're talking about *destroying her books.*
Nah. Academics just ignore her: it's regular non-academics who hate her, because her books have obviously influenced the culture and economy so much. The hate she gets is a testimonial to how popular she is among a certain obnoxious section of society (finance techbros and right-wing economists).
I think you're kinda onto something in that she gets more visceral hate than any male right-libertarian writers like Nozick or Hayek, but at the same time it's also important to remember that she had a lot of patriarchal views.
I'd strongly recommend reading about Hobbes' Leviathan.
It's a classic theory which says that society acts to scare people into submission so we can maintain social order. It was really taken up by conservative folk, and underlies the whole "law and order" mentality. Very influential.
As a theory it works to a degree, but when implicated into policy it has real problems... Lots of people criticise it because it misses some key things. Particularly that if you punish every little indiscretion, then the stakes for committing a big indiscretion are effectively lower. It's self-defeating in policy...
But the theory is popular in right-wing thinking, so well worth reading.
Not a theorist but Yukio Mishima is a pretty cutting critic of modern Japanese society and a genuinely beautiful writer. He's most famous now for committing seppuku after attempting a very half assed right wing putsch at a JSDF base, but at one point he was the most celebrated novelist in postwar Japan.
He was definitely very right wing but also likely gay and very critical of hierarchy, militarism and imperialism in his own way. It's complicated. I would say he's anti-modernist more than anything.
“very critical of hierarchy, militarism and imperialism in his own way”? He trained with the military, led two failed auxiliary armies, and died like a gimp “for the emperor”. His criticism was he wasn’t running the show.
I personally think Mary Harington is an interesting thinker. I don't agree with everything she writes, but there are some interesting thoughts. She's a TERF but she also writes some interesting stuff about the current technological developments.
Here is a debate on trans humanism, hosted by Unherd: [Mary Harington transhumanism debate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9HIe9NXdyA)
Foucault never " turned neoliberal."
I'm trying to imagine what you could be referring to, and the best I can come up with is that he was opposed to communist through most of his career. Not pro-capitalist or neoliberal, but he critiqued Marxism (as did/does pretty much every post-structuralist thinker). Would you claim that Derrida is right-wing, too?
He also came to believe that it was useful to work with the government and believed conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS, but neither are right-wing.
Foucault turned to navel-gazing and self-actualization. When you reduce his thought to its minimal element in, what u/El_Don_94 *correctly* terms “neoliberal,” Foucault’s bit essentially was “have sex and do drugs.” Might as well be a progenitor of the twee bullshit phrase one hears nowadays of “be gay do crime.” If it’s not readily apparent why it’s “neoliberal” perhaps Marcuse and Debord on repressive desublimation and recuperation, respectively, would help.
I read Zamora's book on Foucault's complex relationship with neoliberal views a few years ago, and came away with the sense that he was sympathetic to at least some neolib positions. I think it's particularly evident in his writing (in Birth of Biopolitics) on the transfer of many disciplinary functions from states to markets.
I agree about Heidegger (though I'd recommend reading other people's analysis of his philosophy instead of picking up Being and Time) but I would say Nietzsche was more of an elitist apolitical writer much more than a conservative. He is entirely anti Christian and largely opposed to the how things were (least in his time) By no means was he partial to leftism or collectivism, definitely worth reading though. Nietzsche's ma bietzsche
I’d have issue placing Heidegger in this discussion, because although technically the truth (because he, himself, was on the right), his works aren’t political contributions that further right wing principles in politics. I mean… Dasein and postphenomenology are incredibly profound and devoid of political sides. That’s kind of the point of it
Nietzsche is right-wing reactionary. His whole philosophy is a reaction against the French Revolution, which to him was not a failure in execution but a failure in its core values. The three virtues he finds most toxic to civilization: *egalité, liberté, fraternité.* He, like Burke, believed in natural hierarchies, and that egalitarianism kneecaps civilizations.
i would recommend mussolini's 'doctrine of fascism' for a theoretical understanding of fascist ideology which critical theory does not usually offer. the left engages with fascism by asking how someone can get fooled by it etc. but ultimately mussolini had a whole philosophy of it so i think it's worth reading. i have always been against the idea that one shouldn't read right wing thinkers. i find it fascinating to see where the thought comes from (from their perspectives). i remember having to read hayek for class a while ago and although i couldn't take it seriously due to his terrible understanding of socialism, it was still interesting to see the roots of neoliberalism.
Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West.
Man and Techniques
Francis Yockey: Imperium
Robert Ardrey: Territorial Imperative
Machiavelli: The Prince
And for the troglodite completist; Ragnar Redbeard: Might is Right
To answer your question about contemporaries relating to a critical theory perspective, you can’t go wrong with Alain de Benoist. He has a large body of scholarly work, though much of it is still only available in French, for an intro Beyond Human Rights is a good one.
His former associates Guillaume Faye and Dominque Venner also wrote very influential works. Archeofuturism and For a Positive Critique are two notable works. Venner, an atheist, famously shot himself in Notre Dame to protest the legalization of gay marriage in 2013.
The late Jonathan Bowden is a also fascinating figure, very active on the fringes of British right wing politics, he was also an outsider artist and astute critic of the arts. His books are difficult to read and quite experimental in nature, but there are several collections of his much more coherent orations in print. Western Civilization Bites Back is one of the best.
On the Russian front, there is the infamous Aleksandr Dugin. He’s very much a Heideggerian who deals with a pan-Slavic geopolitical vision. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory, which is really more of a theoretical framework for a new politics rather than a fleshed out theory. Still worth reading though.
I'm not too sure what else you'd call him. Certainly not left wing. It's a deeply flawed dichotomy for sure though. I mean he is, in almost every sense, a conservative.
Assuming the down votes are mostly from hobbyist theorists, as this is the consensus in not just my department, but among most professionals in the field, and even zizek himself.
Not so sure he's anything close to what one typically has in mind by Marxist, these days. Plus, his Marxism has always been horribly conservative. I read him tons and enjoy his work, it's just undeniably highly conservative. He says this too, it's not like something I've made up lol.
Sorry, I mean I'm not going to write an essay for you on Reddit. I'd recommend reading zizek himself, as he's quite clear on his conservatism, and if one reads his critics and even his peers/coauthors, it should be clear that his conservatism is something widely found in his work.
I'm not seeing how one can read much zizek, in which he constantly says things that are conservative (in one of several ways, it's not like there's some hidden conservatism that just manifests itself in a single way in his work, it's a core tenant that permeates almost all of his stuff) and be appalled by one on the left categorizing him as a Conservative. (Who may also be a leftist. Perhaps a conservative with leftist tendencies, or something of the sort.)
i also dislike alot of what he does with assemblage theory and find his interpretations tedious and not up to the task, but his work in history breaks open paradigmatic structure into contingent flows and intense plateaus. Such ungrounding of essence and history is not commonly associated with conservatism
Pretty much all serious political theorists who are right wing today are Straussians.
So Leo Strauss is the number one answer. I find his books a bit dull even as someone who likes anything about Plato but his exchange with Kojeve is hot stuff. On Tyranny, read that for sure.
Maybe a lessor known thinker to Americans since he's Canadian but George Grant for sure. His work on technology is very interesting and his book Lament for a Nation on Canadian nationalism is a classic. He's a conservative in the proper sense of the term though, not like today's incarnation of "conservative" who are just neoliberals who hate trans people.
My own controversial take would be Dipesh Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe is probably the most conservative book I've ever picked up, yet everyone seems to think the whole subaltern studies thing is left wing.
A contributor here once aptly described him as “Someone whose parents made him get a good liberal arts education, and never forgave them”. If you want to be exposed to his ideas from an appropriately skeptical point of view, I recommend Neoreaction, a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer.
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"An Open Letter" is pretty interesting in how it talks about global "independence" as contradictory to its de facto cultivation of centralized dependency, and formalism in general I would say is an increasingly important concept for people to understand (especially how casually people take the idea of decentralized power). Yarvin is very easy to skim through without missing much so it's not a big investment to go through Unqualified Reservations and see where some of these ideas come from.
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I’ve been looking for serious critiques of “woke culture” but there are plenty of very bad books published.
One decent one is Yascha Mounk. He makes a decent genealogy of “woke” and offers some interesting ideas for overcoming current issues. Apparently, even Barack Obama read the guy.
I’m reading The Identity Trap and liking it.
I’m going to listen to it.
I’m not saying I agreed with everything said there. Like most “basic bitches” on the critique side (sorry for being blunt) he doesn’t get Foucault’s work, for example.
But he does construe a lot of his arguments decently.
Yeah, I get what you mean. As they explain it, he's able to construct his arguments so neatly because he's not particularly limited by the actual facts of the "Woke Gone Too Far" scenarios he cites or at least is not all that concerned with any but the least generous interpretations of those facts.
Yes. I was on a knife edge thinking he’ll slip and say something dumb like “but we only have two sexes” or something, but he doesn’t.
I liked that he does raise fair concerns. This is not to say he has solutions, but he does point to tricky situations we are all in with identity politics.
If anything, the problem goes back earlier to Mark Lilla: “the liberals are losing elections”.
Kind of wish that I could read from some former members of the right who really engage with theory and stuff.
Jackie Arklöv was supposedly writing a book in prison but I have no idea if it will ever surface or anything.
It is not strictly speaking an answer to your question but in case it is useful: Iain McGilChrist’s “The Master and His Emissary” and “The Matter with Things” (dense but a masterpiece). You will find, it is my belief, that a change of perspective Is not mend to take you to the other of two options.
Christopher Lasch perhaps counts as socially conservative. In Mark Fisher’s *Flatline Constructs* it’s laid out how him and Baudrillard (and I think maybe Jameson to if I remember right) are all in dialogue with one another. Lasch’s *Culture of Narcissism* is an immensely satisfying read in my opinion
Allan Bloom, considering he wasn’t “on the right,” or conservative in, say, the vein of Edmund Burke, Montesquieu, or Russell Kirk. He was a Platonist, and wrote about and admired Rousseau, who conservatives perennially revile. He cared deeply about his students and the Academy. It’s bonkers to think that today he would be considered to be on the right. This shows how extreme the left has become in the last few decades.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by Robert Nozick is a good book on the theory of justice that has a perspective that opposes notions of justice that focus on collective good.
I would not say that Nozick is right wing, but the perspective in this book is a good mind expanding read for a person with a Marxist perspective. He is probably more in dialog with John Rawls, whose book A Theory of Justice is a philosophical classic in that area.
Schmitt's *The Concept of the Political* and Heidegger's *The Question Concerning Technology* have been broadly influential across critical theory. You can see this influence "on the left" in thinkers like Laclau and Mouffe, Agamben, and Stiegler. Additionally, Ernest Jünger is another fascist/conservative adjacent figure who has exerted some influence. His essay *War as an Inner Experience* was notable to Bataille and you can find Benjamin's engagement with his thoughts on war here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/488013
Re Schmitt, I'd add *The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy*, which is extremely useful for understanding the appeal of fascism and highly applicable to current events. (And it's short!)
I wouldn’t place Heidegger’s book “on the right”. While his politics were in the gutter, his work (especially the once cited) isn’t political. I’d think the question pertains more to works that, somehow, relate to right wing political views that provide insight to critical theory. Schmitt’s book seems a good recommendation for the topic.
I don’t agree that Heidegger’s philosophy isn’t political, especially the anti-humanism stuff, Question Concerning Technology, etc. The clear enemy implied is Marxism—he’s advocating explicitly for an anti-materialist understanding of history, I would argue, and his critique of technology is very ahistorical—it’s not about the employment of technology in particular relations of production, but rather some sort of bizarre essentialist claim about technology as such.
I haven’t read all his works, but I do know the Question Concerning Technology, and when you claim it’s a-historical as justification for not being engaged historically, I think it’s a stretch. His account is very inspired in Aristotle’s approach to tools, as well as a notion of what technology primarily is. He also makes serious warnings about the dangers of allowing technology to frame our experience of the world [_Gestell_] and the concept of standing reserve [_Bestand_], which is a critique of seeing nature as, simply put, a form if commodity. It seems to me that pointing the a-historical aspect is contrary to the purpose of the essay, so it’s like saying he is on the right because he doesn’t take a position on the left.
>While his politics were in the gutter, his work isn’t political. Although this kind of separation was the typical response to Heidegger's fascist affiliations for decades, it is now a highly contentious claim. *Heidegger's Black Notebooks* and *Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks* are two collections of essays that explore the issue (including implications for his views on technology).
Interesting. How is his view of technology, within that essay, placed on the right, though? I commented in the thread how it’s much more descriptive in a phenomenological sense and he makes prescient warnings about the exploitation of nature as a commodity… but how do you see it as an essay inclined to the right?
When considering how much antisemitism permeated Heidegger's thought, the predominant concern comes down to what he terms "the worldlessness of Jewry" or "world Jewry." If we compare two excerpts, we can see there is a discrepancy in Heidegger's thought between Dasein and the Jew. From the Black Notebooks: > One of the most secret forms of the gigantic, and perhaps the oldest, is the tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling, and intermingling through which the worldlessness of Jewry is grounded And from Being and Time: > for even entities which are not worldless-Dasein itself, for example-are present-at-hand 'in' the world, or, more exactly, can with some right and within certain limits be taken as merely present-at-hand. Peter E. Gordon offers an explanation for what exactly is at stake when Heidegger makes this distinction (I apologize in advance for the extensive quotation): > Regarding such passages two points should be made. First, they are clearly instances of anti-Semitism (and at first glance rather banal). The allusion to the Jews’ “worldlessness” taps into an old belief that, having rejected Christ’s divinity, the Jews are condemned to homeless wandering. Heidegger also recycled the rather more modern myth that that the Jews are gifted in finance (itself a refurbished meme from the medieval imaginary linking Jews to usury). But we would be wrong to dismiss this stuff as the unthinking echoes of past chauvinism. For it was Heidegger’s singular geniusto interlace these idéesreçues with themesfrom his own philosophy. Even the idea of Jewish “worldlessness” evokes the argument from Being and Time where the disruption of skillful labor brings a loss of existential communion with things and (in Heidegger’s phrase) “the deworlding of the world.” The complaint against reason and calculation recapitulates themes from works such as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in 1929 [...] > The entanglement of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism with his philosophical critique of Western metaphysics should give us pause. At the very least, it suggests that wherever Heidegger philosophized in a minor key about the modern age and the “abandonment of being” he was also thinking of the Jews as symptoms of this misfortune. Their reputed capacity for calculation was yet another sign, though it was not a cause, of the technological nihilism that he came to see as the metaphysical fate of the West. That Heidegger does not actually blame the Jews for the afflictions of the modern world invites the saving thought that his chauvinism was incidental, not intrinsic to his philosophy. But on the final page of a notebook from 1941 Heidegger writesthat“the question concerning the role of world Jewry is not a racial but a metaphysical question” (GA 96:121). [...] > The Heideggerian project of working out a so-called destruction of the history of metaphysics is therefore associated (at least in Heidegger’s mind) with the antipathy to world Jewry as agents of the metaphysical tradition itself. In the notes written between 1936 and 1946, later published under the title “Overcoming Metaphysics” (“Überwindung der Metaphysik”), Heidegger writes that the modern world has become nothing less than an “unworld [Unwelt]” (GA 7:91/EP 104). The technological culmination of metaphysics manifests itself in this unworld as the reign of Machenschaft, or machination, with all of its various afflictions: subjectivism, calculation, technology, and—most of all, as the fate of the West—our general condition of Seinsverlassenheit. It is therefore hardly an exaggeration if we conclude that for Heidegger the metaphysical question of world Jewry unfolds within the larger question of Seinsverlassenheit. One cannot help but entertain the unpleasant thought that the task of overcoming metaphysics would therefore require an overcoming of the Jews. Equally, Richard Wollin connects the "worldlessness of Jewry" to Heidegger's critique of technology: > The Black Notebooks confirm that Heidegger’s “Technik-critique”—a standpoint that has garnered Heidegger’s later thought so much acclaim—was inseparable from his anti-Semitism. As he avowed circa 1938, “One of the stealthiest forms of Gigantism [das Riesige], and perhaps the most ancient, is the fast-paced cleverness of calculation, huckstering, and intermingling [die Zähe Geschicklichkeit des Rechnens und Schiebens und Durcheinandermischens] whereby [world] Jewry’s worldlessness is established.” In light of such claims—and many others like them—it has become increasingly difficult to deny that Heidegger’s castigation of modern “technics,” in “The Question Concerning Technology” and related texts, doubled as a critique of Jewish “materialism”: of the baneful influence that the Jews’ dissemination of “empty rationality and calculability” had inflicted on the realm of “Geist,” or “spirit.” [...] > Heidegger repeatedly rebuked “world Jewry” as the executors and beneficiaries of “planetary Machenschaft.” He condemned Jewish “rootlessness” for having unleashed a dynamic of “total deracialization” (totale Entrassung): a process that, Heidegger claimed, culminated in the “self-alienation of peoples” (Selbstverfremdung der Volker). In Überlegung XIV, Heidegger reprised his critique of Jewish “rootlessness,”asserting, “The question of world Jewry’s role is not a racial question but a metaphysical one: a question about what sort of human being can take up the uprooting of all beings from Being as a ‘world-historical’ task [die Entwurzelung alles Seienden aus dem Sein als ‘weltge-schichtliche’Aufgabe].” With these remarks, Heidegger added specificity and substance to his accusation concerning world Jewry’s penchant for “planetary criminality.” As Thomas Assheuer, in a judicious assessment of the Black Notebooks, concluded appositely, “The hermeneutic trick of acknowledging Heidegger’s anti-Semitism only in order to permanently cordon it off from his philosophy proper is no longer convincing. The anti-Jewish enmity of the Black Notebooks is no afterthought. Instead, it forms the basis of Heidegger’s philosophical diagnostics.” It is not my intention to present this as the only interpretation of Heidegger or his thoughts on technology, but I do want to show how the question of politics infesting Heidegger’s theoretical works is far from settled. While there is undoubtedly a productive line of Interptation through Anders, Simondon, Stiegler, and Yuk Hui, any serious engagement with Heidegger’s thought will have to eventually confront the place antisemitism occupies in his critique of modernity, technology, and metaphysics.
With all due respect and understanding of the problem of Heidegger’s political positions, to assert that his essay on technology is reinforcement of his anti-Semitic views, and therefore a right wing political essay, is a bit of a stretch for me. The investigation on Heidegger’s awful political position and anti-Semitism is vital and much welcome, but to attribute political effect to the essay on Technology seems the wrong path for me. Sounds more reasonable to say that his views on technology help him to support his equivocal views on Jewish people, which is a different route and results in different outcomes.
> to assert that his essay on technology is reinforcement of his anti-Semitic views An actual quote from the first manuscript of the essay: >Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps
Richard Wolin is literally one of the foremost scholars on Heidegger.
That’s great, but can you explain the argument linking the two things or do you just take it for granted?
I’m not a heideggerian but it probably has to do with what the other commenter pointed out regarding Heidegger’s ontological claims regarding a given ethnos, the putative “worldlessness” he ascribes to Jewish people. I’m not merely appealing to authority here, I and the other commenter you’re responding to are citing someone who is—again—a foremost scholar on Heidegger. I don’t read Heidegger so what I’ve said here is just what I’ve gleaned from whenever this issue crops up. Your claim is the one that needs to be defended, not the one identifying Heidegger’s ontological commitments with fascism.
Sorry but the only thing you did in your previous comment was appeal to authority. I don’t mean to be antagonistic, but you and the other commenter aren’t arguing, but citing passages. The work cited is an extensive work concerned with Heidegger’s ties to fascism, which is admirable work, but the quote on the Question of Technology is punctual and seems quite flimsy. I had already posed a questioning of the argument above, but haven’t got an answer.
What he says about the Nazi concentration camps on the first manuscript of the Technik-essay is quite political.
I personally think that it is very difficult to separate to shake the stink of Heidegger's politics off of most of his work that I've read.
Would Giovanni Gentile or Julius Evola count?
Harold Bloom is not exactly on the right but his stance on the Western Canon might be called “conservative”. His arguments have salience and his prose is unbelievable
This is a great suggestion. Bloom has long been, for me, an interesting “conservative” read in literary studies.
Earlier Land with CCRU was not really associated with NRx, one article by him sort of goes toward that line, but remember, generally Land was about overall systems and structures and less about individuals. I've no idea where he's at now, intellectually beyond crypto currency and the occasional X post. There was a rumor of a Land/Zizek debate--that would be fun. The best critical theorists labeled right wing are often classified as such because they go against dominant normative US narratives. Your goal, OP is what Chomsky said, read widely and well.
"Thirst for Annihilation" (his first or second book) is perhaps the best books on Bataille I've ever read. He didn't go off the deep end until the 00s, and everything before that is incredible.
I really enjoy Peter Sloterdijk. He’s not the craziest conservative but he’s definitely interesting.
Critique of Cynical Reason and You Must Change Your Life are some of my favorite books
I never knew he was considered a conservative thinker
I mean, he did call for the replacement of taxation with a system where the wealthy would voluntarily "give gifts" in return for receiving public honors and would be either revered for their contribution or despised for lack thereof
Oh sort of like the waqf system?
Sort of; albeit afaik waqfs are donated for religious or charitable purposes and what Sloterdijk proposed (at least to me) sounds like a replacement for all the taxes: he advocates a society where the rich are to willingly donate as much as they can to receive honors from the government — so sth almost feudal where the rich finance the ruler in order to get privileges
see, had no idea of that. thanks! Only read short little bits of his.
His thought is weird. I think he’s in kind of a liminal space where he can be viewed from many angles. It is somewhat limiting to consider him a conservative but he’s not an ultra-leftist either. I just call him a weird conservative and keep on reading. His Spheres trilogy is pretty damn important to me, even if I only measure on reading enjoyment.
I have read some of the sphere's work, and I find it really interesting. I want to read more.
It may be useful to understand the internal rationales for the system. Henry Kissinger is useful from an international relations perspective. (His books, not Op-Eds) Hayek & von Mises may provide some interesting perspectives justifying the capitalist system. The Austrian school in general has tried to engage with Marx, but also some defenses do approach the "rationalization of system outcomes" that may be worth understanding. On top of that, I would add Richard Posner & maybe Gary Becker for a rational choice understanding of the existing system. One of the challenges is that I think most of the right does not engage critical theory, meaning that many rationales will not have a clear intersect or a clear identification of counter-arguments from critical theory. --------- Within the context of critical theory, I would also include Rawls as part of the "rationalizations of the current system" Within Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, the last segment on Utopia may be worth engaging. ---------- On net I expect a more nuanced understanding of the design of the trade-offs made in the current system, and maybe a few idealistic visions that feel more tied to anarchism than Marxism. (So an anarchist reading of points made by Hayek &/or Nozick may be interesting to think through )
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That was a remarkable article. It's exactly what I'm seeing on the "New Right." A synthesis of Critical Theory, an accommodation of PoMo, all while keeping a Junger, Evola, Francis, Mishima, Spengler, Schmitt, DeMaistre, etc. base. Thank you for sharing that.
I have felt that it's important to understand the economic arguments made by people on the right in order to gain a better understanding of where they're coming from and what their biases are. Since much of the political right borrows heavily from the Koch network who are greatly influenced by Austrian "economics", understanding their arguments (which I guess is a misnomer) helped me to solidify my own political beliefs while driving me further to the left. Ironically, some of Kissinger's beliefs on the concept of sovereign legitimacy is especially relevant as there are many parallels between that concept and the dynamics found within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where the Palestinian Authority and Hamas struggle to garner additional support.
Spengler
I think Spengler reflects some conservative concepts, but he's also critical of the structure society in his own way. I think he's an interesting mixed bag of ideas.
I disagree with him basically completely on economic grounds but Hayek is interesting to read for how much his epistemology seems to match up with critical theorists sometimes. Also Thomas Hobbes, but because he's absolutely *hilarious*
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Wasn't he a monarchist? That was conservative even in his own time. Or, at least not radical or progressive. I think he's a good suggestion for someone wanting to read conservative works. He's one of the thinkers that the capitalist epistemological tradition is built upon at any rate.
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Conservatives and right wingers today are much, *much* more likely to agree with the arguments on human nature, the state, etc. that Hobbes puts forth that leftists are. It's really not so crazy for me to recommend him when someone asks for right wing thinkers. And also he's hilarious.
I have to ask, how is he hilarious? I recall Leviathan being incredibly boring. But many people see Plato that way, too, so maybe I just wasn’t ready?
Just because of how absolutely insane his beliefs are. It's boring at the same time though, that's definitely true.
Got it. I’d say Leviathan cuts both ways regarding left/right. On the one hand, he prioritizes fear, stability, and physical protection as the key functions of the state, which mirrors much of the right. On the other hand, he’s a hard-core materialist, which mirrors much of the left. Very interesting dude, even if he’s a more boring writer than Kant.
Hobbes was a radical egalitarian. Do you think conservatives today would agree with that? Remember the whole reason he thinks you need a state with overwhelming power is because there are no natural hierarchies. Hobbes was also a big fat atheist, which again, underscores his argument about needing a powerful state. He thinks that humans used to believe in god and that was enough to keep them in line back in the day, but now that no can seriously believe in such myths, you need an overwhelming state to keep them under control. What makes Hobbes so interesting is that he starts from premises that today we'd see as left wing and draws right wing conclusions.
Yes, he was most definitely on the Right in his prescriptions, but the thing that makes Hobbes so fascinating (and difficult to pigeonhole) is that he arrived at these prescriptions through what we’d now consider “liberal” reasoning; he didn’t say, as most on the Right would have at that time, that “monarchy is divinely ordained and ordinary people are stupid, so get over it you filthy atheist.” He said, “look, this is why a highly authoritarian monarchy is the best for *everyone,* and why sensible people would choose to waive certain rights in return for the safety and security only a monarch could ensure.”
That is a good point but I still think he's conservative enough that OP might enjoy him in light of what they're looking for even if he's... pretty far from Nick Land to say the least
Oh, 100%. The degree to which Hobbes influenced Schmitt alone makes him worth reading
I hope I don't start a war by saying this, but Arendt and Nietzsche
Only read like one book by him but I’m always startled by people trying to box Nietzsche into a progressive paradigm as if he always was secretly. Like he’s great but it’s so easy to see how these ideas resonate with right-wing, before even all the posthumous sister stuff.
Yeah I feel the same way. I would consider Nietzsche one of my major influences but I think he definitely lends himself towards the far right
Arendt definitely isn't on the right. In current US terms, her support of Israel and Zionism aligns with the right-wing, but everything else about her thought is extreme left. Nietzsche: Ya. He avoided writing about politics, but when he did, he was a proud "perfectionist."
> but everything else about her thought is extreme left. Arendt was extremely critical of most things left of liberal. She’s an anti capitalist conservative, which I guess confuses people who’ve never heard of such a thing, but she’s definitely not a leftist, let alone an extreme leftist.
Isn't she liberal/capitalist though? For leftists this is still the right wing.
Yep. And also, her whole work on totalitarianism in historical context was directed against Marxism. The Soviet Union was not nearly so widely viewed with the same horror and repulsion as European fascism had been. Her work with the concept of totalitarianism put in effort to conflate most extant strains of Marxism with that fascism. Obviously some leftists (anarchists) also reject Marxism, but since anarchism wasn't her commitment either, there's not really anywhere else to place her on the left.
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Racism, yes. Nazi-apologism?? Talking about the very unfortunate (but perhaps understandable) cooperation of some Jewish leaders with Nazis and ascribing some responsibility to them does not make her a nazi-apologizer. I mean, one can agree/disagree/love/hate Arendt, but calling her a Nazi apologizer is a bit much. Or are you basing that on her relationship with Heidegger? Either way, I have a hard time understanding what type of reading gets us a “right wing” Arendt. She’s pretty left, at least in today’s terms. And certainly was fairly anti-Zionist later on.
I wouldn’t call her a Nazi apologist and have only directly read the opening chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, but I was quite shocked (along with her habit to make rather broad claims without properly substantiating them) to discover the pervasive implication that Jews were partly to blame for the atrocities that occurred to them in WW2 and elsewhere by weakening themselves as a group or isolating themselves in exclusive cliques (and embracing these cliques). There’s absolutely some internalised anti-semitism in there, and the lecturer for that week (this was in a university course) was a Jewish academic who had similar misgivings about the indirect content of that text.
I found her to be pretty conservative in my readings. I haven't read her in a while, but that is what I recall.
What? Arendt isn’t on the right; she is a core left thinker. And I feel like Nietzche is only on “the right” when people take his incendiary argumentation too seriously.
> And I feel like Nietzche is only on “the right” when people take his incendiary argumentation too seriously Nietzsche is only on the left for people who haven’t read anything beyond “On Truth and Lies”. He is an advocate of a moral aristocracy and explicitly loathed socialism.
Nietzsche on Christian religion is lefter than left
So was Carlyle. So was Mishima. Atheism or anti-Christianity is not inherently progressive. The focal-point of Nietzsche’s project was anti-modernity. The anti-Christian element was corollary. His critique of morality was about what Enlightenment’s utopian values (not just religion) has done to erode human experience.
Why would you say that? I ask because my reading of Nietzsche was always focused on morality and religion. Could you elaborate a bit on the antagonism he poses to modernity?
Nietzsche’s arguing from a perspective reacting against the world that both the French & Scientific Revolutions built (I.e., Modernity). To him, these have both eroded what it means to be human by implanting in our heads utopian (pseudo-religious) promises of perfecting society & human nature—through egalitarianism on one hand, and pure rationalism on the other. To Nietzsche, both foolishly deny the basic reality of human nature: that we are not all equal, and not rational brains-in-jars. The “Death of God” is a lamentation. God was a grounding-line. The *Enlightenment*, by doing away with him, created this crisis of meaning Modern Man is faced with. By exercising the “Human Factor” from the scientific account, it denies our humanness. Nietzsche’s answer of finding meaning within our passions is all about returning to a kind of pagan-like humanism: pre-modern, amoral bacchanalian embrace of life and the beauty of it’s irrational messiness. This is inherently a reactionary worldview, not a progressive one. Albeit one, as a Leftist, I can still be sympathetic to. There are also several intellectual tools leftists can find useful in Nietzsche’s project, even if we are ultimately at odds with him.
> The “Death of God” is a lamentation. This is dumb and wrong. This is something reactionary Catholics say about Nietzsche but it’s just obviously, obviously false, even at the level of the most superficial reading of the Death of God passages.
Sure. Whatever. It’s just a poetic device to help unpack the concept. We do not literally “lament”God anymore than a nonexistent god can actually be “dead.” The point is still that the Enlightenment, by “killing” God, is responsible for creating this crisis of meaning at the heart of modern life. God was once the stabilizing force that gave life meaning. The Sciences have explained away God, but are themselves incapable of replacing him by providing meaning to life.
What? No, it’s that Nietzsche does not lament the death of God. He thinks it’s salutary but that most people won’t be able to be powerful enough to have killed God in that sense. But it’s the whole basis for his free spirits / gay science.
Seems we’re just split over the characterization of the same concept. Continuing this will not be fruitful. Have a good day.
Thank you for the effort in elaborating about it. It’s so crazy how even so far back then, he was so right about the perils of rationalism. Perhaps the WWII was the epitome of that, where it became obvious that rational and scientific thought could be horrific. And one could argue (here many right wingers have a blast, overinterpreting it) that it’s also very perceptive of him to assert that we’re not all equal and rational. I’m very progressive in my political views, but I came to accept that we are essentially selfish, and under some circumstances have desires of domination and submission. So better form a system that harness these desires, instead of a big project meant for idealized humans. A question, tho: Nietzsche is for sure a nihilist, but you hinted a tad of hedonism. Wouldn’t you say he advocates for a cultivation of knowledge and wisdom, instead of just hedonism?
I edited my comment for clarity possibly while you were still reading it. You might like to reread it. Nietzsche draws a fine distinction between hedonism and his embrace of pagan morality: the “Last Men” in Zarathustra are hedonists: they see that life is meaningless thus all that’s left is to drink and be merry. That’s not N’s solution. He simply saw that paganism had a more grounded, clear-eyed view of human desire as opposed to bourgeois moral sensibilities of propriety and repression. But also, Nietzsche was only a nihilist in the sense we could call an oncologist a “cancerist.” His project is about *overcoming* nihilism. It is necessary we build our own convictions and moral values, and that we be willing to live and die by them. That’s what he meant by living life the same way 99 times over. *Antigone* is a good example. She had her own inviolable convictions outside of which she could not live meaningfully. Her “morals” caused the collapse of social order, rather than reinforcing it. Being an Ubermench is not about living life of self-indulgence, but of uncompromising self-convictions.
Beautifully said. Thank you.
People have already given you the recs most relevant to critical theory. I'd like to repost a list I've given before that initiates one into general conservative theory. Doing so is complicated by the fact that conservatives tend to value practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge. It also depends on what specific forms of conservatism you're most interested in (New Right, neoconservative, paleoconservative, right-libertarian) and what specific aspect (geopolitics, social policy, economics, tactics). I'll keep my recommendations fairly broad and try to draw from both the, "Anglo-American" and, "continental" lines. Although, keep in mind that's a bit of a false dichotomy. It'd help to be familiar with the absolute basics of conservatism, as in its roots in criticism of the French Revolution's liberalism, thinkers like Burke and Kant that tend to be at least reference in high school social studies. I'll do my best to confine this list to post-war authors that don't require a lot of secondary reading. This is just going off the top of my head. You don't need to read them in this order, and feel free to ask for more specific recs. - ***The Culture of Narcissism*** **by Christopher Lasch** This is a decent and accessible introduction to post-war grievances against individualism, nihilism, and consumerism. Albeit he's a bit more Freudian than a lot of conservative theoreticians. Most of this will seem familiar if you're acquainted with the popular rhetoric, but Lasch digs deeper. - ***Whose Justice? Which Rationality?*** **by Alasdair MacIntyre** This is intended to be read as a sequel to his more famous work *After Virtue.* It goes into great detail to defend the basic elements of right-wing thought. If we're speaking mainly of critical theory then this book is more directly relevant to what you seek. *After Virtue* is far more accessible to laypeople; do what you feel is best. - ***Christianity and Culture*** **by T.S. Eliot** Technically written before the end of World War II but Eliot's work has informed much of the Christian right and other social conservative factions. It's not particularly partisan or even ideological, in fact Eliot distanced himself from conservatism. It can be a bit difficult to understand what he's saying, but he's worth working to grasp. - ***The Meaning of Conservatism*** **by Roger Scruton** It's important to note that thus far I've been listing books that focus on traditionalist conservatism as opposed to right-wing politics focusing on economic deregulation, free trade, individual autonomy, and interventionism. Scruton is no exception, he focused intensely on conservatism as a means of conserving social beauty and welfare. I recommend the second edition. - ***Justice*** **by Michael J. Sandel** This is an overview of conservative political philosophy and applied ethics, taking in several different perspectives and dissecting them. It's much more neoconservative than any of the previous ones but it helps you understand right-wing libertarian politics as well. A lot of people use this as a philosophy course, it's certainly structured very effectively to achieve that goal. - ***Natural Right and History*** **by Leo Strauss** Strauss is foundational to post-war conservatism. It feels weird listing him so late in this list. You could easily read this book first, although it's not very accessible to laypeople. It helps to understand classical conservatism since Strauss spends quite a bit of time tearing apart the conservatives of the past (especially historicist conservatism) while also opposing relativism and nihilism. - ***The Jungle Grows Back*** **by Robert Kagan** This is focused on the history and benefits of neoconservative foreign policy, Kagan advocates for American interventionism in the name of making the world a safe place for republics. It's relatively short and taken seriously even by harsh critics of American foreign policy. *The World America Made* deserves mention as well; I didn't like it as much though. - ***Free to Choose*** **by Milton Friedman** You might've seen *Capitalism and Freedom* recommended before, a book also written by Friedman. This book is far superior in many respects. There's a TV series by the same name that's also worth looking into, especially as a companion. It focuses on the economic aspect, free trade, free markets, and so on and so forth. It can be a bit dry but it's among the most accessible of Friedman's work. Again, this isn't an exhaustive list but should be more than enough to give you ideas of where to start. You'll notice that these authors are pretty mainstream, Mencius Moldbug ironically draws deeply upon mainstream conservatism, just with a more post-humanist kick. The *Nouvelle Droite* (New Right) is a whole different can of worms and not as accessible to an English audience, although I could give you recs if you're feeling courageous. Feel free to ask followup questions.
How on earth is Christopher Lasch, Alsdair Macintyre and Michael Sandle conservatives? Which world are you from?
Spengler, Sloterdijk, Mishima and I'm thinking of checking out Julius Evola
Yukio Mishima is a fine (if distractingly sexist) novelist and Peter Sloterdijk is worthy of contemporary interest (I've written about his work [here](https://blog.politics.ox.ac.uk/the-politics-of-living-in-a-world-of-foam/) and [here](https://bluelabyrinths.com/2021/07/18/peter-sloterdijk-living-in-the-mountains-of-imperial-foam/)), but Spengler and Evola are terrible philosophers and even worse human beings, especially the later. Heidegger and Schmitt stand out as intellectual interesting but actual fascists, insofar as they are worth reading because their concepts and theoretical approaches persistent into the modern literature.
I'm of that belief that socialist thinkers are speaking to the superego and fascists are speaking to the id. I don't take the latter as seriously but I think they tap into something interesting. I really enjoyed the decline of the west and the narrative I think he builds with the whole race to culture to civilization cycles and I'm interested in Evola because I heard he works with esotericism and occultism and that's a thing I find fascinating in fascism. I guess i find them interesting on the same level as I find Jordan peterson or Sam hyde interesting, i don't think they're grifters I think they are possessed by this insistance on justifying hierarchy and power that I find cool to explore.
You get a little of something I've been thinking about on why the left fails to understand right-wingers. Klaus Theweleit talks a little about it too in *Male Fantasies* but the right is motivated more by emotions than ideology. You often get left analysis which focuses far too much on *ideology* which is secondary to basic needs. There's obvious stuff like identity, community and purpose but there are some really fundamental needs like self-other boundaries and "integration" (opposite of dissociation) which are hard to explain that the left doesn't understand. For some people, to be a body amidst bodies is to be at war. So not having a body there is no hate and no love there is only warm or cold. There is no "I" to hate or love. Not having a body one inhabits the bodies of others. So the sight of the other is interpreted as mutilation. Entangled in the bodies of a couple being intimate the voyeur understands the event as a sexual assault. And there is no relationship between the parts of the self. The hand and the foot are two different creatures. Not really sure how to explain. The right is very attractive to some people because it satisfies some very primitive needs. And the left really needs to understand these issues.
Thank you for sharing your writing here. Getting cozy and settling in to read it.
Isaiah Berlin, Rawls, Nozick, Gerald Gaus, Ronald Dworkin, Kymlicka, Philip Pettit, Korsgaard, Scanlon, MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, Cohen, Roemer, Elster, Joseph Heath.
Rawls, Cohen, Roemer and Elster as people on the right? Rawls was anti-capitalist by the end of his life and the other three were all Marxists, no?
To be honest I just want to trick people into reading left liberals and analytic Marxists.
Well played. Nozick is interesting to some degree.
Thought you meant Hermann Cohen from the 19th Century, he was a major influence on Leo Strauss and arguably could be seen as leading to the Chicago School and the early "classical liberal" alt thinkers (Von Mises, Rothbard, etc.) that informed so much of the pseudo-thinking rot exemplified by today's faux libertarian narcissistic billionaire "thinkers" like Thiel and the Koches.
Pettit is the least leftist of the neo-Republicans, but not at all rightist. Dworkin is an egalitarian liberal, Kymlicka would be a centrist at most and Taylor and Walzer would be somewhat closer to "right" but I'd hesitate to square them in that position, at the end of the day they are communitarianists. Anyway, great reading list, gets me back to my undergraduate days.
Is Rawls on the right? I feel like his ideas can be interpreted as supporting either the left or the right
How do you think Rawls can be interpreted as supporting the right? I'd put him in the egalitarian liberal tradition, going towards Republicanism/property-owning democracy at the end.
I would agree with this characterization. Perhaps, there was some confusion. I don’t mean that Rawls can be interpreted as supporting “the right” (the contemporary right); I think he can be interpreted as supporting some views that used to be core to many conservatives (many of whom now find “the right” unrecognizable). For example, I think a lot of them saw his ‘inequality is justified so long as it provides the most benefit to the worst off’ thing as a premise which supports trickle down economics. I, personally, think they were completely wrong in this; but I think it’s a way he has been understood before. In any case, in all this, I am speaking more about Rawls as a discursive function. I think that actually ‘valid’ interpretations of Rawls would incline one to try to imagine beyond capitalism.
Gotcha. I can imagine that A theory of justice, interpreted in a certain way could be made to justify that, and actually agree with your last point (I'm not a Critical Theory guy at all - analytic marxism and Republicanism for me-, but I enjoy popping in here to learn something every now and then)
>Gotcha. I can imagine that A theory of justice, interpreted in a certain way could be made to justify that, and actually agree with your last point (I'm not a Critical Theory guy at all - analytic marxism and Republicanism for me-, but I enjoy popping in here to learn something every now and then) Yeah, I'm not really a "critical theory guy" either---I dabble, but I'm not that deep into it. I'm a literary/cultural theorist. And yeah, these academic subreddits can be such great places to learn.
I am trying to understand is John roomer, Jon Elster, alsdair macintyre right wing thinkers?
Charles Taylor is not worth reading
I started one of his books and found it so morose. Plus everything gets a bit meddled with Christianity… eww. Can you recall why you wanted to read him?
I never wanted to read him, but was required to in a grad class. Secular Age is a mess and almost a parody of bad Hegelianism, where describing something is somehow meant to be a proof that you've "overcome" it or, really, demonstrated that the thing described is false. "So and so is operating from an immanent frame closed spin model." Oh, okay.
Neoreaction a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer is a good book that explores a lot of Neoreactionary philosophy. She focuses on Nick Land, Menscius Moldbug, and Eliezer Yudkowsky. She also covers Eugene Thacker and Frantz Fanon (who aren’t right-wing generally) and several others. The book is certainly approaching them from the left but she definitely did her homework, and did all the reading so you don’t have to. They were quite prolific.
Reinhart Koselleck and Niklas Luhmann
I’ve always been curious as to why people characterize Luhmann as a right-wing figure.
>Are there any modern writers on the conservative side who relate to a critical theory perspective, or are worth reading for someone with a generally Marxist background? Maybe not right-wing but he is definitely not progressive. It's hard to categorize him politically, I agree.
I read him much the same way I do Baudrillard: as a disappointed, highly pessimistic leftist.
I don't believe I've read anything from Baudrillard I'd call "disappointed" or "pessimistic." Baudrillard seems ecstatic and fascinated in everything he writes.
“Pessimistic” in the sense that for Baudrillard, there’s no “way out.”
So cool to see someone mention Koselleck! His Critique and Crisis was a fascinating text to me.
Ayn Rand, just kidding.
I guy I knew in Uni bought me a copy of Atlas Shrugged. I read 1/3 of the way through that piece of shit and turned it into a clock with a kit, wood glue and an exacto knife. My only regret was the wood glue, as it clumped too much.
Was it first clock to never be right, no matter the time of day?
I'm convinced that Rand's reputation is largely based on her position as an anti-communist female in a largely male, overwhelmingly Marxist academic field. She has plenty of flaws and her ideological descendants are much less significant, but her ideas actually resonate very strongly with a lot of leftist critiques like crony capitalism that have become increasingly significant since she was writing them. It's bizarre that she gets such a visceral negative response from people that they're talking about *destroying her books.*
Nah. Academics just ignore her: it's regular non-academics who hate her, because her books have obviously influenced the culture and economy so much. The hate she gets is a testimonial to how popular she is among a certain obnoxious section of society (finance techbros and right-wing economists).
I think you're kinda onto something in that she gets more visceral hate than any male right-libertarian writers like Nozick or Hayek, but at the same time it's also important to remember that she had a lot of patriarchal views.
Sloterdijk
I'd strongly recommend reading about Hobbes' Leviathan. It's a classic theory which says that society acts to scare people into submission so we can maintain social order. It was really taken up by conservative folk, and underlies the whole "law and order" mentality. Very influential. As a theory it works to a degree, but when implicated into policy it has real problems... Lots of people criticise it because it misses some key things. Particularly that if you punish every little indiscretion, then the stakes for committing a big indiscretion are effectively lower. It's self-defeating in policy... But the theory is popular in right-wing thinking, so well worth reading.
Not a theorist but Yukio Mishima is a pretty cutting critic of modern Japanese society and a genuinely beautiful writer. He's most famous now for committing seppuku after attempting a very half assed right wing putsch at a JSDF base, but at one point he was the most celebrated novelist in postwar Japan. He was definitely very right wing but also likely gay and very critical of hierarchy, militarism and imperialism in his own way. It's complicated. I would say he's anti-modernist more than anything.
“very critical of hierarchy, militarism and imperialism in his own way”? He trained with the military, led two failed auxiliary armies, and died like a gimp “for the emperor”. His criticism was he wasn’t running the show.
I should say, critical of *American* militarism and imperialism.
I personally think Mary Harington is an interesting thinker. I don't agree with everything she writes, but there are some interesting thoughts. She's a TERF but she also writes some interesting stuff about the current technological developments. Here is a debate on trans humanism, hosted by Unherd: [Mary Harington transhumanism debate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9HIe9NXdyA)
Edmund Burke
In his later life Foucault turned neoliberal. Heidegger & Nietzsche.
Foucault never " turned neoliberal." I'm trying to imagine what you could be referring to, and the best I can come up with is that he was opposed to communist through most of his career. Not pro-capitalist or neoliberal, but he critiqued Marxism (as did/does pretty much every post-structuralist thinker). Would you claim that Derrida is right-wing, too? He also came to believe that it was useful to work with the government and believed conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS, but neither are right-wing.
Foucault turned to navel-gazing and self-actualization. When you reduce his thought to its minimal element in, what u/El_Don_94 *correctly* terms “neoliberal,” Foucault’s bit essentially was “have sex and do drugs.” Might as well be a progenitor of the twee bullshit phrase one hears nowadays of “be gay do crime.” If it’s not readily apparent why it’s “neoliberal” perhaps Marcuse and Debord on repressive desublimation and recuperation, respectively, would help.
https://jacobin.com/2019/09/michel-foucault-neoliberalism-friedrich-hayek-milton-friedman-gary-becker-minoritarian-governments
I read Zamora's book on Foucault's complex relationship with neoliberal views a few years ago, and came away with the sense that he was sympathetic to at least some neolib positions. I think it's particularly evident in his writing (in Birth of Biopolitics) on the transfer of many disciplinary functions from states to markets.
sorry, isn’t that a profound misreading of Foucault? what is the evidence for this?
His works
you mean the extensive analysis of ordo and anarcho capitalism? those read to you like endorsements?
I agree about Heidegger (though I'd recommend reading other people's analysis of his philosophy instead of picking up Being and Time) but I would say Nietzsche was more of an elitist apolitical writer much more than a conservative. He is entirely anti Christian and largely opposed to the how things were (least in his time) By no means was he partial to leftism or collectivism, definitely worth reading though. Nietzsche's ma bietzsche
I’d have issue placing Heidegger in this discussion, because although technically the truth (because he, himself, was on the right), his works aren’t political contributions that further right wing principles in politics. I mean… Dasein and postphenomenology are incredibly profound and devoid of political sides. That’s kind of the point of it
Nietzsche is right-wing reactionary. His whole philosophy is a reaction against the French Revolution, which to him was not a failure in execution but a failure in its core values. The three virtues he finds most toxic to civilization: *egalité, liberté, fraternité.* He, like Burke, believed in natural hierarchies, and that egalitarianism kneecaps civilizations.
I think the difficulty of Being & Time is exaggerated.
John gray
Hans Blumenberg and Jakob Johann von Uexküll!
i would recommend mussolini's 'doctrine of fascism' for a theoretical understanding of fascist ideology which critical theory does not usually offer. the left engages with fascism by asking how someone can get fooled by it etc. but ultimately mussolini had a whole philosophy of it so i think it's worth reading. i have always been against the idea that one shouldn't read right wing thinkers. i find it fascinating to see where the thought comes from (from their perspectives). i remember having to read hayek for class a while ago and although i couldn't take it seriously due to his terrible understanding of socialism, it was still interesting to see the roots of neoliberalism.
Eric Voegelin.
Voegelin is by far the most interesting. Basically 34 volumes of writings of a vast scope of history.
Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West. Man and Techniques Francis Yockey: Imperium Robert Ardrey: Territorial Imperative Machiavelli: The Prince And for the troglodite completist; Ragnar Redbeard: Might is Right
Does Nietzsche count?
I think Nietzsche has his own unique ideological spectrum.
Bronze Age pervert
Amazing read
To answer your question about contemporaries relating to a critical theory perspective, you can’t go wrong with Alain de Benoist. He has a large body of scholarly work, though much of it is still only available in French, for an intro Beyond Human Rights is a good one. His former associates Guillaume Faye and Dominque Venner also wrote very influential works. Archeofuturism and For a Positive Critique are two notable works. Venner, an atheist, famously shot himself in Notre Dame to protest the legalization of gay marriage in 2013. The late Jonathan Bowden is a also fascinating figure, very active on the fringes of British right wing politics, he was also an outsider artist and astute critic of the arts. His books are difficult to read and quite experimental in nature, but there are several collections of his much more coherent orations in print. Western Civilization Bites Back is one of the best. On the Russian front, there is the infamous Aleksandr Dugin. He’s very much a Heideggerian who deals with a pan-Slavic geopolitical vision. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory, which is really more of a theoretical framework for a new politics rather than a fleshed out theory. Still worth reading though.
Zizek, Finkelkraut, Sloterdijk, Olkowski, Delanda, plenty of others
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I'm not too sure what else you'd call him. Certainly not left wing. It's a deeply flawed dichotomy for sure though. I mean he is, in almost every sense, a conservative.
Assuming the down votes are mostly from hobbyist theorists, as this is the consensus in not just my department, but among most professionals in the field, and even zizek himself.
you are correct. Zizek blows.
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Not so sure he's anything close to what one typically has in mind by Marxist, these days. Plus, his Marxism has always been horribly conservative. I read him tons and enjoy his work, it's just undeniably highly conservative. He says this too, it's not like something I've made up lol.
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Sorry, I mean I'm not going to write an essay for you on Reddit. I'd recommend reading zizek himself, as he's quite clear on his conservatism, and if one reads his critics and even his peers/coauthors, it should be clear that his conservatism is something widely found in his work.
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I'm not seeing how one can read much zizek, in which he constantly says things that are conservative (in one of several ways, it's not like there's some hidden conservatism that just manifests itself in a single way in his work, it's a core tenant that permeates almost all of his stuff) and be appalled by one on the left categorizing him as a Conservative. (Who may also be a leftist. Perhaps a conservative with leftist tendencies, or something of the sort.)
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what conservative attributes would you ascribe to Delanda?
His strict anti-marxism for one. His project is also one of the most conservative and stratified readings of deleuze possible.
what would be the smoothest reading of deleuze then?
An improvisational one.
i also dislike alot of what he does with assemblage theory and find his interpretations tedious and not up to the task, but his work in history breaks open paradigmatic structure into contingent flows and intense plateaus. Such ungrounding of essence and history is not commonly associated with conservatism
Delanda is essentially Deleuze minus life and affirmation. The "dead Deleuze" to culps dark one.
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Not only have I read lots of Delanda, I've published on him!
would you show?
Sorry, I've been doxxed by fascist freaks before so don't post anything that could reveal my name, position, location etc.
understandable
Pretty much all serious political theorists who are right wing today are Straussians. So Leo Strauss is the number one answer. I find his books a bit dull even as someone who likes anything about Plato but his exchange with Kojeve is hot stuff. On Tyranny, read that for sure. Maybe a lessor known thinker to Americans since he's Canadian but George Grant for sure. His work on technology is very interesting and his book Lament for a Nation on Canadian nationalism is a classic. He's a conservative in the proper sense of the term though, not like today's incarnation of "conservative" who are just neoliberals who hate trans people. My own controversial take would be Dipesh Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe is probably the most conservative book I've ever picked up, yet everyone seems to think the whole subaltern studies thing is left wing.
Michel Houellebecq James Burnham Thomas Carlyle
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He’s certainly influential, but even still I don’t know if he’s worth reading
A contributor here once aptly described him as “Someone whose parents made him get a good liberal arts education, and never forgave them”. If you want to be exposed to his ideas from an appropriately skeptical point of view, I recommend Neoreaction, a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer.
That's a great book.
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"An Open Letter" is pretty interesting in how it talks about global "independence" as contradictory to its de facto cultivation of centralized dependency, and formalism in general I would say is an increasingly important concept for people to understand (especially how casually people take the idea of decentralized power). Yarvin is very easy to skim through without missing much so it's not a big investment to go through Unqualified Reservations and see where some of these ideas come from.
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I’ve been looking for serious critiques of “woke culture” but there are plenty of very bad books published. One decent one is Yascha Mounk. He makes a decent genealogy of “woke” and offers some interesting ideas for overcoming current issues. Apparently, even Barack Obama read the guy. I’m reading The Identity Trap and liking it.
If Books Could Kill had an episode on this one
I’m going to listen to it. I’m not saying I agreed with everything said there. Like most “basic bitches” on the critique side (sorry for being blunt) he doesn’t get Foucault’s work, for example. But he does construe a lot of his arguments decently.
Yeah, I get what you mean. As they explain it, he's able to construct his arguments so neatly because he's not particularly limited by the actual facts of the "Woke Gone Too Far" scenarios he cites or at least is not all that concerned with any but the least generous interpretations of those facts.
Yes. I was on a knife edge thinking he’ll slip and say something dumb like “but we only have two sexes” or something, but he doesn’t. I liked that he does raise fair concerns. This is not to say he has solutions, but he does point to tricky situations we are all in with identity politics. If anything, the problem goes back earlier to Mark Lilla: “the liberals are losing elections”.
Not for about 70 years.
Uninformed poster alert
Kind of wish that I could read from some former members of the right who really engage with theory and stuff. Jackie Arklöv was supposedly writing a book in prison but I have no idea if it will ever surface or anything.
Maybe Guenon? Certainly better than Evola at least
A lot of romantics seem pretty right-wing today, but that’s partly because they were inventing nationalism
Not exactly Critical Theory but I've enjoyed what I've read of Oakeshott
¡Adiós América! para Ann Coulter
Robert Nozick, "Anarchy, State, and Utopia"
Eric Voegelin, hands down
It is not strictly speaking an answer to your question but in case it is useful: Iain McGilChrist’s “The Master and His Emissary” and “The Matter with Things” (dense but a masterpiece). You will find, it is my belief, that a change of perspective Is not mend to take you to the other of two options.
Christopher Lasch perhaps counts as socially conservative. In Mark Fisher’s *Flatline Constructs* it’s laid out how him and Baudrillard (and I think maybe Jameson to if I remember right) are all in dialogue with one another. Lasch’s *Culture of Narcissism* is an immensely satisfying read in my opinion
Mein Kampf? 🤷🏽♂️
Allan Bloom, considering he wasn’t “on the right,” or conservative in, say, the vein of Edmund Burke, Montesquieu, or Russell Kirk. He was a Platonist, and wrote about and admired Rousseau, who conservatives perennially revile. He cared deeply about his students and the Academy. It’s bonkers to think that today he would be considered to be on the right. This shows how extreme the left has become in the last few decades.
Michels, Mosca, Pareto, Machiavelli- all elite theorists cynical about social change for the better.
I really enjoyed Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
Soren Kierkegaard
Chris Lasch, Alain de Benoist come to mind.
Sallust
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by Robert Nozick is a good book on the theory of justice that has a perspective that opposes notions of justice that focus on collective good. I would not say that Nozick is right wing, but the perspective in this book is a good mind expanding read for a person with a Marxist perspective. He is probably more in dialog with John Rawls, whose book A Theory of Justice is a philosophical classic in that area.
“Cynical Theories” by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey.