Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Counter-modernism

Posted on | May 26, 2009 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf

In my review of Jonathan Bowden’s book Mad I  discussed the possibility of “a unique and coherent Nietzschean/Lovecraftian worldview that is strictly positivist in its epistemology, and  distinctly reactionary in its rejection of egalitarianism and democracy, as an alternative to socialism, (classical) liberalism and contemporary conservatism.” Interestingly, Samuel Francis made a related observation in his discussion of the French New Right in a book review for the Occidental Quarterly:

The French New Right, in other words, was heading toward what I have elsewhere called “counter-modernism” rather than the anti-modernism in which it eventually became involved. Counter-modernism is itself a form of modernism and accepts many of its metaphysical premises (including its naturalism) while rejecting the conventional implications and constructs (especially social and political) that the Enlightenment and its heirs have devised. Examples of counter-modernist thinkers in Euro-American thought would be Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, the Federalist Papers, the Social Darwinists of the nineteenth century, the classical elite theorists Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, and James Burnham.

This was not to be, as illustrated by an article on Ernst Jünger in a recent edition of the same magazine. Alain de Benoist writes:

To finish with nihilism, we must live it to its end—“passing the line” which corresponds to the “meridian zero”—because, as Heidegger says, the technological framework (Ge-stell) is still a mode of being, not merely of its oblivion. This is why, if Jünger sees the Worker as a danger, he also says that this danger can be our salvation, because it is by it and through it, that it will be possible to exhaust the danger.

When Martin Heidegger is discussed for any other reason than to ridicule him or to educate the reader on logical fallacies, it is a safe bet that we are dealing with a tradition of thought that warrants little serious attention.  It  appears that the prospect of a counter-modernism that accepts many of modernism’s “metaphysical premises (including its naturalism) while rejecting the conventional implications and constructs (especially social and political) that the Enlightenment and its heirs have devised” remains largely a theoretical construct.

Category: Philosophy, Politics
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