“The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
The Third Way
To understand the French New Right, it is necessary to begin with its identitarian philosophy of history. This philosophy, however, is so entangled in an ideological thicket of critical scorn that it is all but impossible to approach with impartiality. Like revolutionary conservatism, national bolshevism, and various expressions of populism and syndicalism, the French New Right seeks a revolutionary course beyond the Left-Right politics it rejects; and, like these other “Third Way” tendencies, it, too, is routinely compared with the most notorious of the Third Way movements: fascism and National Socialism.(n1) While liberalism, social democracy, and communism, as different expressions of the Left, are not similarly equated (and tainted), there is a certain, if tenuous logic to these comparisons in that all Third Way tendencies oppose the modernist order. Less certain still is the inquisitional intent of these comparisons.(n2) Efforts by Alain de Benoist’s GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne),(n3) the principal French proponent of the Third Way, to challenge the liberal paradigm or to evoke the Indo-European heritage as a spur to cultural renewal, have led to numerous McCarthy-style allegations of Nazism and “Aryan supremacy”(n4) — even though for thirty years Benoist and his Grecistes have denounced Nazism as a “brown Jacobinism” and have characterized racism as an offshoot of the totalizing modernity they oppose. The greatest obstacle to understanding the Third Way may stem, however, from the fact that these comparisons mistakenly assume that ideology, an “outgrowth of modernity” that reduces the world to itself, and philosophy, which is an opening to the world, are analogous, and that, therefore, the philosophical disposition of a school of thought, such as the GRECE’s, can be deduced from its politics.(n5) Since all these stigmatizing comparisons endeavor to delegitimate, rather than to explain such non-conformist tendencies, it is hardly surprising that they also have succeeded in marginalizing them.(n6)
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