Often misogyny is part of a complex ideology. But it’s not clear which came first–the misogyny or the supporting ideology. For committed misogynists, hatred is a preference. Francis Parker Yockey and Baron Julius Evola were both misogynists. Kevin Coogan attributes this in large part to occult influences. The most prominent source of far right occult beliefs in the postwar period was Theosophy.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Among Yockey’s possessions when the FBI arrested him was a citation for the June 1937 issue of The Theosophical Forum, an American journal of the Theosophy Society. The Russian-born mystic, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded the Theosophical society in New York City in 1875. In 1888, she published her book, The Secret Doctrine. Blavatsky’s doctrine basically turned the evolutionary worldview on its head. However, she had no intention of replacing evolution with biblical creationism. Her work resulted in countless forms and expressions of mischief.
Root Races
According to Blavatsky, the world has seen the rise and fall of seven “Root Races”. This rise and fall has taken place many times over. Now (in Blavatsky’s time) the Aryan, or fifth Root Race, dominates the world. However, the Aryans are at the end of a karmic cycle.
Blavatsky taught that the Kali-Yuga was a time of great destruction. But its end was coming. This meant the beginning of the new Sixth Root Race. And the Sixth Root Race would begin the ascendancy of man toward the highest, Seventh Root Race of god-men.
Curiously, Blavatsky’s Root Races were not biological entities. They were psychic entities. But in spite of this, her arguments were very influential for the racist right in both Germany and Austria. They ‘proved’ the Aryans were distant spiritual descendants of the highest root race, descended from the degenerate Atlantean tribes who themselves descended from the original god-men.
Traditionalism vs Evolutionism
The subterranean world of the high occult enveloped Yockey. Thanks to his occult interests, he saw himself as part of an underground elite, a secret new race of god-men. He wrote extensively about polarity and he developed sado-masochistic inclinations. To understand him, it is necessary to examine the writings of Julius Evola, the most important and most influential fascist high-occultist in postwar Europe.
In his book, Revolt Against the Modern World. Evola argued that every epoch has its own myth. Democratic evolutionism is the Kali-Yuga’s myth. The myth of the new age, however, will be the Traditional worldview.
Tradition teaches that mankind did not come from lower forms. It has higher origins. The lower represents a degeneration from the higher. Like Blavatsky, Evola claimed that today’s Aryans are the spiritual descendants of the highest root race. This highest root race was a ‘divine’ race. But it mixed its seed with the inferior human race, and so it is no longer with us.1
Tradition, in more recent eras, developed a variety of myths referring to races as bearers of civilization and to the struggles between divine races and animal, cyclopic, or demonic races. They are the Aesir against the Elementarwesen; the Olympians and the heroes against giants and monsters of the darkness, the water, and the earth. They are the Aryan deva fighting against the asura, the enemies of the divine heroes; they are the Incas, the dominators who impose their solar laws on the aborigines who worshipped ‘Mother Earth’.
Julius Evola, as quoted by Kevin Coogan p. 304
As mentioned in a previous article, Evola was an early critic of Yockey’s Imperium. However, he merely thought Yockey was unrealistic about the timeframe of the fascist takeover. Evola and Yockey agreed on their basic ideology.
René Guénon
René Guénon was also an important figure in the European occult underground. Evola and Guénon had a disagreement about man’s relationship to the gods, however Guénon’s Traditionalism remained important within the European far right. And although Guénon eventually converted to Islam, he remained close to ‘traditionalist’ elements of the Catholic Church.
Guénon taught that the modern age’s interest in democracy, mass culture, and materialism are all manifestations of the Kali-Yuga. The Kali-Yuga has infected thinking to the point where Western philosophy is purely human in character. Now philosophy is merely part of the rational order, which is inferior.
The ideal order is a sort of genuine supra-rational and non-human traditional wisdom. Humans can’t achieve this kind of wisdom because ‘Truth’ is not a product of the human mind. It exists independently of ourselves. All we can do is apprehend it (Coogan, p. 294).
Evola embraced this argument completely. He shared Guénon’s hatred of ‘mere human logos’. He believed that all the Renaissance had accomplished was to usher in the exaltation of the individual. Greece’s true zenith was not in the time of Socrates. It was during the mythical Heroic Age of Heracles.
Traditionalism and the Un-human Ideal
A human-like ‘personal God’ did not rule Evola’s universe. It was ruled by a numen. He defined a numen as an immutable naked force, an essence free of passion and change, one which creates distance with regard to everything which is merely human, a solar realm of Olympic peace and light, of divine regality. Borrowing from Guénon, he claimed this vision of pure being, the Hindu Satya-Yuga, corresponded in the West to Hesiod’s Golden Age.
Like Spengler, he believed fascism was valuable only because it would bring on the dissolution of the old world in the Kali-Yuga. The old world’s destruction was necessary in order for the new age to arise. For Evola, fascism was merely a political form of Dada.
Coogan on The Hermetic Tradition
To help his readers understand Evola’s argument about God, Coogan examines Evola’s 1931 book The Hermetic Tradition. He reports that when Avaloka, a journal devoted to Hermetic thought, published a review from a section of Evola’s book, The Tree, the Serpent, and the Titan, the journal’s editor, Arthur Versluis, warned his readers that there is something Promethean, if not Luciferian, in Evola’s perspective. Coogan agrees (Coogan p. 296).
The World Tree
According to Evola’s ideology, the tree is an axis mundi joining two worlds: the solar world of immortality and timeless knowledge (Being) and the telluric world of Mother Earth (Becoming). This view associates Becoming with women, earth, and chaos symbols like dragons.
In his book, Evola examines the dual symbolism of the Tree, namely its identification with notions of immortality and supernatural knowledge as well as its association with fatal and destructive forces like dragons, serpents, and demons. But of course Evola is talking about the World Tree. Coogan identifies three famous trees representing universal force. They are the Tree of the World, and the two biblical trees: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. Each of them symbolizes the universal force linked to supernatural knowledge, immortality, and the power of domination. This universal force has a feminine nature.
The Idea of a Danger. Credit: George Cotayo
A Danger or a Promise?
These trees also contain the idea of a danger. On the one hand, the tree symbolizes a temptation which brings ruin and damnation upon the one who succumbs to it. But it is also the object of conquest which transforms he who dares to undertake it into a God. It might even transfer the attributes of divinity and immortality from one race of beings to another.
Adam tried to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and become godlike. He failed. But according to some legends, others have succeeded. These include the Hindu god Indra, Odin, Mithras, and Heracles. The legends tell us
…of an undertaking which involved risk and a fundamental uncertainty. In Hesiod’s Theogony, and typically in the legend of the king of the Woods, Gods or exceptional men are seen as taking possession of power which can pass, along with the attributes of divinity, to whoever knows how to seize it…But among those who make the attempt, some force a way and triumph, and others fall, paying for their daring, experiencing the fatal effects of that same [primordial female] power.
Julius Evola, as quoted by Coogan, p. 297
Coogan objects to Evola’s presentation of this drama. He thinks the real question is whether man should even attempt to rival the gods. In mythology there are only two answers to this question, and they are in opposition to each other. They are the ‘magico-heroic’ answer and the religious answer.
According to the magico-heroic view, he who attempts to become one with the gods but fails, is simply a being whose fortitude and good fortune were not equal to his daring. In the religious interpretation, however, such misfortune is changed to guilt, the heroic attempt [is changed] to a sacrilegious and cursed act not because of its failure, but in itself.
Coogan, p. 297
Adam
What happened to Adam is the only thing that could have happened to him. Credit: Grafissimo
Coogan argues that what happens to Adam is the only thing that could have happened to him. Adam becomes one who has sinned. He has no alternative, therefore, but to seek expiation, and above all to renounce the wish which led him to that undertaking. The idea that the conquered can still think of reconquest, or intend to hold firm to the dignity which his act has earned him, appears from the religious perspective as ‘the most reprehensible Luciferism’ (Coogan p. 298). Yet, the heroic viewpoint persists.
Hermes
The Hermetic tradition represents the heroic viewpoint. Hermes is not only the messenger of the Gods; he is also one who succeeds. He takes from Zeus his scepter, from Venus her belt, and from Vulcan, the tools of his allegorical craft. In Egyptian tradition, Hermes became Hermes Trismegistus. He is the figure of one of the Kings and masters of the primordial age who gave man the principles of a higher civilization.
The Fallen Angels
From Their Union Sprang the Nephilim or Watchers. Credit: francescoch
We also have the account of fallen angels in the Book of Enoch. Coogan argues that it wasn’t merely their desire for the women that caused their downfall. There is power in woman’s relationship with the Tree, and power is what the angels were really after. When the angels became united to power, they fell and came to earth. They alighted on a high place of the earth (Mount Hermon), and from their union with the women sprang the Nephilim or Watchers. The Watchers teach the Royal Hermetic Art by which man can control the Gods.
Evola updated and reissued The Hermetic Tradition in 1948. This was three years after the defeat of the ‘Heroes’ in World War II. For Evola, losing the war was not a metaphysical punishment. It was a simple defeat. He never stopped pursuing the quest for power/knowledge, for immortality, for domination over the Tree/Female. The Hermetic Tradition is a vision of a new race of men/gods.
What Guénon and Evola Had in Common
According to Coogan, Guénon was different than Evola. He thought Catholicism was the only tradition that could provide the ruling mythos for Europe (p. 300). But I think Coogan gives Guénon too much credit. In Guenon’s scheme, the elite will rule the world using primordial teachings found in several distinct traditions. But that is a discussion for another time.
Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, New York, 1999, pp. 291-292 ↩︎
The previous article focused on militant conservatism. But it didn’t go into detail on various types of conservatism, or on the characteristics of conventional conservatism. Nor did it explain how the character of conservatism varies from one nation to another. 21st century progressives are in the process of developing an international outlook, so awareness of ideological and organizational differences is crucial. The concept of conservatism is central to these differences. This article is a review of conservative ideology, politics and principles.
Summary of the Discussion So Far
To summarize the discussion so far, after the end of World War II, social scientists in the United States feared militant anti-communism and its negative influence on the civil rights movement and other campaigns. They believed anti-communist and anti-liberal ideas threatened peace and democracy. Many thinkers in the field of International Relations (IR) tried to create a stronger liberalism as part of their strategy. They believed they could accomplish this by borrowing conservative ‘insights’. The fusion of liberalism and the radical Right was called ‘realism’. Another name for realism is conservative liberalism. Postwar American International Relations developed in this context.
Considering this history, it is not surprising that conventional conservatism has faded into the background. Or maybe it would be more correct to say that conventional conservatism turned into realistic liberalism in the context of International Relations. The same thing happened to liberalism.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr
Thinkers such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr began to reformulate liberalism in a way that muted the radical, progressivist, egalitarian and utopian premises of the Progressive Era, and to talk about ‘original sin’, the inherent irrationality of human nature, and the limitations of political solutions to intractable problems of the human condition.1 At the same time, they denied that the process was distinctly conservative. Another one of IR’s stated aims was to remove utopian elements from liberal politics. According to Eric Goldman, ‘…liberalism gradually turned into a form of conservatism.’ (Cited by Drolet and Williams2)
Militant Conservative Ideas Continue
Militant conservative ideas continued to thrive, however, but not in the mainstream media. They were discussed in a ‘para-scholarly‘, sphere which enjoyed network connections with the political sphere. As a result, radical ideas have spread all over the globe.
In IR’s defense, these thinkers were influenced by the structural reality of American politics. Both Morgenthau and Niebuhr argued that there was no social basis for an ‘authentic’ conservatism in America. And they were right. According to Morgenthau, the great majority of Americans
have never known a status quo to which they could have been committed. For America has been committed to a purpose in the eyes of which each status quo has been but a stepping-stone to be left behind by another achievement. To ask America to defend a particular status quo, then, is tantamount to asking it for foreswear its purpose.
Hans J. Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 296–7.
But, as the RIS article illustrated, the radical Right has already come very close to foreswearing America’s purpose. This will be discussed in more detail in subsequent articles. The purpose of this article is to provide a global perspective on conventional conservatism.
Conventional Conservatism
I’ll begin with the view of conservatism supplied by the RIS article. According to Drolet and Williams 3, conservatism is not a cohesive school of thought. ‘…conservatism is a counter-movement’. It is a collection of ideas, attitudes, and thinkers that oppose historical liberal and socialist ideas.The only time conservative ideology is coherent in a given time and place is when it’s confronted by rival ideological structures. Conservatives are particularly wary of proposals put forward by anyone perceived to be of the Left.
This seems to be how conservatism operates, although conservatives will probably object. The following summary is more neutral by comparison. It is taken from an article on Britannica.com.
Western Europe
Four great imperial dynasties fell in World War I: Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Ottoman Turkey. Those dynasties had been the only remaining representatives of conservatism. Before the war, conservatism presumed monarchy, aristocracy and an established church. After the War, frustrated conservatives created parties to support nationalism in Germany, Italy, and other former allied countries. Then, beginning in the 1930s, the totalitarian Nazi regime either destroyed or coopted conservative parties in Central and Eastern Europe. (This will be explained in another article.)
Dynasties of World War I Credit: Jelle Wesseling
By 1946, socialism had been discredited in western Europe because of its inability to rebuild war-damaged economies. For this reason, many western Europeans returned to conservative politics. Of course, European conservatism no longer had aristocratic associations at this time. Conservative policies were attractive to voters because they promised economic growth, democratic freedoms, and the provision of social services by the state. For the rest of the twentieth century, European conservatism represented liberal individualism, social conscience, and opposition to communism.
Great Britain
The conservative party in Great Britain was very popular at the turn of the twentieth century. However, there was a Liberal interval. The Liberals were victorious in the general election of 1906, but they had already begun to lose trade union and working class supporters to the Labour Party. A Labour victory in 1924 ended the Liberal Party’s political relevance. For the next 40 years, conservatives formed the government. Their strength was largely the result of formerly Liberal, middle-class voters joining the Conservative Party. Today the Conservative Party in Great Britain is a union of Old Tory and Liberal interests combined against Labour.
The Interwar Period in Great Britain
British conservatism after World War I defended middle- and upper-class privileges and opposed socialism. During the 1930s, Conservatives followed a policy of appeasement ( a deal-making commercialist approach) with the Nazis. Appeasement failed and Britain entered the War.
State welfare services were extended after 1945, under the Labour government and mixed economy of Clement Attlee. When Conservatives returned to power in 1951, they left most of these innovations in place. In fact, they claimed they could do a better job than labour in administering the welfare state. They even went so far as trying to outdo Labor’s programs of social spending and the encouragement of new home construction.
This era of Liberal-Conservative accommodation ended with Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s conservatism stressed individual initiative, strident anti-communism, and laissez-faire economics. Her views had more in common with modern Libertarianism than the older conservatism of Burke. When she said, ‘there is no such thing as society‘ she repudiated the organic view of conventional conservatives.
David Cameron (2010-16) and Theresa May (2016-19) had less extreme views of individualism. They brought back some of the communitarian elements of conventional conservatism.
Continental Europe
In western Europe, conservatism was represented by two or more parties ranging from the liberal center to the moderate and extreme right. There are three types of conservative party in western Europe: agrarian (particularly in Scandinavia), Christian Democratic, and the parties allied with big business. These categories are general and may include combinations of these ideologies.
Italy
The Christian Democratic parties have the longest history. They emerged in the 19th century to support the church and monarchy against liberal and radical elements. Since World War I the dominant element in this party has been supporters of business. In Italy, clerical interests remain strongly represented.
The Christian Democratic Party has dominated governments in Italy since 1945. Since 1993, this has been under the name of the Italian Popular Party. The Christian Democratic Party was an alliance of moderate and conservative interest groups. It has formed a long series of government coalitions consisting of smaller centrist parties and the Italian Socialist Party. The Christian Democratic Party has never had a coherent policy and has been increasingly corrupt and politically ineffective, but it managed to exclude the large Italian Communist Party during the Cold War. The Italian Communist Party has been called the Democratic Party of the Left since 1991.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union communism was no longer seen as a threat to Europe, so the Christian Democrats lost much of their support. This coincided with the growth of other conservative and nationalist groups that had formerly been outside of mainstream of Italian politics. These include the Northern League, which called for the creation of a federated Italian republic, and the National Alliance (which, until 1994, was the Italian Social Movement). Many regarded the National Alliance as neofascist. In 1994 a new conservative party was founded by the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi’s party is called Forza Italia (“Go, Italy!”).
Germany
Germany was divided between Roman Catholics and Protestants, so the role of the church in the conservative party was not as significant as in Italy. However, Germany’s political climate has been conservative since World War II. This is illustrated by the fact that the Social Democratic Party of Germany has progressively eliminated the socialist content of its program. They even embraced the profit motive in a party congress at Bad Godesberg in 1959.
However, after 1950, the main Conservative Party, the Christian Democratic Union, adopted a program including support for a market economy and a strong commitment to maintaining and improving social insurance and other social welfare programs.
It was the Christian Democrats who presided over the unification of East and West Germany.
From the 1990s, German conservative ideology has included minimal government, deregulation, privatization, and the reining-in of the welfare state. These policies have been difficult to implement, however. Many Germans continue to support an extensive safety net of unemployment insurance and other social welfare programs.
France
There was no Christian Democratic Party in France to represent moderate conservative opinion. Instead, a large number of French conservatives supported parties like Rally for the Republic. (Rally for the Republic was renamed ‘Union for a Popular Movement’ in 2002, and ‘the Republicans’ in 2015.) This party espoused a highly nationalistic conservatism based on the legacy of Charles de Gaulle, president of France from 1958 to 1969. French conservatives also supported anti-immigration groups such as the National Front, which was led until 2011 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and subsequently by his daughter, Marine Le Pen. The National Front, some argued, was not so much conservative as reactionary or neofascist.
Gaullist Conservatism
Gaullist conservatism emphasized tradition and order and aimed at a politically united Europe under French leadership. Gaullists espoused divergent views on social issues, however. There are a large number of Gaullist and non-Gaullist conservative parties and it is difficult to categorized them. They lack stability and tend to identify themselves with local issues.
The Twenty-first Century
In the early 21st century, French conservatives were united by a number of developments. One was the theme of “law and order.” Law and Order was promoted by interior minister (and later president) Nicolas Sarkozy. Unemployed youths in suburban Paris and elsewhere—many of whom were immigrants or the children of immigrants—engaged in periodic rioting to protest their plight, and were met with stiff (and popular) police resistance.
The perceived threat to French values from immigrants, especially Muslims, also helped unite French conservatives. One of the values allegedly in danger was the conviction that public education should be strictly secular. When young Muslim women insisted on wearing veils to school, the French state reacted strongly. But this may have alienated Muslims from French society more than it reaffirmed French values.
In general, conservatism in Europe has exerted a pervasive political influence since the start of the 20th century. However, it has found expression in parties of very different character. Parties have been characterized by an absence of ideology and often by the lack of any well-articulated political philosophy. They have espoused traditional middle-class values however. They have also opposed unnecessary state involvement in economic affairs, and radical attempts at income redistribution.
Japan
Japan has had conservative rule since the beginning of party politics in the 1880s. The only exception was the military government during the 1930s and 40s.
Extensive social and political changes took place in Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Feudal institutions were abolished at this time, and western political institutions, such as constitutional government, were introduced. But in spite of these innovations, and the dislocations caused by rapid industrialization, politics continued to be shaped by traditional loyalties and attitudes.
The Liberal-Democratic Party
In 1955, the two most important conservative parties merged to form the Liberal-Democratic Party. Both parties had been dominated by personalities rather than by ideology and dogma. Subsequently, the allegiance of conservative members of the Diet was determined by personal loyalties to leaders of factions within the party, rather than commitment to policy. Today, an older Japan continues to influence the values, customs and relationships of Japanese conservatives.
The Liberal-Democratic Party has been linked with big business. Its policies aim to foster a stable environment for the development of Japan’s market economy. To this end, the party has functioned primarily as a broker between conflicting business interests.
Japanese Nationalism
In the early twenty-first century, there was a resurgence of Japanese nationalism. Much of it was centered on how to teach the history of Japan in the 20th century—particularly the period before and during World War II. Conservative nationalists insisted that the Japanese military had done nothing wrong and had acted honorably. They claimed that stories of widespread war crimes were fabricated by Japan’s foreign and domestic enemies. It is not known how pervasive and influential this resurgent nationalism might be.
The United States
Conservatism changed in the United States in response to the New Deal. America’s identity as a liberal country changed as well.
The New Deal Credit: Traveler1116
The New Deal was Not a Liberal Policy
After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the perception of the United States as an inherently liberal country began to change. The New Deal was the economic relief program undertaken in 1933 to help raise the country out of the Great Depression. This program greatly expanded the federal government’s involvement in the economy through the regulation of private enterprise, the levying of higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and the expansion of social welfare programs.
The Old Right
The Republican Party, drawing on the support of big business, the wealthy, and prosperous farmers, stubbornly opposed the New Deal. While Democratic liberals moved to the left in endorsing a larger role for government, Republicans generally clung to a 19th-century version of liberalism that called for the government to avoid interfering in the market. These staunch conservatives were known as the Old Right. They were powerful enough to prevent the US from entering World War II until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. However, their policy of fighting the New Deal did not help them at the polls.
In the first decades after the war, the United States, like Britain, gradually expanded social services and increased government regulation of the economy. However, in the 1970s, the postwar economic growth that the United States and other Western countries had relied on to finance social welfare programs began to slacken. This took place just as Japan and other East Asian nations were finally attaining Western levels of prosperity. And unfortunately, liberal policies of governmental activism could not solve the problem. (This article is non-committal about the cause of US stagnation.)
Neoconservatives
At this point a new group of mainly American conservatives, the so-called neoconservatives, arose to argue that high levels of taxation and the government’s intrusive regulation of private enterprise were hampering economic growth. They also claimed that social welfare policies were leading those who received welfare benefits to become increasingly dependent upon government. The neoconservatives generally accepted a modest welfare state. They were sometimes described as disenchanted welfare liberals. But they insisted that social welfare programs should help people help themselves, not make them permanent wards of the state. In this and other respects neoconservatives saw themselves as defenders of middle-class virtues such as thrift, hard work, and self-restraint, all of which they took to be under attack in the cultural upheaval of the reputedly hedonistic 1960s.
An Interventionist Stance
The neoconservatives also took a keen interest in foreign affairs. They adopted an interventionist stance that set them apart from the isolationist tendencies of earlier conservatives. Many of them argued that the United States had both a right and a duty to intervene in the affairs of other nations in order to combat the influence of Soviet communism and to advance American interests; some even claimed that the United States had a duty to remake the non-Western world on the model of American democratic capitalism. Among American political leaders, the chief representatives of neoconservatism were the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan (1981–89) and George W. Bush (2001–09). Its most articulate advocates, however, were academics who entered politics, such as New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration.
During the Reagan era (the 1980s), more-traditional conservatives whose viewpoints harkened back to the Old Right remained resentful of neoconservatives for supposedly having co-opted and diluted American conservatism with a false brand of anticommunist “welfare statism.”
Paleoconservatives Try to Take the Party Back
The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) encouraged the “paleoconservatives,” as they were then identified by the conservative intellectuals Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, to forcefully articulate their opposition to neoconservatism and to advocate new policies inspired by the Old Right’s ideological battles with New Deal Democrats.
Neoconservatives Counter with Accusations of Anti-Semitism, Racism, Isolationism, and Zenophobia.
Neoconservatives countered with long-standing accusations that the paleoconservative celebration of America’s Christian heritage and opposition to immigration from developing countries were indicative of the movement’s underlying anti-Semitism, racism, isolationism, and xenophobia.
The influence of paleoconservatism within the American right arguably reached a high point at the end of the 20th century in Pat Buchanan’s unsuccessful attempts to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996 and in his failed campaign for president as the nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.
Drolet, J.-F., Williams, M. C. 2021. The radical Right, realism, and the politics of conservatism in postwar international thought. Review of International Studies 47, 273–293. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210521000103 ↩︎
In a previous article I wrote about Professor Wen Yang’s YouTube video in which he argued that the Anglo-Saxons are the worst people ever. He said this was the result of the Anglo-Saxons having missed the Axial Age. Interspersed with Yang’s portion of the video was a speech by Jeffrey Sachs. Both men use similar criteria to condemn the United States. Sachs blamed what he believes is a breakdown in Anglo-Saxon culture on the degeneration of Western Philosophy. I have argued that both arguments are flawed, and I refuted their claims in two articles. Sach’s focus on the influence of Niccolò Machiavelli in Western politics was the subject of one article. The other article was about Professor Yang’s claim that the Anglo-Saxons missed the Axial Age. This study led me to ask why they would make such false claims. I have concluded that the criticism of Anglo-Saxon countries is motivated by ideology. This article and subsequent articles will expand on this idea. This article will cover Realists and the Radical Right.
The Radical Right During and After World War II
Misrepresentation may not have been conscious on the part of Yang and Sachs. Currently, the rise of the radical Right is one of the most important challenges faced by the US government, but it is not mentioned in the field of International Relations. The ideologies of the radical Right have been forced underground since World War II, and sometimes its ideology creeps in unrecognized. Realists have tried to guide the conversation away from it, hoping it will go away. As a result, we are all shocked to discover that the radical Right has made a ‘comeback’.
A paper published in 2021 in Review of International Studies (RIS) 1 provides an explanation for this omission. Authors, Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, explain how and why the discipline of International Relations (IR) eliminated the radical right’s point of view.
This is not a condemnation of realists. It’s hard to argue with the rationale of those who carried out this plan. Social scientists feared the radical Right’s negative influence on the civil rights movement and other campaigns. And they saw anti-liberal ideas as a threat to peace and democracy. This is the context in which International Relations developed.
Today, radical Right ideas have burst into the open, and the realists’ fears have proven to be correct. At this time, it’s important to confront the fact that IR’s origins were framed as a battle between liberalism and realism. The Mearsheimer/Pinker debate, in which Steven Pinker defended liberalism and John Mearsheimer defended realism, is a good example.
The organization of this material
Drolet’s and Williams’ paper is a comprehensive treatment of this problem. It lays out a key part of the history of right-wing ideologies in the United States. It also discusses the people and organizations that fought them. I plan to divide this paper into sections and cover each one in its own article. This article will focus on the men and ideologies of the radical Right, as well as their influence in the United States.
The Failure of International Relations Credit: imaginima
The Failure of International Relations
In the past decade, transnational networks of the radical Right have made gains in Europe, North America and beyond. Governments and political parties with conservative foreign policies have increased as a result. These networks and parties routinely use the ideology of the radical Right to contest prevailing visions of the global order. Their aim is to weaken established forms of international governance.
Drolet and Williams argue in their paper that understanding the intellectual history of the discipline of IR will increase our understanding of right-wing thought, as well as the realist tradition. Their account should also help progressives develop a coherent identity and strategy.
Militant Conservative Ideas in Global Postwar Politics
Right-wing influencers were present in the West both during and after World War II. Much of the literature about these individuals focuses on European thinkers after 1948. Americans remain unaware that a similar influence was present in the United States during the same period. Right-wing ideologues were engaged with international security, geopolitics and Cold War strategy. Their ideology tended to be skeptical or hostile to liberal modernity. They insisted on racial hierarchies, cultural foundations, tradition and myth, as the basis of society.
Drolet and Williams focus on four influential conservative voices in American foreign policy and international affairs. They include Robert Strausz-Hupé; James Burnham; Stefan Possony; and Gerhart Niemeyer. These men were not unified theoretically. However, they were aware of each other’s work and knew each other personally. In addition, they often collaborated with each other and supported the same political causes.
All four men were backed by philanthropic foundations and engaged in Journalism and public debate. They wrote bestselling books and influential columns and lectured at US military and training colleges, and set up training programs based on their ideas. In addition to advising political leaders and candidates, they held government positions or consultancies. Surprisingly, they were also involved in the theory of International Relations. All of this activity took place while they held influential academic positions in leading American universities.
Robert Strausz-Hupé
Robert Strausz-Hupé immigrated to the United States from Austria in 1923. Initially, he worked on Wall Street and as editor of Current History Magazine. He joined the University of Pennsylvania’s political science department in 1940. Strausz-Hupé wrote more than a dozen books, including a book on international politics which he co-authored with Stefan Possony. In addition, both Strausz-Hupé and Gerhart Niemeyer were part of a Council on Foreign Relations study group in 1953 on the foundations of IR theory. In 1955, Strausz-Hupé established the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) at the University of Pennsylvania, with the backing of the conservative Richardson Foundation. He also founded its journal, Orbis. The FPRI quickly established ties to the military, causing Senator Fulbright to denounce them as reactionary threats to American Democracy.
Strausz-Hupé was a foreign policy advisor to Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign. He also advised Richard Nixon in 1968, and served as US ambassador to NATO, Sri Lanka, Belgium, Sweden and Turkey.
The Influence of German Geopolitik
Strausz-Hupé’ is remembered today, for his geopolitics. His connections to the radical right come to light in this context. Geopolitical ideas and reactionary politics go together, according to Drolet and Williams.
Geopolitics became linked to organic state theories and global social Darwinism through nineteenth century theorists like Friedrich Ratzel or Rudolph Kjellen. Kjellen, a Swedish political scientist, geographer and politician was influenced by Ratzel, a German geographer. Ratzel and Kjellen, along with Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, laid the foundations for the German Geopolitik. Later their Geopolitik would be espoused by General Karl Haushofer. Haushofer influenced the ideological development of Adolf Hitler.
Haushofer visited Landsberg Prison during the incarceration of Hitler and Rudolf Hess by the Weimar Republic. He was a teacher and mentor to both men. Haushofer coined the political use of the term Lebensraum, which Hitler used to justify crimes against peace and genocide.2
German Geopolitik’s Political and Cultural Turn
German Geopolitik was inseparable from expansionism, racial or societal international hierarchy, and inevitable conflict. It became more political and cultural through radical conservative thinkers like Oswald Spengler, Moeller van den Bruch, and Carl Schmitt. Culture, race and myth developed as its core, and its urgent focus became the fate of the West.
Spengler insisted Western Civilization was in terminal decline, but Moeller was not so pessimistic. Moeller argued that Germany and Russia were young and vibrant cultures that could escape the decadent Anglo-American Civilizations and flourish in a continental partnership that would dominate the future. Similarily, Haushofer held that Eurasian land power was the geographic pivot of history, and viewed the ‘telluric’ Eurasian land powers as inescapably at odds with the ‘thalassocratic’ Anglo-American sea powers.
Geopolitics in a European and German setting was profoundly conservative and often reactionary. Many of its proponents rejected liberal visions of politics and were especially hostile towards the United States and Britain. German Geopolitik advocated a political geographic determinism opposed to the idea of a Euro-Atlantic partnership. They claimed Europe was the true West. Europe was not part of the Atlantic world, but an alternative to it.
Making America Geopolitical
Strausz-Hupé and other European émigrés taught geopolitics in America. Edmund Walsh, founder of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, joined them in this task. These men taught a version of the Cold War that was a geopolitical critique of liberal modernity. They argued that the Cold War was evidence of a deeper civilizational and metaphysical crisis. These statements had the appearance of analytic objectivity, but the appearance was used to justify a blunt form of power politics.
These men purportedly avoided the German formulation of geopolitics. Unfortunately, Strausz-Hupé’s description of German geopolitik was based on his racial categories and assumptions about European colonialism. He argued that there were two distinct versions of geopolitics. In his version, statesmen used geopolitics to achieve a balance of power. In the Nazi version, geopolitik was used to destroy the balance of power and wipe out all commitments to the shared Christian heritage of Western civilization. German geopolitik had been turned into the doctrine of nihilism and the antithesis of the principles of civilized order because it had given up the trappings of Western Civilization.
Strausz-Hupé Borrows Key Concepts from German Geopolitik
Strausz-Hupé himself doomed this right-wing attempt to distinguish between German geopolitik and American geopolitics. First, he endorsed the German neo-Darwinian vision of international relations as an everlasting struggle for world domination. He proposed that regional systems must be established, each one clustered around a hegemonic great power. Finally, geography and technical mastery designated America as the new epicenter of the West. All the races of Europe would use America’s military capabilities to create a stable world order out of the defeat of the Axis Powers. But there was one condition.
Everything depended on the US leading the fight against Communism and creating an order under which a federated Europe could be subordinated within NATO. Anything short of this, including benign interpretations of the USSR’s motives would be disastrous.
In Strausz-Hupé’s view, liberals failed to recognize that periods of peaceful, competitive coexistence were as much a part of the communist war plan against the Free World as periods of aggressive expansion. Liberalism and containment-focused realists were not capable of sharing Strausz-Hupé’s global vision. Instead, Strausz-Hupé suggested abandoning containment and using superior military power to ‘rollback’ and ultimately destroy communism. The United States must develop a military posture and strategic doctrine that maintained nuclear deterrence, but allowed America to fight limited wars and prepare for the possibility of a total nuclear war.
James Burnham
James Burnham agreed with Strausz-Hupé’s anti-Communism, power politics and attacks on liberal decadence. Burnham was a philosophy professor at New York University from 1929 to 1953. He lectured frequently at the Naval War College, the National War College, and the John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, and was a co-editor of William F. Buckley’s National Review. Burnham also contributed a weekly foreign policy column to Buckley’s magazine and wrote a number of bestselling books on politics and international relations.
Burnham had started out with the radical left as one of Trotsky’s leading American disciples. But he broke with Marxism. Subsequently, he wrote The Managerial Revolution, predicting that the coming order would be a world-conquering managerial technocracy and run by a New Class of engineers, administrators and educators. These technocrats would wield power through the interpretation of cultural symbols, the manipulation of state-authorized mechanisms of mass organization, and economic redistribution.
Burnham’s Foreign Policy
Similar to Strausz-Hupé, Burnham believed liberalism is incapable of understanding the brutal Machiavellian realities of politics. Also similar to Strausz-Hupé, he borrowed his ideas from Europe. He wrote a book on political theory and practice, entitled The Machiavellians. In this book, he identified a group that had been influential in Europe but almost unknown in the United States. The Machiavellians included Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto. Burnham claimed their writings held the truth about politics and the preservation of political liberty.
He argued that all societies are ruled by oligarchs through force and fraud, and that cultural conventions, myth and rationality are all that holds them together. However, a scientific attitude toward society does not permit the sincere belief in the truth of the myths. Democracy itself was a myth designed and propagated by elites to sustain their rule under secular modernity. If the leaders are scientific, they must lie. Liberty requires hierarchical structures, cultural renewal and the primacy of patriotism, all of which were against the liberal consensus.
The Machiavellian World View
Burnham worked on a secret study commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services in 1944 to help prepare the US delegation to the Yalta Conference. In the resulting book, The Struggle for the World, he argued that the Soviet Union had become the first great Heartland power. Therefore, the only alternative to a Communist World Empire was an American Empire. The American Empire would be established through a network of hegemonic alliances and colonial and neocolonial relationships. This was Burham’s response to the revolutionary ideology and continuous expansion of the Soviet Union.
In place of appeasement, he advocated a policy of immediate confrontation. Containing Communism, and overthrowing Soviet client governments in Eastern Europe would be the goal. Intense political warfare, auxiliary military actions, and possibly full-scale war would be the method.
Machiavellianism in Vietnam
This debate extended to the Vietnam War. Burham attacked the ‘Kennan-de Gaulle-Morgenthau-Lippmann approach because it over-emphasized the nationalist dimension of the Cold War at the expense of what he believed was its more fundamental counter-revolutionary character. He said the realists’ analysis seemed plausible, but they failed to grasp the broader geopolitical and metaphysical consequences of a withdrawal–a communist takeover of the Asian continent. He admitted that entering the war may have been a strategic mistake, but it had become America’s ultimate test of will.
Burnham maintained a holistic approach to social theory even though he renounced Marxian theories of universal history. Like Strausz-Hupé, he saw the Cold War as geopolitical and metaphysical. He thought sacrifice was needed for survival, and America’s liberal philosophical and cultural commitments were not up to the task. He expanded on this idea in his book, The Suicide of the West.
Stefan Possony: Race, Intellect, and Global Order
Stefan Possony, also a collaborator of Strausz-Hupé, was also from Austria. He was involved in conservative foreign policy debates in the US for almost 50 years. He held research positions at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, the Psychological Warfare Department at the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Pentagon’s Directorate of Intelligence. In addition he taught strategy and geopolitics at Georgetown. In 1961, he became Senior Fellow and Director of International Studies at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Also similar to Strausz-Hupé, Possony served as a foreign policy advisor to Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Like Burham, he advocated an ‘offensive forward strategy’ in the Vietnam War. Possony became an advocate for President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s.
Possony’s Theory of Racial Hierarchies
Possony was also interested in racial hierarchy. Racial geopolitics was central to his vision of international order. He co-authored Geography of the Intellect with Nathaniel Weyl. In this work, the authors tried to demonstrate the racial hierarchy and geographic distribution of intellectual abilities and their implications for foreign policy. They argued that world power and historic progress depended on racially determined mental capacities and the ability of an elite to influence society’s direction. And they concluded that intelligence is directly connected to the comparative mental abilities of different races. The people with the largest amount of creative intellectual achievement since the Middle Ages are within the Western political orbit. Hence, the West’s geopolitical dominance.
However, Possony and Weyl argued that Western dominance was threatened by technological advancement and demographic dynamics. This process allowed the less able to out-reproduce the elites. They echoed Spengler with this argument.
As societies reach the peaks of civiization and material progress they face the threat of application of a pseudo-egalitarian ideology to political, social and economic life – in the interests of the immediate advantage of the masses who, for political reasons are told that if all men are equal in capacity, all should be equally rewarded. The resources of the society will be thus increasingly dedicated to the provision of pan et circenes (bread and circuses) – either in their Roman or modern form. Simultaneously, excellence is downgraded and mediocrity must fill the resulting gap. As the spiritual and material rewards of the creative element are whittled away, the yeast of the society is removed and stagnation results.
Page 283 – 284
Selective Genetic Reproduction
Selective genetic reproduction via artificial insemination was proposed as a partial response. This followed Hermann J. Muller’s ‘positive eugenics’. Possony argued that through artificial insemination, a small minority of the female population could multiply the production of geniuses in the world.
Possony and Weyl also argued that America’s aid policies and support for decolonization were misguided. This was similar to arguments proposed by Burnham and Strausz-Hupé. They reasoned that such policies are based on the incorrect assumption that men, classes and races are equal in capacity, and that human resources can be increased by education. These policies have unleashed the forces of savage race and class warfare in Africa and the Middle East. They also force the emigration and expulsion of the European elite. And the European elite is the only elite.
Treason of the Scholars
In addition to these classic tropes, these men argued that the West’s decline was partly due to the ‘treason of the scholars.’ In other words, treason of liberal intellectuals who are guilty of spreading specious egalitarian ideals. Such ideals sow envy, anxiety, dissent and disloyalty among the masses. The treasonous ‘pseudo-intelligentsia’ must be supplanted by a creative minority.
Gerhart Niemeyer
Gerhart Niemeyer was a native of Essen, Germany. Like Burnham, he began his career on the left as a student of the social democratic lawyer Hermann Heller. He emigrated to the United States in 1937, via Spain, and taught international law at Princeton and elsewhere before joining the State Department in 1950. He spent three years as a specialist on foreign affairs and United Nations policy. After two years as an analyst on the Council of Foreign Relations, he became a Professor of Government at Notre Dame University. He remained there for 40 years.
His 1941 book, Law Without Force, was part of a postwar attempt to relate international law to power politics. It was influenced by Hermann Heller’s conception of state sovereignty and by Niemeyer’s despair over ‘the politically naive legalism of the Weimar left’.
Criticism of International Law
Niemeyer believed modern international law was unrealistic by nature and that it was partly responsible for the unlawfulness of ‘international reality’. He claimed that during the nineteenth century, international law had been transformed by the rise of liberalism into a mere instrument for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. It now served the ideal of an interdependent global society of profit-seeking individuals. Subsequently, the rise of authoritarianism had made legal norms obsolete. Since international order is established through law, the law must be renovated based on Niemeyer’s criteria.
The Influence of Eric Voegein, Buckley, Goldwater, and Traditionalism
Niemeyer was influenced by Eric Voegelin, and he became a Traditionalist during his time at Notre Dame University. For decades, he was a friend of William F. Buckley. He was considered an expert on Communist thought, Soviet politics, and foreign policy, and was commissioned by Congress to write The Communist Ideology. This work was circulated in 1959-60. Like Strausz-Hupé and Possony, he worked as a foreign policy advisor on the Goldwater campaign. Subsequently, he served as a member of the Republican National Committee’s task force on foreign policy from 1965 to 1968.
Metaphysical Meaning of the Cold War
Niemeyer believed that political modernity is a uniquely ‘ideocratic’ epoch where dominant ideologies strive for new certainties in order to remake the world. Voeglin called this ‘political gnosticism’. The result is a world dominated by ruthlessness, absolutism, and intolerance in which logical murders and logical crimes made the twentieth century one of the worst in human history.
These convictions led him to a radical vision of the Cold War. In his view, the Cold War became an explicitly conservative metaphysical phenomenon. Liberals failed to see that the Soviet Union was not simply a great power adversary but an implacable enemy drivin by gnostic desires of the ‘Communist mind’. He further argued that the Communist mind was a ‘nihilistic and pathological product of modernity’. So, it was natural for people to fear Liberalism as superficial, ignorant of mankind’s demonic possibilities, given to mistaken judgments of historical forces, and untrustworthy in its complacency.
Niemeyer believed the world is at a spiritual dead end. Political orders rest on a matrix of customs, habits, and prejudices underpinned by foundational myths. So, the solution is a mystical awakening that recognizes the importance of mystery and myth in political life.
What They Had in Common
All four of these thinkers were fixated on space, resources, and national power, but they were also tied to a narrative of the ‘crisis of man’. This last item led to a reactionary critique of liberal modernity. By casting the Cold War in metaphysical terms, they could argue that the USSR was an extreme embodiment of the pathologies of political modernity demanding radical responses. If modern liberalism was not up to the task of fighting the Cold War, radical conservatism would have to take over. Otherwise, the West would be destroyed.
Thinkers in the Field of International Relations Response to the Radical Right
These men were not authoritarians, but they expressed misgivings about democracy and liberal modernism. The thinkers in the field of IR were sympathetic to such concerns, but they did not fear liberal idealism as much as they feared militant conservatism’s foreign policy, including its support for military confrontation and nuclear adventurism. Its sympathy for McCarthyism was another concern.
Some of the IR field’s most important early thinkers took up this challenge. They systematically attacked militant conservatism’s ‘Machiavellian’ politics and geopolitical theorizing. They also used conservative insights to develop what they thought was a liberalism capable of withstanding pseudo-conservative attacks. Unfortunately, this resulted in Conservative Liberalism, which became a key part of realism.
The Battle Lines: Cold War America and The National Review Magazine
The National Review was founded in 1955 by radical conservative William F. Buckley. Buckley aimed to create a movement to address the most ‘profound crisis’ of the twentieth century. He argued that this crisis was a conflict between the Social Engineers and the disciples of truth who defend the organic moral order’.
The National Review was a reaction to the advances of organized labour, racial desegregation, women’s emancipation, and the ‘satanic utopianism of communism’. It was also a response to the conformist conservatism of establishment Republicans. Buckley’s magazine was an important platform for the confrontational style of right-wing politics.
Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, The radical Right, realism, and the politics of conservatism in postwar international thought, Review of International Studies (2021), 47: 3, 273–293 doi:10.1017/S0260210521000103 ↩︎
Aside from the climate crisis there is general agreement that individuals on the left don’t have to share the same religious beliefs or ideology. However, that belief is misleading. A focus on Gender rights seems to be an ideological requirement. The issue of Gender rights has become a litmus test for left-ness. A realistic analysis of our allies and our opposition suggests this ideology acts as a handicap for political success.
A Focus on Gender Rights Alienates Important Allies
The climate crisis is rightly a major focus for the political left. Due to time constraints and the ongoing attacks on the democratic process, there are natural limits to additional issues that can be effectively addressed. These limits have to do with our indigenous allies in the fight against climate change and their consensus, or lack thereof, on our political patform.
No one seems concerned that our allies among the Native Americans believe there are only two genders, male and female. This lack of concern is surprising, considering that globally, indigenous people are the foundation of our fight against climate change. We’ve asked them to teach us to care for the land and they’ve indicated that they’re willing to do so, but how teachable are we if we blithely carry the gender rights banner at the front of the parade?
Would the Left Benefit From a Narrower Focus?
In my opinion, individuals on the left have some important questions to answer. What are we trying to accomplish? Are we trying to address a threat to the human race, or are we establishing leftist credentials? Do we behave as friends to our allies, or competing ideologues? Do we fit the Right’s definition of the ‘radical woke’ left, or are we clear-headed strategists? I would argue that if you don’t think these are important questions, either you are not serious, or you don’t understand our opposition.
Gender Ideology is an Easy Target for the Right
Ideologues on the right have made their opposition to gender ideology a major part of their platform, and they are unified against this issue. They also deny the danger of global warming. So, in the minds of undecided voters, denial of global warming has become inseparable from a conservative position on gender. In this scenario, the left’s focus on gender ideology is the opposite of strategic. It is a handicap.
I’ve been saying that we need to reexamine the influence of the ideas of Plato and Aristotle in politics and religion. As it happens, that conversation is already underway. The following discussion is based on an article about Plato’s influence in Russia. Mikhail Epstein, Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory and Co-Director of the Center for Humanities Innovation, identifies the Russian approach to Plato as the source of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. However, the Russian experience should have as much meaning for the West as it does for Russia.
He begins by asking, What is philosophy? He answers by saying that although there is no simple, universal definition, the most ‘credible attempt is a nominalistic reference: philosophy is what Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel were occupied with.’ Then he provides what he calls the most broadly cited definition, that of A. Whitehead: ‘philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.’((Epstein, Mikhail, An Overview of Russian Philosophy. Intelnet. Cited on May 16, 2014. Available: http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/rus_thought_overview.html))
If this is accepted, he argues, Russian philosophy must be seen as a part of the Western intellectual tradition. Russia, and especially the Soviet Union, has been unique in its literal incarnation of the teachings of Plato. This was made possible by the tendency of Russian thought to ‘philosophize reality, to transform it into a transparent kingdom of ideas.’ In the Soviet Union, this resulted in philosophy becoming a supreme legal and political institution, and ‘in its unrestricted dominion [it] was equivalent to madness.’ However, non-Marxist and anti-Marxist thinkers in Russia belong to the same tradition. The hard-won understanding they achieved in this process can provide an invaluable lesson for the West.
“One might even say that the philosophy of the Soviet epoch is the final stage of the development and embodiment of Plato’s ideas in the Western world. During this stage, the project of ideocracy came to a complete realization and exhausted itself. The czardom of ideas arrived at the threshold of self-destruction because the substance of Being resisted the yoke of idealism, and it is now in the process of returning to its primordial identity. Thus Russian philosophy both summarizes and punctuates more than two thousand years of the Platonic tradition and points the way for a return to foundations which are not susceptible to ideologic perversions.
“A relatively short period of years sums up a two-millenium adventure of Western thought which escorted Plato in his search for the world of pure ideas. Among these footnotes to Plato, Russian philosophy appears to the attentive eye as the final entry, signifying ‘The End’.”
Still, I suppose someone could argue that the problem is not Plato, but one particular approach to Plato. Epstein mentions this as a possibility, but says the question has yet to be answered.
“The question is: Now that Platonism in its Marxist guise, has been overcome by Russian thought, is it still possible to find inspiration in Platonism as such, in its sublime idealistic and religious interpretations? Or does the experience of Russian history convincingly argue that Platonism has exhausted itself as a spiritual resource for humanity and that all attempts to Christianize it are just wishful illusions? (Russia slipped into the pagan version of Platonism, while in the West, Plato’s ideas were Christianized.)
“Whatever the answer may be, it is indisputable that the ongoing relevance of Platonism for Russian thought will provide the ground for its intensive dialogue with…Western philosophy also rooted in Plato’s heritage.”((Epstein, Mikhail, The Phoenix of Philosophy: On the Meaning and Significance of Contemporary Russian Thought. Intelnet. Cited May 16, 2014. Avaliable: http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/ar_phoenix_philosophy.html))
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