by Søren Renner
Arktos http://www.arktos.com/ has published (2011) the English translation of Democratie: le probleme (1985), a short and excellent book by Alain de Benoiste. The footnotes alone more than justify the purchase of this enticing little volume. Not, it must be added, the ordinary footnotes which plod along the bottom margin of the text: no, there are actually two strata which are cunningly intercalated, translated notes from the original and notes added by the translator. And what notes! A cavalcade of names pours through them like Roland’s army through the valley of the Pyrenees: Herodotus, Churchill, Plato, Mannheim, Pericles, Aristotle, Sorel, de Tocqueville, Hitler, Guenon, and many more, not as gilt on a secondrate essay but as fitting ornament for a superior text. In order to study ‘genuine’ democracy, it is necessary to turn to Greek democracy rather than to those regimes that the contemporary world wishes to describe by this term…. Returning to a Greek concept of democracy…means re-appropriating…a notion of the people and of community that has been eclipsed by two thousand years of egalitarianism, rationalism and the exaltation of the rootless individual.
The “democracy” of post-Enlightenment regimes is a brutal chimera: “liberalism” and democracy together make a monster. Arbitrarily starting with Max Stirner, we can trace the development of an idea of lonely revolutionary violence through Georges Sorel and Wyndham Lewis to Alexander Dugin: the loneliness here is not that of the liberal “self” but of its opposite, the transcendental subject. Benoist would likely deny that this arc runs through his work; Dugin might approve of the adaptation of his own recent remark:
And all of these critical formulas were embedded in [liberal democracy from the very beginning. That which is appearing now is the outcome: not the evening of [liberal democracy, but the morning of its horror.