« Qui se souvient de Juan Donoso Cortès ? » : c’est sur cette interrogation que Christophe Boutin introduit l’entrée « Donoso Cortès » dans l’excellent Dictionnaire du conservatisme dont il est à l’origine avec Frédéric Rouvillois et Olivier Dard.
Qui se souvient en effet de cet espagnol éclectique qui a partagé sa vie entre l’Espagne où il est né et la France où il est mort après quelques tribulations européennes ?
Juriste de formation, historien par passion, homme politique par devoir, diplomate autant par nature que par vocation (ambassadeur d’Espagne à Berlin puis à Paris), il restera auprès des érudits comme un formidable ciseleur de formules et un orateur au souffle puissant. Ne lui en faut-il pas d’ailleurs, pour énoncer son identité complète : Juan Francisco Maria de la Salud Donoso Cortès y Fernandez Canedo, marquis de Valdegamas. Ouf !
Tout au long d’une vie trépidante, il observe ses contemporains et les institutions qui les gouvernent. Certaines de ses observations sont des plus pertinentes, notamment lorsqu’il pose un regard aigu sur la société française : « Chez les peuples qui sont ingouvernables, le gouvernement prend nécessairement les formes républicaines ; c’est pourquoi la république subsiste et subsistera en France. »
Il souligne ce qui pour lui en est la cause : « Le grand crime du libéralisme, c’est d’avoir tellement détruit le tempérament de la société qu’elle ne peut rien supporter, ni le bien, ni le mal. »
Voilà qui en 2018 et entre deux grèves des services publics, rassurera les hommes politiques inquiets sur l’avenir de nos institutions. Encore que, à en croire Donoso, le président et ses ministres devraient s’interroger sur la réalité des pouvoirs qu’ils croient détenir : « Un des caractères de l’époque actuelle, c’est l’absence de toute légitimité. Les races gouvernantes ont perdu la faculté de gouverner ; les peuples la faculté d’être gouverné. Il y a donc dans la société absence forcée de gouvernement. »
Donoso souligne l’évolution perverse de la classe dirigeante devenue « une classe discutante » qui répugne à assumer son vrai rôle et de ce fait devient incapable de décider : « Il est de l’essence du libéralisme bourgeois de ne pas décider […], mais d’essayer, à la place de cette décision, d’entamer une discussion. »
N’est-ce pas ce qui pousse nos gouvernements, lorsqu’ils craignent de trancher, à créer ces commissions Théodule moquées par De Gaulle.
Il dénonce la complicité entre le pouvoir et la presse d’information accusée de dégoupiller ces grenades fumigènes destinées justement à enfumer l’opinion : « Le journalisme c’est le moyen le plus efficace inventé par les hommes pour cacher ce que tout le monde doit savoir… »
Et c’est ainsi que, pour Donoso Cortès, s’ouvre la voie à cette dérive des institutions qui conduit à faire entrer « l’esprit révolutionnaire dans le Parlement. »
Ce noble espagnol qui connaît l’Europe pour l’avoir sillonnée en différentes circonstances, devine les risques qui la guettent : « Je représente la tradition, par laquelle les nations demeurent dans toute l’étendue des siècles. Si ma voix à une quelconque autorité, Messieurs, ce n’est pas parce que c’est la mienne : c’est parce que c’est la voix de nos pères. »
Donoso Cortès traverse des temps troublés dans lesquels révolutions, révoltes et pronunciamientos alimentent les chroniques et ne laissent guère d’options aux populations qui les subissent. Il en vient à considérer qu’en période de crise il ne reste plus qu’à choisir entre la dictature du poignard et celle du sabre. D’où sa conclusion « je choisis la dictature du sabre parce qu’elle est plus noble. » Et n’est-ce pas cette dictature du poignard que nous vivons quand, en ce début de troisième millénaire, nous assistons à ces morts politiques qui relèvent davantage d’une embuscade de ruffians que d’un duel entre gentilshommes.
Il perçoit dans les tendances politiques qui semblent se dégager les signes avant-coureurs « d’un nouveau paganisme (qui) tombera dans un abîme plus profond et plus horrible encore. Celui qui doit lui river sur la tête le joug de ses impudiques et féroces insolences, s’agite déjà dans la fange des cloaques sociaux. »
Ne trouvez-vous pas quelque actualité à ces propos ?
Mais je vous prie d’excuser ma distraction. J’ai omis de vous préciser que ce monsieur est né en 1809 et mort en 1853.
Décidément comme l’affirmait le roi Salomon, il y a quelques années déjà, rien de nouveau sous le soleil.
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While many living in the West of Sorokin’s day didn’t clearly apprehend what was happening, Sorokin said, they harbored “at least a vague feeling that the issue is not merely that of ‘prosperity,’ or ‘democracy,’ or ‘capitalism’”—in other words, matters handled through normal politics and political action. “The organism of the Western society and culture seems to be undergoing one of the deepest and most significant crises of its life. The crisis is far greater than the ordinary; its depth is unfathomable, its end not yet in sight, and the whole of the Western society is involved in it,” Sorokin wrote in Social and Cultural Dynamics, his 1937 masterwork, whose themes he elaborated upon in subsequent volumes, books and essays.
Appealing both to cultural conservatives and New Age spiritualists (Sorokin saw yoga as a means of integrating spirit and intellect), he attracted the attention of Albert Einstein, Herbert Hoover, and John F. Kennedy. His predictive powers were formidable, and contemporary figures took heed. When he died in 1968, he remained an illustrious, well-known figure, and his opinions were widely written about and explored. Since then, however, he has receded from memory.
Intellektuelle wie Greiner haben sich schon immer als kritisch verstanden. Daher waren sie links zu Zeiten, wo der Mainstream noch konservativ war. Heute ist es andersherum. Die Linken und die Grünen, die dominanten Akteure der Mehrheitsparteien, die „kommentierende Klasse in den Medien“: „Sie alle fürchten, die Hoheit über den sogenannten Diskurs zu verlieren und die bislang unangefochtene Macht, die moralischen Standards des Öffentlichen zu bestimmen. Käme es dahin, ich würde es begrüßen.“ (S.7) So leitet Greiner sein Buch ein. Der Autor wendet sich dagegen, „dass jede Abweichung von der Mitte nach rechts mit dem Nazi-Vorwurf mundtot gemacht“ werde (S.9).
For full disclosure, let me mention that at least one of Scott’s French contacts, Arnaud Imatz, who represents perfectly the kind of French intellectual he describes, is someone whom the author met through me. Arnaud and I have been friends and correspondents for over 30 years, and his understanding of the French nation and the enjeu social (social question) confronting his people make eminently good sense to Scott and me. Although I have focused on German more than French intellectual history, most of the authors and social critics whom Scott cites are for me familiar names. I agree with Scott that Éric Zemmour, a Moroccan Jew who has tried to revive the sense of French honor that he associates with the late General de Gaulle, illustrates the new identitarian French politics. So too does the iconoclastic novelist Michel Houellebecq, who, despite his shockingly erotic work, clearly loathes multiculturalism and despises French Islamophiles. Another figure in this Pleiades of intellectuals of the French right is Christophe Guilluy, who often sounds like the French Steve Bannon. In his books La France périphérique(2014) and Le crepuscule de la France d’en haut (2016), Guilluy comes to the defense of that 60 percent of the French population living on the “periphery,” that is, outside of metropolitan areas and the sprawling suburbs. These are the “les Francais de souche,” the true indigenous French, whom the globalist elites treat like human waste while they cut production costs by bringing in cheap labor from the Muslim Third World.
À la plainte de Schelling (ci-contre) contre une foi occidentale trop profondément infusée de rationalisme et faisant état de sa difficulté de créer une religion « pour soi-même » qui en soit épargnée, succède son appel à la Russie comme étant « destinée à quelque chose de grand ». Cette main tendue, les slavophiles la saisissent en se présentant comme ceux qui ont trouvé la solution au problème romantique : la Russie orthodoxe.
Der Linken galten Comtismus und Positivismus als eine Abart des Konservatismus, der „Szientismus“ war für sie „reaktionär“. Konservative witterten in ihm ein sozialrevolutionäres Ferment. Dieses Janusgesicht, mal konservativ bzw. reaktionär, mal sozialrevolutionär zu sein, ist ganz charakteristisch für den Positivismus. Das hat aber nichts mit der Dialektik des Konservatismus zu tun, der in fortlaufender Auseinandersetzung mit der „fortschrittlichen“ Gegenwart dahin tendiert, revolutionär zu werden. Selbst innerhalb zeitbedingter äußerer Wandlungen behält der Konservatismus sein ihm eigenes Pathos. Und gerade diesem Pathos stellt der Positivismus sein Ethos entgegen: Der Positivismus ist grundsätzlich „sachlich“ und „tatsachenorientiert“, im Gegensatz zu jeglicher Affektgeladenheit ist er objektiv. Überhaupt sind den Positivisten Objektivität und Vernunft einerlei, Vernunft besteht für sie darin, mit der Zeit zu gehen, und nicht etwa zurück – oder nach oben, gen Himmel –, nicht ins eigene Herz, sondern nur vorwärts zu schauen.
« ... Ceci nous ramène à la constitution de l’Angleterre, où il n’y a pas de corps de noblesse destinée à servir le pouvoir, mais un patriciat destiné à l’exercer. »
« Les philosophes qui se sont élevés avec tant d’amertume contre ce qu’ils ont appelé des préjugés, auraient dû commencer par se défaire de la langue elle-même dans laquelle ils écrivaient ; car elle est le premier de nos préjugés, et il renferme tous les autres. »
Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.
Is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s description partly out of date? After all, who touts their allegiance to “diversity” more than the left? But the left’s version of diversity amounts to uniformity of an especially insidious kind. No one may hold a dissenting view about the desirability of “diversity” itself, of course, and “diverse” college faculties are chosen not for their diversity of viewpoints but precisely for their dreary sameness: left-liberals of all shapes and sizes. What’s more, by demanding “diversity” and proportional representation in as many institutions as possible, the left aims to make all of America exactly the same.
This program, wrote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “oozes the spirit of leveling leftism: it was democratic; it was anti-Habsburg (it demanded the destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was against all unpopular minorities, an attitude that is the magnetism of all leftist ideologies.”
Here is where German intellectuals come into the story. Journalists and academics have had a hard time understanding why the Pegida movement emerged when it did and why it has attracted so many people in Germany; there are branches of the Pegida movement in other parts of Europe, but they have gathered only marginal support thus far. Those who suggest it is driven by “anger” and “resentment” are being descriptive at best. What is remarkable, though, is that “rage” as a political stance has received the philosophical blessing of the leading AfD intellectual, Marc Jongen, who is a former assistant of the well-known philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Jongen has not only warned about the danger of Germany’s “cultural self-annihilation”; he has also argued that, because of the cold war and the security umbrella provided by the US, Germans have been forgetful about the importance of the military, the police, warrior virtues—and, more generally, what the ancient Greeks called thymos (variously translated as spiritedness, pride, righteous indignation, a sense of what is one’s own, or rage), in contrast to eros and logos, love and reason. Germany, Jongen says, is currently “undersupplied” with thymos. Only the Japanese have even less of it—presumably because they also lived through postwar pacifism. According to Jongen, Japan can afford such a shortage, because its inhabitants are not confronted with the “strong natures” of immigrants. It follows that the angry demonstrators are doing a damn good thing by helping to fire up thymos in German society.
Like in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality—a continuous inspiration for Sloterdijk—these re-descriptions are supposed to jolt readers out of conventional understandings of the present. However, not much of his work lives up to Nietzsche’s image of the philosopher as a “doctor of culture” who might end up giving the patient an unpleasant or outright shocking diagnosis: Sloterdijk often simply reads back to the German mainstream what it is already thinking, just sounding much deeper because of the ingenuous metaphors and analogies, cute anachronisms, and cascading neologisms that are typical of his highly mannered style. 
Sloterdijk is not the only prominent cultural figure who willfully reinforces a sense of Germans as helpless victims who are being “overrun” and who might eventually face “extinction.” The writer Botho Strauβ recently published an essay titled “The Last German,” in which he declared that he would rather be part of a dying people than one that for “predominantly economic-demographic reasons is mixed with alien peoples, and thereby rejuvenated.” He feels that the national heritage “from Herder to Musil” has already been lost, and yet hopes that Muslims might teach Germans a lesson about what it means to follow a tradition—because Muslims know how to submit properly to their heritage. In fact, Strauβ, who cultivates the image of a recluse in rural East Germany, goes so far as to speculate that only if the German Volk become a minority in their own country will they be able to rediscover and assert their identity. 
Like at least some radicals in the late Sixties, the new right-wing “avant-garde” finds the present moment not just one of apocalyptic danger, but also of exhilaration. There is for instance Götz Kubitschek, a publisher specializing in conservative nationalist or even outright reactionary authors, such as Jean Raspail and Renaud Camus, who keep warning of an “invasion” or a “great population replacement” in Europe. Kubitschek tells Pegida demonstrators that it is a pleasure (lust) to be angry. He is also known for organizing conferences at his manor in Saxony-Anhalt, including for the “Patriotic Platform.” His application to join the AfD was rejected during the party’s earlier, more moderate phase, but he has hosted the chairman of the AfD, Björn Höcke, in Thuringia. Höcke, a secondary school teacher by training, offered a lecture last fall about the differences in “reproduction strategies” of “the life-affirming, expansionary African type” and the place-holding European type. Invoking half-understood bits and pieces from the ecological theories of E. O. Wilson, Höcke used such seemingly scientific evidence to chastise Germans for their “decadence.” 
For instance, 
, the 2010 Stanford University Press book on anti-globalization movements by Charles Lindholm and José Pedro Zúquete contains a quite balanced and well-informed chapter on the European New Right. (See Michael O’Meara’s review 
contains extensive chapters on the French National Front and Italy’s Northern League.
In chapter 1, Hawley argues that modern American conservatism was defined by William F. Buckley and National Review in the 1950s. The conservative movement was a coalition of free market capitalists, Christians, and foreign policy hawks. Hawley points out that based on ideology alone, there is no necessary reason why any of these groups would be Right wing or allied with each other. Indeed, the pre-World War II “Old Right” of people like Albert Jay Nock and H. L. Mencken tended to be anti-interventionist, irreligious, and economically populist and protectionist rather than free market. National Review was also philo-Semitic from the start and increasingly anti-racist, whereas the pre-War American Right had strong racialist and anti-Semitic elements. What unified the National Review coalition was not a common ideology but a common enemy: Communism.
Chapter 5, “Ready for Prime Time?” is devoted to mainstream libertarianism, including Milton Friedman, the Koch Brothers, the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, the Ron Paul movement, and libertarian youth organizations. Chapter 6, “Enemies of the State,” deals with more radical strands of libertarianism, including 19th-century American anarchists like Josiah Warren and Lysander Spooner, the Austrian School of economics, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Lew Rockwell, the Mises Institute, and the Libertarian Party. Again, Hawley has read widely with an unfailing eye for essentials.
Paleoconservatism is defined in opposition to neoconservatism, the largely Jewish intellectual movement that largely took over mainstream conservatism by the 1980s, aided by William F. Buckley who dutifully purged their opponents. Since the neoconservatives are largely Jewish, and many of the founders were ex-Marxists or Cold War liberals, their ascendancy has meant the subordination of Christian conservatives and free marketeers to the hawkish interventionist wing of the movement. Now that the Cold War is over, the primary concern of neoconservative hawks is tricking Americans into fighting wars for Israel.
Chapter 9, “Voices of the Radical Right,” covers White Nationalism in America, with discussions of progressive era racialists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard; contemporary race realism; the rise and decline of such organizations as the KKK, American Nazi Party, Aryans Nations, and the National Alliance; the world of online White Nationalism; and Kevin MacDonald’s work on the Jewish question — which brings us up to where we started, namely the task of forging a North American New Right.
Et Donoso Cortès de continuer son analyse, en clamant que les révolutions «sont la maladie des peuples riches, des peuples libres», le monde ancien étant «un monde où les esclaves composaient la majeure partie du genre humain», le «germe des révolutions n'étant pas dans l'esclavage», malgré l'exemple de Spartacus qui ne fit que fomenter quelque guerre civile : «Non, Messieurs, le germe des révolutions n'est pas dans l'esclavage, n'est pas dans la misère; le germe des révolutions est dans les désirs de la multitude surexcitée par les tribuns qui l'exploitent à leur profit. Vous serez comme les riches, telle est la formule des révolutions socialistes contre les classes moyennes. Vous serez comme les nobles, telle est la formule des révolutions des classes moyennes contre les classes nobiliaires. Vous serez comme les rois, telle est la formule des révolutions des classes aristocratiques contre les rois» (p. 100), et l'auteur de conclure sa gradation par l'image logique, théologique : «Vous serez comme des dieux, telle est la formule de la première révolte du premier homme contre Dieu. Depuis Adam, le premier rebelle, jusqu'à Proudhon, le dernier impie, telle est la formule de toutes les révolutions» (p. 101).
Almost all of Gómez Dávila’s writings are collections of aphorisms called — in Spanish — Escolios. Escolios comes from the Greek scholión, which literally means commentary. This term was used in old manuscripts for commentaries made between the lines by someone other than the original author of the text. These escolios have been compiled into his main works: Escolios a un Texto Implícito I, Escolios a un Texto Implícito II, Nuevos Escolios a un Texto Implícito I, Nuevos Escolios a un Texto Implícito II, and Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila, being a devout Catholic, was also highly critical of modern atheism by affirming that “todo fin diferente de Dios nos deshonra”[12]: “every goal different from God dishonors us” and that we must “Creer en Dios, confiar en Cristo”[13]: “Believe in God, trust in Christ.” This spiritual aspect of life is what provides an adequate interpretation of it: “si no heredamos una tradicion espiritual que la interprete, la experiencia de la vida nada enseña”[14]: “if we do not inherit a spiritual tradition which interprets it, life experience teaches nothing.”
Fourth, there is a common dislike of war and, more especially, of war-society, the kind of society this country knew in 1917 and 1918 under Woodrow Wilson and again under FDR in World War II. Libertarians may protest this, and with some ground. For, the complete libertarian is certainly more likely to resist in overt fashion than is the conservative–for whom respect for nation and for patriotism is likely to be decisive even when it is a war he opposes. Even so, I think there is enough common ground, at least with respect to principle, to put conservatives and libertarians together. And let us remember that beginning with the Spanish-American War, which the conservative McKinley opposed strongly, and coming down through each of the wars this century in which the United States became involved, the principal opposition to American entry came from those elements of the economy and social order which were generally identifiable as conservative-whether “middle western isolationist,” traditional Republican, central European ethnic, small business, or however we wish to designate such opposition. I am certainly not unmindful of the libertarian opposition to war that could come from a Max Eastman and a Eugene Debs and from generally libertarian conscientious objectors in considerable number in both world wars, but the solid and really formidable opposition against American entry came from those closely linked to business, church, local community, family, and traditional morality. (Tocqueville correctly identified this class in America as reluctant to engage in any foreign war because of its predictable impact upon business and commerce chiefly, but other, social and moral activities as well.) This was the element in American life, not the miniscule libertarian element, that both Woodrow Wilson and FDR had to woo, persuade, propagandize, convert and, in some instances, virtually terrorize, in order to pave the way for eventual entry by U.S. military forces in Europe and Asia.
To argue, as some libertarians have, that a solid, strong body of authority in society is incompatible with individual creativity is to ignore or misread cultural history. Think of the great cultural efflorescences of the 5th century B.C. in Athens, of 1st century, Augustan Rome, of the 13th century in Europe, of the Age of Louis XIV, and Elizabethan England. One and all these were ages of social and moral order, powerfully supported by moral codes and political statutes. But the Aeschyluses, Senecas, Roger Bacons, Molieres, and Shakespeares flourished nonetheless. Far from feeling oppressed by the hierarchical authority all around him, Shakespeare–about whose copious individuality there surely cannot be the slightest question–is the author of the memorable passage that begins with “Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark! what discord follows; each thing meets in mere oppugnancy.” As A. L. Rowse has emphasized and documented in detail, the social structure of Shakespeare’s England was not only solid, its authority ever evident, but nothing threw such fear into the people as the thought that authority–especially that designed to repulse foreign enemies and to ferret out traitors–might be made too loose and tenuous. Of course such authority could become too insistent at times, and ingenious ways were found by the dramatists and essayists to outwit the government and its censors. After all, it was strong social and moral authority the creative minds were living under–not the oppressive, political-bureaucratic, limitless invasive, totalitarian governments of the twentieth century.
Libertarians, whom I herewith stipulate to be as patriotic and loyal American as any conservatives, do not, in my judgment, see the national and world picture as I have just drawn in. For them the essential picture is not that of a weakened, softened, and endangered nation in a world of Soviet Unions and Chinas and their satellites, but, rather, an American nation swollen from the juices of nationalism, interventionism and militarism that really has little to fear from abroad. Conservatives remain by and large devoted to the smaller patriotisms of family, church, locality, job and voluntary association, but they tend to see these as perishable, as destined to destruction, unless the nation in which they exist can recover a degree of eminence and international authority it has not had since the 1950’s. To libertarians on the other hand, judging from many of their writings and speeches, it is as though the steps necessary to recovery of this eminence and international authority are more dangerous to Americans and their liberties than any aggressive, imperialist totalitarianisms in the world.
Vooreerst is het belangrijk om op te merken dat sommigen een schijnbare paradox vaststellen bij Burkes gedachtegoed. Zo was hij enerzijds een fervente criticus van het Britse koloniale bestuur in Indië en ondersteunde hij de Amerikaanse revolutionairen in hun onafhankelijkheidsstrijd, anderzijds was hij een fervente tegenstander van de Franse revolutionairen. De meeste auteurs wijzen echter op de continuïteit die men in deze attitudes aantreft, vooral wanneer men nauwgezet de Reflections on the revolution in France (1790) erop naleest. In dit werk, waarvoor hij zo bekend (of berucht) is geworden als vader van het moderne politieke conservatisme, maakt hij een duidelijk onderscheid tussen de traditie van de (Engelse) Glorious Revolution (1688) (en die hij ook terugvond bij de Amerikaanse revolutie) en de Franse revolutionairen van 1789 en nadien. 
