A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right - Matthew Rose

Category: Education, Political
Language: English
Keywords: America Culture Freedom History Liberalism Liberty Philosophy Progressivism Religion

Written by Matthew Rose
Read by Jeff Harding
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 5h 54m

A bracing account of liberalism’s most radical critics, introducing one of the most controversial movements of the 20th century.

In this eye-opening book, Matthew Rose introduces us to one of the most controversial intellectual movements of the 20th century, the “radical right,” and discusses its adherents’ different attempts to imagine political societies after the death or decline of liberalism.

Questioning democracy’s most basic norms and practices, these critics rejected ideas about human equality, minority rights, religious toleration, and cultural pluralism not out of implicit biases, but out of explicit principle.

They disagree profoundly on race, religion, economics, and political strategy, but they all agree that a post-liberal political life will soon be possible.

Focusing on the work of Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis, Rose shows how such thinkers are animated by religious aspirations and anxieties that are ultimately in tension with Christian teachings and the secular values those teachings birthed in modernity.

—
Morningside Institute religious scholar Matthew Rose (’Ethics with Barth: God, Metaphysics and Morals’) delivers a first-rate intellectual history of the “dissident authors and taboo traditions” that have influenced “a revolution in conservative thinking” that questions minority rights, religious tolerance, cultural pluralism, and other tenets of the liberal-progressive world order.

Rose unpacks the writings of far right commentators and academics including Samuel Francis, a former Washington Times columnist and “right-wing Marxist” whose political doctrine “synthesized nationalist populism with brewing racial resentments over the shrinking demographic majority of white Americans,” and Alain de Benoist, a leader of the French far right whose theories of “folk democracy” highlighted the need for “cultural cohesion and a clear sense of shared heritage.”

Though Rose critiques the conclusions reached by these thinkers, he takes their ideas seriously, explaining how the socio-economic failures of neo-liberalism have led to an embrace of ethno-nationalism and a contempt for egalitarianism.

Ultimately, Rose persuasively argues that the roots of today’s “post-liberal moment” are more substantial than many on the right and the left want to believe.

This is an illuminating deep dive into an urgent political matter.