Alain de Benoist - Views

Views

From being close to French-Algerian movements at the beginning of his writings in 1970, he moved to attacks on globalisation, unrestricted mass immigration and liberalism as being ultimately fatal to the existence of Europe through their divisiveness and internal faults. His influences include Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Jünger, Jean Baudrillard, Georges Dumézil, Ernest Renan, José Ortega y Gasset, Vilfredo Pareto, Guy Debord, Arnold Gehlen, Stéphane Lupasco, Helmut Schelsky, Konrad Lorenz, the German Conservative Revolutionary movement, and the Non-conformists of the 1930s.

Against the American liberal idea of a melting pot, Benoist is in favour of separate civilisations and cultures. He opposed Jean-Marie Le Pen (even though many people influenced by Benoist support him), racism and antisemitism. He has opposed Arab immigration to France, while supporting ties with Islamic culture. He favors concepts of "ethnopluralism," in which organic, ethnic cultures and nations must live and develop in separation from one another.

He also opposes Christianity as inherently intolerant, theocratic and bent on persecution.

De Benoist has made pointed criticism of the United States: "Better to wear the helmet of a Red Army soldier," he wrote in 1982, "than to live on a diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn." In 1991, he complained that European supporters of the first Gulf War were "collaborators of the American order."

Benoist argues that heredity is dominant in forming an intellectual elite. In addition, he argues that Europe must return to its pre-Christian roots and uses the Indo-European model, such as Nordic, Celtic, Greek and Roman civilisations, as an alternative to communism and capitalism. "We want to substitute faith for law, mythos for logos... will for pure reason, the image for the concept, and home for exile," he once wrote.

Benoist has said he opposed racism and violence, saying he is building "a school of thought, not a political movement." While he has complained that nations like the United States suffer from "homogenization," due to multiracial industrialization, he has also distanced himself from some of Jean-Marie Le-Pen's views on immigration.

Benoist considers himself, however, neither left nor right-wing, and has recently tried to appear less radical: in his preference for Martin Heidegger over his first influence, Friedrich Nietzsche; his support of multiculturalism rather than disappearance of immigrants' identities (though he does not support immigration itself); his interest in ecology; and a less aggressive view of Christianity. He has said that he hopes to see free-debate and greater popular participation in democracy, although he is also critical of modern democracy.

Benoist also promotes a type of federalism, in which the nation state is surpassed, giving way to regional identities and a common continental one at once. This would be distinct from what he sees as the consumerism and materialism of American society, as well as the bureaucracy and repression of the Soviet Union. This vision looks to a Europe of specific peoples, each with their own cultures and heritages.

His critics, such as Thomas Sheehan, argue that Benoist has developed a novel restatement of fascism. Roger Griffin, using an ideal type definition of fascism which includes "populist ultra-nationalism" and "palingenesis" (heroic rebirth), argues that the Nouvelle Droite draws on such "fascist" ideologues as Armin Mohler and Julius Evola in a way that allows Nouvelle Droite ideologues such as de Benoist to claim a "metapolitical" stance, but which nonetheless has residual "fascistic" ideological elements. Benoist's critics also claim his views recall Nazi attempts to replace German Christianity with its own paganism.