Greg Johnson and guest Keith Woods (Substack, Twitter) were joined by James Tucker (Substack, Twitter), author of the recent Counter-Currents essay “Where George Grant Went Wrong,” for the second half of the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio. (more…)
Tag: individualism
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3,082 words
The New York Times quoted French social critic Jacques Barzun when they defined decadence as the “economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development,” in a 2020 article entitled “The Age of Decadence.” (more…)
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3,644 words
This is the second part of the notes for a lecture entitled “The Conquest of Nature: Ayn Rand,” from October 1999. This was the seventh lecture of an eight-lecture course called “The Pursuit of Happiness,” delivered to my adult education group, The Invisible College, in Atlanta.
Ayn Rand wasn’t always an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Indeed, the early Ayn Rand was a Nietzschean with an aristocratic disdain for commercial society. (more…)
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2,340 words
Part 2 here
Christopher Lasch famously described the family as a “haven in a heartless world.”[1] How is the world heartless, and how is the family a haven? For Lasch, the heartlessness of the world has everything to do with the increasing liberalization and economization of life. (more…)
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White people face enormous challenges today.
Our living standards are declining due to globalization, immigration, and anti-white discrimination.
Our societies are being destroyed by multiculturalism, anti-whiteness, and the debasement of all standards: of behavior, of education, of taste. (more…)
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2,756 words
Christopher Rufo is an outspoken conservative critic of Critical Race Theory and the bizarre excesses of “sex ed” in today’s schools. He is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (New York: Broadside Books, 2023). (more…)
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1,190 words
Richard Hanania is a rising star among Right-wing intellectuals. He has a J.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA. He first came to national attention in 2015 with an op-ed in The Washington Post about why Donald Trump was right not to apologize for his controversial remarks. (This is ironic, given recent events.) (more…)
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August 3, 2023 Alain de Benoist
Against Liberalism:
Society Is Not a Market,
Chapter I, Part 3: What Is Liberalism?4,142 words
Part 3 of 3 (Introduction Part 1 here, Chapter I Part 2 here)
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
This strictly economic representation of society has considerable consequences. Finishing off the process of secularization and “disenchantment” of the world that is characteristic of modernity, it results in the dissolution of peoples and the systematic erosion of their particularities. At the sociological level, the adoption of economic exchange leads the society to be divided into producers, owners, and sterile classes (such as the former aristocracy) at the end of an altogether revolutionary process. (more…)
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3,287 words
Part 1 of 3 (Introduction Part 1 here, Chapter I Part 1 here, Chapter I Part 3 here)
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
Liberalism must, however, recognize the fact of society. But instead of asking why the social realm exists, liberals are mainly preoccupied with understanding how society is able to establish itself, maintain itself, and function. Society, as we have seen, is for them nothing but the sum of its members (the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts). It is nothing but the contingent product of individual wills, a mere assemblage of individuals all seeking to defend and satisfy their particular interests. (more…)
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3,856 words
Part 1 of 3 (Introduction Part 1 here, Introduction Part 3 here, Chapter 1 Part 2 here)
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
Not being the work of a single man, liberalism has never presented itself as a unified doctrine. The authors who have laid claim to the name liberal have sometimes given divergent and even contradictory interpretations of it. Yet there must have been enough points in common between them to consider them liberal authors. It is precisely these points in common that allow us to define liberalism as a school. (more…)
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3,103 words
Part 3 of 3 (Introduction Part I here, Introduction Part II here, Chapter 1 Part 1 here)
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
Let us sum up. Man is a “social animal” whose existence is consubstantial with that of society. Justice in the first instance is not a matter of rights but of measure; i.e., it is only defined as a relation of equity between persons living in society, so there are no holders of rights outside social life, and within it there are only those to whom rights are attributed. (more…)
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Part 2 of 3 (Introduction Part I here, Introduction Part III here)
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
Now, for liberalism, man — far from being constituted as such by his bonds with others — must be thought of as an individual unbound by any constitutive form of belonging; i.e., outside any cultural or socio-historical context. (more…)
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Part 1 of 3 (Introduction Part II here)
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
When liberalism is said to be the dominant ideology of our time, there are always those who protest by citing, for example, the amount of public expenditures or the level of taxation in our country. But this is looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. A liberal society is not exactly the same thing as a liberal economy. (more…)