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Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist (born 11 December 1943) is a French academic, philosopher, a founder of the Nouvelle Droite (New Right) and head of the French think tank GRECE. He is little known outside his native France. Benoist bills himself as a critic of liberalism, free markets and egalitarianism.

Biography

Alain de Benoist was born in Saint-Symphorien and attended the Sorbonne. He has studied law, philosophy, sociology, and the history of religions. He is an admirer of Europe and paganism.

Benoist is the editor of two journals: Nouvelle Ecole ("New School") since 1968 and Krisis since 1988. His writings have appeared in Mankind Quarterly, The Scorpion, Tyr, Chronicles, and various newspapers such as Le Figaro. The New Left journal Telos has also published some of Benoist's work, which led to protests from some scholars on the editorial board. In 1978, he received the Grand Prix de l’Essai from the Académie Française for his book Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Copernic, 1977). He has published more than 50 books, including On Being a Pagan (Ultra, 2005, ISBN 0-9720292-2-2).

Core Views

Alain de Benoist was previously associated with different right wing persons linked with the Algerian independence war. From being close to fascist French 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, Helmut Schelsky, Konrad Lorenz, and other intellectuals.

Against the liberal melting-pot of the U.S., Benoist is in favour of separate civilisations and cultures. He also says he opposes Jean-Marie Le Pen, racism and anti-Semitism. He has opposed Arab immigration in France, while supporting ties with Islamic culture. He has also tried to distance himself from Adolf Hitler, Vichy France or Aryan supremacy, in favor of concepts like "ethnopluralism," in which organic, ethnic cultures and nations must live and develop in separation from one another. He also opposes Christianity as inherently intolerant, theocractic and bent on persecution.

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 role in forming an intellectual elite. In addition, he says egalitarianism is destructive because it ruins the superior qualities and genetic aristocracy in the human race. Benoist 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. He also said that "an intelligent racism, which has a sense of ethnicity, is less harmful than an intemperate, leveling, assimilating anti-racism," -- and violence-prone extremists used the quote as a slogan. 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 Heidegger over his first influence, 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.