Beyond Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist is a controversial French intellectual, often seen as the leader of the “New Right”, a small but well-known school of thought centered on the GRECE think tank. I don't consider myself an expert on his thought, so the following remarks are preliminary only. While I can't say I like De Benoist's broadside against human rights, he does raise a number of important, interesting and sometimes disturbing points. De Benoist is opposed to liberal human rights since they make the individual sovereign in relation to society or the community. The most important political problem becomes how to defend the individual and his private sphere against the state or the collective (any collective), and thereby to safe-guard his “rights”. These “rights” tend to multiply over time, and eventually become demands *on* the state, which responds by totalitarian interventions both home and abroad against everything that supposedly threatens the unlimited “rights” of individuals. The author ties this to the global spread of a “free” market economy, and American “humanitarian interventions” against supposedly undemocratic states in the Third World and elsewhere. Benoist is opposed to both globalization and U.S. interventionism.

To Benoist, the individual of liberal discourse is really an abstraction. Humans are social (and political) animals, which means that the individual (if he even exists) is constituted by a pre-existing community and its various social, political and economic relations. Indeed, rights can only be exercised or guaranteed in a political-societal context. Nor were individuals free in a “state of nature”. For humans, no such state has ever existed. The rest of nature is illiberal and hierarchic, forcing the liberals to abandon it as a source for the “natural” human rights. Paradoxically, human rights – supposedly implemented to defend the unique individual – really turn all individuals into carbon-copies of each other, since their rights can only be derived from their shared “humanity”. The only way to make this shared, abstract humanness concrete, is to actually make everyone equal. (This would explain the constant contradiction within liberal society between mass leveling and individualism. It also explains why even capitalism has a “leveling” side, in the form of mass consumerism. Every individual drinks Coca Cola!) In the end, “human rights” trumps national self-determination and even democracy itself, with Western nations attacking democracies in the Third World where people vote for all the “wrong” candidates. (Benoist doesn't mention any examples, but Venezuela could be one.) As for the contradiction between “individual/negative rights” and “social/positive rights” (such as the right to work, the right to education, etc), De Benoist is surprisingly positive to the latter, despite being a right-winger, since social rights at least restores the collective-societal-communitarian dimension. There can be no “social” rights without some form of collective action and/or collective, supra-individual level. A contradiction not discussed in the book is the one between individualist liberalism and multi-culturalist liberalism, with its group rights. Logically, De Benoist should be more positive towards the multi-culturalists! He does point out that "freedoms" are often better defended by groups rather than individuals. He seems to have ethnic groups, families and guilds in mind.

An interesting point made by De Benoist (who is anti-Christian) is that individual rights are really a Christian, theological idea. Where can the shared essential nature of humanity come from, if it can't be derived from “nature” or the myriad of competing and different human cultures? It can only come from a monotheistic god, who endows all humans with an immortal soul, all souls being of essentially the same substance. Since the Christian is a citizen of heaven, and only secondarily part of the sinful “earthly city”, this means that the individual has a higher destiny than any earthly-temporal polity. In this way, Christianity elevates the sovereign individual over and above every community or collectivity. De Benoist admits, though, that the hierarchic perspective of the Catholic Church stopped the individualist tendencies from working themselves out until the modern period, when they were taken up by secular philosophers. But if human rights or morality can't be derived from God or Nature, doesn't this lead to relativism? There are indeed relativist tendencies in “Beyond Human Rights”, although the author prefers to call himself “pluralist” rather than relativist. All humans are opposed to oppression and crave freedom, but the concrete manifestations of these urges are varied and have to be respected on their own terms. Thus, De Benoist believes that we can't condemns female circumcision in Africa, since it's (supposedly) voluntarily accepted even by the women concerned. No “humanitarian intervention” is permissible. What we can do, at most, is to refuse to implement it in *our* society, and perhaps initiate a process of discussion in African societies, whereby they reach the conclusion that female circumcision is somehow wrong within their own cultural context.

In the last section, Alain de Benoist outlines his own alternative to liberal human rights. It turns out to be a form of pre-modern, “tribal” democracy or early modern republicanism, where democratic deliberations take place among relatively equal “citizens” who live in a homogenous community with shared values. It's at least implied that homogenous means ethnically homogenous. “Freedom” means the ability (or even duty) to participate in the political decision-making, but above all the freedom of the community or republic from outside interference. The freedom of the individual citizen is thus tied to the freedom of the collective. In another little book, “The Problem of Democracy”, Alain de Benoist extols Athens and even talks about aristo-democracy, suggesting that not everyone in the ideal city is a “citizen”. How the non-citizens should defend their freedoms is never spelled out.

Finally, some possible objections to “Beyond Human Rights”. If the Machiavellian or Jeffersonian republic is better than, say, autocratic kingship (which De Benoist seems to imply), why can't *that* be an argument for intervention? Athens sometimes intervened, arms in hand, in other Greek city-states in order to change their system of government. They had local supporters handy, too. If humans naturally crave freedom, why can't traditional Christian, Sufi, Shia and pagan communities in the Middle East band together with the United States in order to obtain much-needed arms for use against ISIS, which threatens their traditional way of life (and often their very lives)? What about the U.S. Civil War? The South wasn't one community, but two: the Black community supported the intervention of the Union. They were obviously “defending freedoms”… Some human practices are so obnoxious that it becomes difficult to take strict non-intervention seriously: cannibalism was widespread in New Guinea before being suppressed by the colonial powers. It's also difficult not to sympathize with Cato's dictum “Carthago delendam”, since Carthage was steeped in the blood of child sacrifice. How can cannibalism, child sacrifice or female circumcision be abolished by an *internal* process in a society that considers such practices internal and integral parts of its culture? There is also a tension in De Benoist's distinction between relativism and pluralism, since – without a transcendental dimension – “pluralism” simply *is* relativism or even nihilism. Surely even the value of pluralism must be grounded in “The City of God” (or at least Mount Olympus with its plural deities).

I also veer towards the idea that “individualism” of the kind widespread today must be replaced by some form of more communitarian vision, not least because of the ecological crisis. Thus, the idea of a virtuous republic “defending freedoms” finds a certain resonance in me, albeit I would make it more inclusive and “elective”, rather than De Benoist's narrow ethno-nationalist vision. That being said, however, I suspect that De Benoist's 100% opposition to our boys intervening abroad will be taken advantage of by people who are defending the very opposite of “freedoms”. Indeed, the editors of this volume bemoans the fate of “the former Yugoslavia” (really Milosevic), “Iraq” (really Saddam) and “Libya” (really Gaddafi). Hardly Germanic tribes meeting in assembly! I also feel that De Benoist's rejection of a transcendental sphere in favor of “the political” (whatever that means exactly – the term is never defined in this book) will lead him straight to some really earthy tribal wars…

Perhaps we must go beyond Alain de Benoist to really defend our freedoms?

That being said, I will nevertheless give this problematic book, published by the essentially fascist Arktos, four stars for at least stimulating my thinking.