Against Liberalism: Society Is Not a Market, Alain de Benoist, Middle Europe Books, 2024, £23.
Alain de Benoist is the leading figure of the French New Right, a movement characterised as ‘far right’ by mainstream progressive liberals, and Wikipedia, but which even the most cursory acquaintance reveals to be highly eclectic, drawing as it does on traditions ranging from pre-war German revolutionary conservatism to the Marxist critique of capitalism. The hallmark of the New Right is an implacable opposition to progressive liberalism. It rejects the ‘market society’, which makes a fetish of productivity and growth, and destroys our sense of the common good. And it regards liberal democracy as a caricature of true democracy, a means of enabling a caste of professional politicians and technocrats to exercise power over a passive population.
This might explain why the New Right is regarded as beyond the pale by mainstream liberal conservatives, wedded as they are to the established dogmas of liberal individualism; and also, perhaps, why the only blurb on the cover of de Benoist’s new book, handsomely produced by Middle Europe Books of Budapest, is from the founder of The Scorpion, a magazine with an unsavoury penchant for subject matter relating to race and IQ, eugenics, Nietzsche, and the Third Reich. This is doubly unfortunate, first because the notion that there exist superior and inferior races is comprehensively rejected by de Benoist, and second because Against Liberalism is a tour de force, a devastating assault on progressive liberalism and all that it entails, executed with forensic precision and profound scholarship. As such, it ought to be essential reading for anyone interested in conservatism.
Critiques of liberalism already feature in Anglophone political philosophy. The most prominent exponents are the ‘communitarians’ (Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer are the most notable) who argue that since man can only ever be conceived as a social being raised in a community, it is meaningless to consider the individual as a being endowed with transcendent universal rights enjoying a merely contractual relation with society – the ‘social contract’. But either they write from a perspective that is broadly within the Anglophone tradition of capitalistic liberal individualism, or they take refuge, like Macintyre, in a nostalgic vision of pre-Enlightenment religious communities. De Benoist, by contrast, is rooted in a continental tradition of political philosophy that is inherently suspicious of both liberalism and capitalism; and therein lies the force and interest of his work to Anglophone readers.
De Benoist has no time for the finer distinctions and conceptual confusions that inevitably arise when the term ‘liberalism’ is deployed. For him, liberalism is at heart a doctrine, an ideology, at once philosophical, political, and social. It is founded on ‘an anthropology essentially based on individualism and economism’, and it is this ‘anthropological error’ at the heart of liberalism that de Benoist seeks to critically analyse in this book.
Although liberalism is not synonymous with modernity, out of it flows nearly everything that is most detestable about the modern world: the religion of the rights of man, disposable goods and planned obsolescence, work reduced to labour, alienation and loneliness, conditioning through advertising, the tyranny of fashion, the judicializing of everything, social control, political correctness, the disintegration of communities, open borders and mass immigration, globalisation, rampant consumerism, ecological destruction, extreme economic inequalities, the crisis of democracy, the emergence of ‘contemporary art’ – to name but a few. Moreover, as pre-liberal social and cultural bonds are undermined, as individual rights are multiplied and society fragments – inevitable developments in a market society – the liberal democracies are rendered incapable of collective political action or of defending themselves on the world stage. De Benoist doubtless puts the worst possible construction on liberalism and its deleterious effects. But when one considers the current state of the Western liberal democracies, the least one can say is that his arguments are frighteningly plausible.
For de Benoist, the foundational premise of liberalism, and prime cause of all that has gone wrong, is the celebrated Enlightenment conception of man as bearer of ‘fundamental individual and inalienable rights’, who owes nothing to society, culture, or history, but whose right to freely pursue his own best interest arises from ‘the mere fact of his existence’. Society is thereby rendered ‘a society of individuals’, an ‘aggregate of private interests’, a ‘civil society’ whose legitimacy is based exclusively on law.
The establishment of a peaceable civil society in which the rights of the individual are guaranteed by the rule of law would seem, on the face of it, a notable and precious achievement – indeed, many conservatives would consider it the crowning glory of the West. But much else follows from the dogma of the sovereign individual. First, the individual endowed with inalienable rights, ‘the right to have rights’, owes, by definition, nothing to society. Although he is bound by formal legal rules and obligations, he is free to follow his preferences and live the life he chooses, however selfish or degrading, so long as he does not infringe the right of others to do the same. The deleterious result is that any notion of a political community, in which citizens are obliged to participate qua citizens and to which they bear allegiance, is eliminated, along with any notion of the common good, or of higher values and ethical principles, that might inform that community.
Liberals like to flatter themselves that liberal man has been emancipated and possesses autonomy, the dead hand of custom giving way to the light of reason. But for de Benoist, true autonomy and true freedom do not consist in ‘cutting oneself off from one’s peers’, but ‘in the capacity to think and act on one’s own without eliminating all relation to others’. The liberty enjoyed by liberal man is not autonomy, but independence; and this independence, this freedom from social obligations or responsibilities, inevitably degenerates into ‘the interaction of egoisms’, ‘mimetic rivalry’, and ‘the desire to eliminate competition’.
The liberty de Benoist is after is Benjamin Constant’s ‘liberty of the Ancients’. Not ‘the right to free myself from public life’, but ‘the ability to participate in public life’. In this republican tradition, political life and participative democracy take precedence over the rights of the individual because the freedom of the individual is contingent on the freedom of a people. True democracy is not a crowd of ‘spectators who vote’, but the exercise of a people’s collective will. In any case, the unconditional freedom of the individual is a very thin form of freedom. The effect of emancipating the individual from all contingent forms of belonging and identity, from all social, cultural and historical forms of determination, is merely to empty him of ‘his inmost humanity’, and deny him any concrete or meaningful form of being in the world. He is reduced to a mere bundle of instincts and appetitive desires.
The corollary of the society of individuals is, of course, the market society – the society where man ceases to be a person and becomes an economic agent. Liberal man’s ‘limitlessness of desire’ and ‘maximisation of self-interest’ finds its perfect expression in the endless accumulation of goods, capital, and profits – an obsession with growth, productivity, and technical progress. But although economic man’s endless pursuit of accumulation, his ‘permanent dissatisfaction’, is a good recipe for wealth creation, it is unlikely to bring happiness. Traditional societies, by contrast, were never defined by economic activity, and such economic activity as did take place usually took the form of reciprocity and gifting, not the exchange of commodities in the marketplace.
Two other consequences follow from the inalienable rights dogma. The first is ‘the principle of equal liberty’. Since all individuals are entitled to equal treatment under the law, their rights conferred by virtue of their very existence, none may be excluded or afforded preferential treatment on account of their contingent identities or ‘forms of belonging’. They are rendered abstract individuals and are, in effect, interchangeable. This universalism manifests itself in a rejection of hereditary elites and a preference for open borders and free movement. The result is laissez faire, laissez passer – the free circulation of labour and capital necessary for global markets to function efficiently. Nations and peoples are dissolved, and liberal democratic states rendered politically impotent and defenceless.
The second is that since the status of individuals arises solely from inalienable rights guaranteed by law, all other characteristics – social, cultural, sexual – are rendered contingent and incidental. Emancipated from all moral norms and social conventions, the individual is left to construct his identity from scratch. Political liberalism thereby evolves into social liberalism. Indeed, for Jean-Claude Michéa, there exists ‘a profound unity’ of the various forms of liberalism – economic, political, social and cultural. This explains the apparent paradox that the postmodern counterculture of the Left, which seeks to eliminate all forms of discrimination, and whose concern for ‘the excluded’ has displaced its former concern for the worker, has progressed in tandem with neo-liberal globalist capitalism. For both share an interest in promoting the decomposition of traditional social norms and the erosion of traditional forms of belonging. The result is ‘the great ideological osmosis of a financial Right that has betrayed the nation and a ‘permissive’ Left that has betrayed the people’.
De Benoist is predictably scathing about ‘conservative liberals’ who advocate economic liberalism while attempting to defend traditional social and cultural values, for it is precisely the liberal economic order, founded as it is on the ideals of mobility, flexibility, open borders, and ‘generalized nomadism’, that erodes the basis of these traditional values. How, asks de Benoist, can one defend ‘the identity of peoples or nations’ while considering these as ‘nothing more than aggregates of separate individuals’? Any genuine form of conservatism defends ‘the existence of a certain number of anthropological constants that liberalism automatically deconstructs the moment it ceases to consider man a social and political being by nature’. But at least Roger Scruton, who ‘wants to consider himself both conservative and liberal’, and who is cited several times, recognises the paradox. De Benoist quotes him thus:
… the individual does not exist independently from a social body, and when economic liberties are exalted like a new form of religion, they increasingly threaten the social bonds and thereby the individual’s own existence.
Special wrath, however, is reserved for Hayek, whose depiction of the unfettered market as the most perfect embodiment of human progress is subjected to an extended and savage critique. For Hayek, the modern market forms ‘a spontaneous’ social and economic order that ‘no human will can reproduce or surpass’; indeed, any attempt to interfere with it, to institute social or economic reform, will only produce negative results. But Hayek’s insistence that because the market is an impersonal self-regulating system, its results cannot be ‘unjust’ or in need of correction – people only have themselves to blame if they lose the game – is characterised by de Benoist as ‘a naked apology of success’, a reprehensible ‘indifference to human unhappiness’. The liberty of the individual is only of value only in so far as it promotes the efficient functioning of the market; and democracy is only permissible so long as liberal principles go unquestioned, which reduces it to ‘an affair of impersonal rules and formal procedures without content’. As for customs and traditions, these only have value insofar as they constitute ‘prerational regulations’ that favoured the emergence of the market and progress toward modernity. Any tradition running in the contrary direction, anything smacking of organic society, or of the common good, or social value, or ‘shared symbolic imagination’, will be steamrolled.
What is to be done? De Benoist is at pains to insist that he is not opposed to the market or to economic activity per se – only when the values of the market usurp a community’s social and cultural values and undermine the common good. It is therefore the role of the state to ensure that the market is kept firmly in its place. But nor does he support a bureaucratic, therapeutic welfare state that ‘mothers its citizens and deprives them of responsibility’. The answer, then, lies not in opposing the public to the private, the state to the market, but in fostering participative democracy and locally organised citizen initiatives, founded on notions of municipality, mutuality, solidarity, and, above all, reciprocity.
It is unfortunate that de Benoist’s rejection of Christianity – on the grounds that its legacy of individualism, universalism, and egalitarianism has played a major role in the development of liberalism – prevents him from seeing that Catholic social teaching, as embodied in Rerum Novarum, has much to offer, founded as it is on notions of reciprocity, participation, the dignity of work, the family, and our social responsibilities. An obscure chapter detailing ‘critical value theory’, which will be opaque to all but the most ardent students of Marxist economic theory, adds little to the argument. It would have been better if the author had provided some practical examples of alternative forms of economic organisation – such as those developed by Ivan Illich in his depiction of a ‘convivial society’, whose institutions and tools are designed to prioritise use values over exchange values and foster organic forms of community.
Conservatives raised in the broad liberal tradition will be uneasy about De Benoist’s apparent devaluation of our individual liberties, private property, the rule of law, representative government, parliamentary democracy, and even our Judaeo-Christian roots. His praise for Viktor Orbán and Hungary’s experiment in ‘illiberal democracy’ is unqualified. But when the soul of a people is extinguished, its voice silenced, its history and its culture sacrificed on the altar of diversity and inclusion, talk of our liberal traditions begins to ring hollow.
