Alain de Benoist, Beyond Left and Right?

• In Event: Taking New-Right Thinkers Seriously: Perspectives on Europe, Russia, and the US

Abstract

Alain de Benoist is a prolific French political thinker who is the leading figure of the school of thought known as the New Right, launched in 1968. De Benoist and his New Right are proponents of ethno-pluralism, ethno-differentialism, the right to difference and a pagan European identity with roots in the Indo-European peoples who migrated in the fifth millennium BC. His main topic of writing today is the criticism of globalization and the hegemony of capital, but there is a debate on the continuity with, or break-away from, his former association with the radical right. In this presentation, we shall try to assess his influence on intellectual thought and politics in France and abroad, as well as to explain the most recent topics he has explored, such as participatory democracy; deep ecology and the theory of deceleration, which are usually associated with the Left, as well as those ideas he still defends ( the inequality of men; the refusal of the multicultural society and Organicism) which are mostly associated with the Right.

Author

• Jean-Yves Camus, Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques