The Revolutionary Right
The War of Types
The Revolutionary Right
There are two thinkers who sought to defend aristocracy and human greatness against the spirit of the French Revolution: Tocqueville and Nietzsche. Nietzsche developed the “revolutionary right,” while Tocqueville took a more moderate approach to promoting human greatness.1 Here is how Leo Strauss frames the historical context of Nietzsche’s thought:
The great watershed was the French Revolution, and the French Revolution led to the formation of two parties in Europe, the conservatives and the liberals. They can easily be distinguished (at least they could easily be distinguished) because the conservatives stood for throne and altar, and the liberals stood for democracy (or something approaching democracy) and religion as a strictly private affair. But liberalism was already outflanked by the extreme revolutionary left, the socialist, communist, anarchist, and atheist left. This was a position which we may call political atheism.
Nietzsche opposed both the moderate and the extreme left, but he saw that conservatism had no future, that its fighting was a rearguard action, and conservatism was being eroded evermore. The consequence of this was that Nietzsche pointed to something which we may call the revolutionary right, an atheism of the right. Nietzsche is then the antagonist of Marx, whom he did not know at all as far as I know. (Leo Strauss, Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil 1971-1972, session 1)
I want to say something very “timely” here with respect to some of the present-day infighting: there are traditionalists who simply identify all “atheistic” thought with the left-wing. They claim that if you are not chaste and praying you can’t uphold the values of civilization and high culture. This way of framing today’s political debate is so thoughtless I have a hard time believing it is genuine. I hope that by explaining why the right-wing takes a turn towards atheism, and what that means, we can get rid of some of this infighting or, at least, carry it on with a clearer idea of what is at stake.2
Why does the right-wing take this turn to atheism? What does it mean to turn to atheism?
Compare Nietzsche’s turn to atheism with Marx’s. For Nietzsche, “God is dead.” For Marx, God was never living; God was just a concept, one of the many masks or lies used by evil oppressors. Marx’s interpretation of the divine in history directs men’s noses into the dirt. He denies the nobility and truth behind real devotion to real religion—Marxism cannot distinguish between real and spurious religion, between religious devotion and cultish delusion, and is therefore doomed to misinterpret all truly noble aspirations men have for transcending the merely human. Nietzsche on the other hand laments the loss of real religion precisely because he wishes for the aristocratic, for the will to transcendence which marshals the lower to serve the higher.
What political atheism accomplishes for both Marx and Nietzsche, and in every case in which it is employed (as in Hobbes’s revolutionary philosophy for example), is the clarification of conflict and a corresponding clarification of the history of philosophy. For both Marx and Nietzsche, political atheism involves the stripping away of all merely historical distinctions in an effort to clarify that the conflict is between types of men.
Marx:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
… “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.” What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. (Communist Manifesto)
Nietzsche on the other hand frames the history of morality as a struggle between aristocratic and slave moralities, that History is in a sense the result of various slave insurrections and the philosophic response to those insurrections—with the latest revolt in Nietzsche’s time being the French Revolution.
Whenever revolutionary political atheism appears, there also appears conflict of the most acrimonious type: civil war or more properly stasis. Political atheism and stasis go together. Take the Greek example of the Peloponnesian War: the noble lie or lies were obliterated throughout the city states; the Athenians openly preached tyranny and the rule of the stronger; these facts corresponded to borderless war between oligarchs and democrats. Every age where “God is dead” is marked by borderless war.3 The war is borderless because no city much less nation is made up of one type of man; the types are held together through gratitude, which is established by the noble lie, which is dead—otherwise political atheism would have no foothold.
This dangerous situation is nevertheless attractive to philosophers of the Right like Hobbes and Nietzsche because the risks are unavoidable and the reward is clarity. It is better for good men to risk catastrophe than submit to slavery and certain death. Furthermore, without political atheism the history of philosophy needs to be bifurcated (into generalized camps of right and wrong, like “Ancients and Moderns”) in order to avoid the conclusion that philosophy is nothing more than competing descriptions of reality—none of which are complete, and all of which lack the rigor of modern natural science. The bifurcation-description of the history of philosophy avoids this relativist conclusion because a man can believe that “truth can be discovered” if there are only two or a few truly alternative descriptions. If there is a limitless number of possible descriptions, philosophy is a silly pursuit. Political atheism goes further than the bifurcation method and does away with the need for bifurcations or the narrowing down of possible descriptions; by pointing to types and how they are fundamental, political atheism establishes a universally true reason for the shameful variety of “philosophies.” The history of philosophy is the story of how philosophers figure out ways to overcome man’s natural stupidity and weakness. The shameful variety of philosophic teachings is not, emphatically not, due to philosophy but to the variety of errors and perversities human societies have succumbed to or embraced over millennia. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” Philosophy is the salvation of manhood in all times and all places and for that reason has never succeeded in rendering up for the historians a single face or a single teaching.
Tocqueville’s Assessment
With Tocqueville however, we have a man of the Right who seeks to save the masculine virtues and opposes democratic leveling while refusing to teach political atheism.
I do not claim to have written [Ancient Regime and the Revolution] dispassionately. It would be hardly decent for a Frenchman to be calm when he speaks of his country, and thinks of the times. ... I have tried not only to detect the disease of which the patient died, but to discover the remedy that might have saved him. I have acted like those physicians who try to surprise the vital principle in each paralyzed organ. ... Whenever I have found among our ancestors any of those masculine virtues which we need so much and possess so little—a true spirit of independence, a taste for true greatness, faith in ourselves and in our cause—I have brought them boldly forward; and, in like manner, whenever I have discovered in the laws, or ideas, or manners of olden time, any trace of those vices which destroyed the old regime and weaken us to-day, I have taken pains to throw light on them, so that the sight of their mischievous effects in the past might prove a warning for the future. (Preface)4
Tocqueville does not teach an open conflict of types—i.e., he doesn’t teach political atheism—but he indicates that this is exactly what is happening, that the democratic revolution is a revolt of the worse against the better and that other theoretical concepts: individualism, religion, selfishness, and so on are all signs or symptoms of this more fundamental conflict of types. To prove this, I will briefly examine the first four chapters (preface through chapter 3) of his book The Ancient Regime and the Revolution. Tocqueville represents one of the primary thinkers for the traditionalist right because he emphasizes the dignity of the Christian religion, gives the republican virtues their due, and offers a way for men to defend human greatness by working within democratic society. If I show that at bottom he was a political atheist, I hope that by doing so I strengthen the present compromise between the traditionalist and revolutionary right factions.
The French Revolution was a period of stasis whose principle object was the destruction of European aristocracies.
The especial objects of the work I now present to the public are to explain why the Revolution, which was impending over every European country, burst forth in France rather than elsewhere; why it issued spontaneously from the society which it was to destroy; and how the old monarchy contrived to fall so completely and so suddenly. … all the men of our day are driven, sometimes slowly, sometimes violently, by an unknown force—which may possibly be regulated or moderated, but can not be overcome—toward the destruction of aristocracies. (85-87)
When the principal sovereigns of Germany proclaimed at Pilnitz, in 1791, that all the powers of Europe were menaced by the danger which threatened royalty in France, they said what was true, but at bottom they were far from thinking so. (93)
The natural right of aristocracies to rule, throughout Europe, suffered a crisis that came to a head first in France. Tocqueville explains at length how the great thinkers and powers of Europe all examined the spread of the revolutionary spirit, first with horror and then with eagerness, but that none understood what it was. Those whom it horrified believed they were looking at an anarchic attack on all religion and order. Those who eagerly sought to harness its energy viewed it as an excellent tool for disposing of their rivals. But neither understood just how bad the spirit of the Revolution was or how vile was the type of man who conquered under the Revolution’s banners. As Tocqueville made clear in his Democracy in America: this was not an American revolution.
The Revolution was neither anti-religious nor truly anarchic. In fact, it was religious, very religious, and for that reason despotic rather than anarchic. Men thought it was anarchic because it attacked all existing institutions of political power. And they thought it was anti-religious because Christianity was at that time an existing institution of political power.
Nothing can be more erroneous than to suppose that democracy is naturally hostile to religion. Neither Christianity nor even Catholicism involves any contradiction to the democratic principle; both are, in some respects, decidedly favorable to it. All experience, indeed, shows that the religious instinct has invariably taken deepest root in the popular heart. All the religions which have disappeared found a last refuge there. Strange, indeed, it would be if the tendency of institutions based on the predominance of the popular will and popular passions were necessarily and absolutely to impel the human mind toward impiety. (97)
Less than a year after the Revolution had begun, Mirabeau wrote secretly to the king, “Compare the present state of things with the old regime, and console yourself and take hope. A part—the greater part of the acts of the national assembly are decidedly favorable to a monarchical government. Is it nothing to have got rid of Parliament, separate states, the clerical body, the privileged classes, and the nobility? Richelieu would have liked the idea of forming but one class of citizens; so level a surface assists the exercise of power. A series of absolute reigns would have done less for royal authority than this one year of Revolution.” He understood the Revolution like a man who was competent to lead it. (98)
The common man and his regime are the natural home of “religion” and therefore the Revolution had a uniquely religious character. In a sense, what the ancients called “stasis,” Tocqueville calls a “religious revolution.” The two conditions have the same borderless character, whereby the many seek to eradicate the few and the few find themselves completely uninhibited by any sense of “duty” to the lower orders.
The Revolution united and divided men, in spite of law, traditions, characters, language; converted enemies into fellow-countrymen, and brothers into foes; or, rather, to speak more precisely, it created, far above particular nationalities, an intellectual country that was common to all, and in which every human creature could obtain rights of citizenship. (99)
All the foreign wars of the time partook of the nature of civil wars; in all the civil wars foreigners bore arms. Old interests were forgotten in the clash of new ones; questions of territory gave way to questions of principle. All the old rules of politics and diplomacy were at fault, to the great surprise and grief of the politicians of the day. (99)
Wherever the religious impulse gained the upper hand, custom—the fruit of generations of discipline—was always attacked and destroyed. The cause of the religious spirit was a widespread hatred of this thing, “custom.” That is, whatever made a society or state particular came to be hated.
Religions commonly affect mankind in the abstract, without allowance for additions or changes effected by laws, customs, or national traditions. Their chief aim is to regulate the concerns of man with God, and the reciprocal duties of men toward each other, independently of social institutions. They deal, not with men of any particular nation or any particular age, but with men as sons, fathers, servants, masters, neighbors. Based on principles essential to human nature, they are applicable and suited to all races of men. Hence it is that religious revolutions have swept over such extensive areas, and have rarely been confined, as political revolutions have, to the territory of one people, or even one race; and the more abstract their character, the wider they have spread, in spite of differences of laws, climate, and race. (100)
And here we see why Tocqueville doesn’t use the terminology of the ancients (Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, etc.): Tocqueville describes stasis as a revolutionary civil-war-scenario based on a “universalist” credo regarding nature. This kind of orientation can be found of course in the pages of Thucydides, but no one thinks to christen it as a religious impulse. Tocqueville explains why this is: Paganism, ancient religion, was always oriented towards the particular; the ancient gods were sustained through the particular disciplines sustaining the aristocratic rulers in the city. The concept of stasis in the ancient world involved, as the French Revolution did, the failure of the aristocratic view of life but the ancient religion was not going to find champions among the democrats. When Tocqueville says “religion is at home in democracies” he means modern monotheisms—he never once calls “paganism” a “religion” in Ancient Regime and the Revolution.
The old forms of paganism, which were all more or less interwoven with political and social systems, and whose dogmas wore a national and sometimes a sort of municipal aspect, rarely traveled beyond the frontiers of a single country. They gave rise to occasional outbursts of intolerance and persecution, but never to proselytism. Hence, the first religious revolution felt in Western Europe was caused by the establishment of Christianity. That faith easily overstepped the boundaries which had checked the outgrowth of pagan systems, and rapidly conquered a large portion of the human race. I hope I shall exhibit no disrespect for that holy faith if I suggest that it owed its successes, in some degree, to its unusual disentanglement from all national peculiarities, forms of government, social institutions, and local or temporary considerations. (100)
[The Revolution] was divesting [Europe] of all that was peculiar to one race or time, and by reverting to natural principles of social order and government, that it became intelligible to all, and susceptible of simultaneous imitation in a hundred different places. (101)
The dignity of Christianity (pure “disentangled” Christianity) rests on one’s view of “all that might be particular to one people”: is what is particular to a people noble? Or is what is particular to a people mere necessity, usually ugly and unjust? The particularities of a people—just like the particularities to be found in a philosopher’s teaching—are due to the need to overcome a particular obstacle, sometimes inspired by “bare nature” (animals and the stinginess of the Earth) but usually inspired by the stupidity and avarice of man. Christianity and universal religion in general is acceptable to all, is meant for all—Tocqueville says the Revolution was quickly and easily adopted “in a hundred different places”; i.e., these universal, non-particular religions/democratic movements are easily adopted because they are not the product of generations of discipline; they are not the preserve of the few to be practiced by the few. Consequently, those who reject this easily adopted truth for all mankind are “evil”: if it is easy to be good, it is evil to be bad.5
Tocqueville’s framing is not so “on the nose” though it is clear enough. The Revolution and Christianity are animated by the ambiguous potentially good things: universalism, nature, human nature, and pure religion rather than religion “entangled” in politics. These concepts were used to attack aristocracies and political rights, indeed “political society” as such, throughout Europe. Tocqueville puts all these bad effects under the heading of “Revolution.” He then ties the spirit of the Revolution to “religion.” Then “religion” becomes “modern monotheism” and specifically Christianity. Paganism is not a “religion.” After all this, Tocqueville then tries his best to salvage the popular belief in those ambiguous concepts (universal truth, human nature, non-political religion), to turn belief in those concepts towards the good by importing aristocratic content into them; for example, a desire for Transcendence in Christianity can lead men to desire freedom more than equality and isn’t found in the Pantheistic-type religions.
Well okay, if I am right about Tocqueville’s settled opinion—and I will be accused of Straussian esotericism here—shouldn’t his reservations about right-wing political atheism be given their due?
Not Everyone is a Philosopher
Political atheism is responsible for some of history’s more shocking doctrines and horrors—horrors we write about but almost to man none of us has experienced. When I began this essay quoting Strauss, I could have been accused of cutting the quotation off too early because immediately after describing Nietzsche’s turn to political atheism Strauss says,
Nietzsche produced the climate in which Fascism and Hitlerism could emerge. One must not be squeamish about admitting this dubious paternity. One must emphasize it. Every fool can see and has seen that Nietzsche abhorred the things for which Hitler in particular stood and to which he owed his success. Some liberals have gone so far as to claim Nietzsche for liberalism. Was Nietzsche not the intellectual ancestor of that great liberal, Sigmund Freud? This partial truth must not be permitted to obscure the more massive and the more superficial fact which I have tried to point out.
I am not squeamish about adopting political atheism when the only other option is defeat at the hands of a more murderous political atheism. I believe the men who adopt political atheism now, who do this early, will in the future appear to deserve the praise and support of those who take no risks on this score. In any event, political atheism is here and someone must do something.
However, even though I am willing to take the risk and think others would do well to do the same, we shouldn’t be blind to the failures of political atheism as such (left or right/democratic or aristocratic). So I want to look at the forms political atheism took at its inception—its first manifestation in recorded history: the political theories of the Peloponnesian War.
Now of course, when it comes to democratic Athens, they were in a sense “anti-aristocratic” but all their political and social institutions would just be called fascist today. In any event, they vindicated democratic imperialism and the rule of the worse over the better in openly atheistic ways. Pericles explained to the Athenians that their empire was a tyranny and that any city that had been able would have done the same as them in acquiring and holding onto their tyranny. And Pericles was evidently not the only Athenian persuaded by this view. In the famous Melian dialogue, Athenian soldiers propound the view that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” -- Perhaps there is some confusion here about “might makes right”: it certainly has taken on aura of being “right-wing,” but it isn’t hard to see that democratic societies have real power that often overwhelms aristocratic men and can resort to this justification as easily as dynamos of physical strength. If you read Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians, he explains all the devices the worse can use to get an advantage over better men—and of course, there is always the sheer number of armed men, which will usually be much greater in democracies than aristocracies and especially oligarchies calling themselves aristocracies (which is the norm).
As for the strictly aristocratic view, the proponents of political atheism were to be found in the Sophists and their students. We have very famous and memorable fragments of two prominent Athenian aristocrats who did all that was in their power to oppose the Athenian democracy. I’ll quote Callicles as an example here.
For by the rule of nature, to suffer injustice is the greater disgrace because the greater evil; but conventionally, to do evil is the more disgraceful. For the suffering of injustice is not the part of a man, but of a slave, who indeed had better die than live; since when he is wronged and trampled upon, he is unable to help himself, or any other about whom he cares. The reason, as I conceive, is that the makers of laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say, that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, by the word injustice, the desire of a man to have more than his neighbours; for knowing their own inferiority, I suspect that they are too glad of equality. And therefore the endeavour to have more than the many is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice, whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. For on what principle of justice did Xerxes invade Hellas, or his father the Scythians? (not to speak of numberless other examples). Nay, but these are the men who act according to nature; yes, by Heaven, and according to the law of nature: not, perhaps, according to that artificial law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and tame them like young lions,—charming them with the sound of the voice, and saying to them, that with equality they must be content, and that the equal is the honourable and the just. But if there were a man who had sufficient force, he would shake off and break through, and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws which are against nature: the slave would rise in rebellion and be lord over us, and the light of natural justice would shine forth. (Plato’s Gorgias)
These atheistic views based on “natural law” became prominent in Greece around the same time that stasis led to the massive and seemingly never-ending Peloponnesian War, which brought an end to Athenian and Spartan leadership over the Greeks. They were the views that led to this conflagration and animated the combatants. What we read in Callicles as well as in the democratic Athenian examples is that these “political atheists” are all animated by a view of “natural law” whereby justice and injustice are labels that belong to identifiable deeds like “tyranny” or “ruling without consent” or in the case of Callicles “lying” and “disobeying the law of the city.” This gets complicated. Here is a different way of putting it for now: men like Callicles can become genuinely angry when men who deny the law of nature nevertheless come out on top; but really, why should the better be angry with the worse for doing whatever it is they can do to rule? Usually when the worse feel no gratitude the “best” have ceased deserving it. As Hobbes observed in his Leviathan: The people are not to be blamed for disobedience. It’s entirely within the power of an intelligent king to render the people sensible and obedient. The best men do not fault the worse and even worst men for seeking, however miserably, their own interests. The point is not to determine “who deserves what” but to establish a harmony of ends based on the natural hierarchy of types.
1The two men did now know of each other. Aside from this fact, their relationship is very much like that of Hobbes and Locke; Hobbes produced the revolutionary teaching which is always uncompromising or less compromising whereas Locke had to accommodate his teaching to a more average type of man and his failings.
2I talk about how Christianity could feasibly take on a right-wing stance in several other essays. I will elaborate on this further and I found an interesting old (and forgotten) book on the matter that I will introduce. Intelligent Christians have been trying to square the theological virtues with the demands of reason for a long time.
3And so it is in ours, where borders are denied for the sake of “civil” warfare.
4All quotations are taken from Liberty Fund edition: https://oll-resources.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/2419/de-Tocqueville_1597.html. The page numbers in parentheses are where the quotation can be found in the Chicago edition translated by Alan S. Kahan.
5If it is difficult to be good, the bad may be dangerous, they may have great power “in proportion to the weight of their homogeneous mass,” but ultimately they are objects of contempt or pity, not evil (88).