Of Alain de Benoist
Source: Barbadillo
Against liberalism. Society is not a market (ed. of the Rock) is the new book by Alain de Benoist, in bookstores in France for a few days. Yann Vallerie, of the online newspaper Breiz-info.com interviewed the French philosopher.
Breizh-info.com. You publish a new book entitled “Against liberalism. Society is not a market". Because it is important to immediately underline that it is a criticism of liberal ideology and not of bureaucracy or an attack on the freedom to undertake, to circulate, d’agire, to think, to have free will?
Alain de Benoist: “Those who know me will find it difficult, I think, imagine myself as an opponent of free will or a defender of bureaucracy! If I bothered to explain, from the beginning of the book, that we must first attack the theoretical foundations of liberal ideology, it is above all because this cannot be attributed to a single author. “Marxism” has completely left Marx's mind, but liberalism has many “founding fathers”, that make it appear, for two centuries, under sometimes very different aspects. The traditional distinction between political liberalism, Economic liberalism and philosophical liberalism have obscured things rather than clarified them. I think, come John Milbank, that liberalism is first and foremost an "anthropological error", in short, that his conception of man is wrong. Ora, It is this anthropology that lies at the basis of all forms of liberalism: the idea of ​​a man who is not naturally social and political, but who constantly seeks to maximize his private interest, the economic domain is the one in which he is supposed to be able to best enjoy his freedom. The liberal man is homo oeconomicus, a self-sufficient being, the owner of himself, indifferent by nature to any notion of the common good. This led me to identify the two fundamental components of liberal anthropology: individualism and the economy”.
Breizh-info.com. You say that liberalism is the ideology of the ruling class. According to her, the defense of liberal ideology would be comparable to bourgeois conservatism?
Alain de Benoist: “The dominant ideology is always that of the ruling class. Today, the ruling class is in no way reduced to the conservative bourgeoisie. It is a transnational class, perfectly attuned to deterritorialized capitalism, that wants to be both “efficient” and “progressive”. It works to turn the planet into a huge market, but at the same time it adheres to the ideology of human rights and the ideology of progress. This class gradually broke away from the people, with all the consequences we know. The bourgeoisie, which is both conservative and liberal, clings to an untenable position. Actually, he can assert himself as a liberal at the expense of his conservatism and he can assert himself as a conservative at the expense of his liberalism. I provide some examples of this inconsistency in my book. How can we expect to regulate immigration by adhering to the liberal principle of the free movement of people, capital and assets? How to prohibit the use of drugs without contravening the liberal idea that everyone should be left completely free to do what they want? How to defend the identities of peoples and cultures if we see them, like the liberals, only as simple aggregates of individual atoms? How to preserve “traditional values” when the capitalist system everywhere works to suppress them?”.
Breizh-info.com. How liberalism is incompatible with participatory democracy, when it fits perfectly with representative democracy?
Alain de Benoist: “From a liberal point of view, the advantage of representative democracy is that it replaces parliamentary sovereignty with popular sovereignty: as Rousseau had seen, in this system the people are the only sovereign on voting day; the next day it is the representatives he has elected who decide. The problem today is that representative democracy no longer represents anything. Hence the widespread distrust towards an oligarchic system completely separated from popular aspirations. But don't be fooled: liberalism, to the extent that it supports the submission of politics to the impersonal forces of the market, it is actually hostile to any form of sovereignty. More exactly, the only sovereignty it recognizes is that of the individual. Nations and peoples do not exist as such. As the very liberal Bertrand Lemennicier writes, the nation is just a "concept without counterpart in reality". Every collective identity is therefore fantasy. Methodological individualism, hostile to any form of holism, it is therefore the only means of analyzing a society that Margaret Thatcher said without laughing that "does not exist". To the extent that participatory democracy helps restore power to the people, so similar to the freedom of the Ancients that, in contrast with that of the Moderns, consisted of giving citizens the opportunity to actively participate in public life (and don't lose interest in participating to take refuge in private life), can only meet opposition from liberals.".
Breizh-info.com. To refer to current events, he would say today that Emmanuel Macron is the perfect figure of liberal ideology? For what reasons?
Alain de Benoist: “Let's say he is one of the emblematic figures. We know that it was the financial circles that allowed Macron to come to power and that, once elected, he was quick to form a government whose main feature was to associate right-wing liberals with left-wing liberals. This at least made it possible to detect that, as Jean-Claude Michéa said and repeated, right-wing economic liberalism and left-wing social liberalism are ultimately just two forms derived from the same ideology – and which complement each other. But this also made it possible to understand that the left-right split is disappearing to be replaced by another, certainly more fundamental: liberal and anti-liberal. Throughout the 19th century, until the appearance of socialism, the conservatives were the main opponents of the liberals. We'll get back to it.".
Breizh-info.com. What antidotes, what alternatives exist, or remain to be invented, for our societies to triumph over this liberalism?
Alain de Benoist: “Obviously there is no miracle recipe. On the other hand, there is a general situation that is evolving more and more rapidly and which now shows the limits of the current system, be it the political system of liberal democracy or the economic system of a capital form faced with the immense threat of a general devaluation of value. The future is local, short circuits, of the rebirth of human communities, of direct democracy, of the abandonment of exclusively mercantile values. The antidote will have been discovered when citizens have discovered that they are not just consumers, and that life can be more beautiful when you repudiate a world in which nothing has value anymore, but where everything has a price". (Translation of mt, interview by Yann Vallerie)