Between two rights: Julien Freund and the origins of political realism in France

The European Intellectual Origins of the Alt-Right

“…Instead the paper takes a different tack by first focusing on the late 1960s and the rise of New Right Movements throughout Europe that sprang up as a response to the New Left, which involved a hatred of liberal internationalism and multiculturalism, a thorough critique of global capitalism, and, in one way or another, promoted an identitarian form of race-based politics. There is no doubt that the New Right movement that I will describe has been influenced by a reactionary canon of thinkers associated with interwar thought, such as with the writings of Carl Schmitt, Ernst Junger, Julius Evola and others (Gilbert, 2018;Müller, 2003;Steinmetz-Jenkins, 2014). But this paper will focus less on these thinkers, and more on one from France who is still alive, and whose thought has provided major ideological inspiration for the so-called Alt-Right, namely: Alain de Benoist.…”