The Religion and Philosophy Room
This may generate some interest.
In “Critique of Liberal Ideology,” Alain de Benoist uses the term “liberalism”
in the broad Europe an sense of the term that applie s not just to American
liberalism but even mor e so to American libertarianism and mainstream
conservatism, insofar as all thre e share a common history and common
premises .—Transl.
Not being the work of a single man, liberalism was never presented in
the form of a unified doctrine. Various liberal authors have, at times,
interpreted it in divergent, if not contradictory, ways. Still, they share
enough common points to classify them all as liberals. These common
points also make it possible to define liberalism as a specific school of
thought. On the one hand, liberalism is an economic doctrine that tends to
make the model of the self- regulating market the paradigm of all social
reality: what is called political liberalism is simply one way of applying the
principles deduced from these economic doctrines to political life. This
tends to limit the role of politics as much as possible. (In this sense, one
can say that “liberal politics” is a contradiction in terms.) On the other
hand, liberalism is a doctrine based on an individualistic anthropology, i.e.,
it rests on a conception of man as a being who is not fundamentally social.
These two characteristic features, each of which has descriptive and
normative aspects (the individual and the market are both described as
facts and are held up as models), are directly opposed to collective
identities. A collective identity cannot be analyzed in a reductionistic way,
as if it were the simple sum of the characteristics possessed by the
individuals of a given community. Such an identity requires the
collectivity’s members be clearly conscious that their membership
encompasses or exceeds their individual being, i.e., that their common
identity is a product of this composition. However, insofar as it is based on
individualism, liberalism tends to sever all social connections that go
beyond the individual. As for the market’s optimal operation, it requires
that nothing obstruct the free circulation of men and goods, i.e., borders
must be treated as unreal, which tends to dissolve common structures andvalues. Of course this does not mean that liberals can never defendcollective identities. But they do so only in contradiction to their principles.
http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/cr...l_ideology.pdf
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Originally Posted by prometheus
