Introduction

Abstract

THE RADICAL RIGHT was once generally imagined in terms of skinheads, tattoo parlors, and hooligans. While all of these do play a role, there is much more to the contemporary radical Right than this. There is also an intellectual radical Right, little known to most, but increasingly important. The central purpose of Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy is to explore it. The existence of an intellectual radical Right is not a new phenomenon. Many prominent thinkers from the French Revolution to the Second World War could be put in this category. The horrors of the war and of the Nazi camps, however, contributed to a general reaction against the radical Right that led to its disappearance from mainstream politics and to its eclipse in intellectual life. For many decades, a new liberal orthodoxy ruled across the West, apparently unchallenged. Since the start of the twenty-first century, the mainstream has been shifting. In Europe, “populist” political parties have pulled the mainstream in their direction, and the liberal orthodoxy of the postwar period is ever less hegemonic. In the US, a series of challenges to the Republican mainstream culminated in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and America’s liberal orthodoxy is also challenged. The reasons for these developments are many and complex, and it is not the objective of this book to add to what has already been written about them. Rather, the objective is to contribute to the understanding of one of the consequences of the general shift toward the Right: The new importance of the thinkers of the radical Right.