The Dual Nature of Modern Extremism

The extremism that troubles modern civilization is not primarily a political phenomenon, but a state of mind. The extremist is a prisoner of a particular idea, which he places above the world around him. He accepts no compromise, reconciliation, or modus vivendi with people, society, and institutions that do not share his beliefs. He seeks to transform, persuade, or destroy them. To the extremist, tolerance is a sign of weakness and capitulation.

Extremism is not a modern phenomenon. It can be found in archaic communities and throughout history. Its anthropological foundations lie in initiation rituals that bring participants into contact with the “otherworld,” that is, with a transitional (liminal) zone. This sphere, presenting an ideal image of social life, provides the norms, values, and aspirations of a given community with which the individual is expected to identify. It is not a blueprint for transforming society, but a cultural model—desirable, yet unattainable in this world. The psychological core of extremism lies precisely in the inability to distinguish between ideal and reality, an inability that has assumed a wide variety of historical and sociocultural forms. The German philosopher Eric Voegelin, for example, described modern totalitarian movements of the communist type in terms of the “immanentization of the eschaton”: the attempt, at the cost of the greatest sacrifices, to establish here on earth the community that traditional churches and orthodoxies associated with the transcendent culmination of the history of salvation in the “world beyond.”

Over the past several centuries, modern secular civilization has produced two types of extremism, associated respectively with the ideas of liberty and equality. The idea of liberty, whose dawn can be discerned in the Renaissance and humanism, found a firm foundation in the teachings of Anglo-Saxon liberalism. It inspired the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 and the American War of Independence. It was associated with the impressive expansion and dynamism of commercial capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The oligarchic character of Western society, however, meant that during the French Revolution the concept of liberty came into conflict with the other great idea of modernity—equality.

The Jacobins, led by Maximilien Robespierre, emphasized, in contrast to the Girondins, that liberty could not be reduced to the inviolability of private property, and that a society whose prosperity derived from the toil of slaves in Saint-Domingue or from the misery of the unprivileged classes in Europe was not truly free. The rivalry between the liberal Right, committed to liberty, and the radical Left, advocating universal equality, defined the modern history of the West. In their extreme forms, both movements gave rise to extremist behavior, although their motives, substance, and objectives differed.

Compared with the liberal Right, the radical Left was at a disadvantage in the nineteenth century. It did not control the state. It developed outside the political, repressive, and ideological structures controlled by the liberal Right, along with the remnants of the aristocracy and great landowners inherited from the ancien régime. The radical Left, comprising a wide range of radical utopian, socialist, and Marxist organizations, was therefore compelled to construct an alternative, non-state power base that emphasized strict organization, discipline, and ideological purity. This psychological and ideological disposition created the conditions for the emergence of an “extremism of emancipation,” whose manifestations included anarchism and numerous revolutionary, national-liberation, and terrorist movements. The genetic inheritance of the extremism of emancipation includes the jacqueries, spontaneous peasant revolts from France to China, the millenarianism of the German Anabaptists, the Chinese Taipings, or the Brazilian Sebastianists, and the revolutionary workers’ movement of the Industrial Revolution.

An important characteristic of left-wing extremism is its belief in predestination and in a privileged relationship with history and its laws, inherited from Karl Marx from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It was precisely in the name of historical inevitability that representatives of the extremism of emancipation committed their greatest crimes against humanity.

Since the end of the Cold War, not only the radical Left but the extremism of emancipation itself has entered a crisis from which it has yet to recover. The liberal Right assumed ascendancy over a unipolar world dominated by the United States. Fukuyama’s “end of history” in fact meant liberal-democratic control over history.

Extremism associated with the defense of the liberal Right's interests and economic inequality first manifested in 1794 and 1795, after the fall of Robespierre, when members of Les Compagnies du Soleil unleashed a bloody anti-Jacobin “White Terror.” This “extremism of order” produced no significant activist groups for most of the nineteenth century. It had no need of them. It had the repressive apparatus of the state at its disposal. The execution of thirty thousand captured Communards was carried out by soldiers of the regular army. Colonial troops maintained order in overseas possessions.

It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century, in connection with the Dreyfus Affair in France, that nationalist activist and antisemitic leagues emerged, among which Charles Maurras’s Action française occupied a prominent position. Fascism and Nazism represented the most developed forms of the extremism of order, responding to the radicalization of an impoverished and traumatized European population and to the phenomenon of the Bolshevik Revolution after the First World War. They were extreme historical analogs of Bonapartism, which in 1799 had halted the renewed advance of Jacobinism.

The ideological foundation of the extremism of order—as a defense of social hierarchy and inequality among human beings and as an opponent of the extremism of emancipation—was Social Darwinism and the ideologies associated with it, including racial ideology and eugenics. It did not draw upon Hegel’s philosophy of history, but upon the authority of the natural sciences, irrationalism, Malthusianism, vitalism, and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Charles Darwin was more important to the extremism of order than the legacy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

After 1945, the requirements of postwar reconstruction and the logic of the Cold War brought about an impressive expansion of productive industrial capitalism in Western Europe, the United States, and the Far East. A large and prosperous middle class emerged as a bulwark of democracy and the welfare state. After 1968, the extremism of emancipation became active among students and intellectuals in Western Europe and in certain centers of the Global South, but by the beginning of the 1980s it had lost the historical initiative. During the postwar period, the extremism of order retreated into the shadows and, according to Daniel Ganser, manifested itself in covert operations such as Gladio, aimed at discrediting or eliminating inconvenient public figures. The Organization armée secrète (OAS), which sought to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle, may serve as one example of such activities.

The rise of neoliberalism at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, representing the dominance of financial and speculative capital at the expense of productive capital, and the end of the Cold War after 1989 brought about an important transformation. The extremism of order lost its raison d’être and became an “extremism of civilizational regression.” Through ongoing deindustrialization, the privatization of the public sector, and the ascendancy of global financial capital, neoliberalism is leading Western society toward a new social model that some authors have termed technofeudalism or neofeudalism. The remnants of the middle class, seeking to preserve at least some vestige or appearance of quality and dignity of life, are becoming clients of large financial institutions. They are bound to lifelong debt much as medieval and early modern serfs were bound to the land. In some cases, feudal dependency provided agricultural workers with a certain form of paternalistic protection and reciprocity. Neoliberal capital, by contrast, is entirely unsentimental and devoid of solidarity. The result is the growth of the precariat, widening social inequalities and homelessness, as well as declining and depopulating post-industrial towns, drained of life and abandoned by capital.

The extremism of civilizational regression only rarely manifests itself in acts of violence, although its inclination toward militarism is evident. Its function is to paralyze critical reason and reverse the historical trend unfolding since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, whose aim was to create a sovereign state of free, skilled, educated, and politically self-confident citizens. Such a society, however, would be incompatible with the nature of neoliberal financial capitalism. As Gabriel Rockhill and Domenico Losurdo have shown, even originally left-wing currents, such as the Frankfurt School and French critical theory, have been ideologically appropriated for this purpose. What is described in the media and public discourse as neo-Marxism or progressivism, and against which the so-called “conservative revolution” mobilizes in the culture wars, is in its present form more an ideological derivative of neoliberalism than an alternative to it.

In recent decades, the extremism of civilizational regression has become firmly entrenched at the very heart of Western political, cultural, and educational institutions. It speaks through leading politicians, mainstream media, prestigious educational institutions, and privileged non-governmental organizations. Only a critical reflection on this reality, together with the adoption of appropriate political measures, will enable us to restore a productive, free, and democratic society.