Skadi Forum - View Single Post - Right-wing anarchism (Karlheinz Wei�man)

symmakhos · Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006

Quite apart from the modern phenomena of �Anarcho-Capitalism�, �National Anarchism�, and �Anarcho-Monarchism� (see other threads in this section), but very interesting, is the entry by Karlheinz Wei�mann in Caspar von Schrenk-Noting�s Lexikon des Konservatismus (Leopold Stocker Verlag, Graz-Stuttgart 1996), s.v. �Anarchismus von rechts�. I translate the beginning of it here (maybe more later):

Quote:

The concept of right-wing anarchism seems paradoxical, indeed oxymoronic, starting from the assumption that all �right-wing� political viewpoints include a particularly high evaluation of the principle of order�. In fact right-wing anarchism occurs only in exceptional circumstances, when the hitherto veiled affinity between anarchism and conservatism may become apparent. Ernst J�nger has characterised this peculiar connection in his book Der Weltstaat (1960):

�The anarchist in his purest form is he, whose memory goes back the farthest: to pre-historical, even pre-mythical times; and who believes, that man at that time fulfilled his true purpose � In this sense the anarchist is the Ur-conservative, who traces the well and the unwell of society back to the root.� J�nger later called this kind of �Prussian� � or �conservative anarchist� the �Anarch�, and referred his own �d�sinvolture� as agreeing therewith: an extreme aloofness, which nourishes itself and risks itself in the borderline situations, but only stands in an observational relationship to the world, as all instances of true order are dissolving and an �organic construction� is not yet again, or never more, possible.

Even though J�nger himself was immediately influenced by the reading of Max Stirner, the affinity of such a thought-complex to dandyism is particularly clear. In the dandy, the culture of decadence at the end of the 19th century brought forth a character, which on the one hand was nihilistic and ennuy�, on the other hand offered the cult of the heroic and vitalism as an alternative to progressive ideals.

Wei�mann refers to Flaubert, Baudelaire, Maurice Barr�s, Gabriele d�Annunzio, Stefan George, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Yukio Mishima. He then draws a very interesting parallel to the libertines of 18th-century France, nihilistic aristocrats which were inspired by enlightenment philosophy but adverse to the idea of egalitarianism.