Attack the System: Modern European Intellectual History and the Origins of the Left and Right

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Keith Preston discusses how the development of modern European intellectual life shaped the political concepts of Left and Right. Topics include:

• The Enlightenment as the third major phase in European intellectual history following the classical Greco-Roman period and the medieval Christian era.
• The Enlightenment as a neo-pagan revolution against the post-Hellenic Christian dominance of Western civilization.
• The English, American, and French Revolutions as political expressions of the Enlightenment.
• The origins of the political concept of Left and Right in the French Revolution.
• The major traditions within rightist thought: reactionary, conservative, and bourgeois.
• The impact of the thought of Nietzsche on the development of the revolutionary right and the Conservative Revolutionaries.
• The question of whether Fascism and Nationalism Socialism can be properly considered rightist ideologies.
• Conflicting strands within leftist thought regarding differing views of human nature and the nature of society.
• Thomas Sowell’s analysis of modern political theory as representing a contrast between constrained and unconstrained visions of human social nature.
• The American and French revolutions as representing conflicting strands within Enlightenment political philosophy.
• The rivalry between Marx and Bakunin as symbolic of a conflict within leftist thinking.
• The thought of Carl Schmitt as a form of modern secular conservatism in the tradition of Hobbes.
• The irony of the dominance of existentialism and postmodernism in modern liberal thought given the roots of these in the philosophy of Nietzsche.