If you search out figures who have influenced the cultural right, various names will come up. They include Thomas Carlyle, René Guénon, Julius Evola, Renaud Camus, Carl Schmitt and others. They each have their specialism, which consequently attracts posthumous constituencies. The name that comes up among young creators is Englishman Jonathan Bowden.

Do some cursory research and you will find Bowden was a peripheral figure, joining and leaving the British Nation Party, The Freedom Party and other Far Right groups. He never won political office, never held an academic position, published no substantial political volumes and died aged 49. He was difficult, argumentative, unstable. Watch a video of him and you will see a portly man with thick spectacles, wearing a tight suit, as he speaks to a group in a small room, his face ruddy and his gestures animated. It is a mildly comic sight, but listen to the cadences, absorb his energy and follow his line of thought and you can begin to see why some listeners considered him the greatest orator of his age.

How has an eccentric misfit become a touchstone for creative figures on the countercultural right today? Shaman of the Radical Right: The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden is the first biography of the man and assessment of his achievements. It is written by academic and author Professor Edward Dutton, who has published extensively on evolution, social sciences and their intersection with political issues; in this book, Dutton attempts to disentangle layers of misinformation, rumour and slander that have accumulated around Bowden. Not least, Dutton has tackled Bowden’s lies about himself, which obscured the truth of his life from even friends and allies.

Dutton delves into the characteristics of genius, neuroticism, autism and Borderline Personality Disorder (necessary to get to grips with Bowden’s peripheral life and erratic behaviour) before explaining Bowden’s background. Jonathan Bowden was born in 1962 into middle-class Protestant English family in Kent; most of his childhood and adult life was spent in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. His father was a bank manager and amateur writer of short fiction and sports journalism. His mother was born illegitimate in Manchester to a working-class woman and an Ulsterman. He told friends that his mother had paranoid schizophrenia and died of a heart attack when he was 15, conditions that presaged Bowden’s own fate. Dutton notes that anti-psychotic medication predisposes subjects to heart failure.

Bowden received a Catholic education and (as a youth) was enthusiastic about the muscular militarism of Israel. The early death of his mother seems to have derailed Bowden’s education for a time; his promising O-levels were followed by failed A-levels. The 1980s are a murky period, with hard facts difficult to pin down. Bowden claimed to have attended a number of universities and to be researching a doctorate, stories that proved to be untrue. In truth, he took new A-levels then completed a single year of a history undergraduate degree at Birkbeck College before dropping out. He attended two terms at Wolfson College, Cambridge before (again) dropping out. By the late 1980s he was involved in pressure groups within the Conservative Party (including the Monday Club) and would become increasingly active in political speaking. In private, he was remembered as a master of the monologue but a poor conversationalist, who was often uncomfortable and withdrawn in company.

Bowden rejected democracy and the concept of equality among peoples and nations in toto. This places him the extreme right category of the New Right, a European movement that arouse in response to rise of the New Left and the subsequent victory of liberalism and socialism in Western Europe during the 1970s. It was catalysed by the rejection of the civil rights legislation and the promotion of equality, minority rights and multiculturalism by the establishment. Bowden was not really a conservative; he rejected populism and the perpetuation of institutions for their own sakes. He was a communitarian but also a supporter of the exceptional individual thinker and creator. In this respect, Bowden followed the lead of Nietzsche, who promoted the idea of the exceptional vanguard breaking standards of materialist conservatives and egalitarian socialists in order to forge new values for mankind.

Dutton summarises Bowden’s philosophy. “We must reject weakness, resentment and being part of the grievance hierarchy. We are in an evolutionary and spiritual battle in which, ultimately the powerful will triumph. We must embrace power openly and fight, eternally against weakness, such that we can bring about the triumph of our people.”[i] Bowden stated, “The Right, even if you don’t use that term, stands for nature and for that which is given. What does that mean? It means conflict is natural, and good. It means domination is natural, and good. It means that what you have to do in order to survive, is natural, and good. It means that we should not begin every sentence by apologizing for our past or apologizing for who we are.”[ii]

Bowden was a self-aggrandising fantasist who claimed to be millionaire and business tycoon, despite being impoverished and living in a mobile-home park. (“A squalid caravan,” admits a friend.) Bowden told stories of being divorced with children, when he never was. Testimony indicates distant and unreciprocated romantic attachments, apparently unconsummated. This fantasy marriage seems to have materialised after he was described (in a BNP magazine) as a bachelor who consorted with homosexuals. Bowden’s drive to appear aloof and imbued with Nietzschean will was aimed at suppressing inherent softness and self-doubt that made him unsuited to leadership. His frequent resignations from groups indicate a thin-skin and lack of toughness, which made him a thinker rather than a man of action.

Bowden’s current influence rests on the talks he gave as Cultural Officer of the BNP, from 2005 onwards, later as an unaffiliated speaker. He would talk on art, literature, philosophy and history, including political aspects but allowing his great learning and spontaneous style to drive his speeches. One attendee recalls, “It blew me away. It was mediumship as opposed to pure oratory. He galvanized the whole room. He went into an altered state and took the whole room with him. It was a fantastical process. It was like he was a spirit guide for the living. He had no notes or anything. He’d go off on tangents but he’d pull it all together. It was like something I’d never experienced before.”[iii]

With the intensity of an autistic autodidact, Bowden could carry crowds with powerful startling speeches. His speeches also exhibit the limitations common to the self-taught giving improvised extemporisation. If one subjects transcripts to careful reading – an unfair practice, given his talks were intended to lively guides rather than precise theses – one finds errors (small and large), unexamined assumptions, unfinished trains of thought and passages of glibness. For all that, Bowden’s speeches are dramatic and passionate. Video recordings and transcripts attest to this and it is these accessible formats available online that make Bowden more approachable than right-wing theorists named at the start of this review.

Dutton explicates the schismatic splintered landscape of the British Far Right in the 1990s and 2000s for younger and foreign readers. Dutton’s narrative, once he has spent time setting out various psychological and neurological conditions that did (or might have) relevance to Bowden, is confident and brisk. It is regrettable that Dutton only touches relatively briefly on Bowden’s creative output – his self-published experimental fiction, self-directed budget movies and his Art Brut paintings. Although the reader might infer that Dutton’s background makes him most comfortable with scientific and statistical insights, Dutton also has an acute ear for language and an appreciation for verse. Perhaps a second edition (including an index and list of Bowden’s book publications) might expand analysis of Bowden’s non-political activity.

I would say that Dutton has omitted one of the key reasons Bowden appeals to young dissidents, aside from his coining some pungent slogans such as “Clear them out!”. Bowden posited a vitalist link that extended from Paganism and Heraclitus to Nietzsche, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He offered an alternative to the fusty revival of traditional physical culture, instead demanded that we “make it new” and embrace the difficult elitist strand called “reactionary Modernism”. Bowden did not propose we decamp to meadows and hamlets, but live and work in ways that accepted revitalisation of society through adopting forms appropriate to the age, whilst rejecting the progressive politics that often accompanies such forms. Bowden was excited by Modernism and that speaks directly to young people today.

In January 2011 Bowden was sectioned after a serious mental breakdown, caused by paranoid-schizophrenia. Acquaintances noted that when released from hospital, medication and depression had robbed him of conviction and energy. His speeches were listless, his demeanour timid. He felt his time had passed and that his talents would not be recognised in his lifetime. Suggestions are that modified medication was returning his old self before his death of heart failure in 2012.

Dutton portrays Bowden as an injured shaman, who went into a trancelike state to retrieve wisdom to be shared in communal gatherings. Bowden was emphatic about his countrymen not being ashamed of being English and about defending their ancestral practices. The accessibility of ideas, his humour and unapologetic eccentricity comes across in Shaman of the Radical Right. Overall, Dutton’s Bowden is not a Little Englander but someone excited by art and passionate about preserving and extending English (and Western) high culture. Anyone wanting to understand why there is more grassroots engagement with decades-old videos of an outsider artist speaking in a public-house function room than with the entire activity programme of the Tate gallery, should read this book.

Edward Dutton, Shaman of the Radical Right: The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden, Imperium Press, February 2025, paperback, 340pp, mono illus., $25

[i] P. 25

[ii] Quoted p. 29

[iii] Quoted Pp 238-9