🪐🌀 Harrowday ⛈️🔱 23 Neptunium 2024 🌘🦣 Mammoth Moon ⛩️ Day 10,388 ⛩️

In the course of answering this question [https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/s/LbN1wphChM] on Neoreactionary theoretical texts, I realized I've read quite a lot of the stuff and that a brief survey of the field might be helpful to others looking to study the far right. so i’m crossposting my reply here v so I have something to send to anyone looking to get an orientation to that troubled field which goes beyond podcast interviews and YouTube edgelords.

I'm not sure how new counts as Neo nor how right wing counts as reactionary for you, so some or all of these might not be what you're looking for.

I think the most cogent reactionary theoretical text would be those of Nazi party member Carl Schmitt. he's one of those rare birds still read widely by both the far right and portions of the far Left for his elucidation of the necessary conclusions to the logic of state power and the nature of dictatorship. his critique of Parliamentarianism can be read in Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, but Political Theology and Concept of the Political are his major works. be ready to engage with a lot of both explicit and implicit Hobbesian ideas.

another cogent theoretical text is Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozik. he's more consistent I think that Rawls, whose the liberal/social democratic philosopher par exallence who was presented as the opposite end of the spectrum in the Ethics 201 class I took years ago (hilariously that text didn't include any anarchists or Marxists so when I referred to Rawls as right wing for his support of capitalism I got marked down lol). They're both Kantians and therefore have many of the same kind of arguments, and to some degree it's useful to read them together to illuminate their common Kantian assumptions.

Milton Friedman is just oh so condescending but he writes reasonably efficiently, if overly dependent on the kind of anecdotal thought experiments for which the anglo-analytic-positivist school is known for. His Capitalism and Freedom is a quick read. I've spent a fair amount of time with chapter two of that text comparing and contrasting it with J. S. Mills' On Liberty, which is a utilitarian defense of liberal constitutional democracy. Possibly Friedman scholars might bristle at Friedman being called a utilitarian but unlike Nozik and Rawls his reasoning is largely consequential. Friedman is the Neoliberal Philosopher par excellence and Neoliberal economics shares the same root system as a lot of Fascist/Nazi economics even as Neoliberals tend to tut-tut over the ostensible dominance of the state in the arrangement of the state-capital alliance. whether you consider him a Neoreactionary or not, basically all Neoreactionaries have already become Friedmanians or quickly adopt his thinking once they get into power.

also see especially the other members of the Chicago School, the brain trust behind the coups and neocolonial Neoliberal reforms imposed on Latin America. one such affiliated intellectual is Leo Strauss, one of the key anglophone Schmittian scholars.

Most ominously, there's Gabriele D’Annunzio. he was one of the earliest fascist writers--[Behind the Bastards credits him with inventing fascism](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-man-who-invented-56106119/)--so I really can't claim he's a *Neo*-reactionary. nonetheless, his writing contains the quintessential reactionary quality which motivates so much of the racist, misogynistic, revanchistic patriarchal colonialism one sees in the so called manosphere and today's far right generally. I myself have not engaged with his work directly. this is a guy who wrote autobiographical poetry about the pleasure of raping people (and he raped all the time). he was a major influence on Mussolini and was enthusiastically celebrated by the Italian far right. if you're interested in pursuing Neoreactionary thought all the way down to the taproot of the movement, he's probably indispensable.

Hayak wrote a creepy little picture book (or his work was adapted into a picture book?) about the dangers of progressive politics leading to totalitarianism during I think the New Deal? you wouldn't necessarily know it from the text, but he was himself a far right "libertarian" who loved the Nazis; his problem was more with Leninism, and his problem with Leninism wasn't the camps or the surveillance but rather the appropriation of wealth from the ruling class.

My gut tells me I should add Murray Rothbard to this list but I might be confusing his work with someone else. he's another far right "libertarian" and iirc his book Man, Economy, and State was tremendously reactionary and pro-colonial. anyone whose more familiar, jump in to correct me.

in part so that this list isn't all dudes, we should add Ayn Rand's complete works (and those of her "school" the Objectivists, who were basically just positivists except stupider) and, not literature but cinema, the Nazi film director Helene "Leni" Riefenstahl who helped establish the cinematographic language of authoritarian propaganda.

finally, a curve ball. Roberto Bolenero was (to my knowledge) in no way a reactionary. However, he wrote reactionary characters quite well and from a very studied position, not least because of time he spent under the Pinochet regime. His book Nazi Literature in the Americas is a review of fictional texts (a favorite conceit of mine which was popularized by Borges, himself a Conservative anti-Nazi anti-Peronist, fyi) written by fictional Nazis. He was able to get into the heads of Neoreactionaries better than they themselves are usually able to. I've only read this work and 2666 of his but I'm those texts at least his prose is masterful, sensitive, enthralling, and eminently readable--something I can't say for any of the others on this list.