Peter Thiel, “The Straussian Moment,” in Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture: Politics and Apocalypse, ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007), 189–218.
Ibid., 207.
The reference to “the unhappy consciousness” is meant to suggest that neoreactionary thinking is a skepticism which cannot get out of itself, similar to what Hegel argued in his discussion of stoicism and skepticism in Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel saw skepticism as a duplication of self-consciousness, an essential aspect of the Spirit not yet in unity: “The Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 126 (§206–207).
Ibid, 455 (§752).
See Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1979), 197, 207.
Ibid, 207.
Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision: German and World-Historical Evoltuion (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002 (1934)), 142–45.
Readers may want to refer to Philip Sandifer’s Neoreaction: A Basilisk (forthcoming), which details the emergence of the neoreactionaries and their main thinkers such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Land, and especially Mencius Moldbug. In the present essay I will have a different focus.
Ishaan Tharoor, “The man who declared the ‘end of history’ fears for democracy’s future,” Washington Post, February 9, 2017 →.
See →.
Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment” →. All subsequent Land quotes are from this text unless otherwise indicated.
Jacobitism was a movement in Great Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which fought to restore the divine right of kings.
See Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Milton Friedman, “The Hong Kong Experiment” →.
Bruno Latour, “Is Re-modernization Occurring—And If So, How to Prove It?” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 20, no. 2 (2003): 35–48. Cited by Ulrich Beck, Wolfgang Bonss, and Christoph Lau, “The Theory of Reflexive Modernization: Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Program,” ibid., 1.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 104.
Nick Land, “Meltdown,” ccru.net, 1997 →.
Just a reminder that radical thinkers like Diderot and d’Holbach were very skeptical of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot’s laissez-faire economic principles, since they were open to all sorts of “friponnerie,” demanding strict vigilance and intervention from the government. See Israel, A Revolution of the Mind, 117–18.
Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory (London: Arktos, 2012), 9.
Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 29.
Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016).
The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 2014 →.
See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 101.
In his book Zero to One, Thiel himself made a comparison between “founders” (entrepreneurs) and scapegoats: “Who makes an effective scapegoat? Like founders, scapegoats are extreme and contradictory figures. On the one hand, a scapegoat is necessarily weak; he is powerless to stop his own victimization. On the other hand, as the one who can defuse conflict by taking the blame, he is the most powerful member of the community.”
Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 38.
Peter Thiel, “Competition is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014 →.
Israel, Revolution of the Mind, 45.
All posters images above were found on HestiaSociety.org, an image-based website affiliated with neoreactionary thought.