GRECE AND THE CONQUEST OF THE POWER OF IDEAS
The following is an essay from the 16th annual GRECE Conference (November 29, 1981) written by Guillaume Faye. Faye discusses the role and mission of GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne) in challenging dominant Western ideologies. Faye argues that contemporary Western thought, including both liberalism and Marxism, has become stagnant and ineffective. He positions GRECE as a movement seeking to create a new intellectual framework that rejects both Christian-derived universalism and egalitarianism in favor of a worldview rooted in European pagan traditions and modern scientific understanding. The essay outlines how GRECE aims to conduct a "metapolitical" struggle - focusing on transforming culture and ideas rather than direct political action - to overcome what Faye sees as the destructive aspects of Western modernity, including individualism, egalitarianism, and what he terms "humanitarian" universalism. He envisions this as a long-term project to fundamentally reshape European consciousness and return to what he considers authentic European values, combining both ancient traditions and modern scientific insights.
You can find this essay, along with others, in PDF format in the original French over at Éléments «Pour un gramscisme de droite»
Translated by Alexander Raynor
Intellectuals no longer have ideas, and the beautiful images in magazines can no longer create illusions: the aging of all thought is met with the hollow babble of mass media. In the background: a world without purpose, a world of noise, where commodities swirl. From old leftists to senile far-right, from neo-Californian sects to the young dynamic executives of the seventies, now converted to environmentalism and soft energies, the discourse of ideologies goes in circles. Defeated by facts, classical liberalism and Marxism leave their former apologists disillusioned.
In his latest book, Régis Debray confesses that his ideas contradict his ideal. Bernard-Henri Lévy1, for his part, recently wrote in his weekly column in Le Matin: "I'm not talking about others, all the others, and also myself, helpless, perfectly disoriented as to the tasks of theory, the urgencies of action, and even the certainty of things" (November 17, 1981). As for us, he can rest assured, we are neither helpless nor disoriented. We know where we're going. We know what we want: to take over from the dominant ideologies.
A long-term task - but everything is permitted to those who know how to wait and work! Publications, books, meetings, conferences, seminars, circles: for thirteen years, our action in the battle of ideas has been expanding. Around our enterprise, comparable in its form to that of the societies of thought before the French Revolution, a new sensibility has been born, as if GRECE had set in motion a force, an idea silently present in civil society.
Thirteen years ago, what were we? Nothing or almost nothing: a handful of students teeming with contradictory intuitions. Today, what are we? A current of thought, a thriving center of values. And tomorrow? I can't help but make the following comparison: the Encyclopedists and philosophers of the 18th century expressed themselves in the midst of a "nobiliary reaction," when the "surface" of social events seemed to contradict their values. The same was true of the Frankfurt School, whose influence we now measure. In fact, like us today, neither of them was truly going against the current. The current situation, indeed, makes me optimistic: after "advanced liberalism," "Western socialism," which is its continuation, is in turn trying to patch up the merchant society, to manage the System, to reactivate the outdated ideals of egalitarianism. But at the first signs, it seems that this is not really a state of grace. Our society is no longer inspired by a renewal of its ideology. Today, it is experiencing its "apogee," that is to say, the beginning of its decline; dead ideas have become moral canons, systems of habits, ideological taboos, which no longer arouse enthusiasm. No more revolutionary ardor, nothing but "minimal hopes": utopia becomes cold. We keep it "for lack of anything better."
But as always in history, a new sensibility is being born under the aged body of official ideas and reigning academicism, insolent and disrespectful. We are, among others, its representatives. We want to give ideas back to a world that no longer has any, to propose meaning to men alienated by a pathogenic society where senility of mind and the hegemony of domestic micro-values compete only with the ramblings of political apparatus histrions. Already, points have been scored: not only is our direct audience growing, but everywhere, by dint of reading and hearing us, people are taking up our concepts and themes. We have introduced these into public debate: the relationships between religion and ideology, the Indo-European fact, questions of cultural identity, the fight against Americanism, debates around ethology, the introduction of life sciences into sociology, the questioning of human rights ideology, etc. This is what is destined to replace the rather provincial ratiocinations of the Parisian intelligentsia on the last post-mortem convulsions of Jean-Paul Sartre or the exegeses of actor Reagan's latest fiscal speech.
On the other hand, we can't help but notice that people of all tendencies are adopting our ideas. Certainly, these ideas contradict and subvert the dominant ideology; they infiltrate in fragments, like incongruous carp, into the pond of official ideas. But so much the better. We are here to throw our stones into the pond, that is to say, to make people think and awaken intelligence.
We must pose subversive questions: Is the profound function of human rights ideology not to legitimize the project of globalizing mass economic happiness? Does the "youth culture" not resemble a true ethnocide of youth, transformed into a new "Western class," homogenized and consuming? Shouldn't we reinterpret the meaning of all so-called protest movements of the sixties and seventies - which, not by chance, appeared in the United States - as a readaptation of the bourgeois spirit to a new form of capitalism, bureaucratic and "non-patrimonial"? In the same vein, shouldn't we consider the propaganda surrounding the permissive society, and the alleged ideologies of "liberation," as counterparts to the emergence of a new totalitarian liberalism that integrates people into a centralized and painless technocratic discipline? Can suspicion not also be cast on the profusion of discourses praising "grassroots democracy," "individual autonomy," etc.? Isn't their function, by encouraging narcissism and polarizing individuals on the everyday, to validate the decline of true citizenship and the reinforcement of social control by the technocratic state apparatus, whether it be "advanced liberal" or social democratic? Another disturbing question: isn't the role of the political spectacle, staged by the mass media, to make people forget the confiscation of public opinion's critical function, in favor of a new acclamatory function?
More generally, we ask: What do the hyper-humanitarian, hyper-egalitarian, hyper-democratic discourses held by the proponents of the Welfare State hide? Do they serve to ensure the establishment of a totalitarian, administrative, and depoliticized domination? What does this magnificent unanimity of the left and the right around the defense of "the West," of "Western civilization" hide? Is it an enterprise concomitant with the voluntary forgetting to teach the historical roots of European culture? Would one perchance want to construct a homo occidentalis, an inhabitant of an Americanosphere, in which the difference between socialism and liberalism would only make sense during the electoral circus? These are the kinds of questions we ask. And there are many others, on all subjects, from anthropology to comparative mythology!
For us, ideas constitute weapons in service of a project. Isolated, neutral, non-combatant intellectuals have never left their mark on history. Yes, we bear witness to engaged thought and culture. This engagement is not and will never be political, but historical. Let's be clear: GRECE and its movement do not intend in any way to provide an ideology to liberals or conservatives, nor to the "left," but want to bring to society, as a whole, the strength of different ideas.
Engaging in "right-wing Gramscianism" means disseminating a system of values that will act in the long term, that may even one day include competing formulations, and that is carried by a metapolitical strategy, that is to say, situated outside political institutions, both in terms of language and aims. GRECE thus disseminates a worldview that can be expressed either through cultural action or, on a strictly intellectual level, through the construction of a theoretical corpus, never completed, always progressing. This latter, which aims to include all disciplines in the same coherence, from biology to philosophy, already presents itself, in the era of Marxism's decline, as the only global attempt at ideological creation of our time. Unlike what Marxism was, what Christianity remains, and what the economic-humanitarian vulgate has become, our ideological corpus is radically open, in constant evolution. It integrates new disciplines, it admits new ideas, it always remains in direct contact with reality.
But what gives GRECE's ideas their main particularity in the current landscape is their independence from all ideologies. The latter, even if they claim to be opposed to one another, all exist within the same worldview that I would characterize as "Western." None of the discourses produced by this ideology, including the most "contestatory" ones, can be considered "critical." Sociologists, writers, playwrights, journalists, ideologues, politicians have been accumulating, since the beginning of the century, seemingly critical statements about our society. There was successively a Marxist critique, an anarchist critique, an existentialist critique, then Freudian, Freudo-Marxist, Christian-existentialist, neoliberal, etc. However, upon closer inspection, these critiques are not critiques at all, starting with the famous Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. And this is normal: the Western world, object of so many remonstrances and crystallization of so many revolutionary or reformist fantasies, is never, at its core, rejected in its ideological substratum. It is only reproached for "technical" imperfections in the realization of its universalist ideals, which are shared by all families, from Trotskyists to neoconservatives. A critique cannot be authentic if it is based on the same postulates as the object being criticized. Yet, the most "contestatory" discourses, from autonomism to radical ecologism, only position themselves "against" Western society to encourage it to further actualize its implicit ideology. As a result, contemporary contestation reinforces the dominant worldview that it claims to oppose.
Our current of thought, however, does not share this worldview. We thus represent, perhaps, the only "ideologically liberated territory" of contemporary society. GRECE and its movement are the first to occupy a radically critical position, a space of real contestation in the midst of "Western conservatism." And it is perhaps for this reason that in our ranks, more than elsewhere, one finds the true protesters of May '68 (the heirs of the Situationists2, for example).
Our critique encompasses all current ideologies, and these must be interpreted as secularizations of the Christian consciousness. At the outset, Christian individualism was posited as a foundational value. The individual man, cut off from the world, in relation with God the Father, must achieve his salvation. The secularization of Christianity, which begins with Calvinism and culminates in modern ideologies, consists of "bringing down" to earth, in order to "transform" it, the metaphysical and moral ideals with which the Christian, as an "individual-outside-the-world," was in spiritual relationship. The Christian axiom according to which man must achieve his individual salvation in relation to an other-world has mutated, in dominant ideologies, into a desire to achieve individual happiness, generally understood as economic well-being. The "will of God" of Christians becomes the "Reason" of ideologues. The goal assigned to society is to rationally achieve individual happiness. True "nature," that is to say, the real, that of differences, vital impulses, of becoming, as attested by modern sciences and as we also want it in terms of values, finds itself devalued in favor of a secularized "other-world," which can be the pacified global society, the end of history, or Western cosmopolitanism.
"Equality" and "freedom" are consequences, not "postulates" of this worldview. The postulates are constituted by the holy trinity "Individual-Reason-Happiness/Salvation". Equality is deduced from the individualist postulate: the abstract and atomized man, subjected to God the Father or to universal reason, is considered similar everywhere only "by default", through devaluation of his essence. In the Promethean tradition, on the contrary, which constitutes the only true "humanism", equality is affirmed in a concrete, limited, and positive way: for example, equality of opportunity, to which we subscribe. Similarly, our current of thought, which prefers plurals to singulars, believes in freedoms, but certainly not in the monotheistic and totalitarian concept of "Freedom".
Equality, in the Christian-Western worldview, is thus understood as a means, an instrumental notion, to bring about a universal society of individual, rational, and reasonable happiness. One is justified in speaking of "egalitarianism" to designate this worldview, insofar as it forms the privileged praxis of the dominant mental system. From Marxism to social Christianity, from the hyper-liberalism of the Chicago school to left-wing autonomism, it is indeed egalitarianism that speaks - and that says, through its multiple strategic and tactical variants, that the finality of man and his world is the rational realization of individual happiness, even if this is conceived under the category of humanity, an additional aggregate of human atoms. Happiness, in this bourgeois vision of the world, is interpreted under an economic and social definition. It results in a devaluation of belongings - peoples, cultures, historical heritages, the antagonistic wills of men and groups - all considered as provisional anomalies in view of the global project of homogenization of the human world, an entropic and anti-vital project to which egalitarian practice leads in its aim to realize here below the Jerusalem of the heavens.
If our critical work consists, in making ourselves genealogists or sociologists, of casting the most radical suspicion on this worldview and the ideologies attached to it, of enabling our contemporaries to become aware of the profound alienation in which it keeps them, we also maintain, on the other hand, an affirmative discourse.
Our project is to establish, in a conscious and formulated state, the reactivation in a hyper-modern form of another worldview, immemorially present in the European consciousness, which took the form of ancient paganism and which, from Gothic art to Galileo, from Nietzsche to Colette, remains ever alive, as a recourse for a lost world. This worldview, active as a sub-consciousness, and which even penetrated Christianity - notably in art - we intend to operationalize its cultural reformulation and historical regeneration.
The epicenter of the values we defend is constituted by the recognition of the fundamental realities of life, as the natural sciences reveal them to us, but also as, since Heraclitus and Homer, our profound philosophy makes us want them. What is true life, the "life of life," if not the proliferation of the living, its aleatory and risky character, its hierarchization, its juvenility, the evolutionary movement that runs through it, the crises and dynamic imbalances that fertilize it, and finally the perpetual combat that animates it? It is troubling to note that the mechanisms of phylogenesis and embryogenesis respond to the same principles as those implicitly present in the cosmology and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and ancient Germans. The same does not hold true for the dualistic cosmologies of the great monotheistic religions. In our perspective, life has no other aim than itself, and the world is devoid of values. What despairs the Christian mobilizes us, namely that it is man who establishes himself as the sole giver of meaning, the sole lord of forms. The meaning is clear for us: to keep alive the culture, the people, the history that are ours and, if possible - because, fundamentally, we are players and aesthetes - to increase this life and ensure that the same is true for all other peoples, each in its singularity and in its will to destiny.
Our theoretical corpus is first characterized by its realist aspect: no scientific novelty can hinder an open system of thought, while ethology has ruined Rousseauism, and anthropology has contradicted the Christian conception of man. We also profess anti-reductionism, a term which we have, moreover, helped to popularize; we accept reality in its complexity and contradictions. Man, for example, must regard himself as a culturally and biologically constructed being, simultaneously drawn to peace and combat, etc. Reality possesses, according to us, several levels of integration, none of which can alone explain the whole: microphysical, macrophysical, organic, anthropological, social, historical levels. Our adversaries, on the other hand, reduce reality to only one of its aspects, be it biological or socio-economic. Consequently, we establish bridges between disciplines: we refuse "pure economics" or "pure biology"; we illuminate, one by the other, the human sciences and the natural sciences. Our view of the world is organic and not mechanistic. We seek, therefore, to never admit a partial view of things. We are, fundamentally, anti-extremists with strong values; whereas our adversaries appear as extremists with weak values. All this allows us to account for the whole of reality, where our adversaries find themselves forced to reject entire swaths of reality, be it aggressiveness, the sacred, or the adventurous irrationality of human behavior, because they contradict their theories.
Escaping the classic and artificial boundaries (innate/acquired, culture/nature, tradition/progress), we try to think together what had always been envisioned in opposition. I will give only a few examples. We define ourselves simultaneously as irrationalists and rational, hyper-modernists (one can even say "futurists") and working towards a reactivation and reinterpretation of our most ancestral European traditions. We declare ourselves revolutionary and playful, but also constructors and conservatives. We are enthusiasts of science and the sacred, insisting both on rootedness and on "dis-installation," the spirit of conquest and adventure that breaks boundaries. We emphasize phylogenetic heritage and man as a being-of-culture. We aspire to powerful communitarian and altruistic values, but we recognize the importance of aggressiveness. We denounce both the racism of hateful superiority and the ethnocidal racism of the "humanitarian" refusal of the specificities of peoples. We are as concerned with the protection of the ecosystem as with the development of technology and science, as a demiurgic expression of what is most risky, thus most human in man; in this regard, we think that technology as such is not responsible for the deadly tepidity of our civilization, but that this must be attributed to the universalist and bourgeois ideology, which diverts modern technology from its profound, creative and "poetic" nature. We consider ourselves "anti-Western" because pro-European, anti-liberal because adversaries of the Welfare State to which mercantile liberalism paradoxically leads, while pronouncing ourselves for the spirit of enterprise and responsibility of economic agents, but also for a submission of the economic order to the sovereign and political function.
Our ideas, as we can see, call to men and not to the worm-eaten schools of thought of our time. We are the first to express a conception of the world virtually present in our contemporaries, perhaps especially in the new generations, harassed by the nonsense, the tablets of the law, and the empty drawers of dominant ideologies. These latter are now entering their third age. Egalitarianism was first religious, with Christian consciousness; then, from the 17th to the 20th centuries, it went through its inventive phase of combat and theoretical and political construction. Today, it reaches its apogee; it becomes "sociological" and behavioral, and is no longer inspired by "ideas." Western civilization, like a world without purpose, self-reproduces. Christianity, having become social morality and secular gospel, loses its religious content and no longer hinders the atheization of the world. For the first time, we live in a society without legitimation or global meaning, where social conditioning and mass psychological alienation have taken the place of ideas and myths.
Our ambition, then, is to propose our ideas as a possible recourse to the people of our time and our nation. But this ambition is a struggle. We fight because not to fight is to die; because the world that surrounds us is one of passivity and slumber, one where the energy of the people is dying. We cannot bear that this senile world imposes itself on the European peoples, whose entire culture, since Mycenae, has been nothing but a feverish construction of history, an adventurous ascent towards the light.
Today, to speak like Hölderlin3, we are perhaps at the midnight of the world. But after the most opaque part of the night, only the glimmer of morning can emerge. Nietzsche's last man, the one who hops about winking and proclaiming himself happy, is now installed. At the same time, by dialectical inversion, he is threatened; he becomes weak, for he no longer has religion or ideas. Reigning, he can propose nothing other than what is. So perhaps, in this desert of wills, in this total darkness that has been so long in coming, a call will be born. The glow of dawn will be long in becoming day, but, through our existence, it already shines. The new day, that is to say the regeneration of our history, will not resemble this twilight that has just faded and for which we retain nostalgia. We draw inspiration from the values of ancient paganism, but it is not this that we want to reinstate. Let us salute the dead gods and prepare the era of the demiurges, the era of the world's second modernity: when a poet will come to retrieve Excalibur, the sword buried in the depths of the waters.
We want the return of our history. So, we simply speak up, to tell the people of our time what our past is becoming, what our present has become, and what our destiny can become. No one will ever silence us, for, since Galileo, no one has ever been able, in Europe, to muzzle new ideas. Now, the wheel is set in motion: it is possible that in the land of France, in this ending 20th century, the new European consciousness will emerge and that, imbued with the virtue of patience, but also possessed by the certainty of victors, we will be its first shoots. GRECE is an avant-garde, that of the new Greek beginning, that of the deepest memory and the most intense modernity. After us, perhaps: the Great Noon4.
TN: Bernard-Henri Georges Lévy is a French public intellectual. He was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" (New Philosophers) movement in 1976. In 1981, Lévy published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most influential work, in which he offers a dark picture of French history. This is the book being referenced by Faye.
TN: The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism.
TN: Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was a German poet and philosopher. Hölderlin was a key figure of German Romanticism.
TN: The phrase "Le Grand Midi" is likely a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical concept of "der große Mittag" in German, which is often translated into English as "the Great Noon" or "the Great Midday." In Nietzsche's philosophy, particularly in his work "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," the concept of the Great Noon represents a moment of supreme clarity, enlightenment, and affirmation of life. It symbolizes the zenith of human potential and understanding, a time when shadows (representing doubt, confusion, or false beliefs) are at their shortest because the sun (symbolizing truth and clarity) is directly overhead.
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Can never get enough of Guillaume Faye.