A Guide to the Imperium Press Substack
For the Uninitiated
If you’re here you probably know what Imperium Press is, but for those who don’t, we’re a publishing house founded in 2018 with the mission of reclaiming the Western Canon from its usurpers and giving it back to its traditional bearers.
My name is Mike, I’m the editor-in-chief of Imperium Press, and this Substack fleshes out in long form some of the ideas I speak about in interviews and on social media. Some are original contributions to folkish and traditional European thought. Some are simply things we as peoples once knew but have long forgotten. Sometimes I comment on current events and the radical right scene in general.
CLICK HERE for a short overview of what this blog is about.
CLICK HERE for a summary of some key folkish concepts.
Below you’ll find links to the articles arranged by concept and by topic:
GUIDES:
QUICK AND DIRTY GUIDES — Much of this blog is introducing (really, recovering) concepts that make more sense of the world than conventional ones. The important concepts that run across many articles are collected here in short, straightforward, and un-paywalled form:
The Ancestral Principle — Authorship is authority
Authority as Primordial — Authority is upstream of truth
Ethical Relativism for Chads — Imperative ethics
Where Does Civic Nationalism Come From? — Propositionality
FOUNDATIONS OF THE RIGHT — The right is all about hierarchy and the sacred, right? Well, yes. But at it’s about much more than that. There are much deeper foundations to the political right, and when you dig down to those foundations you find that much of what’s been considered “right-wing”—even for centuries—is just yesterday’s consolidated left-wing victories.
CONCEPTS:
PROPOSITIONALITY — When propositions exhaust a given domain; propositionality is a major feature of modernity and a sure sign of liberalism. For example, you know propositional nationalism as civic nationalism. But propositionality is much wider than that—it’s found in ethics, religion, and many other domains.
Morality is Not a Kind of Knowledge
Was the Third Reich Civic Nationalist?
See also: “Imperative Ethics” below.
THE AXIAL ROOTS OF MODERN DECLINE — The essentially corrupt features of modernity have ancient roots. The worst symptoms of decline today were born in the transition from the pre-Axial world to the Axial age. Few can swallow this pill.
The Hard Problem of Conscience
Charles III and the Problem of Legitimacy
VIRAL VS. ORGANIC MEMETICS — Cultural objects (religion, beliefs, practices, etc.) spread in one of two ways: either the object’s reproductive interests are aligned with its carrier’s reproductive interests, or not. If not, they spread virally. If so, organically. This has major implications for the idea of progress, “might is right”, and justifications of the present order.
FACTUALISM — You may know this as “irrationalism”. Reason is built on a foundation, but cannot itself be the foundation. No combination of propositions will ever lead you to self-evident premises—rationality rests on a pre-rational foundation, on brute facts that are given but not justifiable. Factualism, from Latin factum, whence our “fact”—something given. The absolute sovereignty of the pre-rational.
How to Dissolve a Civilization
THE ANCESTRAL PRINCIPLE — The ancestral principle is: authorship is authority. This simple principle, which the entirety of the Western tradition rests on, justifies folkishness and has radical implications for our religious life.
Where Do Pagans Get Their Authority?
Charles III and the Problem of Legitimacy
ABSOLUTIST SOVEREIGNTY — Pioneered by Bodin and Filmer, perverted by Hobbes, and culminating in Carl Schmitt, absolutist sovereignty is the only coherent idea of sovereignty. The sovereign is a man and not a multitude; sovereignty is characterized by agency and decision, not law or an idea. Absolutism is utterly rejected by modernity, but it is impossible to think clearly about politics without it, hence moderns are perpetually bamboozled by politics.
Europeans Are Not Individualist
Greenblatt and the Limits of Soft Power
THE ODINIC VS. THE TYRRHIC — Two aspects of Indo-European mythology that are relevant to everything from modern politics to what Spengler called the “culture-soul” of whole peoples. The Odinic man is the great man; The Tyrrhic man is the maintainer of order. Similar to Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysiac framework but with important differences that make it far more useful.
In Defense of Modernist Aesthetics
THE ARCHAIC CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM — Capitalism has rarely been both systematically and effectively critiqued from the right. Related to “Axial Roots of Decline” (above), this critique locates capitalism within a very ancient trend—the desacralization of property.
Capitalism: An Archaic Critique, Part I
Capitalism: An Archaic Critique, Part II
THE MITHRIDATES STRATEGY — Liberalism is a poison, so liberal societies are weak. But this doesn’t mean they will lose out to their competitors. They have a strategy—learn to live with the poison, then export it in its stronger forms to societies with no defense mechanisms. Terrifying, but this strategy seems to be working.
The Third World is Going to Cop It
THE HESIODIC VIEW OF HISTORY — The belief that ideas, practices etc. degrade over time and lose their original integrity. This view of history comes in for criticism here, because just as often, perhaps even the historical norm, is that ideas become more coherent, more consistent, and more purist over time. Trads suffer from the Hesiodic view of history, especially those who want to go back to the thing before the current thing.
ONOMASTICS — Names do a lot more than just point to things: they confer ontological status. When you name something, you call it into being, and when something remains unnamed, for all intents and purposes it doesn’t exist, and so can’t be opposed. The sovereign is the one who wields the power of naming.
IMPERATIVE ETHICS — Ethical statements are almost always thought to be true/false statements of fact. But this assumption is wrong and so it produces a whole host of problems: the is-ought problem, irresolvable debate over justice and right, and ultimately universal self-legislation. We offer a folkish alternative—that ethics is not fundamentally a matter of propositions, but of commands—which sets ethics on an ancient and more solid footing.
Morality is Not a Kind of Knowledge
Who’s the Boss — Folk or Elite?
TOPICS:
DECLINE
Why is Korea Not Breeding? Part I
Why is Korea Not Breeding? Part II
The Anglo and His Destiny, Part I
AESTHETICS
Falling Down: The Modern Odyssey
In Defense of Modernist Aesthetics
THE WESTERN CANON
What Can We Salvage of the West?
BOOK AND MOVIE REVIEWS
Ten Books Required to Understand the Modern World, Part I
Ten Books Required to Understand the Modern World, Part II
Samurai vs. Viking — A Comparison
LIBERALISM
Elon vs. the Therapeutic State
Disgust and the Rebirth of Fascism
The Third World is Going to Cop It
A House Divided Against Itself
MYTHS OF OUR AGE
Falling Down: The Modern Odyssey
Disgust and the Rebirth of Fascism
CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM
Religion as a Function of Biology
How the Indo-Europeans Conquered the World
ENVIRONMENTALISM
NATIONALISM
Renewed my subscription.