We Have Friends In the Academy

Our Work has Not Gone Unnoticed

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In Ed Dutton’s biography of Jonathan Bowden, he opens with an anecdote where at a recent right-wing conference he met an academic who revealed to him her “power level”, sporting a copy of a book of Bowden essays published by Counter-Currents. She looked at him with a wry smile as if to say wordlessly, “I bet you didn’t think I had it in me.” These conferences are beginning to build not only in frequency, not only in intellectual weight, but also in terms of moments like these.

The more interesting people in the academy have long had a fascination with the radical right. It is undeniable that a disproportionate number of the most important thinkers of the 20th century had either overt or muted radical right sympathies, such as Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Gottlob Frege, Mircea Eliade, Georges Dumézil, etc. Even the most important left-wing academics have felt the pull. We could point to Giorgio Agamben’s deep engagement with Schmitt. We could point to Zizek’s defense of the “dignity of the nation” and his rehabilitation of thinkers like Heidegger and Jünger on ontological and poetic grounds. We could point to Jean Baudrillard’s admiration of the symbolic clarity of the Gulf War and Islamic terror as challenges to Western banality. We could point to the whole career arc of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle; initially leftist, he became a fascist intellectual.

Rochelle is hardly the only one. George Steiner, Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, René Girard, Pier Paolo Pasolini—each was either on the left or in the centre, but looked toward distant rightward horizons with fascination, often to the alarm of their contemporaries. We could point to many more. The post-Nuremberg consensus enforced a kind of orthodoxy by way of civilizational trauma, but now the river is reverting to its natural course—illiberal ideas again exert a force they have not done in a century.

Over time liberalism has, like a black hole, pulled bodies of lesser gravity into its maw and assimilated them. Syndicalism, feminism, intersectionality, anarchism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, libertarian socialism, social democracy—all have been given a seat at the New Labour table, all have been folded into and rendered harmless by liberalism, because at the end of the day, they do not fundamentally disagree with liberalism. The only things that remain indigestible to it are, as Bowden himself pointed out, religious fundamentalism, and the radical right. As dissent is winnowed away and these alone remain stubbornly outside the mainstream, the centre of intellectual gravity has begun to shift. True academics—people with the daring to explore any idea, no matter where it comes from—are curious by nature, and so they are drawn to where the intellectual energy is. It is now almost exclusively with us.

Some interesting examples come to mind. Greg Johnson recently wrote an article on Counter-Currents, The Battle of the Books: Counter-Currents in Academia, where he spotlights two books—one recent, and one not so recent—in which the ideas of Counter-Currents themselves are discussed, particularly Greg’s book The White Nationalist Manifesto. His article is fairly short and you should read it, so I won’t summarize here, but suffice it to say that CC has left an imprint on the academic world, one which continues to grow with time.

I have seen this firsthand as well. This Substack that you are reading has attracted a not insignificant degree of academic interest. Over the past three years we have been contacted by many academics wishing to contribute to Imperium Press in some way, always under the strictest confidentiality. Some have produced introductions for us. Some have written books for us. Some have contributed to the project of Imperium in other less mentionable ways. This is not limited to academia—people in the world of finance, tech, and other, more surprising sectors have offered words of encouragement and more. But as an academic publisher, the overwhelming professional attention that Imperium Press has attracted is centred on scholars.

Speaking of scholars, if you search Google Scholar, then at present you will find 156 citations of Imperium Press in academic papers. If you search Google books you will find many citations of our works across hundreds of books. Our work has been cited by the paleoconservative Paul Gottfried, by the Marxist Slavoj Zizek, by the Chinese technocrat Zhang Xiaotong, and by figures who reside anywhere else you can think on the political spectrum.

I have personally been contacted by several mainstream academics to contribute work to academic publications, mostly on the radical right itself. Thus far I have turned these down, but not for lack of interest—only because the requested essays were not the right fit, or somewhat outside my areas of speciality.

Recently the pseudonymous academic “Thomas Dalton”, sympathetic translator of Mein Kampf and author of numerous articles and books on National Socialism, was identified as a senior lecturer at a respected university, a figure who is an important contemporary voice in the field of metaphysics. Perhaps not surprisingly, this academic’s favoured metaphysical position, along with his interest in deep ecology and environmental ethics, maps very closely on to the theological paradigm of animism, which challenges and undermines the assumptions of liberal universalism so foundational to modernity.

While Imperium Press is not a National Socialist publisher, it is important to note that this “outing” of Thomas Dalton is striking—though by no means unique—evidence of the fascination that mainstream academics have with radical right-wing worldviews. One wonders how many Daltons there really are out there. The answer is probably more than any of us realize.

The position occupied by the modern university within the broader society does not permit any foundational dissent from liberalism—the only permitted way to “dissent” is to extend liberal priors and “critique” it for not going far enough, such as in Marxism, wokeness, etc. This has created a stifling culture of orthodoxy and intellectual stupefaction. And yet, many people in the academy agree with you. They see the problems with society that you see. Moreover, they see the solutions that you see too—they’re just not allowed to talk about them. So the more daring academics approach organizations like Counter-Currents, like Imperium Press, who help give vent to their most deeply held beliefs, and offer a way to make a difference anonymously. Many others, perhaps not so daring, look on from the side with admiration, and occasionally reach out to express it.

But you should never think—not for one moment—that the best and brightest disagree with you. The reverse is true. And by Jove, the day is coming when they will be able to say so in the full light of day. That is what we are doing. That is our mission.