A Review of "Revolution from the Right"

“A new front is forming on the battlefields of bourgeois society: the revolution from the right.”

In the radical right, we commonly hear people describe themselves as “reactionaries” who strongly oppose “revolutions”. This is understandable, since anyone on our side will naturally have some affinity for the past, and will see most revolutions as having destroyed things that they value, whether it be the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s. Many events called “revolutions” have played a part in the deterioration of our civilisation. There are those who are moved by this point, among other things, to declare that the very notion of a rightist revolution is a contradiction in terms.

This idea that only the left can be revolutionary, and that revolutions are necessarily bad, was strongly opposed by the German philosopher Hans Freyer in his book Revolution from the Right, originally published in 1931, and recently republished in English translation by Imperium Press. Here I will provide an overview of some of the book’s ideas, and suggest how it is relevant to the contemporary radical right.[1]

We must look at the era in which the book was written to understand why Freyer came to the conclusions he did. The period in Germany between the end of the First World War and the seizure of power by the NSDAP in 1933 must be counted as one of the most intellectually fertile in history. It was a time of great instability, which featured numerous would-be revolutions, from the November Revolution of 1918-1919, to the Kapp Putsch, to Hitler’s ill-fated Munich Putsch in 1923. The economic turmoil of the period led to the proliferation of new economic proposals, and many people called for the abandonment of capitalism. During this period, which saw the establishment of the Weimar Republic, various rightist movements organised in an attempt to provide an alternative system that would enable Germany to recover its pride and regain its greatness.

The most important radical right-wing movements of this period can be broadly characterised into three groupings, according to the schema of Armin Mohler:[2]

a) The Young Conservatives. Mohler has claimed that this faction was the most influential of the Conservative Revolution. It included many influential figures such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (populariser of the concept of the “Third Reich”), Hans Zehrer, E. J. Jung,[3] and of course Hans Freyer himself. Their basic aim was to create a new intellectual elite that would be fit to lead Germany out of the chaos of the Weimar Republic. Some of the principles on which they wanted the new order to be based were: “structure, responsibility of the elites toward the divine and natural law, defense of the people as the reference point of political order, recognition of social evolution when this is consistent with the laws of ‘life’.”[4]

b) The National Revolutionaries. The experience of the First World War had convinced some that new technological developments were ushering in an era in which total mobilisation of the whole nation’s resources was necessary for its preservation.[5] Although there was variation within the national revolutionary camp, it is reasonable to say that they had a modernist orientation. The faction’s central figures included Ernst Jünger, his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger, and the “National Bolsheviks” Ernst Niekisch and Karl Otto Paetel.

c) The Folkish. This faction had the longest history of the three, going back into the 19th century. Early figures included Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a racial theorist and historian, and Adolf Bartels, a poet and literary critic. The central fixtures of the folkish worldview included race, folk (which I have defined elsewhere on my blog), agrarianism, Paganism (or a modified form of Christianity), and anti-Jewish sentiment. Although the folkish tendency was very culturally and intellectually influential, most folkish movements degenerated into infighting or had difficulty gaining more than a few seats in elections.

It is in the context of the events and the ideological currents we just mentioned that we must place Hans Freyer. The moderate right had been discredited; new crises called for new praxis and institutions. Freyer’s thesis was that, whereas past revolutions had been left-wing in nature, the next revolution of the 20^th century would come from the right. We will deal with what a revolution from the right looks like in a moment; but let us first be clear on what a revolution is. A revolution is a process of replacing one social or political order with another based on different principles. A revolutionary situation exists where distinct groups face each other, whose continued co-existence is impossible. Struggle between these groups must result, and the outcome of the struggle will determine whether the present system will exist, or whether it will be replaced with a different one.

Criticism is not revolutionary, for Freyer characterises it as a mere “mental reservation”; similarly, lobbying for concessions from the state, as with trade unionism, is not revolutionary; nor are organised masses necessarily revolutionary. These things are fundamentally compatible with the continued existence of the system. All the talk in the world will not bring about a revolution. As Freyer puts it:

Revolution begins only when critique becomes flesh and blood; when a corporeal and explosive core grows in the shell of the present; when the knot is tightened inside reality itself; when the free forces that are not absorbed by the present represent not only in their better knowledge the judgement of time, but in their existence the historical change of time.[6]

A revolutionary will refuse offers of a sinecure, or pardon by the ruling class if he ceases his activities. He refuses to assimilate, and is the living incarnation of principles opposed to those upon which the current system is built.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, a new economic system developed which revolutionised the world: capitalism. Under this system, the focus shifted towards to quantification and commodification of everything. Anything that could not be directly treated in this way was abstracted away from itself, seen as an emergence from economics. Man himself was brought within this scheme, and transformed into a “worker”, a factor of production, an input into the productive process. But the worker, placed in such an important position, could begin to see himself as the heart of the system. Why was he to suffer so? Why was he propertyless? After all, was he not also a man? Did he not contribute to society? These sentiments could be transformed into revolutionary energy, and were, by the various socialist movements of the 19^th century, particularly Marxism. The proletariat, in the Marxist view, was necessarily exploited by the capitalist system, and only be justly served by the abolition of capitalism itself. Class struggle was a fact of the capitalist system, and the inevitable development of this struggle would be the destruction of the capitalist system.

But a new idea emerged in most of the highly industrialised Western countries, what Freyer termed the “social” idea. The heart of the social idea was the secularised notion of charity. Factory regulations, trade unions to lobby for better conditions, poor relief, and a number of ameliorative measures were devised under its banner. And thus what could have been a revolution was dampened into mere reform, and the spectre of communism was exorcised. The proletariat even championed the social idea themselves, thereby damning the revolution to failure by tying their interests into its preservation:

After all, they already had very different things to lose than their chains, namely their specific rights and the possibilities for their further development.[7]

The essence of the system remained the same, for they were not fighting for the creation of a new system, but for a better place within the present one. Freyer calls this process “the liquidation of the nineteenth century”, because the revolutionary potential of that most potentially revolutionary of previous centuries was nullified. The revolutionaries themselves were distorted and coopted: their “negative”, which aimed at destroying the system, was turned into a “positive” which reinforced it. What strike many as revolutionary developments were really quite compatible with bourgeois industrial society: “no new principle breaks into it”. (I should stress here that when Freyer talks about rejecting “industrial society”, he is not talking about rejecting technology. In fact, he affirms the use of technology. “Industrial society” is his term for the type of society that was predominant in the 19th century, in which every aspect of life was commodified and economised.)

However, the absorption of the revolutionary class—the proletariat—into the service of this order does not end the prospect for further revolution. Indeed, as Freyer says:

It is precisely the dismantling of the revolution from the left that opens up the revolution from the right.[8]

Rather than the proletariat, the organising principle of the revolution from the right is the folk. “Revolutions”, we are told,

[…] are not “developments”, not “progress”, not “movements”. Rather, they are dialectical tensions that are charged and recharged—and whose impact either becomes history here and now—or not.

The incorporation of the proletariat into the service of the industrial order, of the recognition of the necessity and importance of all social classes, cleared a dialectic space within this order, turning the folk from a “vague idea” into a “historical reality”. The folk is “a new formation, its own will and its own right”. It rises above social classes and frees the forces it organises from their character as mere “social interests”. It is “the antagonist of industrial society”.

But what is a folk? According to Freyer, we must pierce through two “layers” before we can understand it. The first layer of the folk is the “nation”, in the 19^th century sense i.e. in the bourgeois sense. This layer was overcome in Freyer’s time, because it was tied to the bygone 19^th century. The second layer was a deeper one. It includes:

[…] the primal forces of history; decrees of the absolute; spirits that were very close to nature, incomprehensibly creative like it; a great immediate existence that works history but does not exude itself in any history.

The folk was in a process of forming into a front against industrial society, and it could not be known with certainty in advance, down to the last detail, what form its social organisation would take after a successful revolution. One could, however, reasonably ask what direction the revolution of the folk would thrust in. Freyer answers: “from the right”. By “right”, he does not mean “right-wing” in the typical sense, since he viewed this as a relic of the 19^th century; rather, he meant that the folk isn’t simply one other interest group that wants to find its place in the system of interest groups, as was the case with the leftist revolutionaries and their “proletariat”. The revolution from the right means that the state will be liberated from its “centuries-long entanglement in social interests”, so as to build a new future out of the folk.

“Every historical situation,” we are told, “produces its own state”. A successful revolution brings about a new state: it does not merely seize the existing state apparatus, keeping it the same but changing the ownership. The revolution from the right will use its state to destroy the “past principle that dominates the present”, and it builds its state even as the old state still exists. The folk and the state are unified in the revolution from the right. Freyer’s conceptions of the folk and state go beyond, respectively, the shallow nationalism of the present, consisting in flag-waving and chanting of slogans, and the notion of the state as something above and separate from the folk, which creates the folk. A folk is a “field of forces”, and the state is, firstly, the tip of the spear with which it deals a deadly thrust into industrial society, and secondly the “concentrated energy” of the folk’s permanent action.

Freyer does give us some indication of what the social order will look like after this revolution. Politics will take precedence over economics. The land will go from being a mere factor of production to a living space for the folk. A new state socialism will be established in which the folk’s “field of force” is freed from “the heterogeneous ricochets of industrial society”. The technical apparatus of the system, as well as the concept of “the social” of the 19^th century will be taken as a matter of course, not as a special achievement or feature of the system. Man will be free, but his freedom will only be within the framework of his folk, not as an isolated “individual”. People will not be organised into separate interest groups which compete with each other, but will see themselves as parts of a unified whole, and work for common ends.

Freyer concludes that a number of people are rising who carry within them the 20^th century, who opposed the dying order of the 19^th century. The front of the folk against industrial society is forming; “that,” Freyer tells us, “is why the revolution from the right is the content of the time”.

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Revolution from the Right is a brief but informative read that remains interesting and useful today. Although the book has many insights, I think that its two most important ideas are:

1. That no future revolutions, at least for the foreseeable future, will come from the left. The left has been fully absorbed into the existing system and work in its interests. Even the “far left” are no real threat, because they either propose ideas that are totally unworkable or they reinforce it. We can see this clearly from the fact that leftist organisations receive funding from the state, NGOs, and the richest members of society.

2. That the revolution against our current order can only come from the right, and that the basic principle behind this revolution can only be the folk, since it is the idea that is completely unassimilable by the system and, if actualised, would create a completely different order.

I would strongly recommend anyone on the radical right to read this book, as it impresses upon the reader the necessity of a revolutionary orientation for the right. Imperium Press’ edition can be found here:

https://www.imperiumpress.org/shop/revolution-from-the-right/

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[1] All page numbers given for quotations from Freyer’s book are from the Imperium Press edition.

[2] See Armin Mohler & Karlheinz Weissmann, The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918-1932, Washington Summit Publishers, 2018.

[3] For those who are interested in Jung, I would recommend Imperium Press’ latest release, his 1930 book, On the Threshold of a New Era, which can be found here:

https://www.imperiumpress.org/shop/on-the-threshold-of-a-new-era/.

[4] Mohler, pg. 130.

[5] One of the key developers of this idea was Johann Plenge, a sociologist who, in his book “1789 und 1914: Die symbolischen Jahre in der Geschichte des politischen Geistes” distinguished between the “ideas of 1789” (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) and the “ideas of 1914” (total mobilization, comradeship of the trenches, etc.). Plenge would later go on to influence National Socialism.

[6] Freyer, Revolution from the Right, pg. 12.

[7] Freyer, pg. 26.

[8] Freyer, pg. 31.