What is Folkishness?

A reply to Arthur Powell

Introduction

The folkish worldview, originally devised in the 19^th century by German thinkers, fell into obscurity for decades after the Second World War. In recent years, although still very much a minority position, interest in it has revived somewhat, and several figures have made efforts to articulate it and popularise it in the English-speaking world. Among those who have been writing from a folkish perspective on Substack, I include Mike Maxwell, founder of Imperium Press,¹ Tristan Powers,² who appears on Imperium Press’ Hearthfire Radio, and myself. Naturally, because it has no mass movement associated with it, and this intellectual work has only been going on for a short period in our own language, some confusion has arisen as to what exactly the folkish worldview is, and what it stands for.

Arthur Powell, a Substack author who used to run the poetry site, Atop the Cliffs, and who has published a volume of poetry with Imperium Press,³ published an article yesterday entitled “Questions for the Folkish”.⁴ In it, he sets out a number of doubts or uncertainties he has about the folkish worldview. These are mainly directed towards Mike Maxwell, the founder of Imperium Press. Mike has a rather idiosyncratic interpretation of folkishness which departs from its original conception in important ways, notably by connecting it to the Ancestral Principle.⁵ As someone who has studied the original German folkish movement quite intensely, and who has tried to develop a contemporary version of it that modifies it whilst remaining true to the essentials of the original, I feel that I am justified in wading into the debate.

In this article I will try to do three things: to set out my own view of folkishness, to respond to the video by Mike Maxwell that Powell was reacting to (as well as some ideas he has expressed elsewhere), and to answer some of Powell’s questions.

Folkishness as I see It

The folkish worldview maintains that the folk to which one belongs is the organisational principle of one’s existence. A folk is a population sharing common ancestry, language and culture, the members of which recognise themselves as a collectivity which is distinct from other human populations. A folk is a whole which is worth more than the sum of its parts. From the myriad interactions of men and women, families, local communities and so on, sharing common ancestry, common goals and ideas, something new arises that is greater than any of the folk’s parts. A folk has a character of its own, a will of its own, and a special ideal of itself, known as its folkhood, in the striving towards which it fulfils and enhances itself. A folk is temporally prior to the state, in that it existed before the modern state came into being; it is morally prior to the state, in that its welfare is the sole justification for state power; and it may exist in the future without a state of its own, even if it had one in the past. This basic conception of folkishness would have been relatively uncontroversial among the original folkish thinkers. What I will try to do here is to draw out the foundations of this worldview.

The foundations of the folkish worldview are a) traditionalism, b) particularism, and c) communitarianism. These can be briefly summarised as follows:

A) It is important to conserve the heritage of the past, the customs, traditions, literature and art of the ancestors, but also to preserve the continuity of the lineage to which one belongs.

b) Partiality towards those who are similar to oneself is not only morally justified but also a moral obligation in many cases.

c) It is not individuals who have primacy, but the larger groupings to which they belong. Although individual people need not be stultified or crushed by these groupings, there are a range of situations in which they can be legitimately called upon to make sacrifices and risk harm for the benefit or defence of the whole.

I have fleshed out these ideas in greater detail in other posts, but this should be sufficient for us to work with.

Mike Maxwell’s Conception of Folkishness

Mike Maxwell said, in a recent video, that “what folkishness is…in a simple definition…is that it places the pre-political before the political”.⁶ The political, as he defines it, concerns how we ought to live at the level of the nation. He illustrates this by asking us to imagine “the political” to be a large circle, and the “pre-political” to be all of the concentric circles within that circle. The idea that Mike is getting at is that a nation is built out of a series of sub-groupings of varying sizes. In ascending order of size, these are the family, extended family, clan, and tribe.

Now, if this is intended as a definition, rather than a statement about one feature of folkishness, obviously it won’t do. Indeed, it is very odd that a definition of folkishness (which is, among other things, a political position) would focus on every group within the folk, but not the folk itself. It strikes me, from having read other things that Mike has written and said, and from conversations with him, that his belief is

a) that we are currently witnessing the breakdown of nations as well as the effectiveness of the state.

b) that it will be necessary, in order to survive this, to revive the clan system with the Indo-European ancestor cult at its base so that we can effectively navigate this breakdown and devolve governance to a more localised level.

Here it is my turn to ask questions. Firstly, does this mean that Mike believes that the folk, as such, has disappeared, or is soon going to disappear? Secondly, if this is the case, does he intend this retreat to the constituent parts of the folk as a precursor to its subsequent reconstruction at some point in the future?

If the answer to the first question is “yes”, and the answer to the second is “no”, then Mike is not folkish (although he may well have significant overlap with folkishness). If the answer is “yes” to both questions, then he is folkish, and is attempting to utilise clannishness in service to folkishness. I suspect that the latter is the case, as Mike has on numerous occasions spoken of the importance of the folk, not just the clan. But Arthur Powell has asked a similar question in his own essay, which suggests that there may be some ambiguity here, and I hope that Mike writes a response to clear up this question. However, leaving this aside, the revival of the clan system does lead to difficulties:

1. The revival of the clan system, based on Indo-European Paganism, will radically change our social, cultural, religious, and economic life. It is clear that life within it will be distinctly unattractive to the vast majority of White people alive today, and even to a large proportion of the radical right. As Powell points out near the end of his article, many of the greatest achievements of the English (and the British more generally) occurred long after the breakdown of the clan system, and this breakdown may have been essential for us achieving these things. A suspicion might arise that, in returning to it, we would be sacrificing our potential to match up to the greatness of our past. Consequently, by portraying a return to the clan system as a central pillar of folkish praxis, it could well put off many thousands of people who would otherwise be attracted to it.

2. It is probable that a return to the clan system will actually hasten the destruction of Western folks as they currently exist. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that it will direct the efforts of many folkish-leaning people away from defending their folk, and towards the creation of a more localised form of life that needed to be broken down historically in order to enable people to more freely engage in folkish life, as opposed to merely clan life. The second reason is that as a result of the potential revival of blood feuds and arranged marriages, which certainly formed part of the original clan system, it is likely that familial ties between different sections of the folk will break down, and conflicts may even arise within the folk itself, at just such a time as we are under attack from every quarter.

Needless to say, the revival of the clan system, even if it were to be successfully pulled off, would take several generations. So far there seems to have been little progress towards re-establishing it (although Mike cannot be faulted for this, since he has only been writing publicly on the topic for a few years, and has done far more than most to contribute to institution-building and the development of theory).

Now, I don’t wish for this to be interpreted as an attack on Mike, as he is a friend of mine, and we have significant ideological overlap, but it is necessary at this early stage that we have a conversation about what folkishness means and hammer out any disagreements we might have. It is better for this process to take place now than years down the line, when the stakes are higher.

Mike does have a point when he identifies the focus on the pre-political as important to folkishness. Folkish identity is not civic in nature. It has nothing to do with citizenship, or the possession of a passport. Nor is folkish identity propositional: it is not based on assent to a set of “British values” or any such thing.⁷ Proper folkists do care about their ancestral and cultural heritage, their families, their local communities, and so on. As I have said, a folk can exist prior to a modern state, and can continue to exist after losing a state that it once controlled. And Mike is also right to emphasise the importance of healthy smaller communities in order to ensure the health of the folk as a whole. What I doubt is that it is necessary to go as far as to recreate the old clan system in order to achieve this.

With all of this having been said, let us turn to Arthur Powell’s questions and see what can be said in response to them.

Answering Powell’s Questions

Powell asks several questions. Because they are asked in response to Mike Maxwell’s conception of folkishness, and my conception is somewhat different to his, these questions do not always apply to my own view. Still, they are good questions, and there are two of them that I think I can respond to, one of which is asked directly, and one of which I think is implicit. Along the way, another question arises that is very much relevant to issues raised by Powell.

The first of these questions concerns conflicts between various groups to which an individual person belongs. Powell rightly points out that someone can have multiple layers of identity and belong to several different social groups at once. There is always a potential for conflict between groups, even closely related groups, and yet the particularism of folkishness demands that we prioritise those who are closer to us. Here a problem arises: when such conflicts arise, who should we side with?

The solution in some cases is relatively clear. A general principle that we could formulate is that when a conflict arises between two or more identity groups of the same type (say, two families, two folks, etc.), one should always back the group to which one belongs. For example, if your brother gets into a fight with another man, or there is a dispute between your family and another family, you should defend your brother, and defend your family respectively. Further, in cases of war, one must always take the side of one’s folk. This principle has no justifiable exceptions or extenuating circumstances, from what I can see.

But there are other cases in which the situation is more complicated: asymmetrical conflicts. When a conflict arises between your family and the wider community, or between your family and the folk as a whole, who should you side with? The slightly disappointing answer here is that it depends on the circumstances. The particular groups that are in conflict, the reasons for the conflict, and the potential consequences of the outcome of that conflict, are relevant here.

Suppose, for instance, your folk was at war with another, and your father, being ideologically aligned with the regime of the foreign country with which your folk was at war, conspired with the enemy in a way that could undermine the war effort and get your own people killed or dominated by hostile foreigners. In this case you would have no choice, however sad it might be, but to accept that he is in the wrong and deserves to be punished. In behaving in this way, your father would be betraying you, your ancestors, and your prospective descendants by threatening the existence of the wider group. However, if you believed that your father was wrongfully accused, you would be obligated to fight tooth and nail to defend his innocence. And, supposing he was guilty of some crime against the folk as a whole or of a local community, it would be permissible in some circumstances to work for forgiveness, or a lighter punishment of some kind, for your father. The sort of case I have in mind here is something on the order of tax evasion, or racketeering. I hope that this admittedly brief coverage of the topic has made clear that there is not necessarily a rigid rule to be applied in every case of asymmetric conflict, and that the right course of action will depend upon the circumstances.

But this question of asymmetric conflict leads us to a further, very important question, which is relevant to other issues raised by Maxwell, Powell, and myself in this essay. Why, precisely, is the folk, and not the clan or tribe, so important to folkishness? After all, treason—the betrayal of one’s folk—seems to be a particularly heinous crime. There must be some reason why this is so. In order to answer it, we will consider an intermediate question. When people are called to abandon, overlook, or weaken tribal loyalties in favour of national ones, how might we justify it?

One way to justify it is to point to the activities of foreign groups. We live on a planet filled with a tremendous number of folks of differing races, religions, languages, customs, and ideologies. Now let us imagine that we are living in a tribal system. A number of tribes living in the same area may well have far more in common with each other than they do with a group of tribes living in a neighbouring region. We will designate the first group of tribes as group A and the second as group B. Now suppose that group A bands together, pooling their resources and cooperating for purposes such as common defence (and offence), but group B does not do this, and instead the various tribes within it continue to act independently and sometimes fight among each other. It is very likely that all of group B will fall prey to group A, which will be collectively far more powerful. Group B may either be physically exterminated, oppressed, or assimilated into the foreign invading group, none of which are as good or better outcomes as could be had by allying with tribes closer to one’s own to form a more powerful alliance. You may stand to lose something by weakening your tribal autonomy and forming a broader identity, but potentially much more could be lost if one doesn’t do this in the face of foreign competition. Where cooperation can be undertaken without abandoning the tribe’s traditions, independence, or separate existence, then this should of course be preferred, but it may not always be possible. If one wants to preserve what is closest to oneself, it is sometimes necessary to be pragmatic.

Once a folk has come into being, aside from the question of collective defence, other benefits accrue. It is possible to develop a “high culture” of a sort that may be very difficult or even impossible for smaller clans or tribes, warring amongst each other, to produce. Literature, sculpture, music, philosophy, and science, as well as great advances in technique have blossomed in modern societies, in which the clan system is no longer extant, on a scale that was never possible before. A folk is sufficiently large that it can carve out a cultural space for itself which makes it possible for all of the aforementioned products to take on a distinct character and be enjoyed on a grand scale by millions. The folk itself, even after clans and tribes no longer exist, can still have strong families and vibrant local communities with their own identities, and it is because of the existence of the folk and the institutions associated with it that all of these things can be enjoyed. One can have a more local identity and a broader identity, without them generally coming into conflict with each other. It seems to be the case that a folk (or a nation state) is the largest possible scale at which one can have all of the benefits of modernity whilst retaining reasonably close kinship relations and conserving the traditions of one’s ancestors. In the light of this, it is unsurprising that the folk as a whole can be seen as so valuable.

The final question we will seek to answer here concerns the relationship of folkishness to religion. Near the start of his article, Arthur Powell says that it does not strike him that folkishness is necessarily exclusively Heathen. This is an important issue that needs to be addressed. Those who read my blog regularly will have noticed that I don’t address religion. This is deliberate. One reason for doing so is that I don’t think that I have anything particularly valuable to contribute concerning religion. But the other, more important reason is that it isn’t integral to my project, which is to develop a core folkish theory.

Folkishness is not inherently tied to any particular religion. In the original German folkish movement there were individuals of all shades of opinion on religion. H. S. Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde, and Wilhelm Stapel were all Christians. Mathilde Ludendorff promoted a form of non-Christian monotheism she called “Gotterkenntnis”. The writer and artist Ludwig Fahrenkrog and his colleague Wilhelm Schwaner were involved with an explicitly Pagan group called the Germanische Glaubens-Gemeinschaft. Yet all were prominent figures in the original folkish movement. Indeed, I could go further and say that one doesn’t need to be religious at all in order to believe in the central tenets of folkishness (although to be religious is probably preferable for a number of reasons). There are people of all religious beliefs or none on the political “right” who might be attracted to folkishness, but some of them might be put off of folkishness if the only folkish content they see is tied to, say, heathenry. They will naturally make the assumption that one has to be a pagan to be folkish, which is not true at all. Since I believe folkishness to be true, and want to convince as many people as possible of its truth, it would only hinder this cause if I were to tie it to a particular religious doctrine. This is not to say that it is wrong for people to try and integrate their religious views with folkishness, but it is very important that we recognise that these religious beliefs are not what characterise folkishness in itself, and I at any rate will continue to write from a perspective that leaves the religious question to the side.

I hope that this article has made a few things clear, and will contribute to a wider discourse on the topic of folkishness. I am also painfully aware that, due to its sketchiness, it may itself raise some questions. These questions will hopefully be answered adequately in future articles.

1

2

3. See Arthur Powell, Horizons of Iron. Perth: Imperium Press, 2022.

4. Questions for the Folkish

5. The Ancestral Principle

6. See the following video: https://hearthfireradio.com/watch?v=vZYyWcYI. The section in question begins around 10:30.

7. Mike has written on numerous occasions on the concept of “civic” and “propositional” identity. On this, please see his articles “Deep Civic Nationalism” and “Where Does Civic Nationalism Come From?”