The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory

This book interrogates the meaning and consequences of the unsettling parallel relationship between today’s critical theory and Right-wing political philosophy.

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What really separates emancipatory thinking from its opposite? The prevailing Left defines itself against neoliberalism, conservative traditionalism, and fascism as a matter of course, but are the philosophical differences more apparent than real? The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand argues that dominant trends in critical and radical theory inadvertently reproduce the cardinal tenets of the twentieth century’s most influential Right-wing philosophers. It finds the rejection of foundationalism, rationalism, economic planning, and vanguardism mirrored in the work of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Strauss. Larry Alan Busk suggests that this is more than just an unfortunate coincidence. Once the ideal of “the rational society” is abandoned, the Right is able to offer intelligible and compelling arguments for its political conclusions, whereas the Left has no corresponding case to make for its positions on either economic or “cultural” issues. If it is to be more than merely an inverted image of the Right, critical theory must reevaluate its relationship to what Julius Nyerere once called “deliberate design” in politics. In the era of anthropogenic climate change, a substantial—not merely nominal—departure from Right-wing talking points is all the more necessary and momentous.