By Gregoire Canlorbe
A Swedish tapestry from the twelfth century showing Odin, Thor with his war hammer, and Freyr with stalks of wheat. Scholars believe this reflects the traditional tripartite division of Indo-European societies.
The national-liberalism of 1789 in the face of the Indo-European tradition
The Indo-European tradition, which some people present as Tradition tout court, is the tradition of a tripartite and hierarchical organization of society, where the sovereign function (which relates to the spiritual sovereignty of the priesthood and to the political sovereignty of the sovereign) takes precedence over the military function, which in turn takes precedence over the productive and reproductive function. The authority to decide on “spiritual” and otherworldly issues is up to the priesthood (who compose the sacerdotal aristocracy); and it is always with the priesthood that this authority lies. As for political power – which includes the power to issue commands and make decisions, as well as the authority to decide on secular issues – it always lies with the sovereign and with a warlike aristocracy; warriors sometimes share the political power with the priesthood, but the supreme authority (on a political and potentially spiritual level) is always with the sovereign alone, by reason of his presumed connection to the deity and his wisdom. For their part, merchants and workers find themselves subservient, due to their inferior rank, to the warlike and sacerdotal aristocracy; it is worth mentioning that, depending on the society envisaged (within the Indo-European world), the castes prove to be more or less combined. Thus, Renaissance Italy saw noble-bankers and priest-soldiers emerging.
The juridico-political enfeoffment of the economic caste to the priest and the warrior is traditionally accompanied by a twin primacy of sacerdotal and warlike values (or functions). The national liberalism of 1789 set up a reversal of the Indo-European tradition by placing the productive function at the top: The enfeoffment of the warrior and the priest to the bourgeois thus follows, as does marginalization of the sense of honor (in favor of a sacrificial conception of heroism) and the advent of a materialistic way of life, which denatures the human being. The overthrow of the Indo-European triad in favor of economic values means, not the decrease of self-sacrifice, but the replacement of the Indo-European warlike ethos (i.e., identifying with and fulfilling oneself through war) with the sacrificial ethos of the bourgeois nations (i.e., anonymizing oneself within the mass of soldiers who die for their mother country). Besides, far from encouraging the global outburst of healthy instincts of territorialism, identity, and the will toward dominance and adventure, the hegemony of economics thwarts these basic instincts, the hypertrophy of the economic instinct leads us to focus entirely on trade and production. Such hypertrophy goes against the instinctive behavior of man, for whom the factors we have already named matter more than mere material enjoyment.
Nowadays, the defense of warlike heroism is most often accompanied by a sacrificial conception of the heroic ideal: the “hero” is perceived as the one who is ready to die for society (the nation, the fatherland, the Republic); and who forgets and denies his individuality, standing aloof from any selfishness in his conduct. That conception, stemming from Christianity and celebrated in bourgeois democracies (as well as in totalitarian regimes), diverges completely from the idea that the “pagans” had of heroism in the ancient world. Far from sacrificing himself for society, the hero and the warrior comprised the ruling and dominant class; it was rather society that sacrificed itself for the hero, and not the other way around, in the sense that the social order was designed for the benefit of the warlike and sacerdotal aristocracy. Besides, war was valued and perceived not as a means of self-denial, but quite the contrary, as the way of supernatural fulfillment for the individual: a way for him to divinize himself in the eyes of other men and to see his exploits sung in eternal glory. The esotericism of the priests were regarded as another modality of supernatural fulfillment: another mode of the deification of the individual. Bourgeois materialism – by which one must understand a state of mind mocking and refusing the warlike spirit (or warlike ethos), and denying the reality of magic and that of one’s intuition of the transcendental realms –won over the spirit as bourgeois nationalism was extending its grip over the Western world.
Not content with rejecting (intermediate) inequalities of law, and advocating for inequalities in income and occupation (under the aegis of the state), the national-liberalism of 1789 indeed advocates a materialist and sacrificial conception of existence, according to which the individual must renounce an honorable life – i.e., his heroic accomplishment – and devote himself solely to enrichment, both his own and that of the nation. Besides, the individual is allowed, and even encouraged, to satisfy his “personal interest” on an economic level, with the economic interests of individuals understood as being synonymous with “the interest of the nation” – but he must also be in a position to put his life at stake on a military level. While war in a traditional society is either the work of the warlike nobility and its mercenaries, or else that of a conscript army that respects and incorporates divisions of rank, conscription is an inevitable trait of the bourgeois nation. As the bourgeoisie dethrones the sacerdotal and warlike aristocracy, and inequalities of rank dissipate (in favor of economic inequalities), war becomes everybody’s business. By the same token, the heroic ideal, the supernatural self-affirmation through war or clairvoyance, is devalued; and it is expected from war that it will henceforth be a path of self-denial, the path of sacrifice “in the interest of the nation.”
The mediocrity of classical liberalism, as seen above, consists in its pacifism: the mediocrity of the national-liberalism of 1789, which has nothing to do with pacifism, stems from its sacrificial conception of heroism. The transition from a warlike and sacerdotal order, such as in France of the Old Regime, to a bourgeois order does not mean that bellicosity dissipates, but that the warrior is now subordinated politically and morally to the bourgeois, even in the specific case where the sovereign authority lies with an individual who arises from the military; and where the warlike function is devalued in favor of the productive and reproductive function. In other words, warlike heroism henceforth means sacrificial heroism; the sense of honor, the chivalrous spirit, of the warlike aristocracy is abandoned in favor of the materialistic moralism of the bourgeoisie. The Napoleonic Wars, far from giving rise to a resurgence of the warlike culture of traditional France, precisely enshrined the bourgeois order and the abandonment of a warlike ethos (in favor of the cult of self-sacrifice for the nation). Let us remember what Carl Schmitt wrote on this subject in The Nomos of the Earth: the Jacobins “decried the classic interstate war, purely military, of the 18th century as a cabinet war of the Old Regime and . . . rejected as a matter of tyrants and despots the liquidation of the civil war and the limitation of the external war accomplished by the state. They replaced the purely state war with the people’s war and the democratic mass uprising.”
The national-liberalism of 1789 is therefore a nationalism which breaks with the Indo-European tradition, and subverts the traditional hierarchy of functions and ranks. It combines the ideal of free enterprise and of an extended division of labor with the ideal of a bourgeois nation: in other words, a nation where inequalities in law and income take such a form that the so-called bourgeois class (i.e., the “merchants” in the broad sense: entrepreneurs, capitalists, executives, consultants, bankers, etc.) is now the dominant class; and where the moralism (Vilfredo Pareto proposed the phrase “virtuism”) and materialism associated with the bourgeois class serve as reference values. Italian Futurism, which culminated in Fascism, was certainly in revolt against bourgeois society and its moralism: “We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight moralism, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice,” wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. To the extent that Soviet nationalism and Hitlerian nationalism – but also Fascist nationalism in its definitive form – in turn subordinated the warlike function to the productive and reproductive function, those nationalist socialisms lie in the lineage of the nationalist liberalism of 1789. They combine the ideal of the collective ownership of the means of production, and of central planning, with the ideal of a proletarian nation: it is no longer the bourgeois, but the proletarian, who subdues the warrior (at least on a symbolic and moral level).
National Socialism is certainly a socialism, but it is a socialism where class consciousness is dissolved in favor of race consciousness; and where the mystique of the proletariat blends into a larger mystique surrounding work. The moral (if not juridico-political) allegiance of the warrior to the proletarian remains incontestable, and shows how the socialism of Nazi Germany was a socialism that broke with the Indo-European tradition. In Hitlerian imperialism, the subordination of the warlike function to the productive and reproductive function was announced and described in these terms by Ernst Jünger, in The Worker:
The armed defense of the country is no longer the obligation and the privilege of the sole professional soldiers, it becomes the task of all those who are likely to bear arms. . . . On the same token, the image of the war, which represents it as an armed action, is blurred more and more in favor of the much broader representation which conceives of it as a gigantic process of work. In addition to the armies fighting on the battlefield, new kinds of armies are emerging: the army in charge of communications, the one responsible for the supply, the one that supports the equipment industry – the army of labor in general.
Further precisions on heroism and bourgeois society
With regard to the precise symptoms of the hegemony of the productive function in contemporary Western society, it has been commonly argued that this hegemony implies the predominance of the “utilitarian” lifestyle associated with the merchant, and the dissipation of the “heroic” way of life associated with the warrior. To begin, the distinction between the hero (seen as the one who is ready to die for others) and the merchant (seen as selfish and calculating) developed by Werner Sombart does not stand up to scrutiny. The traditional hero is the one who performs exploits, i.e., exceptional deeds singling him out, and who exhibits a territorial, adventurous, and domineering will, asserting his identity, such that he proves able to achieve. Only the hero in the modern sense – the hero as defined in bourgeois nations – is the one who dies for others: Achilles is ready to die, but for the sake of his own distinction and the immortality of his name. Whether in fiction or in history, many heroes have been merchants, the emblematic example remaining to this day Cosmo de Medici: the noble who rose to rule Florence by virtue of his skill in finance, and who founded a dynasty of Tuscan rulers. Thus, it goes without saying that in defending heroism in the traditional and pagan sense, we do not intend to discredit acts of generosity in society, including the devotion of the saint and that of the mother to her children.
At first sight, it may seem paradoxical to denounce the virtuism of the bourgeoisie while celebrating the warlike spirit of the great captains of industry. In fact, the “bourgeois” who applies a chivalrous code is bourgeois only on an economic level; morally and psychologically, he is a warrior, a kshatriya. The soap opera The Young and The Restless, which is very popular in France, features a businessman, Victor Newman, cultivating a warlike (or Nietzschean) morality in the puritanical and sententious environment of Protestant America. It cannot be denied that the “will to power,” understood as the simple act of aspiring to hegemony in society, is common to both the bourgeoisie and the warriors; on the other hand, the “will to power,” understood as the will and capacity to set up an assertive and fighting character, and to exhibit a conquering and virtuous intelligence – virtuous in the sense of the Machiavellian virtù – is proper to warriors (and to those of the “bourgeois” who have a warlike soul). The hegemony of merchants in contemporary Western society means the hegemony of a class whose will to power cannot be denied if taken in its first sense, but who lack manliness and the sense of honor: in other words, the will to power taken in its second sense.
In bourgeois society, the primacy of the economy over sovereignty and war does not mean that a strictly utilitarian way of life (i.e., unconcerned with the idea of dying for someone or something) predominates; nor does it mean that the natural instincts are unleashed, and that man regresses to the animal stage. As economics takes over, a way of life impervious to the warlike ethos (i.e., the ethos consisting of achievement and distinguishing oneself in war) becomes predominant, which does not mean that this mode of life becomes utilitarian or that war disappears accordingly. Besides, the economic instinct (i.e., the instinct that leads us to seize opportunities in trade and production) is indeed ascendant when economics becomes hegemonic, but it is pitted against the aggressive instincts, so much so that it is a counter-instinctive way of life which is finally manifested. Those are the true symptoms of the hegemony which is realized by the productive function in the contemporary Western world.
It is to the anthropologist and philosopher Robert Ardrey that we owe the remarkable elucidation of man’s priorities: territory and domination, but also identity (i.e., knowing and proving who we are, and experimenting and seeking recognition for the uniqueness of our personalities) and adventure (i.e., leading an exhilarating and meaningful life). It is true that those aggressive instincts very largely dictate our choices in consumption for the reason that, in the enjoyment of material goods, aggression matters more than material comfort (i.e., the comfort of a roof over one’s head and of a steady supply of food and clothes). It is also true that Promethean growth (i.e., based on the domestication of nature through the coal and nuclear industries) and modern capitalism (i.e., entrepreneurial, financialized, and globalized) have allowed consumer goods to satisfy the aggressiveness of the masses as never before: think of the social status afforded by the only possession of an iPhone or of a luxury watch, or the adventure offered by a videogame saga such as The Legend of Zelda. The fact still remains that economic life – and a fortiori consumption – can only satisfy the aggressive instincts of man in an indirect and incomplete manner; and that those instincts are repressed and left unsatisfied as economics ascends in the scale of values.
Besides, the attitude of the economic hegemony towards war does not only mean that on the battlefield, the warlike ethos (which can still be found among soldiers) is scorned; rather, it means that it is despised in warfare, but also in economics – and in these softened and derivative forms of war that are entrepreneurial and financial competition. A society that has become completely hostile to heroism does not praise the kshatriya any more than it admires and protects the soldier who lives according to a warlike ethos: it expects that the soldier should be ready to die for the homeland (instead of distinguishing himself and seeking the thrill of blood and adventure); and that the entrepreneur should make profits (instead of “dreaming” himself to be the heir of Alexander the Great). The contempt for military and economic heroism characterizes economic hegemony; and that contempt culminates in the importance assigned to university diplomas in contemporary Western society, the assumption being that the culture of the diploma ensures devirilized individuals’ access to key positions in companies, governments, and state armies. It can be argued that the culture of the diploma has enshrined the spiritual and moral hegemony of the vaishya over the kshatriya.
Some people welcome the decline of violence that (apart from the Reign of Terror and the Great War) accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie and the break with the Indo-European tradition: this pacification of Western society was a gift of the bourgeoisie to the world. Nevertheless, the consubstantial violence of the traditional Indo-European societies was a sign of their vitality: a sign that the circulation of elites was ongoing, and that the struggle for life (of which the struggle for preeminence is only a derivative form) was doing well. The gradual pacification of the white world after emerging from the Renaissance should not be interpreted as progress in every respect. To a large extent, the decline of intra-Western violence means the decline of the white world’s elites, for it means the decline of those traditional ways of ascent that include war and the Florentine virtù; it means the prioritization of the diploma and of entrepreneurship among the processes through which the elites are selected. As the circulation of elites is pacified, the chosen elites emerge more and more emasculated and less and less heroic – leading to our greatest misfortune today before the invaders from Africa and the Middle East. When it is not simply humanitarian cowardice that motivates the elites of the Western nations to allow terrorists and colonists prosper with impunity on European and American soil, they behave as emissaries of the world’s superclass, for whom the “great replacement” of the white man (i.e., the European or American Caucasoid) is a clearly established goal.
Towards a new national-liberalism: Territorial-aristocratic liberalism
Can one conceive of a nationalism that combines the ideal of free enterprise and an extended division of labor with the warlike and sacerdotal order on which Tradition is built? We will try to show that yes, such a nationalism is conceivable; and we will outline the contours of this radically new doctrine. Beforehand, however, we must specify that we accept the distinction made by Julius Evola between an aristocratic nationalism (based on the warlike-sacerdotal aristocracy and a heroic and supernatural conception of existence) and a plebeian nationalism (based on equality and materialism). Within national-liberalism, we believe that the same distinction applies between a national-liberalism of the plebeian kind (that of the French Revolution) and that of the aristocratic kind: namely, the one we defend and which is biding its time. If both are defined as national socialism, Soviet and Maoist nationalism can both be subsumed in this category along with Hitlerian nationalism, and national socialism itself is only a modality of plebeian nationalism.
In its new and aristocratic version, national-liberalism approves of the prosperity and “recognition” of the merchants, while rejecting their juridico-political and moral hegemony: likewise, it rejects the enfeoffment of the warlike function to the productive and reproductive function and intends to restore the primacy of warlike and sacerdotal values in society, as well as the juridico-political hegemony of the priests and warriors. Additionally, it defends property rights and modern capitalism of an entrepreneurial, globalized, financialized, and “digitized” kind: it intends to preserve the forms of Tradition in the context of modern capitalism. Such nationalism rejects any form of egalitarianism, including the universality of law (which serves, let us recall, as the fundamental value of liberalism); to the extent that this nationalism affirms its attachment to free enterprise and to the extended division of labor, and recognizes the true value of the coordinating role of the entrepreneur (who adjusts the division of labor in an optimal direction), it is all the same allowed to consider that doctrine as a liberalism – a borderline case of liberalism. Since that liberalism defends the nation, and thus the territorial instinct, and defends the inequalities of rank which constitute Tradition, and therefore the warrior-sacerdotal aristocracy and the instinct towards domination, it is possible to baptize this doctrine: territorial-aristocratic liberalism.
While the national-liberalism of 1789 combines the ideal of free enterprise with the rejection of castes (being the intermediary between the state and the individual), and with a materialistic and egalitarian conception of human life (which rejects supernatural ends and devalues the priest and the warrior for the benefit of the merchant), territorial-aristocratic liberalism simultaneously preaches free enterprise and the return to castes as well as a “traditional” system of values. Far from denying race, the national-liberalism of 1789 recognizes the bonds of blood on which the nation is built; more precisely, it rejects the distinctions of rank within the nation, and thus rejects caste consciousness in favor of mere race consciousness. This state of mind culminates into the “racism” of 1789 towards the warlike nobility, which sees itself conveniently likened to a foreign race. For its part, territorial-aristocratic liberalism advocates race consciousness, but also caste consciousness and the restoration of a sacerdotal and warlike nobility; nevertheless, it remains attached – like the national-liberalism of 1789 – to free enterprise and the extended division of labor. Besides, it denounces deep ecology and promotes Promethean growth: that which does not rest only on the extension of the division of labor, but on the emancipation of human productive powers towards the cycles of nature – an emancipation which is the work of the exploitation of fossil and nuclear energies.
Man, as territorial-aristocratic liberalism envisions him, is not this puppet of Hume or Hayek’s theories, who pursues his “private interest” (an expression which, in their theoretical framework, insidiously designates the pursuit of material well-being) while deliberately and calmly cooperating with others in the framework of universal rules of law. Rather, in this view, he is fundamentally aggressive: First and foremost, he is territorial and domineering, adventurous and identity-minded, and not concerned with his material well-being. Besides, that new liberalism sees man not as a calculating agent whose conduct is deliberate and peaceful at every moment, but as an agent most often making decisions under the influence of emotional impulse, thus only giving an appearance of rationality to his actions through non-logico-experimental derivations. In accordance with this anthropology, territorial-aristocratic liberalism cannot contain the society of this famous “spontaneous order,” which is dear to the heart of Friedrich von Hayek: in fact, that muddy expression refers to a juridically egalitarian order, where the struggle for status is eclipsed in favor of economic competition alone.
Society, as envisaged by the new liberalism, is necessarily organized around a pecking order, a hierarchy of castes, regardless of whether it is a hierarchy which ignores the intermediate ranks; and never around universal rules of law. But while rejecting formal egalitarianism and the universality of law, territorial-aristocratic liberalism does not accept castes without social mobility: that is, without a system of free competition for status. Besides this, it intends to preserve the identity peoples, not forgetting that a relative genetic and cultural homogeneity, as well as a common territory, are an integral part of a social link; and that one cannot boil everything down to the division of labor and commerce. If so many anarcho-capitalists indulge in “multiculturalism,” it seems that this is due to the fact that, conversely, they believe that the division of labor is the cement of society, and they consider that genetic and cultural proximity plays only a secondary, or even insignificant, role in socialization processes. Besides this, they deny the territorial instinct; they therefore imagine that all kinds of heterogeneous races and cultures can cohabit peacefully within the division of labor that has been established on a given space.
And now let’s talk about the state. Its vocation in territorial-aristocratic liberalism is not to guarantee an egalitarian right (i.e., universal freedom), nor is it to administer the economy or to redistribute incomes. The state, as territorial-aristocratic liberalism wants it, presents itself as the guardian and summit of a hierarchy of castes opened to social mobility; i.e., that subordinates (on a juridico-political level) merchants in relation to warriors and the priests in the hierarchy, while warriors and the sovereign (unless he himself stems from the sacerdotal caste) are “spiritually” subordinated to the priests. In this way, the state brings form and harmony, “a differentiated and hierarchical order of dignities” (according to the formula of Julius Evola), to a multitude which came before it; and that proves relatively homogeneous on a genetic and cultural level. In this way, too, the state puts into practice the two laws (dear to Robert Ardrey) that life in society renders necessary in all vertebrate species: the inequality of ranks (in favor of the juridico-political domination of the “alphas”: warriors, priests, and the sovereign); and free competition for status – instead of an automatically hereditary perpetuation of ranks.
Besides this, territorial-aristocratic liberalism is fully open to consumerism and to technological innovations. It envisions the cosmos as an active entity, striving relentlessly towards order and complexity, and the human being as a catalyst for cosmic creation; it believes that the cosmos mandates man to perpetuate and multiply the creative gesture of nature through the accumulation of capital and the provision of new goods and services for the masses. Territorial-aristocratic liberalism considers that a nation can prove to be both “consumerist” (in the sense that it pursues the enjoyment of consumer goods) and faithful to Tradition, a cultivator of virile and supernatural values, and anxious to maintain the connection with the spiritual realm. While defending traditional (or pagan) heroism against sacrificial heroism, it sees in heroism an attribute of the productive function, and not only of the warlike function: it believes that from it may, from time to time, emerge an entrepreneur who possesses the warrior spirit. Not content with praising the men who build a commercial or financial empire, it promotes the enthronement of the great samurais of finance and of the great captains of industry among the ranks of the warlike aristocracy.
Further precisions on territorial-aristocratic liberalism
In the end, our liberalism is archeofuturist in the sense that it reconciles warlike society with consumer society, and the hegemony of the priests with the prosperity of the merchants. With the overthrow of the Indo-European triad, the priest lost his spiritual authority for the benefit of the bourgeois; moral authority henceforth lies with the bourgeoisie, which seeks advice from the priest, soliciting his gifts of clairvoyance for the smooth running of business. Our liberalism, which reengages with the spiritual order and breaks with bourgeois materialism, is a liberalism of the Indo-European tradition: It intends to restore the traditional aristocracy, which consecrates the moral and juridico-political primacy of the priest and the warrior over the merchant. Our liberalism also prohibits itself from intervening in the choices of individuals with regard to pensions and healthcare, with the sole exception of emergency measures to be taken in the case of a serious pandemic. It also believes that education must take warlike and aristocratic values into consideration while leaving the bosom of the state, at least in terms of its funding.
Some additional clarifications need to be made regarding globalization. The inequalities inherent in the legal system of the pre-1789 societies amounted to exceptional laws for the benefit of the warlike and sacerdotal nobility, which existed within nations and yet sustained links of solidarity that extended beyond nations. The contemporary inequalities in law amount to exceptional laws for the benefit of the bourgeoisie (who has taken control of governments through the dissipation of intermediate inequalities in rank), but also for the benefit of a small number of companies and banks whose executives compose what has been judiciously called a world superclass: a class that sits above nations. It would be wrong, however, to conceive of those inequalities in law as consubstantial with the phenomenon of globalization: the grip of the world superclass is an accidental feature of globalization as we are living it; it does not necessarily have to be this way. Territorial-aristocratic liberalism intends to restore the traditional inequalities in law and couple them with globalization; it is not a question of restoring those inequalities in opposition to globalization.
Quite often, the denunciation of “globalism” and of the “reign of merchants” proceeds from the vilest petit-bourgeois resentment. Behind the moralizing speeches against Starbucks, KFC, Volkswagen, Sony, Amazon, or Apple, one can glimpse the second-tier entrepreneur who is jealous of the power of the multinationals. In reality, multinationals represent a danger to the nation so long as they behave as the agents of influence for cosmopolitanism; but they are by no means harmful in the cold pursuit of their economic interests. It is sound, and even imperative, to counter the cosmopolitan lobbying of multinationals; it is insane to denounce the strategy of multinationals to apportion activities on a global scale: specializing the regions of the world according to comparative advantages does not harm, but benefits, the prosperity of nations. Far from deploring the power of multinationals, territorial-aristocratic liberalism knows that the power of a nation implies a hegemony that is as much economic as it is military and cultural. It is not outraged that the firms which an ambitious nation gives birth to conquer an international market, implement subsidiaries around the world, or solicit favors from foreign governments.
Concerning protectionism, territorial-aristocratic liberalism recognizes that the facilitation of trade between nations, which amounts to facilitating the extension of the division of labor across borders, as well as the coordination of the division of labor via the entrepreneurial reallocation of capital across borders, necessarily benefits consumers. It recognizes that this advantaged situation of the consumer means the mutual enrichment of nations engaged in free trade; nevertheless, it knows that it is not true that this mutual enrichment implies that the gains of free trade are also mutual on a geopolitical level. If openness to free trade allows the enterprises of a foreign nation to gain the upper hand over the enterprises of a nation adopting free trade, or the foreign labor force to replace the labor force of this same nation, then there is actually a balance of power which is established. Free trade is always a positive-sum game from the point of view of consumer enrichment; it is very often a zero-sum game from the point of view of the nation’s hegemony. A wise government must seek the right balance between free trade and protectionism: it must ensure the enrichment of the consumer without losing sight of economic hegemony. It is quite legitimate to quote the wording of Voltaire: “To be a good patriot is to wish that one’s own community should enrich itself by trade and acquire power by arms; it is obvious that a country cannot profit but at the expense of another and that it cannot conquer without inflicting harm on other people.”
A word on currency. Applying the teachings of the Austrian School of Economics, territorial-aristocratic liberalism does not entrust the monopoly of issuing money to a single organ such as the central bank in its present sense. It ensures the free competition and circulation of currencies out of a strict concern for respecting property rights; it can nonetheless entitle the state to ban such currencies which are disrespectful of private property, namely which weaken purchasing power, distort the means of production, and generate dysgenic behaviors. It can also entitle the state to determine those currencies which are allowed to circulate, without the state having to intervene in the process of production, exchange, and circulation. For this reason, territorial-aristocratic liberalism favors any currency such as gold or silver (without introducing a bimetallic system) in order to clarify that money – due to its character as a means of exchange and representation of value, must be of a very particular and ethical nature because it coordinates production, exchange, and the temporal preferences of individuals; for this reason, it must obey a principle of relative rarity and very high quality. The practice of the fractional reserve by the banking institutions will be prohibited; banking regulations will be abolished in favor of returning to commercial and private law in the strictest respect for private property; counterfeiting will be severely punished.
Conclusion
The enterprise of subversion in the form of the city, which began with the overthrow of the Indo-European tradition in favor of the advent of commercial society, finds its apogee in contemporary cosmopolitanism. Classical liberalism has strongly encouraged that cosmopolitanism, while the bourgeois takeover has accompanied the implementation of the ideals of 1789. Saving the identity of the West, and of France in particular, can take place by reifying a new national-liberalism: a national-liberalism which is not limited to defending the nation against cosmopolitanism; but that also reconciles free enterprise and the extended division of labor, as well as “Promethean growth,” with the defense of the traditional nation and its warlike and sacerdotal order against both bourgeois society and the modern nation.
Grégoire Canlorbe is an independent scholar who has conducted numerous interviews with economists and social scientists for academic journals such as Man and the Economy, which was founded by the Nobel Prizewinning economist Ronald Coase. His subjects have included a wide range of renowned personalities such as Yves-Saint Laurent’s co-founder and former President Pierre Bergé, Greenpeace’s co-founder and former President Patrick Moore, and former Czech head of state Václav Klaus. Canlorbe is at work on a book of interviews with the sociologist and philosopher Howard Bloom about mass behavior in the universe, from quarks to humans. Besides his intellectual and journalistic activities, he is the Vice President of the emerging French party, Parti National-Libéral.
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