In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor's Introduction
  • Arthur Versluis

This issue of JSR is devoted primarily to scholarship exploring the European New Right and, in particular, the French Nouvelle Droite and the Italian Nuova Destra. As you will see, this is contested territory.

Our first article, by Tamir Bar-On, takes on a challenge concerning the utility of terms like "Left" and "Right" that I proposed in several places in the journal over the past few years. I suggested that "Left" and "Right" do not often accurately describe even mainstream political actors, let alone more unconventional ones. Bar-On, who is the main scholar of the French New Right in English, seeks to address this challenge in the context of the Nouvelle Droite. In his article, he compares the New Right to the New Left and also uses the terminology and ideological distinctions proposed by Norbert Bobbio.

Bar-On's article was peer-reviewed, as all our articles are, by at least two, and often three or more reviewers, but I decided (in addition) to send the article (and the article by Stephane François) to the founding figure and prolific seminal author of the Nouvelle Droite, Alain de Benoist, for his comments. The result was the rather harsh response that we include in a new section, Dossier, in this issue. Benoist takes Bar-On to task not only for this article but also for his books on the Nouvelle Droite. Because Benoist sent a documented and extensive analysis of Anglophone scholarship on the New Right, we felt obligated to publish it in a new [End Page v] section entitled Dossier, and we may continue this conversation in a subsequent issue.

Benoist's reply raises some dramatic questions concerning scholarship on figures and movements on the Right (assuming that Benoist and the Nouvelle Droite in fact belong to the Right exclusively, which Benoist asserts emphatically is not the case). I encountered related issues when coediting a collection of articles, now published as Esotericism, Religion, and Politics (2012). My coeditors and I found that scholars writing about figures or movements on the Right were often themselves situated (more or less obviously) on the Left, and often their articles were, just as Benoist says, not about the Right, but against it. We only sought (and seek here) even-handedness in approach, but this standard made editing the collection quite difficult when it came to articles on the Right. And there are still other questions that so far remain unanswered, such as, above all, the question of whether the Nouvelle Droite is really radical in any meaningful sense of the word, or whether it is in fact fundamentally conservative. Is "radicalism" a term best reserved for movements and figures that belong, broadly speaking, to the Left? Another question, of course, is to what extent should the interpretations of scholars correspond to the perspectives of their subjects?

Our second article, by an Italian scholar, Massimiliano Capra Casadio, analyzes the terminology, history, and conceptual frameworks of the Italian and French New Right(s) with significantly different conclusions than those of Bar-On. Casadio, whose doctoral work focused on this area, concludes that the New Right is genuinely new as a political phenomenon and does not easily fit into conventional political categorization. Perhaps most distinctive about the European New Right(s), in contradistinction to the "Radical Right" or the "Far Right" or the "Extreme Right," Casadio argues, is its "metapolitical" orientation. The Italian and, even more, the French New Right for the most part do not engage in political partisanship, but rather seek to affect politics and culture from a more or less aloof or autonomous vantage point. Casadio concludes that the Italian and French New Right movements, while rooted to some extent in the "Radical Right," nonetheless constitute something genuinely distinct from it. [End Page vi]

The third article, by Stéphane François, emphasizes still another dimension of the European New Right: its indebtedness to the intellectual current known in the Anglophone world as "Traditionalism." François discusses in particular the influence of Julius Evola on the Right end of the political spectrum in Europe and, indeed, this is a topic worth exploring, for it is self-evident...

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