New Culture, New Right is the first English-language study of the identitarian movements presently reshaping the contours of European politics. The study's focus is Alain de Benoist's GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d'Etude pour la Civilisation Européenne), which Paul Piccone of Telos described as the most interesting group of continental thinkers since the existentialists of the 1950s and which elsewhere is recognized as the most formidable school of contemporary right-wing thought. Made up of veterans from various nationalist, traditionalist, far Right, and regionalist movements, the GRECE began as an association of French intellectuals committed to restoring the crumbling cultural foundations of European life and identity. Due to the quality of its publications and its philosophically persuasive reformulation of the Right project, it attracted an immediate audience. By the late 1970s it had recruited an impressive array of continental thinkers to its ranks. In Italy, Germany, Belgium, and a number of other European countries, there have since emerged organizations and publishing concerns either directly linked to the Paris-based GRECE or involved in analogous endeavors. As a result of these diffusions, GRECE-style identitarianism has come to represent the most prominent ideological alternative to the regnant liberalism.

The European New Right to which the GRECE gave birth is new not in the modernist sense of being novel, but in the traditionalist sense of reappropriating an origin whose meaningful possibilities remain open for realization. Never, New Rightists claim, has a revolutionary return to their people’s roots been more urgent. After a half century under the liberal-democratic regimes imposed by the United States in 1945, Europeans now face extinction as a race and a culture. Against this, their appeal to the most primordial facets of their people’s heritage aims at awakening the spirit of resistance and renaissance. The result, as documented in this introduction to its ideas, is one of the most remarkable critiques ever made of the liberal project.

The Right poses a special problem in that its different tendencies tend to define themselves in opposition to the Left, which gives them a negative or reactive character. Due to this peculiarity, any attempt at approaching these political designations must start with the Left. What, then, is the Left? While it too eludes easy definition, in more cases than not it represents those rationalist ideological tendencies favoring the forward political impulses of 'modernity.' Inspired by the spirit of Protestant individualism, Newtonian science, and a latent Gnosticism, it believes in 'the infinite progress of knowledge and the infinite advance toward social and moral betterment.' As such, the past for it is identified with the world's imperfections, particularly its entrenched privileges, and the modern with reason's capacity to ameliorate outmoded practices. On this basis, it holds that every age adds to the achievements of its predecessor, as it gradually progresses toward a condition of ideal rationality. Just, then, as modernity 'heroises the present' (Michel Foucault) and makes 'an increasingly intense cult of the new' (Gianni Vattimo), the Left champions the progress, possibility, and emancipation modernity promises. It consequently places the claims of recent and future experience over and above the alleged irrationalities of traditional ones, whose continuity it endeavors to sever. This causes it to reject hierarchy, authority, and tradition, which it treats as obstacles to change, and to favor the 'liberation' and development of the individual, whose rational being is central to the modernist enterprise. Similarly, it privileges pluralism and fashion, debate, dialogue, and revision. And though it too comes to possess traditions and to serve as a status quo, these are modernist ones, based on innovations of an ostensibly ameliorative sort. The Left, in a word, identifies with the 'myth of progress,' which undergirds its vision of man's possibility, its individualistic faith in reason, its penchant for models, plans, and reform, and its opposition to the heritage bequeathed by the past.

In reaction, the Right is formed in defense of ancestral legacies and a transcendent spiritual order. Unlike the Left, it does not see the traditional heritage as 'a dismal catalogue of absurdities and crimes against humanity,' but as the backdrop to the way the present is to be apprehended and the future worked out. Likewise, it believes this heritage offers a glimpse of the transcendent -- of what stands outside of time -- and of the larger possibilities latent in the human condition. Indeed, when true to itself, it is less concerned with 'conserving' customary forms than with realizing their potential in the present. Its identification with 'the mellowing civilising influence of tradition, of written and unwritten laws and . . . of the lasting values which have been crystallised in the course of history' is, then, with the substance of these things and not their transitory forms. For it is not innovation that the Right resists, but 'reforms' endeavoring to change 'the order of creation.' Nor, must it be insisted, does it defend the past simply for its own sake. As Arthur Moeller van den Bruck writes, it has no ambition 'to see the world as a museum.' Its principal concern is for 'what is' and 'what will be,' both of which it considers inseparable from 'what was.' A 'true Right' (of which there have been few historical manifestations) prefers, thus, to reason in terms of the specific geographic, cultural, racial, religious, and historical realities situating it. This means its immediate references are existing ones, not ideas about how the world might be if reason could make a clean sweep of the past. Similarly, it accepts that man is a flawed creature, adopts a skeptical view of progress and a tragic sense of life, favors enrootment, transmission, and natural hierarchies, and distrusts crusading spirits ignoring 'what is' for the sake of 'what ought to be.'