The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism.

• Author: Diamantis, Mihailis E.
• Position: Book Review

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, by Richard Wolin Publisher: Princeton University Press (2004) Price: $18.87

"Thinking begins only when we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought." With this quotation from Martin Heidegger's "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead,'" Richard Wolin opens his account of the enduring presence of the Counter-Enlightenment thinking of fascists and proto-fascists in his The Seduction of Unreason. Wolin's thesis is twofold: "les extremes se touchent" in their criticism of universalized truths of Enlightenment Reason, and this fact is dangerous for modern liberal developments in the realms of civil liberties and human rights. (1)

The Seduction of Unreason is not only an introductory course in fascist and proto-fascist thought, it is also a political guide to those who would oppose Counter-Enlightenment thought and the rejection of human rights, civil liberties, and democratic equality that it entails. Behind the 1920s German movement, the 1960s French movement, and the present Europe-wide movement, Wolin uncovers a similar cause. The early trend towards Counter-Enlightenment values in Germany was fueled by a "fairly large middle-class electoral base ... the 'losers of the modernization process' ..." (2) In 1960s France, the antipathy to determinacy and reason resulted from post-World War II Vichy Syndrome and a resultant "'will to nonknowledge': a desire to keep at bay an awareness of unsettling historical complicities, facts, and events." (3) Finally, "[t]he constituency of the New European Right is also heavily composed of potential 'losers of the modernization process.'" (4) More generally, "'feelings of anxiety and social isolation, political exasperation and powerlessness, loss of purpose in life, and insecurity and abandonment provide social conditions conducive to the success of far-right political views." (5) Wolin perceptively notes:

The pronounced ideological emphasis in the discourse of the European New Right on 'values' and questions of 'collective identity' ... is consciously cultivated. It is intended to compensate for the instability and disorientation sensed by those who have become supernumeraries in a profoundly threatening economy or 'world society'--a highly impersonal, brave new cyber-technological order. (6) Theoreticians and practitioners who take as their guiding light...