Bénéton begins Les Régimes Politiques by emphasizing the importance of defining what constitutes a political regime. For him, a political regime is not merely a set of institutions or legal frameworks; it is a broader system encompassing the organization of power, the principles guiding governance, and the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Bénéton stresses that political regimes must be understood in their entirety, considering their formal structures and the underlying values and ideologies that shape their functioning. This holistic approach allows him to draw meaningful comparisons between different regimes and to assess their strengths and weaknesses more effectively.

Central to Bénéton’s analysis is his classification of political regimes, which he derives from classical political theory. He draws heavily on Aristotle’s typology, categorizing regimes based on who rules and for whose benefit. According to this classification, regimes can be broadly divided into three types: monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by the few), and polity or democracy (rule by the many). These can degenerate into a corrupt form: tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule, respectively. Bénéton adopts this framework but adapts it to contemporary political realities, recognizing that modern states rarely fit neatly into these categories and that hybrid regimes are increasingly common.

Bénéton contrasts the political structures outlined by Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Marx with Aristotle’s account of regimes, highlighting the shortcomings of modern approaches and demonstrating Aristotle’s enduring relevance. In seeking to redefine politics in purely pragmatic and amoral terms, Machiavelli dismisses the classical emphasis on the common good and virtue. For Machiavelli, the distinction between just and unjust regimes is irrelevant; the effectiveness of power, secured through force or deceit, is paramount. Bénéton critiques this approach for neglecting the stabilizing role of legitimacy and shared moral values, which Aristotle identified as essential to a well-ordered polis. Unlike Machiavelli’s focus on expediency, Aristotle’s framework insists on aligning political power with justice and the natural order, fostering stable governance through the active consent and virtue of the governed.

Montesquieu’s tripartite classification of regimes—republic, monarchy, and despotism—marks a departure from Aristotle’s nuanced typology that integrates the number of rulers and their orientation toward the common good. While Montesquieu emphasizes the importance of institutional structures and the spirit of laws, Bénéton argues that his analysis lacks the depth of Aristotle’s moral and teleological foundation. Montesquieu focuses on the mechanics of governance and the principles animating different systems, such as virtue in republics and honor in monarchies. Still, he does not address the intrinsic nature of justice and the cultivation of human flourishing as central to political life. By contrast, Aristotle provides a more holistic account, categorizing regimes not merely by their structure but by their alignment with the virtuous development of citizens, thereby situating political life within the broader context of human excellence.

In his critique of political regimes, Marx subordinates politics to economics, reducing regimes to mere instruments of class struggle and modes of production. Bénéton identifies this economic determinism as a fundamental flaw, as it dismisses the autonomy and moral dimensions of political life. Aristotle’s account, by contrast, maintains the primacy of politics as the architectonic science, shaping all other human activities. While Marx envisions the ultimate dissolution of political regimes in a classless society, Aristotle recognizes the perpetual necessity of political structures to mediate human relations and promote the common good. Bénéton concludes that Aristotle’s emphasis on justice, virtue, and the moral purpose of governance offers a superior framework, preserving the intrinsic dignity and complexity of political life in a way that modern theories fail to achieve.

Bénéton critiques the 20th-century behavioral political sciences, as represented by figures like David Easton, Robert Dahl, and Gabriel Almond, for their reductive approach to political regimes. These thinkers prioritize empirical methodologies and systemic generalizations, often modeled on the natural sciences, to analyze political life. Focusing on observable behaviors, patterns, and measurable dynamics reduces regimes to mechanistic frameworks devoid of moral or cultural depth. For example, Easton’s “systems theory” views politics as an input-output process, while Dahl’s pluralist model treats power as dispersed among competing groups, and Almond’s “structural-functionalism” emphasizes universal roles and functions. Bénéton argues that these approaches overlook the qualitative and normative distinctions between regimes, which Aristotle emphasizes as central. Aristotle’s account sees regimes not just as systems of governance but as expressions of ethical and communal life grounded in justice, legitimacy, and the common good—dimensions behavioral political science fails to address.

Moreover, Bénéton critiques the behavioral sciences’ claim to value-neutrality, which he sees as fundamentally flawed and inadequate for understanding political regimes. By striving for objectivity, thinkers like Dahl and Almond flatten the profound distinctions between democratic, oligarchic, and tyrannical regimes, reducing them to variations in institutional structures or distributions of power. This perspective erases the moral and teleological aspects of political life that Aristotle highlights, particularly the idea that regimes aim at specific ends—some noble, others corrupt. For Aristotle, the regime determines the ethical orientation of its citizens and the pursuit of the common good. In contrast, behavioral science, with its descriptive focus, neglects the question of how regimes cultivate or undermine virtue, leaving its analysis ethically impoverished and unable to evaluate the qualitative differences that make one regime superior to another.

Bénéton underscores how the behavioral sciences’ emphasis on systemic regularities and universal patterns fails to grapple with the historical and cultural particularities that shape regimes. Aristotle’s analysis, rooted in the diversity of political life, acknowledges the interplay of historical, ethical, and social factors in determining a regime’s character. For instance, Aristotle differentiates between regimes based on their alignment with justice and their capacity to promote human flourishing, recognizing the profound consequences of these distinctions for civic life, and in its quest for generality, behavioral political science disregards such nuances, treating regimes as interchangeable mechanisms for managing power. Bénéton concludes that while behavioral approaches offer valuable technical insights, they ultimately fall short of Aristotle’s richer and more holistic understanding of regimes as the foundation of communal and ethical life.

Bénéton’s discussion of democracy is remarkably nuanced and insightful. He recognizes democracy as the dominant political regime of the modern era but carefully distinguishes between different forms of democracy. He differentiates between “classical democracy,” which he associates with direct participation by the citizens in the governance process, and “representative democracy,” which is characterized by the election of representatives who make decisions on behalf of the people. Bénéton argues that while representative democracy is the most prevalent form today, it has its challenges and potential pitfalls.

One of the key themes in Bénéton’s analysis of democracy is the tension between “liberty and equality.” He observes that modern democracies are often torn between the desire to promote individual freedoms and the drive to achieve greater social and economic equality. Bénéton states this tension can lead to contradictions and conflicts within democratic societies. For example, policies promoting equality, such as wealth redistribution, may infringe on individual liberties. In contrast, policies prioritizing freedom, such as laissez-faire economic practices, may exacerbate social inequalities. He argues that managing this tension is one of the central challenges for modern democracies and requires carefully balancing competing values.

Bénéton is also critical of what he sees as the “excesses of democratic egalitarianism.” He warns that an overemphasis on equality can lead to a leveling of society that undermines excellence, merit, and the pursuit of the common good. In his view, democracy should not merely focus on ensuring equal outcomes but should also strive to cultivate virtues and promote the well-being of the community as a whole. Bénéton is concerned that contemporary democracies, in their pursuit of equality, may neglect these higher goals and reduce politics to a mere struggle for power and resources. This, he argues, can lead to the erosion of civic virtue and a decline in the quality of public life.

Another critical aspect of Bénéton’s analysis is his exploration of the “moral foundations of political regimes.” He argues that the legitimacy and stability of any political regime depend on its moral and ethical underpinnings. In this regard, Bénéton is mainly concerned with the role of “virtue” in governance. Drawing on classical political philosophy, he contends that a good regime is one that promotes virtue among its citizens and rulers. For Bénéton, virtue is not just a personal quality bujusticet ajustice public good that is essential for the proper functioning of society. He believes that without a commitment to virtue, political regimes will likely become corrupt and degenerate, leading to tyranny or chaos.

Bénéton’s emphasis on virtue leads him to critique modern liberal democracies, which he believes have largely abandoned the pursuit of virtue in favor of “procedural justice” and individual rights. While he acknowledges the importance of these principles, he argues that they are insufficient for sustaining a healthy political community. Bénéton worries that the focus on individual rights and freedoms can lead to a kind of moral relativism, where the pursuit of self-interest takes precedence over the common good. This, he suggests, can result in a fragmented and atomized society where civic engagement and social cohesion are weakened.

In addition to his critique of modern democracy, Bénéton also explores the dynamics of “authoritarian regimes.” He is particularly interested in how these regimes maintain control and legitimacy in the absence of democratic processes. Bénéton argues that authoritarian regimes often rely on a combination of coercion and consent, using propaganda, surveillance, and repression to suppress dissent while also seeking to cultivate a sense of legitimacy through appeals to tradition, nationalism, or ideology. He notes that while authoritarian regimes can achieve stability, they are often brittle and prone to collapse if their sources of legitimacy are undermined.

Bénéton’s analysis of totalitarianism, a particularly extreme form of authoritarianism, contributes significantly to his understanding of political regimes. He identifies totalitarianism as a regime that seeks total control over all aspects of life, including politics, the economy, culture, and even personal beliefs. Bénéton highlights the dangers of totalitarian regimes, particularly their tendency to dehumanize individuals and reduce them to mere instruments of the state. He argues that totalitarianism represents a profound threat to human dignity and freedom and that its emergence is often the result of profound social and political crises that disrupt the normal functioning of democratic institutions.

In Les Régimes Politiques, Bénéton also engages with the concept of “regime change” and the conditions under which political regimes transform. He argues that a combination of internal and external factors, including economic crises, social unrest, wars, and ideological shifts, often drive regime change. Bénéton is particularly interested in how regimes manage or fail to manage these pressures and what this reveals about their strengths and vulnerabilities. He suggests that successful regime change often requires not just the removal of the old regime but the establishment of a new political order that is both legitimate and capable of addressing the underlying causes of the crisis.

Finally, Bénéton concludes his analysis by reflecting on the future of political regimes in the modern world. He is cautiously optimistic about the prospects for democracy but warns that the challenges it faces, particularly the tension between liberty and equality, must be carefully managed. He also emphasizes the importance of cultivating civic virtue and a sense of common purpose in order to sustain democratic governance. Bénéton’s work is a call to political philosophers and practitioners alike to engage deeply with political regimes’ moral and ethical dimensions and seek ways to strengthen the foundations of democratic life.

In conclusion, Philippe Bénéton’s Les Régimes Politiques offers a rich and nuanced exploration of political regimes, drawing on classical political theory while addressing contemporary challenges. Bénéton’s analysis is characterized by its emphasis on the moral and ethical dimensions of governance, particularly the role of virtue in sustaining political order. His critique of modern democracy, focusing on the tension between liberty and equality, provides valuable insights into the challenges facing democratic regimes today. Through his examination of different types of regimes, including authoritarianism and totalitarianism, Bénéton delivers a comprehensive framework for understanding the complexities of political life and the conditions necessary for the success and stability of political regimes.

The post Philippe Bénéton’s Understanding of Political Regimes in Les Régimes Politiques appeared first on The Miskatonian.

The Austrian polymath Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, needs little to no exaggeration when presented to the public, not because he was well-known (actually rather the opposite), but because his life, his time, his works, his ideas and ultimately his intellectual legacy show he was truly worthy of the title of “the world’s most fascinating man“ that his friend and editor at National Review magazine, William F. Buckley, gave him during the time they worked together.

Now, this little endeavor of presenting ‘the Lion of Lans‘, as he also got called, in reference to his family’s crest and coat of arms and his final residence, I am undertaking here is no gratuitous task, but the result of a many years drive to learn about him and place him properly alongside other Austrian thinkers, like F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises have had entire collections of biographies and books written about their lives.

It would be no surprise, either, that Kuehnelt-Leddihn was their contemporary, as well as of other great men of his time, like Otto von Habsburg-Lothringen or Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, and that in their little network of intellectuals and statesmen, there might have very well been some contact among all of them, mostly with only one to no degrees of separation.

But back to Erik Maria, to begin with, the most basic details of his life would already be a hard task: born in 1909, the beginning of the last decade of existence of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the small town of Tobelbad (now Haselsdorf-Tobelbad), close to Graz, in Styria, Austria, he belonged to the aristocratic Kuehnelt-Leddihn family, a noble house that had been ennobled and given the title of hereditary knights (Ritter) by the Habsburg emperors.

The first ten years of his life were marked by World War I, the end of the rule, and the very short one of the last two Danubian monarchs, Franz Josef and Karl, but by the time young Erik had become sixteen after the dust of conflict and political instability had settled, he was already writing for the London-based The Spectator news magazine as their correspondent in the capital of the newly proclaimed Austrian Republic.

As the scion of a surviving family of the old Austro-Hungarian nobility, Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s education was not bound by the borders imposed in the peace treaties/dictates of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Trianon, as as soon as he was of age, he went to study law and theology at the University of Vienna, before pursuing further studies in economics and later political science at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, where he was taught by the once and future Hungarian Prime Minister and political geographer, Count Pál Teleki de Szék, and where he got awarded his master’s and doctoral degrees in the early 1930s.

Following the old traditions of European nobility, Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s first language was not his native German but French, and aside from English, the tongue he used in his foreign work, and Magyar, which he took during his studies in Hungary, he also learned, spoke and another dozen languages, each with their own stories and contexts, such as Russian, when he was sent to Russia as a special correspondent for a Hungarian daily during his twenties, Spanish, when he covered the Spanish Civil War in situ in the late 1930s (and later during his trips to Latin America), and Japanese, which he actually taught as a college professor at Fordham University in New York during the middle of World War II.

A renegade child of the Wilsonian order of self-determination of peoples that broke his ancestral homeland and bound by the Catholic loyalties of his family, Kuehnelt-Leddihn became a political legitimist and a monarchist early on in his life, but he was not merely another simple partisan for the restoration of altar and throne in his country and region, but a deep thinker who studied and understood the nature of his land and his peoples as a different, yet equal, to the one he found in the other country that received him the most, which was the United States.

You see, dear reader, Kuehnelt-Leddihn was no ordinary man, and aside from his aristocratic background and impressive skills as a polyglot, his life allowed him to become a universal man of letters and an avid traveler, writing over 35 books, including four novels and 3, now timeless, classics in social and political theory, as well as countless columns in both German and English, published by some of the most important outlets of the places in which he lived and visited.

His ideas can be easily summarized in his own words: “I dislike specialization. I have repeatedly altered the line of my activities in order to attain and retain a comprehensive view of the humanities. My skeptical views in regard to democracy resemble those of the Founding Fathers, of Alexis de Tocqueville, Jacob Burckhardt and, especially, Montalembert whom I admire greatly. My studies in political theory and practice have been largely directed toward finding ways to strengthen the great Western tradition of human freedom, now under attack from so many sides.”

In a lifetime marked by the dual threats of hyper-nationalist and hyper-egalitarian totalitarianisms, Kuehnelt-Leddihn took a different path, the path of liberty and tradition against the danger and excesses of mass mediocrity, which he saw as the essence of the revolutionary spirit that had plunged Europe in two centuries of destruction and later engulfed the entire world in a similar path.

Pulling no punches, he wrote continuously against the vices of mass electoralism, alternating between his admiration for the American experiment in government and his blood and faith loyalty to the old Christian Empire and Kingdoms of Central Europe, amassing an impressive amount of philosophical and political knowledge that gave him the nickname of “a Walking Book of Knowledge” that only increased as his trips abroad, departing from his permanent home in the Austrian Tyrol, could allow him yearly.

Analyzing Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s entire body of work, including all published writings, both long and short format, as well as the hundreds of hours of lectures recorded, freely available online for any interested researcher would be a Herculean task, so for the sake of simplicity, it should be better to focus on his three major works, all in socio-political theory: The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large, originally published in 1943, pseudonymously as Francis S. Campbell, in order to protect his relatives in Nazi-occupied Austria (the old Austrian Catholic nobility was heavily persecuted after the Anschluss since they were the bulwark of the the resistance movement against Nazi occupation in Austria, and more so since this resistance was informally lead by Archduke Otto, son of the last Habsburg Emperor), Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of our Times, published in 1952, and Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse, which first appeared in 1974, with its Revisited edition from 1990 (now subtitled From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot to update the contents up to the latest Communist carnage: the Cambodian genocide).

These three books constitute the core of Kueenelt-Leddihn’s thought, presented as timely reflections of the moments they were written against the mirror of history, united in a common thread characterized by their author’s magnanimous disdain for mass electoralism as prime culprit for the decreases in human dignity, war, famine and mass death in the 20th century, drawing the genealogy of all our modern evils from historical processes beginning with either the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution up to Hitlerism, Stalinism and contemporary progressivism.

In The Menace of the Herd, he set up to extensively describes the spirit of modernity as one of grey, boring sameness, embodied in the collectivist ideal that destroys hierarchy, diversity, order, faith, and freedom in the name of equality. His frequent praise of the Middle Ages in contrast to the (then) present time is marked by his obvious Catholicism and by a certain Romantic nostalgia, reminiscing of a certain classical liberalism in the veins of Acton and Tocqueville that had been long forgotten in his day: one that conceives freedom as a necessary element in the eternal order of heavenly hierarchy, naturally anti-egalitarian and yet functional for the greater common good.

As Kueenelt-Leddihn put it himself in this very book, “the plenitude of life so eagerly sought by the Romantic, as here conceived, is inaccessible to the animal. The terrifying diversity of the total cosmos (visible as well as invisible) has no meaning for the termite or the herdist with their limited existences in their limited buildings.

The great achievements — sanctity, heroism, holy wisdom, the beatific vision — are not eagerly sought for by the herdist who like the beasts of the field longs to be a ‘secure’ animal (to use an expression of Peter Wust) instead of being proud to remain an insecure’ animal, which man is by nature and in the order of things. Hostile to adventure, which after all was one of the great magnetic powers of the Middle Ages, the herdist moves cautiously in the broad stream of the mediocre masses avoiding all extremes except those in a frenzied mass hysteria.

Yet Christianity is an extreme. The yoke of Christ is not a lesser menace to his meager and miserable personality than the iron postulates of the Cross — of the same Cross which is a flat denial of his shining rule of the ‘fifty-fifty’, and disturbing to all his cautious calculations and plannings.

Only the select can be closely confronted with the Absolute without taking flight. Only the saints, but not the ‘commonsensical’ herd, can and will surrender to the ‘Holy Folly of the Cross’. For this reason we have such hatred on the part of the mediocre man, who hates any sort of hierarchy, whether of the saints or of sanctity itself.

Sanctity is not only an extraordinary condition but also an adventure. And adventure belongs to the domain of the ‘Romantic’. Adventure is a solitary enterprise, like sanctity, and therefore not congenial to the herd and the herdist.”

He further developed these ideas in Liberty or Equality, considered by some as his masterpiece for bringing back into intellectual discussion a serious defense of monarchy as a political institution in a discipline tainted by egalitarian dogmas.

In this book, he clearly lays a considered critique of the contemporary forms of political organization as the formal base upon which totalitarianism takes root, explaining their descent from the radical Jacobin republicanism of the French Revolution, distinguishing from the organic, controlled and naturally limited extent of monarchy, preferably Catholic, in society, for which liberty and responsibility as its complement were paramount.

His defense of monarchy as the best political system stems from his love of individualized “differentiation, not ‘identity’“, in which kings, acting as fathers of their known, mature sons, hold the exercise of power over a diverse society in cautious discretion, authorized only if the limits of their faith, not by the “authority from anonymous, secretly voting masses on a purely numerical basis“, from which nothing can be liable in their collective, and thus irresponsible, behavior.

His opposition to egalitarianism is increasingly explored here, with Kueenelt-Leddihn famously declaring that “liberty and equality are in essence contradictory“, using the concept of justice as a base and expanding it through ideas of logical reasonability and the empirical account of history, both medieval, modern and contemporary.

In a sense, Liberty or Equality managed to combine the understanding of ordered freedom with traditional monarchy, in a complex but fair system of inequalities, as the ultimate opposite of the egalitarian phenomenon represented in mass electoralism, where tyranny is able to reign with absolute might with the support of hordes of nameless voting ‘equals’.

At last, in Leftism, and later in its Revisited edition, Kueenelt-Leddihn provided the genealogy of ideas behind totalitarianism in its many forms through recent history and contrasted it with the different variants of Liberalism, Conservatism, and American political realism, mostly in foreign policy.

Following the same line set by his previous works, he thoroughly tried to explain the intricacies of the different leftist movements of his time, controversially including fascism and national socialism as part of them due to their egalitarian, even if virulently nationalistic, nature.

Here he claimed that “in the last two hundred years the exploitation of envy—its mobilization among the masses—coupled with the denigration of individuals, but more frequently of classes, races, nations, or religious communities, has been the key to political success,” equating Marxist class struggle theory with the persecution against perceived internal enemies and war against apparent external enemies promoted by all fascist national variants.

He also took shots against mainstream American politics, which he saw dangerously close to it European counterpart, albeit different in its presentation but not in its statist and interventionist spirit, which he saw particularly represented in the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In his eyes, there was little to no difference in the war crimes committed by any of all sides and belligerents during World War II, for the conflict was not one between sound beliefs respectful of freedom and local diversity but between simplistic ideologies hellbent on global domination at the cost of millions of lives.

As always, he defined his position as a sui generis syncretic “conservative arch-liberal” synthesis, which while highly attuned to the echoes of a political tradition lost in the past, was immensely foreign to the modern understanding.

This position explored at length in his socio-political books, was also made available for the occasional reader and for the activist in shorter works, among those famously included his Intelligent American’s Guide to Europe and his Credo of a Reactionary, Roots of ‘Anticapitalism’ and Four Liberalisms essays, as well as the founding Portland Declaration for the Philadelphia Society, to which many of his fellow contemporary libertarian and conservative thinkers belonged.

To American and, by default, Anglo-Western audiences, Kuehnelt-Leddihn was primarily known as the regular foreign contributor to National Review, and aside from that, and was held as a dear friend and associate scholar of the Mises and Acton Institutes, which promoted the same economic and, to some extent, also political, views to which he had arrived through his independent scholarship and which he shared with many of his fellow Austrian émigrés.

But unlike many other intellectuals of his time, Kuehnelt-Leddihn was not only a polymath and a man of letters, but in true Romantic and Renaissance fashion, he also indulged in other activities, such as photography, hitch-hiking, music, bridge, stamp collecting, and painting, all activities that were, in his own words, dearer to him than writing, for he enjoyed “much more wielding the brush than the pen.”

If his deeply Catholic religious faith was not completely understated through his works, some of his colourful life stories would do, such as when Erik, travelling through Finland, encountered the Devil himself in a freak event that blurs the line between anecdote and apocryphal account, one that traveled through the years and countries just like he went from place to place as he grew older, always returning to his beloved Austria and Hungary. Those who knew him knew that whether this story was real or just the product of an old man with a life well lived, they needed to let Erik be Erik.

A man out of time yet who experienced the marvels and the horrors of his age and a voice of old reason in an era obscured by its very zealous cult to reason for its own sake, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn truly deserved to be called “the world’s most fascinating man.”

However, his relentless will to reincorporate Catholic thinking into the Godlessness of liberal political theory should grant him another title, one more fitting to his station as a nobleman of old and a gentleman of new: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn may have been the Last Knight of Christendom, at least until someone else takes up his torch. We can only hope.

***

Out of the couple of biographical essays I’ve written, this one might be one of the most personally relevant to me, since the influence of Kuehnelt-Leddihn has been one of the major pillars in my own political and philosophical self-education since my own coming-of-age.

I remember my first encounters with his works through the magic of the internet, and the first time I managed to read him in paper the first time I visited the Mises Institute in Alabama years ago. and I also remember how, through the threads and networks laid out by his ideas, I found out about Catholic monarchist author Charles Coulombe and how I began exchanging through text with him up to the point we actually talked about him when we met for lunch in Vienna last year.

The thing about us, readers and scholars of Kuehnelt-Leddihn, is that just like him, we try to live interesting lives that can permeate and shape our faith and our beliefs into something greater than ourselves and our times.

My conversation with Charles keeps popping around, maybe because Kuehnelt-Leddihn somewhat manages to pull off that combination of Romanticism, Liberalism, and Traditionalism that could only be found in an unholy mix between Lords Acton and Byron, since just like Kuehnelt-Leddihn, he might be the current runner-up to his legacy, and if life and destiny, God willing, could allow someone in my generation to work their way up to become their intellectual heir apparent.

It might sound pretentious, yes, but part of the duty of most libertarians and conservatives, in the opinion of Bradley J. Birzer, should be to be as eccentric as possible. To individualize themselves while strengthening their ties to our communities. If the track record is not wrong, then Kuehnelt-Leddihn might have just been the most eccentric of them all, and rightfully so: not every other guy could have been a polyglot, polymath, Austrian Catholic nobleman traveling around the world and writing for American publications.

But the key to understanding Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is not just to see him as a traditionalist of the old school who found his way into mainstream liberal conservatism by casual chance and the adequate combination of talent in the most adequate moment.

My choice to name him as “the Last Knight of Christendom“, is, like with almost everything else, no coincidence since I wanted to make a parallel with Ludwig von Mises, who was christened as “the Last Knight of Liberalism” by Jörg Guido Hülsmann in the biography he wrote of the Austrian economist.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn must be understood first as a deeply Catholic writer and then as a Liberal thinker, without each category contradicting the other, who devoted his life to tirelessly defending faith and freedom as one and the same against the spirit of his time and the strength of its waves.

Unlike many others in these circles, I never had the conflict of having to choose between tradition and faith on the one hand and freedom and prosperity on the other, and I am fairly certain I owe that balance between the two to having been exposed to Kuehnelt-Leddihn very early on in my intellectual development, mostly through intermediaries, like Matthew Scarince with his amazing essay on the vice of illiberalism.

I cannot forget one of his quotes from Leftism, where he explained and released this tension in the simplest terms that follow: “The root is liber (‘free’). The term liberalis (and liberalitas) implies generosity in intellectual and material matters. The sentence ‘he gave liberally’ means that the person in question gave with both hands. In this sense liberality is an ‘aristocratic’ virtue. An illiberal person is avaricious, petty-minded, tight-fisted, self-centered. Up to the beginning of the Nineteenth century the word “liberal” figured neither in politics nor really in economics”

It should be natural, thus, to see how his works would attract young scholars like me, dreaming beyond the pettiness of electoral politics and half-baked ideologies, who, in one way or the other, would feel reflected in his life and his ideas.

But unlike the staff of National Review, who merely viewed him as a shiny relic from the Old World and would just “let Erik be Erik” in his writings, I think better advise would be to be more like him, to try to achieve that aristocratic eccentricity that would allow individuals and societies to thrive in the freedom offered in tradition and faith.

Maybe that way, there might be someone to succeed him as The World’s Most Fascinating Man & the Last Knight of Christendom.

The post Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn appeared first on The Miskatonian.

This quote from influential political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, one of the founders of the Italian School of Elite Theory singlehandedly encapsulates the evolution of Politics.

Since classical antiquity, we can categorize governments into the following: Aristocracy, Monarchy, and Democracy. Aristotle conceptualizes the State as the political unit that strives towards the Common Good, and with the emergence of proto-Enlightenment thought supplanting Scholasticism, a schism emerged between Political Science, Ethics, and Morality.

With such a break, the State was transformed into an entity that seeks to increase and centralize its Power exponentially to attain a ‘monopoly on violence’, as defined by Max Weber, or a permanent ‘state of exception’, as stated by Giorgio Agambem, drawing from Carl Schmitt.

Nevertheless, we can observe that there are certain universal principles and laws that persist and can be applied to any political society in history. This is where both Pareto and his contemporary Gaetano Mosca provide us with their insights about the nature of political arrangements.

First, there are always and everywhere two distinct classes: the so-called ‘ruling’ and ‘non-ruling’ classes, The ruling class is constituted by the minority and the non-ruling by the rest, that is, the majority, and within the ruling class, we can find two different types of elites, or what Pareto calls ‘residues‘, these being either ‘foxes‘ or ‘lions‘.

The first group can be classified as elites who rule through persuasion, cunningness, and compromise. The second one, on the other hand, rules through cold, harsh, brute force, meaning they are more willing to resort to violence to protect their position.

While one group may dominate another for a certain period, all ruling classes in history have invariably contained a mixture of both ‘foxes‘ and ‘lions‘, and Mosca himself proved to be adamant to the idea that singular rule is practically unattainable, instead insisting power was always vested in a small number of people with common interests who monopolize force.

The non-ruling class, by consequence, is nothing but powerless against this small minority since it lacks the necessary features required to establish control. Thus, Mosca dispels the notion that the masses can be self-governed in the following terms: ‘The organized hundred will always defeat the disorganized thousand.’

Fellow Italian elite theorist Robert Michels builds on his colleagues’ work by contending that what in reality enables the small minority to govern and exert control over the large majority is indeed organization, but more than organization itself, hierarchy.

For him, organization necessarily requires a hierarchical structure, as in the classical political form of oligarchy, and that need becomes an inevitability, or as he coined it, an ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy‘, that provides that the management of any institution requires special expertise, education, and skills, which in turn is what distinguishes the elite from the masses.

In the age following the Industrial Revolution, extensive division of labor and mass production exacerbated this separation, given that as organizational complexity increases, so does the need for tight management, and to quote Michels, “who says organization, says oligarchy.”

In our current reality, no institution can be classified as fully democratic, since there always happens to exist a decisionist leadership class. If the non-ruling majority wanted to trump the ruling minority it would have to organize itself, creating a hierarchy amongst its members and thus a class of people (that is, a minority) to replace the current ruling class.

Consequently, the fall of an elite governing class’ goes in hand with the ascent of another competing ruling class that replaces it in turn. This cyclical and deterministic phenomenon is what we might call the ‘circulation of elites‘.

This phenomenon concerns how new elites can enter the political system and ultimately attempt to replace or usurp the current elite.

There are different barriers to entry depending on the political system. For instance, it is much easier for new elites to arise in a democratic system where, at least in principle, there are no barriers to entry compared to an aristocracy where it is much easier for someone to be cast in the ruling minority if he is born into it.

Since societal matters mirror the way in which the elites conduct themselves, one can understand the history of a country and analyze its Politics based on the structure of the Ruling class.

Pareto takes Michels’ idea about the circulation of elites one step further in the sense that he talks about it as a ‘process of dynamic competition‘. According to him, societal shift can take place when the types of individuals, along with their relations towards society, change.

Two main ways exist relating to how a circulation of elites can take place: a conservative and steady integration of new individuals, or with revolutionary means which translates to a new regime and ideology to legitimize it.

In the case of Aristocracies, they face an inherent difficulty in the system since the supply of new individuals is inelastic, thus in the long run there is a tendency for them to degenerate and eventually be overthrown. Democratic systems may not face the same problem at this scale but they still in practice have external obstacles to the free circulation of individuals on the social ladder.

Returning to the analogy between ‘foxes‘ and ‘lions‘, revolutions typically arise when there is a disequilibrium between both groups within the decadent ruling class, as one type of elite becomes heavily overrepresented.

Thus, a new counter-elite sets to exploit the internal weaknesses to restore balance, and for that new emerging elite to be properly established and withstand the test of external competition, powerful narratives, called ‘political formulas‘ by Gaetano Mosca, become necessary.

These ‘formulas‘ are sets of abstract principles or beliefs, which help legitimize and eventually consolidate the ruling elite in their position, irrespective of their alignment with social reality.

Examples of ‘political formulas’ could be the so-called ‘Great Chain of Being’ persistent through the Christian Middle Ages, the hendiatris (tripartite motto) of Revolutionary France, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité“, or the appeal to ‘the Proletariat‘ in Marxism, and later on, in communist regimes.

These abstract beliefs illustrate and serve as an answer to man’s universal social need for moral principles that don’t base themselves on material realities.

Speaking of Marxism, one might think that the political framing of Italian Elite Theory is similar to the method of Power Elite Analysis, developed by New Left sociologist C. Wright Mills, but the fact is that the former predates the latter, and has several key differences that make these two almost impossible to combine, given that Power Elite Analysis, due to its Marxist heritage, focuses on the socio-economic factors that make the rule of the elites possible in the first place, narrowing the focus mainly on the capture of economic resources by the ruling class in order to maintain its control.

Furthermore, while ‘classical’ elite theory resembles a value-free attempt to analyze the function of power, Power Elite Analysis takes a critical approach and even seeks to be remedial, claiming that a classless society brought forward by the proletariat can bring equality.

For Pareto, Mosca, and other elite theorists (the titular Machiavellians of James Burnham’s book of the same name) this is nothing more than a utopian folly, and as witnessed with the Russian Revolution, elite rule must be understood as something inevitable, and cyclical brought forward by civilizational forces.

In that sense, anyone who seeks to understand any political system, irrespective of its ideology, shall first understand that it will inevitably be composed of a non-ruling majority and a ruling minority.

This realization creates radical implications for mass ideologies, such as the Enlightenment idea of popular sovereignty, for the simple fact that if power resides within a tight minority group, then it can’t reside at the same time with the rest of the population.

Majority rule thus can be described as nothing more than a mere political formula to effectively blur the lines separating the rulers from the non-rulers. The political elite can still cling to power through either the pervasion of the incentive structure within mass society, clientelism, or even internal political party arrangements.

At last, considering some of the insights of American political theorist James Burnham, who was heavily influenced by the earlier works of Pareto, Mosca, and Michels: “the general field of the sciences of Politics is the struggle for social power among organized groups of men.”

The wielders of power, and ultimately, the ones controlling the institutional structures for violence and the exception, that is, of the State apparatus, constitute a classical definition of an oligarchy, shaping and transforming society’s character, underscoring the top-down mechanism of culture being downstream from a set of rules that regulate behavior, that is, of Law.

The post A Layman’s Introduction to Elite Theory appeared first on The Miskatonian.