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Title: Editor’s Introduction Author: Arthur Versluis Date: FALL 2020 Language: en Source: Journal for the Study of Radicalism Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 2020 Michigan State University Press
Throughout its history, JSR has included articles on radicalism across
the political spectrum, and in fact the international conference we
hosted some years ago asked whether (or when) radicalism was “beyond
left and right.” At the conference, some scholars told us that to ask
the question itself was beyond the pale. JSR’s masthead statement
includes this: “With sensitivity and openness to historical and cultural
contexts of the term, we loosely define “radical,” as distinguished from
“reformers,” to mean groups who seek revolutionary alternatives to
hegemonic social and political institutions, and who use violent or
nonviolent means to resist authority and to bring about sudden dramatic
transformations of society.” In short, radicalism, as opposed to reform,
can be understood functionally in terms of efforts at a sudden, dramatic
nonviolent transformation of society, and that working definition would
seem to be independent of a left–right political spectrum, however one
understands it.
That said, it is also the case that the bulk of JSR’s articles have
focused more on the left end of the political spectrum, or to put it
another way, have not focused as much on the right. And it has been a
challenge to steer the journal away from reformism and towards
radicalism. But there is no line between reform and radicalism, only an
indistinct borderland. The question of radicalism on the right is
related to this. That is, if the right is associated with conservatism,
the urge to conserve is not itself radical, and thus the term would not
seem to apply very well to much of the right. Although the Flemish
separatist group Vlaams Belaang is sometimes classed as radical, [End
Page v] after speaking at length to one of its leaders, one might have
the temerity to ask if this label is appropriate. What is the group
seeking to conserve? Or overthrow? Or both?
In this issue, we include some quite interesting articles that
investigate questions of radicalism on the right, beginning with Victor
Lundberg’s “A Fascist Baby Hawk in Nuremberg,” in which he explores the
history connecting five Swedish fascists with their attendance at a
National Socialist Party Congress, looking at how this history reveals
the dynamics of individual radicalization. Then, in “Beachhead or
Refugium? The Rise and Dilemma of New Right Counterculture,” Eliah Bures
discusses right-wing intellectual counterculture since World War II,
focusing on the influence of Ernst Jünger on contemporary “New Right”
writers and activists. The New Right would seem to be radical when it
sees itself as seeking the sudden, dramatic transformation of society
through violent or nonviolent means. In the third article, “Radical
Russianness: The Religious and Historiosophic Context of Aleksandr
Dugin’s Anti-Occidentalism,” Marcin Skladanowski and Lukasz Borzecki
elaborate on a major contributor to the anti-Western (one could also say
anti-American) thought of the Russian public intellectual and theorist
Aleksandr Dugin, looking at anti-Western thoughts’ deep religious roots
in Russian theological history, as well as the complexities of Dugin’s
own thought in this area. Because Dugin urges war against the West
(i.e., against the enemy of Russia), that would be not only conservatism
(though arguably it is that on the Russian side), but also (external to
Russia) the sudden, dramatic transformation of Western society through
war. This argument also involves the activities and possible motivations
of Vladimir Putin as part of its case that both Dugin and Putin are
participating in a historiosophic perspective that not only predated
them, but undoubtedly will follow them.
The next three articles explore related themes. The fourth article is
Daniel Rueda’s “Neo-Ecofascism: The Example of the United States,” which
first examines the development of ecological perspectives in Germany
prior to and during the Third Reich and the National Socialist roots of
modern environmentalism. Then Rueda examines how and the extent to which
the resurgence of the far right in the United States also includes
ecological thinking as an important dimension of its political-cultural
agenda. One most likely associates ecological radicalism with the left,
but Rueda documents that a good case can be made for considering the
natural home of ecological [End Page vi] thinking to be on the right, or
at least that there is a history of an ecological right with
contemporary exponents. Our fifth article is Nikos Potamianos’s
“Populism in Greece? Right, Left and Laclau’s ‘Jacobinism’ in the Years
of the Goudi Coup, 1908–1910,” in which he explores the relationships
among “right,” “left,” and “populism” in the context of modern Greek
history, focusing on an important historical moment. But the
implications go beyond this moment, which we can see when we gaze at the
contemporary political scenes not only in the United States, but also in
Western and Eastern Europe. Finally, we include an article by Kevin
Christiano on “Labor Poet Ralph Chaplin: Resister to the Great War,
Prisoner of the Class War,” a figure whose life and work belong to that
border area between radicalism and reformism. A labor activist who
opposed U.S. involvement in World War I, was Chaplin really a radical?
Was he seeking the sudden transformation of American society through
violent or nonviolent means?
The issue concludes with six book reviews on a wide range of topics,
including Italian anarchism, Emma Goldman and feminism, subjectivism and
misinterpellation, the art of protest, political activism and violence,
and the history of radical environmentalism. These are quite interesting
books and reviews.
Of course, JSR seeks provide a forum for the scholarly and dispassionate
analysis of radicalism of many kinds, and from many different
perspectives. We continue to welcome a steady stream of excellent
articles, and remain the only journal in the world that focuses on the
full range of political, social, and religious forms of radicalism. Next
year, we expect to feature articles on subjects including religious
radicalism (in all its varied forms) as well as ecological radicalism,
anarchism, black bloc radicalism, and other forms of radicalism. We
welcome your queries, submissions, and shared conversation about these
currents of radical political and religious movements and individuals,
as well as on other topics that advance our understanding of radicalism.
Thank you for supporting our journal, and we hope you enjoy this issue.