Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the New Radical Right

We live in times as politically uncertain as those faced by the modernists a century ago. Europe once again faces the possibility of a post-liberal future, with sophisticated New Right intellectuals---not only populists---challenging the core Enlightenment values of liberal society. Often assumed to be merely 'reactionary, ' the radical modernist roots of the New Right are largely overlooked. Through metapolitics -- the social diffusion of ideas and cultural values for long-term political gain -- the New Right instead seeks to steer modernity 'forward' in an alternate direction, and claims 'proto-fascist' modernists such as Wyndham Lewis as part of its drive to occupy culture as the 20th-century Right occupied politics. Recasting Lewis as our intellectual contemporary, this book offers the first political-philosophical study of literary modernism's influence on the New Right's anti-Enlightenment vision and calls for an urgent re-evaluation of Lewis's legacy as an insider-critic of this ideological lineage. It applies Lewis's critiques of his reactionary modernist peers to leading New Right intellectuals, such as Dugin and de Benoist, critically examines Lewis's reception among New Right authors, and marks a major reassessment of Lewis's relevance to contemporary affairs-revealing how his work advances a rationalist and individualist vision of an Enlightened future that challenges, rather than legitimises, the alternative modernities envisaged by today's most radical anti-liberal thinkers.