Book Review: 'The seduction of reason: The intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to postmodernism'

When the famed postmodernist Jacques Derrida came to Australia in 1997 he managed to pack out the Sydney Town Hall. Academics, students and the curious listened intently as Derrida expounded his view of language and its broader societal context.

More fool them, according to Professor Richard Wolin, who teaches history at the Graduate Center of New York's City University.

Wolin's The Seduction of Reason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism published in May this year by Princeton University Press is a strident and polemical attack on a movement that has infused the literature, philosophy and history departments of thousands of universities and colleges in the US, UK and this country over the past 30 years.

The core idea of postmodernism - that we should accept as correct Friedrich Nietzsche's debunking of the idea that we can ground political and moral values in some form of objective truth - is offensive to Wolin. He argues that "postmodernism's hostility towards ‘reason’ and ‘truth’ is intellectually untenable and politically debilitating".

And what makes postmodernism all the more dangerous is the political actions and rhetoric of its progenitors in Germany and France.

The Enlightenment - that cradle of rationalism and liberal values - is under attack, according to Wolin, from the political right and the academic left. The former, represented by the likes of France's racist political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, wants to replace the values of democracy with those of ethnicity. They propose a type of “parliamentary ethnic cleansing”. The latter, of whom Derrida is a leading exponent, argues that Enlightenment humanism, underpinned by Rene Descartes' "will to will" has inevitably caused genocide, nuclear war, environmental devastation and totalitarianism.

In wanting to shore up the Enlightenment's moorings, Wolin embarks on a systematic and forensic dissection of the post-modernist tradition, beginning naturally with that confounding German "giant", Friedreich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche, Wolin correctly surmises, was delusional (he wrote to musician Carl Fuchs in 1888, "I shall be ruling the world from now on") and an enemy of democracy. He fought against democracy "...tooth and nail. His training as classicist convinced him that greatness was the province of elite and that a meritocracy was synonymous with mediocrity".

But of equal concern in political terms was Nietzsche's sympathy of "the annihilation of the weak", his toying with the idea of a master race and his contempt for the Jews. No wonder, as Wolin rather surprisingly reveals, that buffoonish Italian dictator Mussolini became a "Nietzsche connoisseur and admirer".

In short, for Wolin, Nietzsche is the arch-enemy of the Enlightenment. But running a close second in the race to claim that mantle is Carl Jung, so beloved of the "New Age" baby boomers in the developed world today.

Jung, unlike Sigmund Freud, who "proudly asserted his Enlightenment patrimony", denounced the failings of Western civilization. As Wolin notes, this antipathy to the Enlightenment's emphasis on scientific reason, makes Jung a popular figure today among those who seek "alternative" knowledge from myths and imagination.

The Jungian industry is a multi-million dollar business these days, with CG Jung Educational Centres flung across the four corners of the globe. Jungianism, according to Wolin, provides an antidote to the radical secularism of today's world and critically for its followers, allows for the promise of redemption.

"The basic terms of Jungian psychology - anima, persona, archetype and collective unconscious - may well boil down to so much verbal hocus pocus and intellectual chicanery. Little matter. For true believers, they do the trick. They claim to put the individual in touch with mysterious powers that transcend his or her own atomised and spiritually impoverished existence," says Wolin in one of many withering passages on the "great man".

The flip side of Jung - his anti-Semitism and "Aryan psychoanalysis" is conveniently overlooked by his followers. Wolin acknowledges Jung's later antipathy to the Nazi's but says that this came “too late”. It is a fact that Jung accepted the presidency of the Nazi sponsored General Medical Society for Psychotherapy and in a 1939 interview described Hitler as a "medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better a myth".

If the Germanic anti-Enlightenment intellectual tradition is "proto-fascist", their French comrades regard themselves as the "philosophical heirs of May '68," according to Wolin. No wonder that in an essentially derivative intellectual culture like Australia, it is the French tradition that has been so influential in universities and the media. And now those "heirs of '68" have spawned a new generation of anti-Enlightenment advocates through the rise of the green left movement in Australia.

Wolin has some discomforting news for leftists of the French anti-Enlightenment tradition - they share much in common with the German "right". Georges Bataille (1897-1962), for example, shared with German conservatives of the 1930s, an aversion to Reason. "It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light", noted Bataille.

Bataille, Wolin notes, was an enemy of parliamentary democracy. "It aims at co-optation and the elimination of difference," the former wrote. The alternative, fascism, offers "a new political aesthetic" of charisma, violence and martial glory. Fascism for Bataille, "promises a measure of collective solidarity in a society otherwise suffused with fragmentation and anomie".

Bataille's confrere, Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is fairly skewered by Wolin. A hero to "household" names like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Blanchot was at the height of his powers during the 1930s. A period of chronic duplicity and weakness in the French body politic - something understandably despised by both Blanchot and Bataille.

But Blanchot took full advantage of the faltering democracy around him to advocate terrorism, anti-Semitism and to support the Nazi puppet regime of Petain. And of course, to provide the intellectual platform for Jacques Derrida.

It is Derrida and deconstructionism's relations with contemporary politics that especially fascinates Wolin. He is seemingly bored by traversing the familiar ground of Derrida's oft cited maxim, "There is nothing outside the text." Citing Foucault and the recently departed Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, Wolin notes that "Derrida is the master ventriloquist who in sovereign fashion determines which textual meanings become unrevealed and how".

But in the political realm, Derrida becomes more intriguing and disturbing. Wolin couples Derrida's view that law and justice never coincide ("general maxims - be they moral, constitutional, or legal - are intrinsically incapable of doing justice to the specificity of the individual case") with his preparedness to sanction "a violent act of revolutionary founding" because it creates a pristine abyss.

Derrida's rejection of the modern natural law tradition, which Wolin notes is the firmament on which our democracy is based, is particularly dangerous in these troubled times. Derrida leaves us with a "political existentialism in which, given the 'groundless' nature of moral and political choices, one political 'decision' seems as good as another".

Wolin's critique of the post-modernist tradition has a practical relevance in a world dominated by one superpower - the USA. In a searching section of the book's conclusion, Wolin teases out the antipathy of post-modernists to America. A hostility, he argues, that proceeds from not only the German "right" represented by Nietzsche and Heidegger, but by Derrida and Foucault. They all, "aimed their sights unremittingly at 'reason', 'humanism' 'modernity'". America, for better and for worse manifests these objects. America, founded on principles that opposed monarchy and superstition, is the child of the Enlightenment.

This unrelenting intellectual assault on America was evident in the post-modernist reaction to 9/11. Popular French critic and writer Jean Baudrillard commented that the entire world wanted the event to happen! “In essence it was [the terrorists] who committed the deed, but it is we who wished for it.”

Wolin accuses the post-modernists of being “inconsistent and confused.” On the one hand, he notes, they “bask in the freedoms of political liberalism - to whose institutions they are indebted for their brilliant academic careers - while biting the hand that feeds them”.

It is in celebrating the difference and heterogeneity, and in undermining universality, that post-modernists risk fuelling the current threats to democracy - ethnic and religious tribalism.

As the celebrated American philosopher Richard Rorty argued in a review of Seduction of Reason, published in Nation on June 14 this year, “Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister”. Wolin has exposed the postmodernists in an unprecedented fashion.