Alain de Benoist and the New Right

Abstract

This chapter discusses the life and work of Alain de Benoist, a prolific French political thinker and the leading figure of the school of thought known as the New Right, launched in 1968. De Benoist and his New Right are proponents of the right to difference (often understood as ethnopluralism or ethnodifferentialism) and a pagan European identity with roots in the Indo-European peoples who migrated in the fifth millennium BC. His main focus today is the criticism of globalization and the hegemony of capital, but there is a debate on the continuity with, or breakaway from, his former association with the radical Right.