CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL IDEOLOGY∗

ALAIN DE BENOIST
_____________________

TRANSLATED BY GREG JOHNSON

In “Critique of Liberal Ideology,” Alain de Benoist uses the term “lib-

eralism” in the broad European sense of the term that applies not just
to American liberalism but also to American libertarianism and main-
stream conservatism, insofar as all three share a common history and
common premises.—Trans.

Not being the work of a single man, liberalism was never presented
in the form of a unified doctrine. Various liberal authors have, at
times, interpreted it in divergent, if not contradictory, ways. Still, they
share enough common points to classify them all as liberals. These
common points also make it possible to define liberalism as a specific
school of thought. On the one hand, liberalism is an economic doc-
trine that tends to make the model of the self-regulating market the
paradigm of all social reality: what is called political liberalism is sim-
ply one way of applying the principles deduced from these economic
doctrines to political life. This tends to limit the role of politics as
much as possible. (In this sense, one can say that “liberal politics” is a
contradiction in terms.) On the other hand, liberalism is a doctrine
based on an individualistic anthropology, i.e., it rests on a conception
of man as a being who is not fundamentally social.
These two characteristic features, each of which has descriptive and
normative aspects (the individual and the market are both described
as facts and are held up as models), are directly opposed to collective
identities. A collective identity cannot be analyzed in a reductionistic
way, as if it were the simple sum of the characteristics possessed by
the individuals of a given community. Such an identity requires the

∗
Alain de Benoist, “Critique de l’idéologie libérale,” in his Critiques—Théoriques
(Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme, 2002), 13–29. The translator wishes to
thank Alain de Benoist for permission to translate and publish this essay, Michael
O’Meara for checking the translation, and Arjuna for help with French idioms.
10 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

collectivity’s members to be clearly conscious that their membership

encompasses or exceeds their individual being, i.e., that their common
identity is a product of this composition. However, insofar as it is
based on individualism, liberalism tends to sever all social connec-
tions that go beyond the individual. As for the market’s optimal op-
eration, it requires that nothing obstruct the free circulation of men
and goods, i.e., borders must be treated as unreal, which tends to dis-
solve common structures and values. Of course this does not mean
that liberals can never defend collective identities. But they do so only
in contradiction to their principles.

***

Louis Dumont has shown Christianity’s role in Europe’s passage

from a traditional holist society to a modern individualistic society.
Right from the start, Christianity presented man as an individual who,
prior to any other relationship, has an inner relationship to God and
who thus seeks salvation through personal transcendence. In this rela-
tionship with God, man’s value as an individual is affirmed, and by
comparison the world is necessarily degraded or devalued. Moreover,
the individual is made equal to all other men, who also have individ-
ual souls. Egalitarianism and universalism are thus introduced on a
higher plane: the absolute value the individual soul receives from its
filial relationship with God is shared by all humanity.
Marcel Gauchet takes up the theme of a causal link between the
emergence of a personal God and the birth of an inner man, whose fate
in the beyond depends solely on his individual actions, and whose in-
dependence is already present in the possibility of an intimate rela-
tionship with God, i.e., of a relationship that involves God alone. “The
more remote God becomes in his infinity,” Gauchet writes, “the more
the relationship with him tends to become purely personal, to the
point of excluding any institutional mediation. Raised to the absolute,
the divine subject has no legitimate terrestrial counterpart other than
intimate presence. Thus the original interiority leads directly to reli-
gious individuality.”1
The Pauline doctrine reveals a dualistic tension that makes the

1 Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 77. In

English: The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar
Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 11

Christian, in his relationship to God, an “otherworldly individual”: to

become Christian implies in some way giving up the world. However,
in the course of history, the “otherworldly” individual gradually con-
taminated worldly life. To the extent that he acquired the power to
make the world conform to his values, the otherworldly individual
progressively returned to the world, immersing himself in it and
transforming it profoundly.
The process was carried out in three main stages. Initially, secular
life was no longer rejected but relativized: this is the Augustinian syn-
thesis of the two cities. In the second stage, the papacy secularized it-
self by assuming political power. Finally, with the Reformation, man
invested himself completely in the world, where he worked for the
glory of God by seeking material success that he interpreted as the
very proof of his election.
In this way, the principle of equality and individuality—which ini-
tially functioned solely in the relationship with God and thus could
still coexist with an organic and hierarchical principle structuring the
social whole—was gradually brought down to earth, resulting in
modern individualism, which represents its secular projection. “In or-
der for modern individualism to be born,” writes Alain Renaut expli-
cating the theses of Louis Dumont, it was necessary for the individual-
istic and universalist component of Christianity “to contaminate,” so
to speak, modern life to such an extent that gradually the two orders
were unified, the initial dualism was erased, and “life in the world
was reconceived as being able to conform completely to the supreme
value”: at the end of this process, “the otherworldly individual be-
came the modern worldly individual.”2
Organic society of the holist type then disappeared. In contempo-
rary terms, one passed from community to society, i.e., to common life
conceived as simple contractual association. The social whole no
longer came first, but rather individual holders of individual rights,
bound together by self-interested rational contracts.
An important moment of this evolution was the fourteenth century
nominalism of William of Ockham, who held that nothing exists but
particular beings. Another key moment was Cartesianism, which phi-

2 Alain Renaut, L’ère de l’individu. Contribution à une histoire de la subjectivité (Paris:

Gallimard, 1989), 76–77. In English: The Era of the Individual: Contribution to a History
of Subjectivity, trans. M. B. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1999).
12 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

losophically established the conception of the individual later presup-

posed by the legal doctrine of the rights of man and the intellectual
perspective of the Enlightenment. Beginning in the eighteenth cen-
tury, the emancipation of the situated individual from his natural at-
tachments was routinely interpreted from the perspective of universal
progress as marking the accession of humanity to “adulthood.” Sus-
tained by this individualistic impulse, modernity was characterized
first and foremost as the process by which local and kinship groups,
and broader communities, are gradually broken down to “liberate the
individual,” and all organic relations of solidarity are dissolved.

***

From time immemorial, to be human meant to be affirmed both as

a person and as a social being: the individual dimension and the col-
lective dimension are not identical, but are inseparable. In the holist
view, man develops himself on the basis of what he inherits and in
reference to his social-historical context. It is to this model, which is
the most common model in history, that individualism, which one
must regard as a peculiarity of Western history, directly comes to be
opposed.
In the modern sense of the term, individualism is the philosophy
that regards the individual as the only reality and takes him as the
principle of every evaluation. The individual is considered in himself,
in abstraction from his social or cultural context. While holism ex-
presses or justifies existing society in reference to values that are in-
herited, passed on, and shared—i.e., in the last analysis, in reference
to society itself—individualism establishes its values independently of
society as it finds it. This is why it does not recognize the autonomous
status of communities, peoples, cultures, or nations. For it sees these
entities as nothing but sums of individual atoms, which alone have
value.
This primacy of the individual over the community is simultane-
ously descriptive, normative, methodological, and axiological. The in-
dividual is assumed to come first, whether he is prior to the social in a
mythical representation of “prehistory” (the anteriority of the state of
nature), or simply has normative primacy (the individual is what is
worth more). Georges Bataille asserts that, “at the basis of every being,
there exists a principle of insufficiency.” Liberal individualism, on the
 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 13

contrary, affirms the full sufficiency of the singular individual. In lib-

eralism, man can apprehend himself as an individual without refer-
ence to his relationship to other men within a primary or secondary
sociality. Autonomous subject, owner of himself, moved solely by his
particular interests, the individual is defined, in opposition to the per-
son, as a “moral, independent, autonomous and thus primarily non-
social being.”3
In liberal ideology, the individual possesses rights inherent in his
“nature” entirely independent of social or political organization. Gov-
ernments are obligated to guarantee these rights, but do not establish
them. Being prior to all social life, they are not immediately correlated
to duties, because duties imply precisely that social life already exists:
there are no duties toward others if there are no others. Thus the indi-
vidual himself is the source of his own rights, beginning with the right
to act freely according to the calculation of his private interests. Thus
he is “at war” with all other individuals, since they are supposed to
act the same way in a society conceived as a competitive market.
Individuals may well choose to associate with one another, but the
associations they form are conditional, contingent, and transitory,
since they remain dependent on mutual assent and have no other goal
than to better satisfy the individual interests of each party. Social life,
in other words, is nothing but an affair of individual decisions and in-
terested choices. Man behaves like a social being, not because it is in
his nature, but because it is to his advantage. If he no longer finds it
advantageous, he can always (in theory at least) break the pact. In-
deed, this rupture best expresses his freedom. In opposition to ancient
freedom, i.e., the possibility of participating in public life, modern
freedom is, above all, the right to withdraw from public life. This is
why liberals always tend to define freedom as synonymous with in-
dependence.4 Thus Benjamin Constant extols “the peaceful pleasure of

3 Louis Dumont, Homo æqualis. Genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique

(Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 17.
4 Certain liberal authors, however, endeavored to distinguish independence and

autonomy, while others (or the same ones) endeavored to differentiate between the
subject and the individual, or even between individualism and narcissism. Unlike
independence, autonomy is compatible with submission to supra-individual rules,
even when they come from a self-grounding normativity. This is, for example, the
point of view Alain Renaut defends (L’ère de l’individu, 81–86), but it is not very con-
vincing. Autonomy is indeed quite different from independence (in certain connec-
tions, it even represents the opposite of it), but that is not the essential question. The
14 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

private individual independence,” adding that “men, to be happy,

need only to be left in perfect independence, in all that relates to their
occupations, their companies, their sphere of activity, their dreams.”5
This “peaceful pleasure” is to be understood as the right of secession,
the right to be constrained neither by duty of membership nor by any
of those allegiances that, in certain circumstances, can indeed appear
incompatible with “private independence.”
Liberals insist particularly on the idea that individual interests
should never be sacrificed to the collective interest, the common good,
or the public safety, concepts that they regard as inconsistent. From
this idea it follows that only individuals have rights, while communi-
ties, being only collections of individuals, have none of their own.
Thus Ayn Rand writes, “Since only an individual man can possess
rights, the expression ‘individual rights’ is a redundancy.”6 Benjamin
Constant also affirmed that, “Individual independence is the primary
modern need. Consequently, one never should ask it to be sacrificed
to establish political freedom.”7 Before him, John Locke declared that
“a Child is born a Subject of no Country or Government,” since, having
become an adult, he is “at liberty what Government he will put him-
self under; what Body Politick he will unite himself to.”8
Liberal freedom thus supposes that individuals can be abstracted
from their origins, their environment, the context in which they live
and where they exercise their choices, i.e., from everything that makes
them who they are, and not someone else. It supposes, in other words,
as John Rawls says, that the individual is always prior to his ends.
Nothing, however, proves that the individual can apprehend himself
as a subject free of any allegiance, free of any determinism. More-
over, nothing proves that in all circumstances he will prefer freedom
over every other good. Such a conception by definition ignores com-
mitments and attachments that owe nothing to rational calculation. It is
a purely formal conception, that makes it impossible to understand

essential question is to know what, from a liberal point of view, can force an indi-
vidual to adhere to any limitation of his freedom, whenever this limitation conflicts
with his self-interest.
5 Benjamin Constant, De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes (1819).
6 Ayn Rand, “Collectivized ‘Rights’,” in her The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Con-

cept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1964), 101.

7 Constant, De la liberté des Anciens.
8 John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), ch. viii, in Two Treatises of

Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 347.
 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 15

what a real person is.

The general idea is that the individual has the right to do every-
thing he wants, so long as his use of his freedom does not limit the
freedom of others. Freedom would thus be defined as the pure ex-
pression of a desire having no theoretical limits other than the identi-
cal desire of others, the whole of these desires being mediated by eco-
nomic exchanges. It is what Grotius, the theorist of natural right, al-
ready asserted in the seventeenth century: “It is not against the nature
of human society to work for one’s own interest, provided that one
does so without wounding the rights of others.”9 But this is obviously
an irenic definition: almost all human acts are exercised in one way or
another at the expense of the freedom of others, and it is, moreover,
almost impossible to determine the moment when the freedom of one
individual can be regarded as hindering that of others.
In fact, liberal freedom is, above all, the freedom to own. It does not
reside in being, but in having. Man is called free insofar as he is an
owner—first of all, an owner of himself. The idea that self-ownership
fundamentally determines freedom will later be adopted by Marx.10
Alain Laurent defines self-realization as an “ontological insularity
whose primary goal is the search for one’s own happiness.”11 For lib-
eral writers, the “search for happiness” is defined as the unhampered

9 Hugo Grotius, Du droit de la guerre et de la paix (1625).

10 Besides supporting the “mechanism” characteristic of liberal ideology, which is
given a fundamental epistemological value, Marx himself adheres to a metaphysics
of the individual, which led Michel Henry to see him as “one of the leading Chris-
tian thinkers of the Occident” (Michel Henry, Marx [Paris: Gallimard, 1991], vol. 2,
445). The reality of Marxist individualism, beyond its collectivist façade, was estab-
lished by many authors, beginning with Louis Dumont. “Marx’s entire philosophy,”
Pierre Rosanvallon writes, “can . . . be understood as an effort to enhance modern
individualism. . . . The concept of class struggle itself has no meaning outside the
framework of an individualistic representation of society. In a traditional society, by
contrast, it has no significance” (Le libéralisme économique. Histoire de l’idée de marché
[Paris: Seuil, 1989], 188–89). Marx certainly challenged the fiction of Homo economicus
that developed beginning in the eighteenth century, but only because the bourgeoi-
sie used it to alienate the real individual and bind him to an existence narrowed to
the sphere of self-interest alone. However, for Marx, self-interest is merely an ex-
pression of a separation between the individual and his life. (It is the basis of the
best part of his work, namely his criticism of “reified” social relations.) But he by no
means intends to substitute the common good for private interests. There is not even
a place for class interests.
11 Alain Laurent, De l’individualisme. Enquête sur le retour de l’individu (Paris: Pres-

ses Universitaires de France, 1985), 16.

16 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

freedom to try always to maximize one’s best interest. But immedi-

ately we encounter the problem of understanding “interests,” espe-
cially since those who take interests as axiomatic seldom care to speak
of their genesis or describe their components, any more than they
wonder whether all social actors are at bottom driven by identical in-
terests or if their interests are commensurable and compatible. When
cornered, they tend to give the term a trivial definition: for them an
“interest” becomes synonymous with a desire, a project, an action di-
rected towards a goal, etc. Anything can become an “interest.” Even
the most altruistic or disinterested action can then be defined as egois-
tic and interested, since it corresponds to the voluntary intention (the
desire) of its author. In reality, though, it is clear that for liberals, an
interest is defined initially as a material advantage which, to be appre-
ciated as such, has to be calculable and quantifiable, i.e., to be ex-
pressible in terms of the universal equivalent which is money.
It should, therefore, be no surprise that the rise of liberal individu-
alism initially entailed a progressive dislocation of the organic struc-
tures of existence characteristic of holist society, then a generalized
disintegration of the social bonds, and finally a situation of relative
social anomie, in which individuals were increasingly estranged from
and even enemies of one other, which is part and parcel of the modern
version of the “war of all against all,” that is, generalized competition.
Such is the society Tocqueville described in which each member, “re-
tired to the sidelines, is like a foreigner to all the others.” Liberal indi-
vidualism tends everywhere to destroy direct sociability, which for a
long time impeded the emergence of the modern individual and the
collective identities that are associated with him. “Liberalism,” writes
Pierre Rosanvallon, “to some extent makes the depersonalization of
the world a condition of progress and freedom.”12

***

Liberalism is nevertheless obliged to recognize the existence of the

social. But rather than wonder why the social exists, liberals are instead
concerned with how it is established and maintained, and how it func-
tions. After all, society for them is nothing more than the simple sum
of its members (the whole being nothing but the sum of its parts),
merely the contingent product of individual wills, a simple assembly

12 Rosanvallon, Le libéralisme économique, vii.

 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 17

of individuals all seeking to defend and satisfy their private interests.

Society’s essential goal, therefore, is to regulate exchange relations.
Such a society can be conceived either as the consequence of an initial
rational voluntary act (the fiction of the “social contract”) or as the re-
sult of the systemic play of the totality of projects produced by indi-
vidual agents, a play regulated by the market’s “invisible hand,”
which “produces” the social as the unintentional result of human be-
havior. The liberal analysis of the social rests, thus, either on contrac-
tualism (Locke), recourse to the “invisible hand” (Adam Smith), or the
idea of a spontaneous order, independent of any intention (F. A.
Hayek).
Liberals developed the whole idea of the superiority of regulation
by the market, which is supposed to be the most effective, most ra-
tional, and thus also the most just means to harmonize exchanges. At
first glance, the market is thus presented above all as just a “technique
of organization” (Henri Lepage). From an economic standpoint, it is at
the same time an actual place where goods are exchanged and a vir-
tual entity where in an optimal way the conditions of exchange—i.e.,
the adjustment of supply and demand and the price level—are
formed.
But liberals do not wonder about the origin of the market either.
Commercial exchange for them is indeed the “natural” model for all
social relations. From this they deduced that the market itself is also a
“natural” entity, establishing an order prior to any deliberation and
decision. Being the form of exchange most in harmony with human
nature, the market would be present at the dawn of humanity, in all
societies. One finds here the tendency of every ideology to “natural-
ize” its presuppositions, i.e., to present itself, not for what it is, in fact
a construction of the human spirit, but as a simple description, a sim-
ple transcription of the natural order. The state being correlatively re-
jected as an artifice, the idea of the “natural” regulation of the social
by means of the market can then be imposed.
In understanding the nation as a market, Adam Smith brings about
a fundamental dissociation between the concept of space and that of
territory. Breaking with the mercantilist tradition, which still identi-
fied political territory and economic space, he shows that the market
cannot by nature be contained within specific geographical limits. The
market is indeed not so much a place as a network. And this network
is destined to extend to the ends of the earth, since its only limit in the
18 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

final analysis lies in the ability to exchange. “A merchant,” Smith

writes in a famous passage, “. . . is not necessarily the citizen of any
particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from
what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will
make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry
which it supports, from one country to another.”13 These prophetic
lines justify the judgment of Pierre Rosanvallon, who sees Adam
Smith as “the first consistent internationalist.” “Civil society, con-
ceived as a fluid market,” adds Rosanvallon, “extends to all men and
allows them to transcend national and racial divisions.”
The main advantage of the concept of the market is that it allows
liberals to solve the difficult problem of how to make obligation part
of the social pact. The market can indeed be regarded as a law—a
principle regulating the social order—without a legislator. Regulated
by the action of an “invisible hand,” which is inherently neutral be-
cause it is not incarnated in concrete individuals, the market estab-
lishes an abstract mode of social regulation based on allegedly objec-
tive “laws” that make it possible to regulate the individual relations
where no forms of subordination or command exist. The economic
order would thus have to establish the social order, both orders being
conceived as emerging without being instituted. The economic order,
says Milton Friedman, is “the nonintentional and nondesired conse-
quence of the projects of a great number of people driven solely by
their interests.” This idea, abundantly developed by Hayek, is in-
spired by the formula of Adam Ferguson (1767) who referred to social
facts that are “the result of human action, but not the execution of any
human design.”14
Everyone knows the Smithian metaphor of the “invisible hand”: In
commerce, the individual “intends only his own gain, and he is in this,
as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end
which was no part of his intention.”15 This metaphor goes far beyond
the altogether banal observation that the results of a one’s actions are
often quite different from what one expected (what Max Weber called
the “paradox of consequences”). Smith indeed frames this observation

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2
13

vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), vol. 1, book III, ch. iv, 426.
14 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), third part, section II, p. 119.
15 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, book IV, ch. ii, p. 456.
 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 19

in a resolutely optimistic perspective. “Each individual,” he adds, “al-

ways makes every effort to find the most advantageous employment
for all the capital at his disposal; it is quite true that he envisions his
own benefit, not that of society; but the care that is given to finding his
personal advantage leads him naturally, or rather necessarily, to pre-
cisely prefer the kind of employment that is most advantageous to so-
ciety.” And further: “All while seeking only his personal interest, he
often works in a much more effective manner for the interest of soci-
ety than if his purpose really were to work for it.”
The theological connotations of this metaphor are obvious: the “in-
visible hand” is only a secular avatar of Providence. It should also be
emphasized that, contrary to what is often believed, Adam Smith does
not assimilate the very mechanism of the market to the play of the “in-
visible hand,” because he utilizes the latter only to describe the end
result of the confluence of commercial exchanges. Besides, Smith still
accepts the legitimacy of public intervention when individual projects
alone fail to realize the common good.
But this qualification would soon disappear. Neo-liberals now dis-
pute the very concept of the public good. Hayek prohibited any com-
prehensive approach to society on principle: no institution, no politi-
cal authority ought to set objectives that might question the efficiency
of the “spontaneous order.” Given this view, the only role that most
liberals agree to allow the state is guaranteeing the conditions neces-
sary for the free play of economic rationality to work in the market.
The state can have no goal of its own. It exists only to guarantee indi-
vidual rights, freedom of exchange, and respect for law. Equipped
more with permissions than with prerogatives, it must in all other do-
mains remain neutral and renounce proposing a model of the “good
life.”16
The consequences of the theory of the “invisible hand” are deci-
sive, particularly at the moral level. In some passages, Adam Smith
indeed rehabilitates the very behaviors that previous centuries always
condemned. By subordinating the social interest to individual eco-
nomic interests, Smith makes selfishness the best way to serve others.
While seeking to maximize our best personal interest, we work—

16 With respect to the role of the state, this is the most current liberal position. The
libertarians known as “anarcho-capitalists” go further, since they refuse even the
“minimal state” suggested by Robert Nozick. Not being a producer of capital,
though it consumes labor, for them the state is necessarily a “thief.”
20 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

without knowing it, indeed without even having to want it—for the
interest of all. The free confrontation of egoistic interests in the market
“naturally, or rather necessarily,” allows their harmonization by the
play of the “invisible hand,” thus making them contribute to the social
optimum. Thus there is nothing immoral in seeking one’s own interest
first, since in the final analysis the egoistic action of each leads, as if by
accident, to the interest of all. It is what Frederic Bastiat summarized
in a formula: “Each one, while working for himself, works for all.”17
Egoism is thus nothing but altruism properly understood. By contrast,
it is the schemes of the public authorities that deserve to be de-
nounced as “immoral,” whenever, in the name of solidarity, they con-
tradict the right of individuals to act according to their own interests.
Liberalism links individualism and the market by stating that the
free operation of the latter is also the guarantor of individual freedom.
By ensuring the best return on exchanges, the market in effect guaran-
tees the independence of each agent. Ideally, if the market’s perform-
ance is unhindered, this adjustment takes place in an optimal way,
making it possible to attain an ensemble of partial equilibriums that
ensure an overall equilibrium. Defined by Hayek as a “catallaxy,” the
market constitutes a spontaneous and abstract order, the formal in-
strumental support for the exercise of private freedom. The market
thus represents not just the satisfaction of an economic ideal of opti-
mality, but the satisfaction of everything to which individuals, consid-
ered as generic subjects of freedom, aspire. Ultimately, the market is
identified with justice itself, which leads Hayek to define it as a “game
that increases the chances of all the players,” stipulating that, under
these conditions, losers would be ill-advised to complain, for they
have only themselves to blame. Finally, the market is intrinsically
“pacifying” because, based on “gentle commerce,” it substitutes the
principle of negotiation for conflict, neutralizing both rivalry and
envy.
Note that Hayek reformulates the theory of the “invisible hand” in
“evolutionary” terms. Hayek indeed breaks with any sort of Cartesian
reasoning, such as the fiction of the social contract, which implies the
opposition (standard since Hobbes) between the state of nature and
political society. On the contrary, in the tradition of David Hume, he

17 Frederic Bastiat, Harmonies économiques (1851). This is the well-known thesis

that Mandeville defends in his Fable of the Bees: “Private vices, public virtue.”
 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 21

praises custom and habit, which he opposes to all “constructivism.”

But at the same time he affirms that custom selects the most effective
and rational codes of conduct, i.e., the codes of conduct based on
commercial values, whose adoption results in rejecting the “tribal or-
der” of “archaic society.” This is why, invoking “tradition” all the
while, he criticizes traditional values and firmly condemns any or-
ganicist vision of society. Indeed, for Hayek the value of tradition de-
rives above all from what is spontaneous, abstract, impersonal, and
thus inappropriable. It is this selective character of custom that ex-
plains why the market was gradually imposed. Hayek thus thinks that
any spontaneous order is basically “right” in the same way that Dar-
win asserts that the survivors of the “struggle for life” are necessarily
“the best.” The market order thus constitutes a social order that pro-
hibits by definition any attempt to reform it.
Thus one sees that, for liberals, the market concept goes well be-
yond the merely economic sphere. The market is more than a mecha-
nism for the optimal allocation of scarce resources or a system regulat-
ing the pathways of production and consumption. The market is also
and above all a sociological and “political” concept. Adam Smith him-
self, insofar as he turned the market into the principal agent of social
order, was led to conceive human relations on the economic model,
i.e., as relations between merchandise. Thus a market economy leads
quite naturally to a market society. “The market,” writes Pierre
Rosanvallon, “is primarily a way of representing and structuring so-
cial space; it is only secondarily a decentralized mechanism for regu-
lating economic activities through the pricing system.”18
For Adam Smith, generalized exchange is the direct consequence of
the division of labor: “Every man thus lives by exchanging, or be-
comes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be
what is properly a commercial society.”19 Thus, from the liberal per-
spective, the market is the dominant paradigm in a society that de-
fines itself through and through as a market society. Liberal society is
only a realm of utilitarian exchanges by individuals and groups all
driven solely by the desire to maximize their self-interest. A member
of this society, where everything can be bought and sold, is either a
merchant, or an owner, or a producer, and in all cases a consumer.

18 Rosanvallon, Le libéralisme économique, 124.

19 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, book I, ch. iv, p. 37.
22 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

“The superior rights of consumers,” writes Pierre Rosanvallon, “are to

Smith what the General Will is to Rousseau.”
In the modern age, liberal economic analysis was gradually ex-
tended to all social facts. The family was assimilated to a small busi-
ness, social relations to a network of competing self-interested strate-
gies, political life to a market where the voters sell their votes to the
highest bidder. Man is perceived as capital, the child as a consumer
good. Economic logic was thus projected onto the social whole, in
which it was once embedded, until it entirely encompassed it. As Ge-
rald Berthoud writes, “society can then be conceived starting from a
formal theory of purposeful action. The cost-benefit analysis is thus
the principle that rules the world”20 Everything becomes a factor of
production and consumption; everything is supposed to result from
the spontaneous adjustment of supply and demand. Everything is
worth its exchange value, measured by its price. Correlatively, all that
cannot be expressed in quantifiable and calculable terms is held to be
uninteresting or unreal. Economic discourse thus proves profoundly
reifying of social and cultural practices, profoundly foreign to any
value that cannot be expressed in terms of price. Reducing all social
facts to a universe of measurable things, it finally transforms men
themselves into things—things substitutable and interchangeable
from the monetary point of view.

***

This strictly economic representation of society has considerable

consequences. Completing the process of secularization and “disen-
chantment” of the world characteristic of modernity, it leads to the
dissolution of peoples and the systematic erosion of their distinct
characteristics. On the sociological plane, privileging economic ex-
change divides society into producers, owners, and sterile classes (like
the former aristocracy), through an eminently revolutionary process
that Karl Marx was not the last to praise. On the plane of the collective
imagination, it leads to a complete inversion of values, while raising
to the pinnacle commercial values that from time immemorial had
been regarded as the very definition of inferior, since they were mat-
ters of mere necessity. On the moral plane, it rehabilitates the spirit of

20 Gerald Berthoud, Vers une anthropologie générale. Modernité et altérité (Geneva:

Droz, 1992), 57.

 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 23

self-interested calculation and egoistic behavior, which traditional so-

ciety has always condemned.
Politics is regarded as intrinsically dangerous, insofar as it concerns
the exercise of power, which is considered “irrational.” Thus liberal-
ism reduces politics to the guarantee of rights and management of so-
ciety solely by technical expertise. It is the fantasy of a “transparent
society” coinciding immediately with itself, outside any symbolic ref-
erent or concrete intermediation. In the long run, in a society entirely
governed by the market and based on the postulate of the self-
sufficiency of “civil society,” the state and related institutions are sup-
posed to decay as surely as in the classless society imagined by Marx.
In addition, the logic of the market, as Alain Caillé shows, is part of a
larger process tending toward the equalization, even the interchange-
ability, of men, by the means of a dynamic that is observed already in
the modern use of currency. “The juggling act of the liberal ideology,”
according to Caillé, “. . . resides in the identification of the legal state
with the commercial state, its reduction to an emanation of the mar-
ket. Consequently, the plea for the freedom of individuals to choose
their own ends in reality turns into an obligation to have only com-
mercial ends.”21
The paradox is that liberals never cease affirming that the market
maximizes the chances of each individual to realize his own ends,
while affirming that these ends cannot be defined in advance, and
that, moreover, nobody can better define them than the individual
himself. But how can they say that the market brings about the opti-
mum, if we do not know what this optimum is? In fact, one could just
as easily argue that the market multiplies individual aspirations much
more than it gives them the means to achieve them, that it increases,
not their satisfaction, but their dissatisfaction in the Tocquevillian
sense of the term.
Moreover, if the individual is always by definition the best judge of
his own interests, then what obliges him to respect reciprocity, which
would be the sole norm? Liberal doctrine would no longer base moral
behavior upon a sense of duty or the moral law, but upon self-interest,
rightly understood. While not violating the liberty of others, I would
dissuade them from violating mine. Fear of the police is supposed to

21 Alain Caillé, Splendeurs et misères des sciences sociales. Esquisse d’une mythologie

(Geneva: Droz 1986), 347.

24 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

take care of the rest. But if I am certain that, by transgressing the rules,
I incur only a very small risk of punishment, and reciprocity does not
matter to me, what prevents me from violating the rules or the law?
Obviously nothing. On the contrary, taking into account nothing but
my own interests encourages me to do so as often as I can.
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith writes frankly:

. . . though among the different members of the society there

should be no mutual love and affection, the society, though less
happy and agreeable, will not necessarily be dissolved. Society
may subsist among different men, as among different merchants,
from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection;
and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound
in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary
exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation.22

The meaning of this passage is clear. A society can very well econo-
mize—this word is essential—on any form of organic sociality, with-
out ceasing to be a society. It is enough for it to become a society of
merchants: the social bond will merge with the feeling of its “utility”
and the “mercenary exchange of good offices.” Thus to be human, it is
sufficient to take part in commercial exchanges, to make free use of
one’s right to maximize one’s best interest. Smith said that such a so-
ciety will certainly be “less happy and agreeable,” but the nuance was
quickly forgotten. One even wonders if, for certain liberals, the only
way to be fully human is to behave like merchants, i.e., those who
were formerly accorded an inferior status (not that they were not re-
garded as useful, and even necessary, but for the very reason that they
were nothing but useful—and their vision of the world was limited by
the sole value of utility). And that obviously raises the question of the
status of those who do not behave like that, either because they lack
the desire or the means. Are they still men?

***

The logic of the market actually imposed itself gradually, beginning

at the end of the Middle Ages, when long-distance and local trade
started to be unified within national markets under the impetus of the

22 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1976), 86.
 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 25

emerging nation-states, eager to monetize and hence tax formerly un-

taxable forms of noncommercial intra-community trade. Thus, far
from being a universal fact, the market is a phenomenon strictly local-
ized in time and space. And, far from being “spontaneous,” this phe-
nomenon was in fact instituted. Particularly in France, but also in
Spain, the market was by no means constructed in spite of the nation-
state, but rather thanks to it. The state and the market are born to-
gether and progress at the same pace, the former constituting the lat-
ter at the same time as it institutes itself. “At the very least,” Alain
Caillé writes, “it is advisable not to consider market and state as two
radically different and antagonistic entities, but as two facets of the
same process. Historically, national markets and nation-states are
built at the same pace, and one is not found without the other.”23
Indeed, both develop in the same direction. The market amplifies
the movement of the national state which, to establish its authority,
cannot cease to destroy methodically all forms of intermediate sociali-
zation which, in the feudal world, were relatively autonomous or-
ganic structures (family clans, village communities, fraternities,
trades, etc.). The bourgeois class, and with it incipient liberalism, sus-
tained and aggravated this atomization of society, insofar as the
emancipation of the individual it desired required the destruction of
all involuntary forms of solidarity or dependence that represent as
many obstacles to the extension of the market. Pierre Rosanvallon ob-
serves:

From this perspective, nation-state and market reflect the same

type of socialization of individuals in space. They are conceiv-
able only within the framework of an atomized society, in which
the individual is understood to be autonomous. Thus both the
nation-state and the market, in both the sociological and eco-
nomic sense of these terms, are not possible where society exists
as an encompassing social whole.24

Thus the new form of society that emerged from the crisis of the
Middle Ages was built gradually, starting from the individual, from
his ethical and political standards, and from his interests, slowly dis-
solving the coherence of political, economic, legal, and even linguistic

23 Caillé, Splendeurs et misères, 333–34.

24 Rosanvallon, Le libéralisme économique, 124.
26 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

realms that the old society tended to sustain. Until the seventeenth
century, however, state and civil society continued to be one and the
same: the expression “civil society” was still synonymous with politi-
cally organized society. The distinction begins to emerge late in the
seventeenth century, notably with Locke, who redefines “civil society”
as the sphere of property and exchanges, the state or “political soci-
ety” being henceforth dedicated to protecting economic interests
alone. Based upon the creation of an autonomous sphere of produc-
tion and exchanges, and reflecting the specialization of roles and func-
tions characteristic of the modern state, this distinction led either to
the valorization of political society as the result of a social contract, as
with Locke, or to the exaltation of civil society based on the spontane-
ous adjustment of interests, as with Mandeville and Smith.25 As an
autonomous sphere, civil society creates a field for the unrestricted
deployment of the economic logic of interests. As a consequence of the
market’s advent, “society,” as Karl Polanyi writes, “is managed as an
auxiliary of the market. Instead of the economy being embedded in
social relations, social relations are embedded in economic rela-
tions.”26 This is the very meaning of the bourgeois revolution.
At the same time, society takes the form of an objective order, dis-
tinct from the natural or cosmic order, which coincides with the uni-
versal reason to which the individual is supposed to have immediate
access. Its historical objectivation initially crystallizes in the political
doctrines of rights, the development of which one can follow from the
time of Jean Bodin to the Enlightenment. In parallel, political economy
emerges as a general science of society, conceived as a process of dy-
namic development synonymous with “progress.” Society henceforth
becomes the subject of a specific scientific knowledge. To the extent
that it achieves a supposedly rational mode of existence, and its prac-
tices are subject to an instrumental rationality as the ultimate princi-
ple of regulation, the social world falls under a certain number of
“laws.” But due to this very objectivization, the unity of society, like
its symbolization, becomes eminently problematic, the more so as the
privatization of membership and attachment leads quickly to the
fragmentation of the social body, the multiplication of conflicting pri-

25Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714).

26 Karl Polanyi, La grande transformation. Aux origines politiques et économiques de
notre temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 88. In English: The Great Transformation: The Po-
litical and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).
 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 27

vate interests, and the onset of de-institutionalization. New contradic-

tions soon appear, not only between the society founded by the bour-
geoisie and remnants of the Old Regime, but even within bourgeois
society, such as class struggle.
The distinction between the public and the private, state and civil
society, was still acute in the nineteenth century, generalizing a di-
chotomic and contradictory view of social space. Having extended its
power, liberalism, henceforth promoted a “civil society” identified
with the private sphere alone and denounced the “hegemonic” influ-
ence of the public sector, leading it to plead for the end of the state’s
monopoly on the satisfaction of collective needs and for the extension
of commercial modes of intrasocial regulation. “Civil society” then
took on a largely mythic dimension. Being defined less and less in its
own terms than in opposition to the state—its contours fuzzily de-
fined by what was theoretically subtracted from the state—it seemed
more an ideological force than a well-defined reality.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, adjustments had to
be made to the purely economic logic of society’s regulation and re-
production. These adjustments were less the result of conservative re-
sistance than of the internal contradictions of the new social configu-
ration. Sociology itself arose from real society’s resistance to political
and institutional changes as well as those who invoked a “natural or-
der” to denounce the formal and artificial character of the new mode
of social regulation. For the first sociologists, the rise of individualism
hatched a double fear: of “anomie” resulting from the disintegration
of social bonds (Émile Durkheim) and of the “crowd” made up of at-
omized individuals suddenly brought together in an uncontrollable
“mass” (Gustave Le Bon or Gabriel Tarde, both of whom reduce the
analysis of social facts to “psychology”). The first finds an echo among
counter-revolutionary thinkers in particular. The second is mainly
perceptible among the bourgeoisie concerned above all with protect-
ing itself from the “dangerous classes.”
While the nation-state supported and instituted the market, an-
tagonism between liberalism and the “public sector” grew in tandem.
Liberals never cease fulminating against the welfare state, without re-
alizing that it is precisely the market’s extension that necessitates ever-
increasing state intervention. The man whose labor is subject solely to
the market’s play is indeed vulnerable, for his labor might find no tak-
ers or have no value. Modern individualism, moreover, destroyed the
28 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

organic relations of proximity, which were above all relations of mu-

tual aid and reciprocal solidarity, thus destroying old forms of social
protection. While regulating supply and demand, the market does not
regulate social relations, but on the contrary disorganizes them, if only
because it does not take into account demands for which one cannot
pay. The rise of the welfare state then becomes a necessity, since it is
the only power able to correct the most glaring imbalances and at-
tenuate the most obvious distresses. This is why, as Karl Polanyi
showed, every time liberalism appeared to triumph, it has been para-
doxically assisted by the addition of official interventions necessitated
by the damage to the social fabric caused by the logic of the market.
“Without the relative social peace of the welfare state,” Alain Caillé
observes, “the market order would have been swept away alto-
gether.”27 This synergy of market and state has long characterized
(and in certain regards continues to characterize) the Fordist system.
“Social protection,” concludes Polanyi, “is the obligatory accompani-
ment of the self-regulating market.”28
Insofar as its interventions aim at compensating for the destructive
effects of the market, the welfare state in a certain manner plays a role
in “de-marketizing” social life. However, it cannot completely replace
the forms of community protection destroyed by industrial develop-
ment, the rise of individualism, and the expansion of the market.
Compared to these old forms of social protection, it indeed has as
many limitations as benefits. Whereas the old solidarity rested on an
exchange of mutual services, which implied responsibility for all, the
welfare state encourages irresponsibility and turns citizens into de-
pendents. Whereas the old solidarity fell under a network of concrete
relations, the welfare state takes the form of an abstract, anonymous,
and remote machinery, from which one expects everything and to
which one thinks one owes nothing. The substitution of an imper-
sonal, external, and opaque solidarity for an old, immediate solidarity
is thus far from satisfactory. It is, in fact, the very source of the current
crisis of the welfare state which, by its very nature, seems doomed to
implement only a solidarity that is economically ineffective because it
is sociologically maladjusted. As Bernard Enjolras writes, “to go be-
yond the internal crisis of the welfare state presupposes . . . rediscov-

27 Caillé, Splendeurs et misères, 332.

28 Polanyi, La grande transformation, 265.
 Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology” 29

ering the conditions that produce a solidarity of proximity,” which are

also “the conditions for reforging the economic bond to restore syn-
chronism between the production of wealth and the production of the
social.”29

***

“All the degradation of the modern world,” wrote Péguy, “i.e., all
lowering of standards, all debasement of values, comes from the mod-
ern world regarding as negotiable the values that the ancient and
Christian worlds regarded as nonnegotiable.”30 Liberal ideology bears
a major responsibility for this “degradation,” insofar as liberalism is
based on an unrealistic anthropology entailing a series of erroneous
conclusions.
The idea that man acts freely and rationally in the market is just a
utopian postulate, for economic facts are never autonomous, but rela-
tive to a given social and cultural context. There is no innate economic
rationality; it is only the product of a well-defined social-historical de-
velopment. Commercial exchange is not the natural form of social re-
lations, or even economic relations. The market is not a universal phe-
nomenon, but a localized one. It never realizes the optimal adjustment
of supply and demand, if only because it solely takes into account the
demand of those who can pay. Society is always more than its indi-
vidual components, as a class is always more than the elements that
form it, because it is that which constitutes it as such, and that from
which it is thus logically and hierarchically distinct, as shown in Rus-
sell’s theory of logical types (a class cannot be a member of itself, no
more than one of its members on its own can constitute the class). Fi-
nally, the abstract conception of a disinterested, “decontextualized”
individual who acts upon strictly rational expectations and who freely
chooses his identity from nothing, is a totally unsupportable vision.
On the contrary, communitarian and quasi-communitarian theorists
(Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel) have shown the vital impor-
tance for individuals of a community that necessarily constitutes their
horizon, their episteme—even to forge a critical representation of it—

29 Bernard Enjolras, “Crise de l’Etat-Providence, lien social et associations : élé-

ments pour une socio-économie critique,” Revue du MAUSS, 1er semestre 1998, 223.
30 Charles Péguy, “Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne,”

Note conjointe (Paris: Gallimard, 1935).

30 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008

for the construction of their identity as well as for the satisfaction of

their goals. The common good is the substantial doctrine that defines
the community’s way of life and thus its collective identity.
The whole current crisis arises from the contradiction that is exac-
erbated between the ideal of the abstract universal man (with its corol-
lary atomization and depersonalization of all social relationships) and
the reality of the concrete man (for whom social ties continue to be
founded on emotional ties and relations of proximity, along with their
corollaries of cohesion, consensus, and reciprocal obligations).
Liberal authors believe society can be based solely on individualism
and market values. This is an illusion. Individualism has never been
the sole foundation of social behavior, and it never will be. There are
also good reasons to think that individualism can appear only insofar
as society remains to some extent holist. “Individualism,” writes Louis
Dumont, “is unable to replace holism completely and reign over all
society. . . . Moreover, it cannot function without holism contributing
to its life in a variety of unperceived and surreptitious ways.”31 Indi-
vidualism is what gives liberal ideology its utopian dimension. Thus it
is wrong to see holism as only a doomed legacy of the past. Even in
the age of modern individualism, man remains a social being. Holism
reappears the moment liberal theory posits a “natural harmony of in-
terests,” in effect recognizing that the common good takes precedence
over private interests.

Alain de Benoist, the leading theorist of the French “New Right,” is the
editor of Nouvelle Ecole and Krisis and the author of some fifty books
and more than 3,000 articles, essays, and reviews. On Being a Pagan
(Atlanta: Ultra, 2004) is his most recent title in English.

31 Dumont, Homo æqualis.