[lbo-talk] Nietzsche, Mencken, and anarchism

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 23 00:03:25 PDT 2008


The early-20th-century radical left and right grew out of the same cultural milieu, and also had a common fixation on "changing the world" and "creating new man and society" and "casting aside the past" and of course often the belief that their movement with an embodiment of History. So it's not really surprising that they would have intellectual influences in common. I think that for a lot of them perhaps what was important was being radical, with left or right being tacked on according to geographical location. :) (I'm thinking here especially of Futurism in Russia and Italy.)

--- On Tue, 7/22/08, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
> Well if one reflects upon Sorel's analyis of
> political myths and his Nietzschean-Bergsonian
> irrationalism, it's not so hard to understand
> how he could have been influential among
> people on both the radical left and the
> extreme right, or indeed how his own
> sympathies could shift back and forth
> between the extreme left and the
> extreme right.



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