re: Intellectuals: Top-Five List (Alain de Benoist, France)

Alain de Benoist writes:

I thank Alan Levine for his kind and detailed answer (20 January ). I disagree with him on minor (or not-so-minor) points. I do not think that people like Foucault or Baudrillard were “footnotes to Nietzsche.” I do not think that Nietzsche said “that there is no truth” (this seems to me a superficial reading). I do not believe that “Heidegger was a Nazi” and that he “never renounced the Nazis,” a topic which has already given birth to an avalanche of controversies (see his devastating critique of Nietzsche’s will of power as “will of will” and all he wrote against the metaphysics of subjectivity, which was the very basis of the Nazi doctrine). But discussing all this points would need hundreds of pages.

To write a “top-five twentieth-century thinkers” list is of course quite difficult (and somewhat arbitrary). My tentative list would be:

1. Heidegger
2. Max Weber
3. Hannah Arendt
4. Oswald Spengler
5. Vilfredo Pareto

However, I would like to add:

Walter Benjamin
George Orwell
Thomas Mann
Gustave Le Bon
José Ortega y Gasset
Arnold Gehlen
Antonio Gramsci
Bertrand Russell
Louis Dumont
Georges Dumézil
Ludwig Klages
Max Scheler
Georg Lukács
Carl Schmitt
Christopher Lasch
Julien Freund
Ernst Jünger
Jean Baudrillard
Solzhenitsyn

… and many others!

In my list, there is no novelist (with a few exceptions, writers are not thinkers) nor scientist (technoscience discovers, but does not think).

JE comments: A most impressive list, although many WAISers will object to Alain de Benoist’s characterization of scientists! Note, as well, that Alain’s list does not include any politicians.

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