Thomas Carlyle is enthusiastically read by the Ideologues of the Far Right
No wonder J.D Vance finds in Carlyle a philosophical justification for modern conservatism. There are various points that Cummins will present in his Public Books article on Carlyle. The bottom line is that Carlyle was vocally anti-democracy and found it to be a precancerous phenomenon that would eventually subside. His key argument is “Evil is chaos; Good is order”. This also enables him to make ultranationalist arguments which often favour the rigour of war and conflict. Fichte is intellectually nearest to him, as he too argues that the war is the only source of nobility.
Yarvin a modern day interlocutor of Carlyle presents him as soothsayer of the human condition in the 21st century. He places his argument on chaos and order in the context of the ideological conflict between the right and the left. His argument being that the conservatives represent order while the post-modernists deconstructionists find solace in disorder which delegitimises their position. On another plane, he also is enamoured by Carlyle’s argument that the “nation must be synonymous with, or subsumed by its army and its civil and cultural life must be indistinguishable from its military. For someone who highly regards order, Carlyle rather appears a war-monger.
His position on Slavery is also interesting. His argument is that slavery is almost like any other human relationship, for instance marriage. It also requires some form of regulation. Slavery thus should not have been abolished, but rather regulated in order to reduce the misery of those enslaved. He also takes the eugenic position that the innate characteristics of some are more suited to mastery than slavery. This finds its place in the modern far-right rhetoric on racism.
References
- https://www.publicbooks.org/in-the-fuhrerbunker-with-carlyle-and-yarvin