Alain de Benoist traces the concept of "authoritarian liberalism" from Hermann Heller's 1930s coinage to its present-day resurgence, arguing that when liberal democracy feels threatened, it sheds its own principles and resorts to banning parties, criminalizing dissent, and policing not just acts but motives and thoughts.
The notion of “authoritarian liberalism” was born in the early 1930s, notably from the pen of the jurist Hermann Heller, a great adversary of Carl Schmitt. It resurfaces today in a different context, one in which liberticidal measures are proliferating at the very heart of liberal democracies. The covidist episode of lockdown and vaccinism marked a high point in the establishment of this authoritarian liberalism. The brutal repression of the Gilets jaunes [Yellow Vests] was another.
When liberalism feels threatened, it reacts like any other form of power — that is, like a dog afraid of having its bone taken away. When the dyke overflows and the “cordons sanitaires”1 begin to fray, all that remains is to ban the parties that win, to bar their candidates from standing for election, even to have them killed.
Of this we can be sure: cornered, the oligarchs of the System will stop at nothing. They have already multiplied bans and dissolutions, closed bank accounts, and decreed prohibitions of movement.
In Germany, a bill now proposes that municipalities exercise a right of pre-emption over real estate in order to prevent its acquisition by persons suspected of being “enemies of the Constitution.” This past February, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said so plainly: “In our country, freedom of expression ends where it undermines the Constitution.”
Now that the rejection of the dominant ideology is perceived as a scandal, any means will do to govern not merely without the people, but against them.
Surveillance Capitalism
The hunt for nonconformist ideas — which grants license to search the innermost conscience — goes back at least as far as the Inquisition. In a climate ruled at once by moral puritanism, racial prudishness, and sexual denialism, freedom of expression disappears the moment one begins to legislate on feelings (love and hate), to ban dissident remarks even when uttered in private or within the family circle, and to ask the courts to punish not merely acts but motives, intentions, and thoughts.
Ever since freedom of expression was made conditional, an Orwellian principle has been adopted: one may say anything except what one may not say. To which a second is added: whatever is not forbidden is merely (provisionally) tolerated. Everyone today lives under a regime of conditional liberty — that is, of liberty under surveillance.
The emergence of authoritarian liberalism shows not only that these two words, so often set in opposition, can become synonyms, but that it would be immensely naïve to expect any genuine protection of liberties from liberals. All the more so since the hardening of repression against dissidents goes hand in hand — and this is graver still — with an acceleration in the rollout of control and surveillance procedures throughout every Western country.
Alexandre Kojève, in his Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (g), had already foretold the gradual dissolution of political antagonisms into an administrative and police regime in which every contradiction would be absorbed into the technical management of things. In the age of “surveillance capitalism” (Shoshana Zuboff), the globalization of capital advances in lockstep with social control. In the name of the demand for “transparency,” technological surveillance, hygienic and biomedical surveillance, commercial surveillance, ideological surveillance, and sexual surveillance all claim to pass judgment on private conduct, to manage bodies, and to shape even the most intimate aspects of daily life.
In this way, the whole of society is progressively subjected to a global, reticular form of control that gathers an ever-increasing quantity of data to weigh on choices, steer tastes, influence opinions, and alter behaviors. It is no longer merely a matter of penalizing violations of the law but, as Giuseppe Gagliano has described, of building, by means of algorithms, “a world in which each individual can potentially be analyzed even before having done anything at all.”
Social control makes it possible to anticipate, to delegitimize, or to incapacitate — not on the basis of what one has done, but of what one might do. Thus, the door is thrown open to the worst.
And that worst is “voluntary servitude.” When tyranny speaks the language of technology, algorithms produce self-disciplined subjects. The Korean sociologist Byung-Chul Han has shown that, in liberal societies, we are witnessing a new form of violence directed no longer against others but against oneself: in a world shaped by the capitalist diktats of performance and all-out mimetic rivalry, the self-imposed constraints born of the internalization of dominant norms are now added to old-style prohibitions.
Since social death has become the present-day form of the death penalty, censorship begins with self-censorship. The superego merges with the ego. The result is that it has become pointless to set liberty against constraint, for they are now one and the same. Byung-Chul Han sums this up in a Bernanosian formula: “The new violence always strikes the bearer of an interiority.”
The engine of self-constraint and self-policing is fear. The exploitation of fear, whatever its nature (crime, narco-trafficking, hybrid wars, cyberattacks, immigration, natural disasters, pandemics, terrorism, violence of every kind), makes it possible — under the pretext of better ensuring security — to abolish all liberties, to transform the state of exception into a permanent regime, and to present every new form of control as a new protection.
Where, then, does hope lie? To paraphrase Péguy, let us say that there are two kinds of men: those for whom today is merely the day after yesterday, and those for whom today is the eve of tomorrow. Good luck to the latter.
Originally published in Éléments, no. 221, August-September 2026
Translated by Alexander Raynor
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TN: “cordons sanitaires” — retained in French; the term is used to describe mainstream parties’ refusal to govern with a proscribed party, as seen in many European countries where mainstream political parties isolate and refuse to work with “far-right” parties.
Whew!
de Benoist saw the light before there was a tunnel and knew it was a train.
"the bearer of an interiority" seems to me to be the mark of actual humanity. one wonders what the others are.................