Giorgio Locchi (1923–1992) was, along with figures such as Dominique Venner and Alain de Benoist, one of the founders of the French New Right. Guillaume Faye counted him among his most important sources of inspiration, and when you read Faye’s references to Locchi, it quickly becomes apparent that he was a valuable and original thinker.
Despite this, Locchi remains relatively unknown in the Anglophone world, with few of Locchi’s texts having been available to non-French speakers. Because of this, the anthology Definitions (published in English by Arktos in 2024) is a great service to culture: it is a collection of translated texts that offer an introduction to his thought.
The broadly liberal hegemony still dominating the West means that large parts of the prevailing worldview are taken for granted, indeed are even nameless. Like fish, we lack words for the water in which we swim. Locchi is like a sun illuminating what would otherwise remain hidden. He gives names to aspects of the common understanding of such things as humanity and history, using terms such as egalitarianism, segmentary conceptions of history, and mentality.
But Locchi also identifies an alternative: the suprahumanist tendency, represented by figures such as Wagner and Nietzsche. This makes him interesting from a metapolitical perspective, but also valuable to academics, artists, and political activists.
Starting from Arnold Gehlen’s anthropology, Locchi shows that man is a biological being, but at the same time “world-open,” perpetually free to choose:
“To reduce man to a biological species is to strip him of his humanity, of his historicity. This, of course, is the unconscious desire of societies exhausted by history.”
This applies both to individuals and societies, for “culture is the nature of man.” Locchi identifies two anthropological ideal types, while remaining fully aware that they are tendencies that coexist in most people. On the one hand, there is the mass man, incapable of doing anything other than following; on the other there is the founder/hero, who possesses and realizes an idea of his society.
In Locchi’s model, there is no necessary contradiction between the autonomous individual and his or her society: the founder/hero both preserves and ennobles the culture and society of his people. The alternative is a false dichotomy: “taking charge of a society, the hero occupies the pinnacle of the social hierarchy by right.”
Also of interest in this context is Locchi’s discussion of the relationship between society and myth: “as a social bond, Myth organizes society, guaranteeing its coherence in space and across time.” Myth is central, which means that a society that loses its myths, or even allows its enemies to replace them, faces great dangers. Such a society needs new myths, and Locchi saw Bach and Wagner as attempts in this direction. This is a worthy project for artists, philosophers, and musicians.
Locchi also develops one of the New Right’s central ideas, the spherical conception of time. He identifies the linear, or more precisely segmentary, view of history that characterizes both the bourgeoisie and the Left, with the “end of history” as its goal. Such a view of history is characterized by an egalitarian impulse: the end of history has no place for “great men” or inequality. At the same time, Locchi shows that the egalitarian conception of history has had three phases, from the mythical through the ideological to the scientific. All proceed from the same mentality.
Another one of Locchi’s valuable insights is that ideological analysis must identify the underlying mentalities and sentiments. In contrast to the linear mode of thought, an anti-egalitarian mentality guides Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Conservative Revolutionaries of the 1920s. For Nietzsche, past, present, and future coexist; their meanings affect one another, and bygone events are potentially ever-present. Locchi’s view of history is “the struggle among men in the name of images they themselves make and which they mean, by realizing, to equal.” Here, too, we find an unapologetically agonistic ideal, in which rivalry and competition are not regarded as something negative but, on the contrary, as the engine of history.
The agonistic ideal is thoroughly Indo-European, something Locchi was well aware of. His essay “Indo-European Identity and the Modern World” is a fascinating application of the Indo-European worldview to society, in which the Indo-European myths of the war between the Æsir and Vanir depict how “the ‘predator-gods’, continuators of the ‘first man’ as self-domesticator, impose themselves through the binding magic of their chief, Odinn-Wotan.”
Likewise, two social categories can be identified historically: “those who attained a superior level of consciousness… offered themselves as an elite”; “the ‘domestication’ of the mass was effected by the elite.” Here Locchi draws on Dumézil’s description of the three Indo-European functions, albeit reduced and combined into two. It is as fascinating a read as his intellectual massacre of Lévi-Strauss’s project. For Locchi, all societies have an elite of magicians and warriors who, by having attained self-control, can also claim the right to lead them.
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Overall, Definitions is a treasure trove, or an arsenal, for the genuine Right. Locchi writes with authority about Wagner, Nietzsche, and Dumézil, as well as Spengler and the Conservative Revolution.
He addresses the “American disease” that has afflicted Europe, describes the European Empire as an ideal, and identifies the egalitarian dream of bringing history—and with it, humanity in the Locchian sense—to an end (“then history as a whole also ends with us”). He describes attempts to rehabilitate, and neutralize, Nietzsche; in passing, he observes that “‘cold societies’ ought really to be called cultural broken branches.”
Locchi’s clear vision of man and history is inspiring, as is his warning against attempts to step outside of history. Equally inspiring, interesting, and impressive are his analyses of myths, from Oedipus and the Indo-European creation myth to The Ring of the Nibelung and the war of the gods.
The mentality that guided Locchi emerges in stark contrast to the mentality and sentiments guiding today’s “liberals” and “leftists”; and for most readers, Locchi is likely to be a source of inspiration.
In short, Definitions is metapolitics at its best, and this present time also seems ripe for the suprahumanist tendency and the spherical conception of history in a way that the 1980s perhaps were not.
