RULING THE VOID: A BOOK REVIEW

Ruling the Void
By Peter Mair
Verso, 160 Pages
Available for purchase from Amazon here

Reviewed by William Solniger

Written by the Irish political scientist Peter Mair, who died before the book was finished, Ruling The Void is a penetrating account of the steady decline of democracy in Europe. In my view, the book is far better for having been left incomplete: it stands far stronger as a negative assessment of the times than it would had the author racked his Leftist politics for some illusory and half-hearted set of “solutions” to the structural problems he describes. The book seems to have attracted far less attention than it deserves, except from certain Eurosceptics who have focused myopically on its criticisms of the European Union, ignoring the wider significance of the “hollowing of democracy” which is the book’s main theme.

Ruling the Void opens with the most damning indicator of decline: the falling level of participation in national elections. Against those political scientists who are tempted to deny the evidence of this phenomenon, Mair establishes his position beyond doubt by a thorough review of the facts: electoral turnout has certainly been falling across Europe in the last decades, not in the sense that turnout is progressively lower for every election, but in the more general sense that troughs in participation occur more and more frequently.

CONTRA COSMOPOLITANISM

by James Lawrence

  

In common with many others in this movement, I see European racial self-defence as the foundation of the Alt-Right. This does not mean, as some would have it, that this foundation is also the pinnacle, or that the Alt-Right can be reduced to it and nothing else. But in a future where the European people have been replaced, and the civilisation of Europe no longer exists in any form distinct from the modernist anti-culture to which it gave birth, everything else good and true on the Alt-Right ends up reduced to so much meaningless blog chatter.

However, I have long been aware of a serious shortcoming in ethnonationalism, which runs through all of its discourse like cracks in a wall. On the one hand, most if not all of the ethnonationalist charges against ‘foreigners’ (blacks, Muslims, Jews etc.) are both carefully reasoned and backed up with solid facts. On the other hand, cheek by jowl with these, we find statements and assumptions about ‘our own people’ (white Europeans) that are not only arbitrary and slapdash, but do not even accord with basic common sense.

THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION BY JAMES BURNHAM

The Managerial Revolution
by James Burnham
Buy at Amazon.com

Reviewed by Matt Forney

Assuming you even know who James Burnham is at all, he probably occupies a footnote at best in your mind. A notable political theorist and activist during the mid-20th century, he began his public life as a Marxist and Trotskyist but later transitioned to conservatism, spending the latter decades of his life as a columnist for National Review. Shortly after the fall of France in World War II, he wrote The Managerial Revolution, a radical tract that deserves to be more widely read.

Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism”; rule by managers.