Eliah Bures received a PhD in modern European history from UC Berkeley in 2014. From 2014-2017 he was a postdoctoral fellow at IE University in Madrid and Segovia, Spain. Bures is currently a visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Center for Right-Wing Studies, where he is completing his first book, Friends and Enemies: Ernst Jünger and the Countercultural Survival of the German Far Right, which is under contract at University of Pennsylvania Press. His publications have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Journal for the Study of Radicalism (forthcoming), H-German, German Quarterly, Foreign Policy, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as in edited volumes.
Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2023
A major development on the European far right since 1945 is the turn to a 'metapolitics' supposed... more A major development on the European far right since 1945 is the turn to a 'metapolitics' supposedly influenced by the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Metapolitics, in this sense, deemphasizes electoral politics in favor of intellectual activism and the pursuit of 'cultural hegemony' as a prelude to seizing political power. This article examines the metapolitics of the European New Right (ENR) from a new theoretical and historical perspective. It argues that the literature of the US 'culture wars' better explains the enr's practice than any reception of Gramsci. And it presents enr metapolitics not as the strategic reformulation of interwar fascism but as part of a broad transatlantic backlash against the leftist successes of the 1960s. This approach better accounts for ENR intellectuals' function as 'culture warriors' specializing in demonization and mastery of the tools of public discourse.
What are the most urgent issues and problems—either in research or policy—for those concerned wit... more What are the most urgent issues and problems—either in research or policy—for those concerned with right-wing politics today? The voices assembled in this roundtable provide widely divergent answers to this question. They reflect on the state of the right from different disciplinary fields, from different regions of the world, and with different issues in mind. At the same time, these twelve brief essays, taken together, highlight recurring themes in the contemporary academic study of the right. These overlapping concerns and areas of agreement map the terrain of present understanding and gesture toward new avenues of investigation.
This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its... more This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its suspicion of conceptual and discursive language. It argues that Conservative Revolutionaries not only disdained intellectualism and public discourse; they also extolled their presumed opposites—instinct, intuition, self-evidence—as crucial ingredients in an “ineffable nationalism” which held that a true nation is based on unexpressed or difficult-to-articulate feelings and values. The origins of this ideology are found in a modernist crisis of representation and in sociological accounts of traditional “organic” communities. These themes were politicized by World War I, whose seeming incommunicability magnified the problem of representation and made the unspoken harmony of wartime comradeship an attractive model for a revitalized national community. The article's final section examines the early writings of Ernst Jünger in order to show in detail how these issues came together to cre...
Author(s): Bures, Eliah Matthew | Advisor(s): Jay, Martin E. | Abstract: This dissertation argues... more Author(s): Bures, Eliah Matthew | Advisor(s): Jay, Martin E. | Abstract: This dissertation argues that ideas and experiences of friendship were central to the thinking of German radical conservatives in the twentieth century, from the pre-WWI years to the emergence, beginning in the 1970s, of the New Right.I approach this issue by examining the role of friendship in the circle around the writer Ernst Junger (1895-1998). Like many in his generation, Junger's youthful alienation from a "cold" bourgeois society was felt via a contrast to the intimacy of personal friendship. A WWI soldier, Junger penned memoirs of the trenches that revealed similar desires for mutual understanding, glorifying wartime comradeship as a bond deeper than words and a return to the "tacit accord" that supposedly marked traditional communities. After 1933, Junger turned from a right-wing opponent of democracy into a voice of "spiritual resistance" to the Nazi regime. For Junge...
This essay considers the development of right-wing intellectual counterculture since World War Tw... more This essay considers the development of right-wing intellectual counterculture since World War Two, paying particular attention to Germany and the influence of Ernst Jünger on the postures and attitudes of contemporary “New Right” writers such as Botho Strauß, Götz Kubitschek, and the Austrian “Identitarian” Markus Willinger. The essay argues that, for all its noise, today’s New Right is in fact split: while many are insurgents eager to conquer the mainstream as speedily as possible, others fear that a decisive transformation is still many years away. For such skeptics, far-right counterculture is primarily a site of refuge—a place where alienated right-wing radicals can preserve ideas and values and cultivate new talents while they continue to wait for liberal modernity’s final collapse.
This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its sus... more This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its suspicion of conceptual and discursive language. It argues that Conservative Revolutionaries not only disdained intellectualism and public discourse; they also extolled their presumed opposites-instinct, intuition, self-evidence-as crucial ingredients in an "ineffable nationalism" which held that a true nation is based on unexpressed or difficult-to-articulate feelings and values. The origins of this ideology are found in a modernist crisis of representation and in sociological accounts of traditional "organic" communities. These themes were politicized by World War I, whose seeming incommunicability magnified the problem of representation and made the unspoken harmony of wartime comradeship an attractive model for a revitalized national community. The article's final section examines the early writings of Ernst Jünger in order to show in detail how these issues came together to create the Conservative Revolutionary mind.
Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2023
A major development on the European far right since 1945 is the turn to a 'metapolitics' supposed... more A major development on the European far right since 1945 is the turn to a 'metapolitics' supposedly influenced by the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Metapolitics, in this sense, deemphasizes electoral politics in favor of intellectual activism and the pursuit of 'cultural hegemony' as a prelude to seizing political power. This article examines the metapolitics of the European New Right (ENR) from a new theoretical and historical perspective. It argues that the literature of the US 'culture wars' better explains the enr's practice than any reception of Gramsci. And it presents enr metapolitics not as the strategic reformulation of interwar fascism but as part of a broad transatlantic backlash against the leftist successes of the 1960s. This approach better accounts for ENR intellectuals' function as 'culture warriors' specializing in demonization and mastery of the tools of public discourse.
What are the most urgent issues and problems—either in research or policy—for those concerned wit... more What are the most urgent issues and problems—either in research or policy—for those concerned with right-wing politics today? The voices assembled in this roundtable provide widely divergent answers to this question. They reflect on the state of the right from different disciplinary fields, from different regions of the world, and with different issues in mind. At the same time, these twelve brief essays, taken together, highlight recurring themes in the contemporary academic study of the right. These overlapping concerns and areas of agreement map the terrain of present understanding and gesture toward new avenues of investigation.
This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its... more This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its suspicion of conceptual and discursive language. It argues that Conservative Revolutionaries not only disdained intellectualism and public discourse; they also extolled their presumed opposites—instinct, intuition, self-evidence—as crucial ingredients in an “ineffable nationalism” which held that a true nation is based on unexpressed or difficult-to-articulate feelings and values. The origins of this ideology are found in a modernist crisis of representation and in sociological accounts of traditional “organic” communities. These themes were politicized by World War I, whose seeming incommunicability magnified the problem of representation and made the unspoken harmony of wartime comradeship an attractive model for a revitalized national community. The article's final section examines the early writings of Ernst Jünger in order to show in detail how these issues came together to cre...
Author(s): Bures, Eliah Matthew | Advisor(s): Jay, Martin E. | Abstract: This dissertation argues... more Author(s): Bures, Eliah Matthew | Advisor(s): Jay, Martin E. | Abstract: This dissertation argues that ideas and experiences of friendship were central to the thinking of German radical conservatives in the twentieth century, from the pre-WWI years to the emergence, beginning in the 1970s, of the New Right.I approach this issue by examining the role of friendship in the circle around the writer Ernst Junger (1895-1998). Like many in his generation, Junger's youthful alienation from a "cold" bourgeois society was felt via a contrast to the intimacy of personal friendship. A WWI soldier, Junger penned memoirs of the trenches that revealed similar desires for mutual understanding, glorifying wartime comradeship as a bond deeper than words and a return to the "tacit accord" that supposedly marked traditional communities. After 1933, Junger turned from a right-wing opponent of democracy into a voice of "spiritual resistance" to the Nazi regime. For Junge...
This essay considers the development of right-wing intellectual counterculture since World War Tw... more This essay considers the development of right-wing intellectual counterculture since World War Two, paying particular attention to Germany and the influence of Ernst Jünger on the postures and attitudes of contemporary “New Right” writers such as Botho Strauß, Götz Kubitschek, and the Austrian “Identitarian” Markus Willinger. The essay argues that, for all its noise, today’s New Right is in fact split: while many are insurgents eager to conquer the mainstream as speedily as possible, others fear that a decisive transformation is still many years away. For such skeptics, far-right counterculture is primarily a site of refuge—a place where alienated right-wing radicals can preserve ideas and values and cultivate new talents while they continue to wait for liberal modernity’s final collapse.
This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its sus... more This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its suspicion of conceptual and discursive language. It argues that Conservative Revolutionaries not only disdained intellectualism and public discourse; they also extolled their presumed opposites-instinct, intuition, self-evidence-as crucial ingredients in an "ineffable nationalism" which held that a true nation is based on unexpressed or difficult-to-articulate feelings and values. The origins of this ideology are found in a modernist crisis of representation and in sociological accounts of traditional "organic" communities. These themes were politicized by World War I, whose seeming incommunicability magnified the problem of representation and made the unspoken harmony of wartime comradeship an attractive model for a revitalized national community. The article's final section examines the early writings of Ernst Jünger in order to show in detail how these issues came together to create the Conservative Revolutionary mind.
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