What a sad and wretched world we live in. The decline of Free Speech, British Values, and Common Sense has let the loony left and Radical Woke Nonsense destroy our Institutions.

Remix these words enough and you too can qualify to be a conservative commentator in the contemporary British political landscape. Looking across the commentariate of the right wing, you’d be forgiven for believing that these figures were grown in test tubes. One part ‘cultural Christian’ (with “mixed feelings” on gay marriage and abortion), another part straight-talker, with a dash of ‘political incorrectness’ (always tempered by a well-to-do attitude) and some kind of minority identity as a sting in the tail for the left, and you’ve got a Common Sense Conservative.

The Common Sense Conservative isn’t hard to find: they fill the ranks of GB News and do the talking for Talk Radio – what underlines the whole project is a constant bewilderment with the modern world, and an ability to formulate programmatic responses to the latest trends from the left wing. They are the zig to the liberal zag, but both invariably pull in one direction – towards more of the general decay they claim to lament.

One Common Sense Conservative is very quick to point out that identity politics allegedly places an expectation on what he, a non-white man should believe. This, in his view, is a form of racism, which ipso facto debunks identity politics. What goes undiscussed, is that the dispute between the Common Sense Conservative and the “Woke Left” (who are really just more internally consistent leftists) is simply the narcissism of small differences. The leftist project of the modern world is one of liberation, where liberation is defined as the absence of restraint. Identity politics comes to be viewed by the Common Sense Conservative as one such restraint, and must therefore be rejected. The fundamental metaphysic is the same: atomised selves, who cannot be infringed upon by collective projects. The modern left recognises that for the self to be liberated, they have to be embedded within a social context in which their self-expression is affirmed. To this end, collective action is necessary, and proven to work in the success of the Civil Rights movement. Ironically enough, the Common Sense Conservative often appeals to the MLK Jr. attitude of the ‘content of character’ to resist identity politics. The disagreement between these two forces is not a philosophical one, but a pragmatic one – do we undergo collective action to liberate the self, or do we rely on an atomised individualistic approach which denies group differences?

These inherent parallels make nice-sounding hollow appeals to buzzwords necessary. To actually explicate a coherent philosophy would be to fundamentally challenge not just the desirability of things like free speech, but the real possibility of such a thing to begin with. No-one believes free speech means you can broadcast the position of all nuclear submarines, and this belief has to be justified somehow. Put simply, you’re not allowed to do this because it threatens the political order atop of which your right to free speech rests. The principle is simple then: you cannot extend your principles to those who would threaten their existence. Yet, when Novara Media, an outlet which calls consistently for deplatforming is itself deplatformed – the sycophants from GB News and UnHerd flock to fill the void, with Tom Harwood claiming they have a right to be heard.

What this underscores is a hesitance to actually give limits on rights and so-called freedoms, preferring instead to defer to whatever seems reasonable in the given circumstance. Consequently, the Common Sense Conservative often finds himself shaped by the social context he inhabits; these environments quickly become targets for Gramscian takeover and ensure that what qualifies for Common Sense tomorrow will be assuredly more left wing than Common Sense today.

An example of this emerges in the way we discuss positive discrimination, quotas, or diversity. Quite recently, Andrew Bridgen MP posted a photograph of him and his supporters at the 41 Club in Castle Donington. In response, he suffered anti-white racist abuse due to the fact his supporters were White. Among these responses, someone mentioned the only diversity in the room was the waiting staff – and it was this response one Common Sense Conservative took to highlight the ‘bigotry’ of the progressive opposition. For this individual, it was not at all noteworthy that a gathering of white people was apparently subject for abuse, but instead a passing comment about non-whites was the indicator of racism. Again, we see that the framing of the discussion is always limited by social context. It goes with the general flow of society to defend even the most minor form of prejudice towards non-whites, before defending overt prejudice towards whites – and so the latest iteration of Common Sense dictates that this must be where the opposition is mounted.

The argument that affirmative action, quotas, and diversity are actually bad for those they claim to help is 50 years old now. Thomas Sowell made it in its honest and earnest form in the 1970s, and since then conservatives have used it to defeat the left – on their own terms. What continues to go unaddressed is that the primary victims of affirmative action are not ethnic minorities, who lose their ability to provide for themselves by being given grants or get placed in educational facilities that have workloads they are mismatched for. The primary victim is the majority population which loses money to pay for these grants but do not benefit from them, and lose places they otherwise would have achieved in educational facilities.

Ultimately, these unexamined priors which are justified under the edifices of ‘Common Sense’ reveal an intellectual vacuum in the modern right. The only attempt to form an alliance between intellectualism and conservatism in recent memory was the Conservative Philosophy Group in 1974, restarted with the help of Sir Roger Scruton in 2013. One exchange highlights the differences between the traditional form of conservatism with its modern vacuous counterpart:

Edward Norman (then Dean of Peterhouse) had attempted to mount a Christian argument for nuclear weapons. The discussion moved on to “Western values”. Mrs Thatcher said (in effect) that Norman had shown that the Bomb was necessary for the defence of our values. Powell: “No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.” Thatcher (it was just before the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands): “Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.” “No, Prime Minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.” Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism. 

In Thatcher, we see appeals to values with no underpinning of where they emerge from and their justification, and in Powell we see a world-view which justifies itself from the ground up. It’s no wonder that today we see Thatcher emblazoned all across conference, to the extent that one Common Sense Conservative even has a cut-out of her in her room. Thatcher represents the true beginning of the vacuous conservativism that reduces Political problems to technical ones, and exists to retroactively justify the decisions of the mercantile class. To this end, it is incapable of creating anything new, and so invokes its own previous iterations with new coats of paint to provide a veneer of consistency over an economic order which fundamentally requires constant flux.

The flux of modernity is only truly possible because of the aforementioned metaphysic that we are atomised selves, who contract or compete to create the social, Political, and economic orders in which we live. We can therefore not be infringed upon as individuals, but are reconfigurable units in these wider orders, and by virtue of our individual nature – have no right to dictate what these wider orders are, as this would be an infringement upon the individual.

Appeals to ‘common values’ will never work as long as this individualistic ontology is accepted; it offers no justification as to why these common values cannot be departed from at will. For this reason, it is necessary to invoke ‘Common Sense’ as the reason to remain within the common set of values. But of course, by the time you must invoke common sense, it’s hardly common any more. I’m yet to have an argument over the common sense notion that one ought to look both ways before crossing the road, but I’ve had plenty of arguments about the fact that men aren’t women. Truthfully, these beliefs need justification beyond appeals to common sense. The categories of men and women need to be defined not just in a taken-for-granted social manner, but in a metaphysical, biological, and philosophical manner. Only when these beliefs are deeply rooted and interconnected with not just the fabric of oneself, but of the fabric of reality itself, can people be driven to the depths of passion necessary to rebuff the challenges of the modern world. To that end, a right-wing intellectual vanguard is necessary to any movement which seeks to overturn the new orthodoxies of modernity.

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At the time of writing, the UK is facing a sharp rise in cases of the novel Omicron variant. As a result, after a relatively normal summer and autumn, the government has now enacted ‘Plan B’, a series of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) including mandated mask wearing as well as work-from-home and vaccine passport recommendations, all intended to slow the virus’ spread. Further, despite having previously denied having any intention of doing so, it now appears to be floating the possibility of a third national lockdown or lockdown lite, limiting indoor dining (in winter…) and socialising. Amidst this, the government’s messaging continues to be that Omicron’s defeat lies in widespread uptake of the covid vaccine’s booster dose, which is not really surprising as we had previously been warned that the emergence of new variants would likely require cycles of booster jabs. This may not seem like terribly controversial advice in a country like the UK where, up until now, vaccine acceptance has been high. However, it is naïve to assume that all those who accept the jab do so for the same reasons. And, by that token, short-sighted not to consider the negative impact that another lockdown (or indeed the mere threat of one) could have on future levels of vaccine acceptance amongst some.

Given the toxicity of vaccine discussions (consider, the boogieman figure of the antivaxxer as the epitome of wilful ignorance and callousness, even before covid), the vaccine-hesitant report being unlikely to share their reservations with vaccine-acceptant peers for fear of encountering derision or scorn. As a result, vaccine accepters seldom have to engage with anything other than a David Icke-esque caricature of vaccine hesitancy. This obscures how, far from belonging to separate realms of ‘reason and science’ and ‘irrationality and conspiracy’, vaccine attitudes exist on the same spectrum, tipped by out-and-out refusal and full acceptance, and filled in by a gamut of vaccine hesitancies. Similarly, the binary outcomes of a vaccine decision (either you get jabbed or you don’t) obscure how people with different degrees of hesitancy will opt to receive covid vaccine but, given their differing stances, may respond differently to future policy changes regarding boosters and lockdowns.

Through a study based on a series of online surveys March 15^th and April 22^nd, 2021, academics from Swansea University identified at least two sorts of attitude amongst accepters of the covid vaccination. Being vaccine-accepters, both had received at least one dose of a covid vaccination or indicated their intentions to do so when it was offered to them.

However, whereas ‘full-accepters’ experienced few qualms about their decision to get jabbed, often just seeing it as an extension of a well-established social-norm, ‘accept-but-unsure’ accepters were more ambivalent, thus flirting with vaccine hesitancy. Though they did accept a jab (or said they would when it came to it), they did so with some concerns about its safety and effectiveness.

In explaining their eventual decision to accept the vaccine, they emphasised a trust in science (“I was a bit suspicious… but the science today compared to years ago is outstanding isn’t it?”) and sense that, whatever their reservations, the vaccine was in some way necessary to allow for a return to ‘normality’. Vaccination was seen as “the only way forwards, to get on with our lives”. Anecdotally, I find that this certainly chimes with my experience of social media last spring when Twitter was briefly aflood with clips of fully vaccinated Israelis rediscovering the pleasures of legal public-gatherings and indoor dining, and promising a happier, freer summer than the last. More academically, surveys carried out by the ONS this

September found that 65% of previously hesitant accepters gave a desire for restrictions to ease and life to return to normal as one of their motivations for getting jabbed (interestingly, only 21% gave potential vaccine passports as one of theirs but this is another story).

Importantly, this recognition of the vaccine’s necessary role in our return to normality often involved a recognition that this was not a ‘one off’, that is, that there would in all likelihood be cycles of boosters in response to novel variants of the virus. It was largely recognised that as these emerged, we would need to continue receiving jabs to protect normal life and stave off life-destroying NPIs like lockdown.

This means that for some accepters, vaccine acceptance is a trade-off between some degree of hesitancy and a desire to see normal life resume. They got jabbed (and accepted that they would need to do so again in the future) on the understanding that this guaranteed their ability to live as before. As a result, the UK government’s re-threatening of this ability each time crisis looms may start to gnaw at these people’s levels of vaccine acceptance. If each time numbers climb my being vaccinated is not enough to protect normality from threat, the accept-but-unsure accepter might think, why should I swallow my hesitations and continue to accept the jabs? Though there are surely those who (for whatever reasons) will accept round after round of booster as necessary, even as authority continues threaten their civil society and flourishing, I think that it would be naïve to assume that this will be the case of all those who accepted the first, second and even third jab.

I do not know what the scale of this problem is, the quantitative research into various types of vaccine acceptance in the UK seems somewhat limited. However, if we are to trust government’s claim that the already limited numbers of unvaccinated people pose a significant threat to public health, whilst also seeing how they are unlikely to respond positively to coercive measures like vaccine passports, I do not see how adding to their future numbers would not be, on the government’s own terms, damaging to the effort against covid. Resorting once more to anecdote, over the last fortnight or so, I have heard more than one (generally young) person express their grumpiness at having to accept a third, and potentially fourth, jab given the limited risk the virus poses to them and the disruptions the fresh barrage of NPIs has caused in their lives. However minor this problem turns out to be, the government needs to consider the impact that their continued treatment of normality as a privilege could have on some people’s future vaccine acceptance.

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When faced with the utter treachery of progressive intellectuals, there are times when one is tempted to go back to the old ways. Show up to their threshold, give them a slap with your glove and then hopefully grant them eternal peace from their nightmarish debility in a duel at the next daybreak. Peace would then return and one would tread home with the gratifying thought of having served mankind. But alas, the time of blood feuds is spent, and the resting lion who could once easily crush the hyenas troubling his sleep is now constrained to articulate his maw into words; explaining to them why it is uncourteous and inappropriate to come to his dwelling and trouble his sleep.

So be it. Let us contend defamation with apology, caricature with truth, and cede the arma to the togae; after all, we have no army at our disposal to cross the Rubicon. 

An anglophile, and an admirer of Anglo-Saxon famed freedom of speech and liberalism, I must say I have been rather disappointed by how sententious the analysis of British and American newspapers of Mr Zemmour’s political position has been. After having observed now for two months or so the unceasing manhunt of the candidate by mainstream British media, I thought that one should not let this monochord blabber follow its course without a single objection. For example, let us take a look at this stereotypical leftist hit piece from The Guardian.

Written by what many would call an academic demigod, Didier Fassin, professor in anthropology at the Collège de France, one could have expected this article to be a dense synthesis of a profound analysis of French society and politics. How mighty was my astonishment when I found that the author’s main source regarding Zemmour’s ideas was one pamphlet from the junk information website Slate. I can easily guess that Professor Fassin never thought it worthy of his rank to listen to Mr Zemmour with his ears once in the past decade. Here is the only grounded and meaningful paragraph extractable from Professor Fassin’s article about Mr Zemmour:

“Indeed, he [Mr Zemmour] has said that parents should only be allowed to give their children ‘traditional’ French names, approvingly referred to people comparing Nazism with Islam, propagated the so-called ‘great replacement’ theory and argued that employers have a right to turn down black or Arab candidates. He believes that political power should belong to men and that women’s role should be to have and raise children. He has claimed to be on the side of General Bugeaud, who massacred Muslims during the colonisation of Algeria, has contended that Marshal Petain saved Jews during the second world war, and would like the death penalty to be reinstated. His overarching narrative is reversing France’s supposed national decline, which featured again in the video announcing his candidacy.”

Let us dissect these eight claims, in which the author restitutes eight of Zemmour views that he thinks should be problematic and let us try to display to the reasonable and discerning Anglo-Saxon reader how Zemmour’s real positions are not as grossly fascistic and vulgar as Professor Fassin wishes to make it seem.

1. “He has said that parents should only be allowed to give their children ‘traditional’ French names.”

Zemmour argues that the civility under which French citizens are recognised in the public space should be a French traditional first name. That is either from the calendar of Saints or prior traditions such as Greco-Latin history. Let us be clear, he does not speak of the use of a foreign name in private life. He does say that one’s ID and passport are not of the private but of the public domain, which is true.

Indeed, the elites of the now frighteningly multicultural city of London might be revolted by this proposal. These “enlightened divines”, as Burke would call them, would also be edified to know that this was a French law, passed by Napoleon. It was only repelled in 1993 when it was stated that parents had the right to freely choose their children’s names. Still to this date judges may forbid names that are judged disadvantageous to one’s future, such as: ‘Borat Miller’ or ‘Mr Bean Smith’. Anglo-American progressives are prompt to project their multicultural conceptions on France, but our histories differ.

At any rate, for most great societies until the twentieth century, the adaptation of foreign names or their outright changing, especially between Western nations, was the rule. In particular, virtually all French Jews between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, adopted French names as they were finally integrated into French society after centuries of rejection.

“We must give the Jews everything as individuals, but nothing as a nation” is a quote from the revolutionary nobleman Clermont-Tonnerre, often uttered by Zemmour, for it matches entirely his own family’s choices and trajectory, that of Jewish France. This cultural assimilation was the way of integrating migrants in France for the past 200 years, since the founding of the Republic and before.

2. “[Zemmour] approvingly referred to people comparing Nazism with Islam.”

Muslim people do not share this tradition of adapting names and they never have. After all, Muslims seldom moved to a country outside of the context of invasion and this wasn’t to change until the 20th century when Muslims immigrated to countries for other reasons. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion of law but even more so. Islam requires not only material compliance of its followers but sets a legal and political order of which they are a part. Thus, the historical distinctions of Muslim countries (Caliph, Sultan, Emir, Sheik) are both religious and feudal titles.

Islam also took from Christianity its universal purpose. Islam sought to establish a universal caliphate. But the lector knows of this, as recent history does not cease to recall us that fundamental difference.

In that aspect, Islam is of all religions the closest one to modern totalitarian ideologies, because it seeks to change every detail of private life in a codified manner, and seeks to bring about these changes universally, willingly or by legitimate force. In short, Islam seeks to transform the individual and the world in their totality.

Hitler himself was an admirer of Islamic values, and said, quoted by Albert Speer:

“Theirs [mahomedans] was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to their faith. The Germanic people would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.”

The comparison of Islam and Nazism has at least this much relevance but, of course, it does not aim at saying that Muslims are Nazis, nor that Imams are Gestapo officers.

3. “[Zemmour] propagated the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ theory”

Here, there is no need even for discussion, let alone debate, but just for a brief word.

The ‘Great Replacement’ is but the junction of two simple facts. Firstly, contrary to America, which is based upon no ethnicity, France, as most nations or peoples in the Old World, is very much based upon ethnicity, although not limited by it. France emerged as a nation of people who had shared the same land, history, culture and even religion for 2000 years. In terms of ethnology, France is much closer to the Iroquoian confederation than to the USA. As General Charles De Gaulle famously said to an American diplomat telling him “I know France well, I have lived here for 10 years”, De Gaulle answered, “Well, we have for 2000 years!”

Now, the second idea is even more genuine: The fact that several hundred thousand migrants enter France each year, mainly from African and/or Muslim countries, and that the birthrate of women from these countries is on average twice that of white French women, mathematical law implies that there is a demographic landslide, or “Grand Remplacement” of “European” descendants. Whether it is desirable or not, whether it is even worth discussing, is a question begging to be answered.

So there isn’t anything for Mr Zemmour to propagate but a trivial collection of facts. Most of the people who are willing to vote for him would consider this a major issue independently of his candidacy. Someone ignorant of the ethnic change that France is going through was either in hibernation and has only just woken up, or a very biased leftist who would rather point out the risk of alien invasion than the risk of Islamisation.

4. “[He] argued that employers have a right to turn down black or Arab candidates.”

Zemmour indeed argues that it is an employer’s right to refuse or grant someone a position for any reason he should see fit, whether it is competence, character or skin colour. To discriminate is to choose. It is a most rational and simple argument: an employer is not a public service and refusing to give someone a job, lease him a car or a property cannot be earnestly considered as harm done to this person.

Let’s be clear, a crime committed for any reason related to race, sex, sexual orientation, colour, religion or even competence, regardless of the reason, is a crime and should be punished as such. But rejecting an application is not a crime. How could an act that is not a crime in itself, be called a crime once the intention underlying it is known? In the end, this is nothing but an impugnation of motives. Undoubtedly, society should in any way possible facilitate the life of those who suffer from objective physical and mental handicaps. I ask Professor Fassin and his Londoner friends: Is Muslim religion a mental illness? Is dark skin a physical handicap? Is sexual orientation an objective deficiency?

No, will they will inevitably answer, but it is perceived as such, and this law should be in effect until all prejudice has been removed from society. Should law have a curative purpose? Justice is absolute, and so are good and evil. Crime is a crime, regardless of the time and context. The circumstance may affect the gravity of it, but not the nature of the act. Therefore, by mindlessly stuffing everything they find disagreeable into the criminal category, the left yields to the reproach made to it by conservatives for two centuries: the progressive idea of justice a contingent one, they ultimately subscribe to sophism, that is believe in nothing except themselves.   

The proof that recruitment discrimination cannot be called a crime or an offence, is that it is in practice undetectable. How do you prove that someone was hired or rejected based on their ethnicity rather than on their competence? In most cases, you cannot. How do you prove an organisation has a hiring bias? You have to organise tests, which is akin to pursuing a fly with a sledgehammer.

5. “He believes that political power should belong to men and that women’s role should be to have and raise children.’’

The French candidate says some qualities are more closely related to one or the other gender. He states that political power belongs by default to manhood. A clear example of this is the traditional virtue of virilitas so cherished by Republican Rome. For biological reasons, the functions of power, war, and political decision making were, for dozens of millennia, by default masculine functions. Those of education, housekeeping, cooking and, even I dare say, finance were by default feminine ones.  

He is right. Of all the folks and communities of mankind ever known on this planet, there was never a single matriarchal society. Some societies are more matriarchal than others, but it is only relative and never absolute. Processor Fassin knows this perfectly well, for he is himself an anthropologist, and in order to disagree with Mr Zemmour, he would have to go against the scientific consensus in his own field.

This again should not be an inspiration for fixed laws in a Republic founded upon the principle of equality between individuals regardless of their sex, and it would be absurd for a patriot of the nation of Joan of Arc to try and relegate women to the household. But that it is not in any way part of Zemmour’s agenda, even by extrapolation.

6. “He has claimed to be on the side of General Bugeaud, who massacred Muslims during the colonisation of Algeria.”

None will disagree that the massacre of innocents can be excused or even explained. But then again, this is not what Zemmour did: Zemmour lauded a military man’s uncompromising patriotism. He did not excuse this particular command of Bugeaud to suffocate an entire tribe into the cave where they had taken refuge.

Being coherent with my own words, I believe that statues of General Lee should not be taken down in the US, because despite fighting for an evil cause, he was still a great military leader, a patriot, and even freed slaves that he should have received has inheritance, before the war. Alas, few heroes of American, French or British history were saints, and fewer even by modern standards of sanctity. If Lee is taken down, how long before Nelson, Napoleon, Churchill and De Gaulle receive the same fate?

To remind Anglo-Saxon readers of the historical context, one of the casuum belli of the French conquest of Algeria from 1830 onwards was to put an end to slave raids that had plagued the Mediterranean for a millennium. And this was far from being a pretext, as some historians like to put it. When the French expedition took Algiers it immediately freed several hundreds of French slaves – thousands of European slaves altogether. This excuses nothing but explains how the struggle between the Western and Muslim worlds is not a recent, superficial or arbitrary one, and how the situation cannot be naively diagnosed in all abstraction of history.

7. “[Zemmour] has contended that Marshal Pétain saved Jews.”

Marshal Pétain and the regime of Vichy generally speaking – despite being regimes founded upon the treason of the French nation, forsaking the alliance with Britain, and collaboration with Nazi Germany – spared France from total defeat. Fighting to the end would have meant that the whole of France would have been conquered and placed under direct German governance, like Poland, Czechia or Greece. One knows that in the latter countries, the proportion of Jews who died in the Holocaust reached 90%, in the case of Greece or the Netherlands. In France, it was around 10%. Vichy leaders still instinctively rejected Nazi racist axioms. In France, in Italy, in Spain, Jews undeniably found a better shelter from hatred and deportation than under direct German rule.

This does not mean that Mr Zemmour ignores the existence of the Vel d’Hiv deportation, of the Lois Juives, or of the militia’s massacres, and general servility of Vichy towards Germany. He acknowledged it and maintained his position all the same.

Be that as it may, this historical thesis was not at all invented by him. It was generally accepted in France, even defended by Jewish and Israeli historians, until the publication of Robert Paxton’s book Vichy France which condemned Vichy as altogether evil. Recently, an Israeli historian has published sources that demonstrate the active role of Vichy in attempting to protect French citizens, regardless of their religion, from the Gestapo and the SS.

I think that Pétain was a traitor to France, but history is complex. This matter is still an area of academic debate, and I believe it will forever remain a matter of opinion. Only the party that wants to censor the other one will truly be wrong.  

8. “[He] would like the death penalty to be reinstated.”

One can reasonably disagree with Mr Zemmour, and join the liberals who believe, like Victor Hugo, that “Vengeance is human, Justice is divine. The State is in between, its role is to heal, to better the men.”  

Nevertheless, support for the re-establishment of capital punishment is widespread among French people. Some months ago, the Rwandese refugee who burned the cathedral of Nantes, that had been left to roam about by the police because “He was not subject to detention under European laws of asylum” said the French interior Minister Darmanin, eventually found the primary target of his arson, the vicar of the cathedral, and stabbed him to death, in the Vendée. Most of the perpetrators of the past ten years were known to be dangerous by the intelligence services but were still left free because of lack of space in prisons or EU legal restrictions.

But there again, Mr Zemmour’s support for the death penalty is anecdotical in the greater picture of his battles and it is certainly not something he would have the leisure and popularity margin to reinstate if he managed to beat Le Pen and Macron.

As a way of conclusion, I will say that it matters greatly for foreign conservatives or reactionaries to understand their French comrades and comprehend the hope we put in Mr Zemmour. For every new decay brought by progressivism in any one of our nations inevitably ends up plaguing the other ones, and we have a common interest in vanquishing deconstructivism in the West as a whole. One could not forget how the French theory (it is a shame in itself that such devilry should be characterised as French) crept from the intellectual boroughs of Paris, insidiously wrecking itself on the shores of New England, and eventually mutated into the notorious, dreadful and destructive cancel culture that scourges our time.

The fact that a member of the Collège de France, pretty much the equivalent of Cambridge Trinity College in England, should write a derogatory article about a French presidential candidate in the British media demonstrates what is wrong with France’s establishment. The establishment of my country lives in an enclosed penthouse, more concerned about what foreign elites think of them than about what their own people think about them. Sound familiar? 

Where their fate might be worse than that of Britain’s establishment, is that their minds and their logos are colonised by Anglo-Saxon structures, and they play the role of New-England progressives more readily than that of French scholars. Professor Fassin is probably eminent in his field, but in this particular case, he blatantly used his position and network at The Guardian to cast a stone at My Zemmour, because of political enmity. Even in the case that The Guardian did ask him for his contribution, he could have passed, quite obviously not being an expert in the matter.

I will also indulge in begging The Guardian, or any British media outlet, that if they should wonder about Mr Zemmour’s views they should simply ask him directly and let Professor Fassin return to his studies, by which he is certainly much beguiled so that he has no spare time to come down from Mount St Genevieve and seek quarrel in the political arena.

One last sting: The Guardian seems to gather and spread information about France only through those with whom they are in ideological communion; the same way that the American or Soviets informed themselves about the countries they invaded or ‘freed’, only with the local communists, pro-West or Shia Muslims. I think I am fair to call this a colonial method.

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The purpose of this short enquiry is into the significance that Immanuel Kant’s essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784) played in the development of political thought. It is widely known and remarked upon that the Answer is a major intervention in the apotheosis of the Enlightenment, and its remarkable brevity has provided great philosophical inspiration. My concern here, however, is the specifically political implications of Kant’s observations and the wider Enlightenment (Aufklärung in Kant’s native German). The fact that German is the original language might seem a minor point, but in reality is the central issue to my enquiry: German is famously difficult to translate directly into English, the most common philosophical examples being Geist (Hegel) and dasein (Heidegger). Kant is, quite obviously, not spared this. 

The opening lines remark that Enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”. Immediately we are faced with a semiotic problem: some translations of Kant’s phrase are “self-imposed nonage”, whilst some also use the more evocative minority. In this sense, “immaturity/nonage/minority”, might seem interchangeable but in the history of political ideas hold varying degrees of weight: immaturity is the most commonly used term because of its relationship to the wider Enlightenment’s project of reason, rationality and clarity of thought, which is a state of achievement of the intellect. Nonage and minority, however – which is the chosen translation of Columbia University and, as Mary J. Gregor shows, was Kant’s intended meaning – mean more specifically a state of dependence, as Kant quickly moves onto, arguing that it is the “inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction of another”. 

The reason minority is more appropriate than immaturity is that the latter implies a lack of critical faculties, whereas the former implies a denial of their existence. It is not that “man” or “the human” cannot make use of rational thought, but that he is not allowed to do so – in a state of self-imposition, of course. Kant is not claiming that the human race has been enslaved, but that it has thus far displayed a “lack of resolution and courage” to use its own powers of intellect. None of this is particularly original or insightful commentary: indeed, Kant deals with it in the first paragraph of the Answer. What matters, however, is the historical context of political thought which was inevitably in the back of Kant’s mind. 

As the Answer moves on, Kant claims that it is unlikely individuals in their own lives will be able to embrace this rational freedom fully, and that those who do will “only make an uncertain leap over the narrowest ditch”. Kant directs, instead, his call to courage to “a public” (ein Publikum) which has made the mistake of allowing its thinking to be done by a minority (and here the word is specifically denoting a numerical minority) and not itself. “Publikum” offers another linguistic indeterminacy, unfortunately, on both sides of the linguistic barrier: in translation, for instance, “publikum” might mean people, or public, or audience; in English, meanwhile, ‘people’ might mean several individuals, a single mass, a multitude, a greater entity than merely the sum of those alive, and so on. Here, we can reasonably assume, due to Kant’s context, he means “the public” in the pre-democratic tradition, of the wider numbers of individuals who are not “fit to rule”. 

It is this proto-democratic move that makes Kant so significant, and his comment on “minority” often passed over by political theorists. To understand why, we must take a brief detour to the medieval jurists. In late-twelfth and early-thirteenth century England, there arose the idea of a specifically public realm that belonged not to the King, but to the wider entity of the public world; again, not public in the sense of the multitude of undifferentiated people, but the “eminent domain” that, as Ernst Kantorowicz observed, belonged to the continuity of a domain whose matters”touched all”. 

At the same time in history was the slow transference of ideas from the religious to the secular, specifically the application by Baldus de Ubaldis of St. Augustine’s idea of the “mystical body” (corpus mysticum) of the Church, to the public, using the same terminology – a corpus populus mysticum, a mystical public body. The first, emergence, and then alignment of the public with the “political realm” is significant when we read Kant’s appeal to the public, as he was speaking to a surprisingly recent development of political thought, which was still much-resisted by monarchs and republics across Europe (it is important to remember ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’ are not synonymous). 

Before understanding Kant’s significance fully, however, there was another major development by Baldus that requires explanation: the idea of the public as a legal minor. Indeed, “the public” was more a legal creation than anything else, but its legal definition and status was as yet undetermined. As Joseph Canning details, Baldus argued in the fourteenth century, that the populus could not possess a “legally valid will”, as it was incapable of acting entirely on its own. Instead, it “acts and wills” through its representative: the King (as in a monarchy) or council (as in a city-republic), whose actions are taken as synonymous with the realm. It was following a rediscovery of a Roman Law Edict, moreover, that the legal terminology which anticipated Baldus’ claim arose in the thirteenth century. This Edict observed that those people “under the law” were “madmen, children, and cities”. The conflation with children and madmen implied that a public had no mental maturity that would allow it to govern alone. It did not merely require a King – it depended on one.

This is why Kant’s use of the word “minority” holds so much significance in the history of political thought up to the Enlightenment; Kant directly and boldly refuted the very basis of anti-democratic thought, by claiming that man – in the public sense – was not a minority but in fact did possess the rational intellect capable of making its own choices and, therefore, ought to be given the freedom to exercise that intellect.

There is, however, a short comment to make in conclusion. Kant’s proto-democratic claims did not prevent the nineteenth century thinker, John Stuart Mill, from making the argument that whilst some “publics” (to use Kant’s term) had achieved maturity, others had not – and it was therefore the responsibility of the mature publics to guide the immature publics to civilisation in a benevolent imperialism that, illiberally enough, would influence the imperial project for the rest of its existence. As Jennifer Pitts makes clear, in Mill’s eyes, “progressiveness, the cardinal human quality, was also the monopoly of a select group of societies”. 

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