Volume 5, Number 2 · August 26, 1965
The Wrong Right
By Walter Laqueur
The European Right: A Historical Profile
edited by Hans Rogger, edited by Eugen Weber
California, 589 pp., $9.50
Entire libraries have been written about the left in Europe in this century; the number of serious studies of the history and character of right-wing movements can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are several good reasons for this: most people who write books are, in Europe at any rate, closer to the left than the right. The intelligentsia is attracted by ideas, and these have been traditionally less ideas (and ideology) on the right, than on the left. That the right has no consistent Weltanschauung is not necessarily a drawback; it needs one less than the left As Mussolini once put it very succinctly: 'The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.' Intellectually the right is inferior to its adversaries; for that reason alone it is in many ways a less exciting and fruitful subject for students of ideas in modern history.
Review, 1888 words
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