The Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX) and the Holocaust Center in Oslo are hosting a one-day workshop the topic of far-right politics and esoteric thought in historic and contemporary perspective on 31 October which will unite comparative and transnational research on the various forms of esoteric thinking prevalent within the far-right milieu from the late nineteenth century until today.
Why is this important? Scholarly interest in esoteric thought and practice has exploded in the 21st Century. No longer the marginal interest of a few historians of ideas or religions centred exclusively on the Westerns traditions, research in the field is globally oriented, and theoretical and methodological developments has made the field truly cross-disciplinary. Scholars have examined how esotericism has intersected with the far right, but this focus has often been cursory rather than sustained. This situation is even more pronounced in other disciplines. Outside historians of the Third Reich, there have been few sustained studies aiming to situate esoteric thinking as a central component of far-right thinking. Whilst the recent exception of a special issue in Aries even less attention is paid to the phenomenon in the period after 1945. Much of this field has been left to pseudo-historians or those personally invested in either esotericism or the far right.
The raison d’être of the workshop is to provide a corrective to the cursory treatment that esotericism and conspiratuality (a term denoting the overlap between conspiratorial modes of thinking inflected with a yearning for spiritual transformation) have received by scholars of the far right. It will situate the relationship between esotericism and far-right thought within the wider trajectory of the development of far-right ideologies from the late nineteenth century onwards. Rejecting “methodological nationalism” the workshop and its participants will also consider these developments within their wider transnational context as a means of reasserting and reemphasizing the central importance of esoteric thinking, particularly with regards to race, to the politics and praxis of the far right.
This workshop aims to generate new insights into the ideological affinities and overlaps between various forms of fascism and esoteric ideas as well as the activities of esoteric thinkers, their networks, their positionality vis-à-vis the far right.