Introduction to Alain de Benoist and Giorgio Locchi’s The American Malady (Imperium Press, 2025)

Alain de Benoist and Giorgio Locchi’s The American Malady (Imperium Press, 2025)

The American Malady (Imperium Press, 2025) 

Translated and with an Introduction by Dr. Alexander Jacob.

There have been a few attempts, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, to study and describe the American way of life and the American character. However, most of these works—such as Margaret Mead’s And keep your powder dry: An Anthropologist looks at America (1942), Geoffrey Gorer’s The Americans: A Study in National Character (1948) and Henry Steel Commager’s The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (1950)—were written from a liberal point of view that did not see in Americanism any danger to the world that it hoped to influence and control.[1] The present work, from 1975, by Alain de Benoist and his former colleague at GRECE,[2] Giorgio Locchi,[3] is one of the few that observe America from a firmly European point of view and descry its basic defects as well as the threats that these defects pose to Europe and the rest of the world.

Beginning their penetrating analysis of American history and character with the disastrous development of Puritanism and Enlightenment attitudes among the early colonials, the authors demonstrate how these doctrines culminated in the quantitative and materialistic capitalist system of contemporary America. The authors indeed consider Puritanism as one of the major sources of America’s several psychological deficiencies. In this context, we may recall that Max Weber in his 1905 work, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, had already identified the capitalist ethos as a particularly Calvinist Protestant one.

According to Benoist and Locchi, what is most alarming in the Puritan ethos of the American colonials is that the craving for material comfort in the new environment was accompanied by a hypocritical religiosity that condoned many of the crimes that were committed by the pioneers in search of material gain. It is not surprising that Puritanism gradually developed in this way, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, into a silent accomplice of American gangsterism.

At the same time, while the Americans turned a blind eye to the injustices that they may have perpetrated against people outside the accepted social circles, their blind adherence to Enlightenment theories of egalitarianism caused them to develop, within their own society, a stubborn anti-authoritarianism that would not allow any real leadership to arise in American organisations, social or political. The lack of doctrine in American religion was thus matched by a lack of ideology in politics and a consequent absence of any strong leaders who could change the basic precepts and policies of the America’s eighteenth-century Constitution. As for the apparently revolutionary protests of the sixties, the authors rightly point out that they did not really alter the American empirical and utilitarian system in any way and merely resulted in more outlandish bohemian sects than had already existed in the nineteenth century as the multifarious sprouts of Protestantism.

The rejection of authoritarian discipline in American life also entails the loss of the father’s control of the family and the devolvement of this power on the mother, so that American society exhibits all the qualities of a matriarchy. Women in this matriarchal system however lose their feminine qualities and have to strive to be superwomen—or caricatures of themselves. Children robbed of paternal authority also tend to act like adults before their time and the search for social success forces adults to maintain youthful attitudes regardless of their age. The result is that the entire American society remains a stunted childish one.

Worse, the lack of character development among Americans causes them to be marked by a general cowardice. Americans do not understand—and vigorously oppose—militaristic societies such as were present in Europe. As a result, their soldiers are mostly reluctant participants in forced wars that they later regret having conducted. Even the heroes of American noir fiction are not marked by any strong individual will but rather by passive ‘behaviourist’ reactions to external stimuli.

In this context, we may note the concomitant absence of any clearly defined foreign policy in America apart from the ambition for commercial aggrandisement. We know how the initial isolationist tendency of the United States in the beginning of its history was replaced by a forced interventionism in the twentieth century. The authors maintain that the later interventions of America in Europe, as well as in the East, were prompted not by any ideology but by a desire to maintain its commercial dominance in the world. However, it may be argued that America too has been driven politically by something approximating to an ideology even if it be only a negative anti-European one directed against both Europe and Russia. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, for instance, crystallised this anti-European stance of the Americans, while America’s involvement in European industrial development after 1945 is further evidence of its ambition to control Europe commercially as well as politically. Its foreign policy thus is essentially a continuation of the anti-European attitudes of the early Puritan settlers and revolutionaries of the country.

The cultural influences that America brings with its economic colonisation are, however, deleterious to the radically different, historically aristocratic, identity of the Europeans. The American is not only a mercantile predator lacking a strong historical culture, but he is also marked by an incapacity for creation, artistic or scientific. Infused with a desire for material comfort, his interests are all material and temporary and lack both depth and duration. This superficiality precludes the formation of artistic individuality. The lack of personal development—apart from a steadfast desire for self-made financial ‘success’—also produces a standardised society constituted of mass individuals.

Just as America has little cultural creativity, its education too is geared towards the quantitative disciplines of business, science and technology that require more computational ability than creativity. However, even the various American mechanical inventions are mostly only applications of scientific discoveries originally made in Europe by Europeans.

Living in the present, with no notion of the value of the past, America is singularly ahistorical and utopian so that it is best characterised as a Coca-Cola Marxist state. America cannot indeed constitute a nation since it is composed of diverse populations that do not share a common historical background, and it has no sense of the significance of the state, which incorporates the past of its people and their entire spiritual and intellectual heritage. The danger of a country that lacks any clear sense of history or destiny is that it threatens the existence of other countries or cultures that may have such a sense and that are not strong enough to defend themselves against the American ‘empire’—which is indeed not a ‘Roman’ empire but, rather, a ‘Carthaginian’ one.

For Europe, in particular, the American empire is perhaps the greatest danger that it faces since it has, since the end of the last war, been steadily colonised by America—economically and even culturally—and has now become so accustomed to the American hegemony that it automatically approves of and voluntarily propagates the American way of life. The call for Europe’s independence that the authors end the present work with is thus a reminder of the situation in which Germans found themselves during the Napoleonic occupation of German territories at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Only a European consciousness that resists the American occupation the way the Germans resisted the French and formed a unified German state and empire can lead to the creation of a unified and independent Europe.

[1] Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) notes the dangers of moral relativism in the modern American universities but does not study the international implications of this phenomenon.

[2] The ‘Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne’ was established in Nice in 1968/1969 as a conservative European cultural association by Dominique Venner, Giorgio Locchi, Alain de Benoist, Pierre Vial and other French nationalists.

[3] This work began as a short article by Giorgio Locchi (1923–1962) that had been commissioned in 1975 for the Nouvelle École and was considerably expanded by Alain de Benoist (1943– ). It was not published in book form until an Italian translation, Il male Americano, appeared in Rome in 1979.