The first edition of Right appeared in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty, the Euro-federalist document signed by the government of John Major that deeply divided the Conservative Party. Jonathan Bowden appeared in the Right-wing fringes of the political lanscape around this time, storming the motley array of groups, discussion circles, and clubs that rejected the politics of the Major era, impressing some—and dismaying others—with his political and philosophical zeal, his torrent of ideas, and his mastery of obscure and difficult concepts. While Bowden, like many of his colleagues, disliked the European Union, he did so as a self-confessed ‘European fundamentalist’, his criticism being that the EU was neither particularly European nor proud of its cultural roots. He saw no contradiction between Great Britain and a Great Europe, and, to this effect, inspired by Alain de Benoist’s GRECE (the think tank of the French New Right), while at the same time fed up with the empty anti-EU bigotry of many conservatives on the Right wing of the party, he was determined to establish a New Right school of thought in the British Isles, aiming to reorient conservatives away from purely reactionary emotions and towards the higher pursuit of cultural regeneration. First, however, had to come the book, and this is what Right was intended to be. Bowden did not last long in the party, and Right, which was conceived as a longer work, was never completed beyond the first part. Out of print for over twenty years, with no surviving manuscript, and with no copies of the first edition available anywhere, the text was thought lost. The discovery of a single extant copy in a private library, however, has made it possible to make Right available again. This second edition comes with annotations, a full index, and a new foreword by Jonathan Bowden’s friend and collaborator, Stuart Millson.
Right
