Caught between an intensifying climate crisis and a wave of far right movements gaining power across the globe, critical theorists must take seriously the role of planning for a rational society if they want any hope of avoiding all-out destruction. However, for decades now the idea of planning such a society has been looked upon with suspicion by the left, if not outright hostility. For scholars such as Enzo Traverso, the failure of communism inaugurated a skepticism of planned societies and a kind of left-wing melancholia: a culture of defeat which replaced much needed enthusiasm for rational planning. For Larry Alan Busk, however, the issue is no mere historical contingency. It is rather a theoretical shortcoming of contemporary critical theory that must urgently be rectified, lest it become indistinguishable from the right-wing intellectuals it seeks to critique.

Busk’s The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory is a sorely needed intervention into critical theory in the twenty-first century. In it, Busk provides a rigorous study of five influential right-wing intellectuals—Carl Schmitt, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Ayn Rand—whose thought informs the way that our world operates today. In doing so he offers the left a long-overdue critical theory of the right, which moves beyond the usual charge that these thinkers are “anti-democratic” and aims instead to connect them via their shared rejection of the notion that society should be organized according to a self-consciously constructed and rationally planned project. While this theme suffuses all five thinkers, it is perhaps most well-known in the context of Hayek’s writing, who argued that a human society premised on a model of natural selection is superior to a planned society, which could never hope to apprehend the inherent complexity of social interaction.

Given the context above, it should come as no surprise that Busk’s actual motivation for giving an account of the intellectual right is precisely because its core tenet is “mirrored” by the left. According to Busk, the left has come to adopt many of the theoretical hallmarks of the right, which ultimately preclude it from the kind of rational planning (which he calls “intelligent design”) required to create a world that might meet climate change and overcome fascist violence. For Busk, the shadow of post-structuralism and post-modernism (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Jean-François Lyotard, and so on) continues to haunt and defang the left, dispatching useful categories such as reason, Enlightenment, and progress. More contemporary fields of thought on the left display the same theoretical tendency toward skepticism of intelligent design: affect theory eschews reliance on rationalism and “reflects the broader and incredibly dangerous tendency toward what we might call immediatization” (p. 33), while decolonial theory’s appeal to non-Western ways of knowing is “another theoretical dead end” (p. 27). Thus, the rejection of economic planning, foundationalism, vanguardism, and the Enlightenment at the heart of right-wing theory is now increasingly common on the left, rendering one’s opposition to violence (and, ultimately, fascism) a merely “aleatory” choice. If critical theory wants firm footing on which to fight fascism and achieve a better world, it must dispose of its own theoretical suspicions of intelligent design and its constituent categories.

Busk is certainly not wrong about the modern theoretical and intellectual crossover between the right and left: for instance, Chantal Mouffe’s influential formulation of agonistic democracy relies on a particular reading of Schmitt, spurring the left more broadly to do some soul-searching about whether “left-Schmittian” is a contradiction in terms. Likewise, Mouffe, Richard Rorty, and William Connolly all engage Oakeshott positively, excusing his conclusions as inconsistent with his philosophical insights. In light of these theoretical similarities and against a backdrop of melancholia in the face of historical defeat, Busk’s underlying anxiety is that a left that flirts with, if not outright endorses, irrationalism both precludes intelligent design and, worse still, provides no reason not to be a fascist.

For Busk, then, reading the right closely illuminates precisely what the left should do. His rigorous interpretation of Schmitt indicates the necessity of requiring a philosophical foundation in order to avoid fascism, while his attention to Oakeshott’s writings clarify to the left that “the determination of this foundation is a practice of reason and culminates in a rationalist politics” (p. 13). The lesson that Busk draws from these analyses is therefore that any politics (the left included) that does not rely on rational foundations is, when rigorously applied, more prone to fascism. Thus, any left seeking to avoid this predicament must be fearlessly committed to a rational foundation on which to construct its intelligent designs. In this way, Busk’s close reading of right-wing intellectuals illuminates and informs his own reliance on some core dualities: among them rationality versus irrationality and Enlightenment versus anti-Enlightenment. While his prescription that the left begin planning again is well taken, the necessity of relying on such theoretical binaries remains an open question. Readers may well ask whether or not the left can be critical of reason and foundations without disposing of those categories in toto, thereby opening itself up to the dangers of irrationality that Busk identifies.

Whereas Busk insists that “the creation or consolidation of a holistic Left that is feminist, anti-racist, anti-heteronormative, anti-imperialist, and socialist is not a matter of sheer addition or ‘hegemonic articulation’ but of consistently applying the principle of intelligent design in politics” (p. 7), it seems equally true that the critique of categories such as reason, progress, and Enlightenment is crucial if we want an intelligently designed society worthy of its name. Post-structuralism, feminism, anti-racist theory, decolonial thought, and a host of other radical traditions all rightly point out that various tendencies or elements of Enlightenment reason have made it fall far short of its lofty goals. The left turned its sights on reason precisely because rationalization stood in the way of progress; this shift in left theorizing was no accident, after all. In this way, one could be critical of reason without being an irrationalist and therefore precluding intelligent design and comprehensive socialist planning.

Here, it is worth mentioning that Busk begins the book with a thinker who already—some 80 years ago—offered us tools to think through this conundrum: namely, Theodor Adorno, who made a distinction between reason at its most violent (instrumental rationality) and a self-critical version of reason substantive enough to secure liberation. For Adorno, once we dispose of a monolithic understanding of reason, it becomes much easier to dispatch the specter of irrationalism while at the same time endorsing self-critical notions of planning and progress. Though Busk does not ultimately rely on Adorno’s categories, his provocation to critical theorists is nonetheless necessary and timely: because it is clear that a liberatory alternative is required in the face of intertwined green capitalism and climate destruction, how might one formulate foundations immanent to society upon which to undertake intelligent design, but without having to rely on categories that have historically ignored or done violence to marginalized people? In this respect, The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory is necessary reading for anyone interested in a rigorous analysis of the right, as well as for critical theorists dedicated to formulating a politics worthy of the future.