Social:Metapolitics

Metapolitics (sometimes written meta-politics) describes political attempts to speak in a metalinguistic sense about politics; that is, to have a political dialogue about politics itself. Activists who use the phrase often view metapolitics as a form of "inquiry" in which the discourse of politics, and the political itself, is reimagined and reappropriated. The term was coined by Marxists and is almost always used in the context of ideological discourse among the far-left and far-right, unlike the wider academic field of political philosophy. Those citing the term often do so in an attempt to take a "self-conscious" role in describing their preferred form of political inquiry.

Contemporary thought

By ‘metapolitics’ I mean whatever consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought. Metapolitics is opposed to political philosophy, which claims that since no such politics exists, it falls to philosophers to think ‘the’ political.

Alain Badiou, April 1998

The term "metapolitics" originated from left-wing French academics, being first popularized by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. Discussing Badiou's Metapolitics, Bruno Bosteels asserts that:

“Badiou argues against the tradition of political philosophy, which he associates with the likes of Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort, by proposing to think not of ‘the political’ (le politique) but of ‘politics’ (la politique) as an active form of thinking, or thought-practice, in its own right. He then goes on to evaluate the proximity of this proposal for a ‘metapolitical’ orientation to the work of his teacher Louis Althusser and his contemporaries Jacques Rancière and Sylvain Lazarus, before offering case studies on the concepts of democracy, justice and Thermidoreanism.”

Contemporary politics

This section is an excerpt from Nouvelle Droite#Metapolitics and strategy[ edit ]

Sources

• Bar-On, Tamir (2001). "The Ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968-1999". The European Legacy 6 (3): 333–351. doi:10.1080/10848770120051349. 
• De Benoist, Alain (2014). "Alain de Benoist answers Tamar Bar-On". Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8 (1): 141–161. doi:10.14321/jstudradi.8.1.0141. 
• Johnson, Douglas (1995). "The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe". The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe (second ed.). London and New York: Longman Group. pp. 234–244. ISBN 9780582238817. https://archive.org/details/farrightinwester00luci/page/234. 
• McCulloch, Tom (2006). "The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Ideology and Entryism, the Relationship with the Front National". French Politics 4 (2): 158–178. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200099. 

Further reading

• Carlo Gambescia, Metapolitica. L’altro sguardo sul potere, Edizioni Il Foglio Letterario 2009, ISBN 978-8876062476.
• Carlo Gambescia, Trattato di metapolitica, Edizioni Il Foglio, 2023, 2 voll.: - vol. I. Storia, concetti  e metodo, ISBN 978-88-7606-981-9; - vol. II. Laboratorio storico, ISBN 978-88-7606-966-6
• Felix Schilk (2025). The Metapolitics of Crises: How the New Right Weaponises Narratives to Mainstream Far-Right Ideology. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. doi:10.1007/s10767-025-09519-3

External links

• A. J. Gregor. Metascience and Politics. Dictionary definition
• Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler, 2003. ISBN 978-0-7658-0510-2.
• Peter Viereck, Metapolitics Revisited
• Commentary on Alain Badiou's book Metapolitics
• Leo Zaibert, Toward Meta-politics
• Igor Efimov. Metapolitics: our choice and history (in Russian). Leningrad, 1991. 224 pages. ISBN 5-289-01365-2