1. By way of introduction: authority and authoritarianism

Any discussion on authoritarianism in criminal matters preliminarily requires delimiting it from the concept of authority. The distinction is all the more necessary given that its promoters usually argue that theirs is a rescue operation of lost authority. This claim conceals reality. It is rhetoric that distorts history regarding a process of decadence initiated the moment authority became uncertain and dragged freedom down in its fall¹.

Etymologically, authority means to increase, elevate, or magnify. The term derives from augeo, that is, to make something grow, increasing it or transforming pre-existing material. Authority is the antonym of infertility, the tendency to unify individuals, make social relations uniform, and homogenize culture. It is true that Roman auctoritas was rooted in the past, hereditary transmission, or the memory of those who laid the city’s foundations, called maiores, whereas modern authority is based on democratic consensus, the spiritual fact of its recognition by the subjects who voluntarily submit to it. However, in both cases—the foundational authority of the Romans and the authority born of the social contract—the notion of power, and even more so violence, is alien to the essence of the concept. Authority is and must be respected for the simple reason that it was instituted and is recognized as authority. The power conferred upon magistrates—the ancient coertitio—is merely an epiphenomenon of the determining core, which rests on the recognition by those subject to the law². Without consensus, there can be no authority, just as we are not obliged to obey anything other than legitimate powers (Rousseau, p. 32). And the possibility of consensus requires that the country, region, province, municipality, school, or university community, etc., be governed democratically.

Authoritarianism has nothing to do with authority. Its essence lies in the power of domination. For this reason, it has always been an enemy of liberal ideology and the doctrine of fundamental human rights. In law—the juridical form of the community’s political organization—authoritarianism perceives only the coercive dimension, force, nor is it repulsed by the latter in its immediate brutality: violence³.

Setting aside the variations exhibited throughout history and the related political programs of the 20th century, it is possible to distinguish certain traits that invariably appear in any ideology, organization, situation, or outpost of authoritarianism. There are three: 1) a firm belief, analogous to religious faith, in the power of dominion that allegedly belongs to and is exercised by certain individuals over others; 2) the will to obey unconditionally those at the top and impose oneself on those at the bottom, within a sick political, social, and economic stratification, as it is corroded by the vices of arbitrariness and corruption; and 3) the conviction that power, obedience, and imposition are supposedly natural in human vicissitudes, much like the inequality of every subject compared to their peers, among whom authoritarian power establishes or tolerates discrimination based on nationality, social class, religion, political ideas, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, etc., instead of considering them in the light of a synthetic principle: their humanity, the immanent and eminent dignity of every individual.

The foregoing is a summary of authoritarianism viewed from the empirical plane, according to 20th-century social psychology research (Guzmán, 2019, pp. 610-619). However, the studies by Reich, Adorno, Sanford, Eysenk, Rokeach, Duckitt, Altemeyer, and Stenner have regained relevance due to the resurgence of ultranationalist, xenophobic, Nazi, fascist, “libertarian,⁴” and pseudo-republican discourses. These are diatribes that falsify problems of common interest, promote intolerance toward foreigners as a public matter, harass nationals defeated in the struggle for life, denigrate defenders of peace among peoples, the equality of nations, the rule of international law over the naked facts of war, the supremacy of human rights in intersubjective relations, and the protection of the natural environment. Nor do jurists and criminologists escape this invective when they scientifically analyze the savage powers of miscreants, whether these be street thugs extorting individuals abandoned by the State or “captains of industry” who defraud entire communities with the guarantee that their exploits will receive, at most, dismissals, fines, or alternative sentences (Ferrajoli, 2011, pp. 41-48).

2. Psychology and axiology of authoritarianism

The psychology of authoritarianism focuses especially on the relationship between the individual and society. From this, it identifies submission, aggressive tendencies, the identification of the individual with the group, and the undifferentiation of the self as constant elements.

These characteristics explain the punitive attitudes rampant in public opinion today, as well as the sharp list of penal legislation, increasingly divorced from the foundational moment of contemporary criminal law. Let us recall that the great penal reform of the Enlightenment had as its axes the principle of the legality of crimes and penalties, the personal nature of criminal responsibility, and the humanization or mitigation of punishments (de Rivacoba y Rivacoba, 1987, pp. 197–200). The political basis of these maxims was the doctrine of fundamental personal rights, which in turn rested on the psychology of sentiment of 17th and 18th-century philosophical empiricism. From there arose, as a paramount demand, the recognition of the essential equality of human beings (Cassirer, 1981, pp. 271-281).

Certainly, the punitive attitudes of the masses are not a phenomenon exclusive to the present. They are rooted in the psychic humus of authoritarianism in general: the aforementioned undifferentiation of the self. If one observes the history of criminal law, it is possible to distinguish two trends: one exalts the group as a substantive entity superior to its singular members; the other sees the individual as the fulcrum of social organization, which is considered a means to protect and ensure for everyone, particularly the weakest or most disadvantaged, the necessary conditions for the development of their personality (Guzmán & Squella, 2008). Characteristic of the first trend is a weak consciousness of the self. The subject does not perceive himself in his individuality; he feels part of a uniform whole (family, clan, tribe, nation, race, state, etc.). Identification with the group of belonging makes him prone to exclude the criminal, who for this mentality—of evident cultural primitivism⁵—represents an alien being; not merely someone similar but diverse in one or more respects, but completely strange⁶.

From this mentality have surfaced the attitudes that abound today in the population and the ruling strata, surrendered to the obsessions of the extreme right in the public arena.

For the time being, an unconditional support for the punitive power of the State. For the sake of its efficiency, there is no reason to feign scruples regarding detentions of doubtful lawfulness, the legal correctness of resolutions on facts not sufficiently proven, or sentences to penalties more severe than those corresponding to the crime. Secondly, the rejection of the ius puniendi, a legal relationship with duties and rights for its subjects, of circumscribed content and limited in time. In the absence of a bilateral bond regulated by law, prisoners lack subjective rights; they have only expectations, the satisfaction of which is unilaterally entrusted to the administrative authority⁷. Thirdly, a warm approval of the violence that prevents crimes, even if it lacks necessity and proportionality—requirements inherent to the function of the realization of law, which for the State constitutes a duty legally, not a defensive faculty. Fourth, the inability to distinguish crime from transgressions of the rules of civility and moral norms, whereby contempt, domestic disturbances, neighborhood nuisances, and displays of lack of culture or coarseness fall under public authority⁸. Finally, the frank permission of self-tutelage in privileged self-defense and the disproportionate use of violence in cases of flagrancy, whether true or supposed.

But let us examine authoritarianism on the philosophical-political plane.

Every ideology, planning, or simple political purpose entails, consciously or unpremeditatedly, an axiological determination. It is, therefore, a matter of identifying the axiological system to which the authoritarian political conception and legal thought respond.

The axiological system is value absolutism. A characteristic of absolute value is its universal validity, without limits of space, time, or recipient. Its culmination consists in the unity of values, before which no other can exist. Value absolutism is intolerant and unequal by definition. It is the opposite of relativism. The possibility of the coexistence of different value conceptions presupposes the equality of human beings, and therefore, tolerance as a sine qua non requirement for them to live together. From this axiological system comes the saying that “relativism can tolerate any opinion, except the one that claims to be absolute” (Radbruch, 1980, p. 101). In contrast, axiological absolutism proclaims the admission of opinions that bow to the single value and the silencing of the rest.

Absolutism is not expressed legally in the idea of the social contract. The authoritarian mentality has always rejected this supposition of political thought. The true legal subject is not the individual who accepts the rules of coexistence; it is the State, the nation, the race, the social class, or the governing majority in an illiberal democracy⁹. This axiology adopts supra-individualistic or transpersonal legal conceptions. Its fulcrum is the collectivity; its idea of law is power. Justice and humanity have no place here, nor do the international organizations that represent them, such as the International Criminal Court and the World Health Organization¹⁰.

Supra-individualism and transpersonalism inspire leaders, parties, and ideologies of an authoritarian character. In this atmosphere, the concept of authority is completely out of place. As only the power of domination matters, political activity limits or cancels citizens’ rights; it combats civil rights because they weaken state power and question the underlying moral theory or economic system; it defends itself against any hint of danger, including the expression of ideas that dispute its superiority. Legal weaponry will be sought in constitutional or legal reforms that favor the Executive Power, minimize the Judicial Power, harden the penal system, centralize the internal government of the State, and grant operational autonomy to the police.

It seems pointless to dwell on further details to exhaustively describe the phenomenon, since all the elements that could be adduced to complete it represent a single system. “One must not begin by asking how conservatives will behave on a constitutional or legal question, because they will always adopt that decision which contributes to preserving or increasing the power of the State” (1937, pp. 161 and 162), wrote Max Ernst Mayer in 1923, adding that for the identical reason they defend the death penalty, the policy of armaments, war conquests, and, in general, the strengthening of the instruments of state power. In 2025, we have simple and qualified life imprisonment—a “perpetual” perpetuity—the war against immigration, the bellicose evolution of the legal order regarding the problem of organized crime, the disregard for the rights of minorities, the street and media persecution of dissident thought, the cultural delegitimization of the sciences and the arts, etc.

3. Authoritarian criminal law

Authoritarian criminal law reflects to a tee the psychology and axiology summarized in the preceding section.

Above all, it is at odds with nullum crimen nulla poena sine lege. For authoritarianism, this principle represents an unbearable barrier in all its projections, such as absolute reserve, non-retroactivity, determination, and completeness of penal laws. The political background of the principle, which links it to the sovereignty of the people, the struggle against the power of governments, and the rule of legal certainty, explains why authoritarian criminal law directs its onslaughts first against the law in its role as the sole immediate source of crimes and penalties—whether by piercing it through analogy, as the Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms did, or by vaulting over it with the pole of emergency decrees, supreme decrees, or executive orders, as we shall discuss in due course regarding the practices of the extreme right (Rodríguez, 1971, p. 884)¹¹.

Legal systems of this ilk do not sympathize with the principle of equality of persons before the law either. Given that their axis is the totality, not the individual controlled by the police or summoned to a court, and since that totality deserves what is denied to the latter—respect and consideration for the mere fact of existing, regardless of the multiple somatic, biological, economic, social, or cultural conditionings that determine everyone’s fate, including their way of thinking and how they conduct their life—authoritarianism acts as reason of State demands: arbitrarily. It will persecute or tolerate crime, like the police of the French absolute monarchy; under the pretext of protecting the group, it will impose intrinsically and extrinsically disproportionate penalties; conversely, it will privilege ringleaders, profiteers, and cohorts, gifting them with backdoors to the criminal process, conditional releases, amnesties, or pardons of indecorous prevarication; finally, it will be implacable with political adversaries and will treat mercilessly those who dare to rebel through crimes of survival or hedonistic exhibition, subjecting both to secret and exceptional courts or proceedings¹².

Another distinctive feature of authoritarian criminal law is the conversion of disciplinary faults and administrative infractions into crimes: public demonstrations and roadblocks; prison riots, passive resistance in jails or holding centers for undocumented immigrants; the introduction of certain objects into such precincts, even if the afflictive content of the penalty does not extend to them; disobedience to lawful or unlawful orders from authority, and others¹³.

Related to the previous feature is the fact that penal authoritarianism ignores the protection of legal interests. To a conception for which the idea of law is power—dominion announced through behavioral orders threatened with punishment—it is incomprehensible that the meaning of legal precepts consists in the protection of goods. The concept of legal good presupposes valuing certain objects, recognizing in them a reference to valued ends. It is rooted in an axiological ethics that formulates estimations, declares a preference, and hierarchizes values by their cultural importance¹⁴. Religious, moral, aesthetic, or legal value does not lie in a duty. Ordering conduct does not infuse it with a valuable meaning either. It is precisely the reverse: every duty must find its foundation in a value; otherwise, it will not be a duty but a mere imposition¹⁵.

In its dearth of valuations, authoritarian criminal law creates crimes without a legal interest, e.g., migrant smuggling where the victim is the material object rather than the holder of the legal interest of the infraction¹⁶; it punishes the attempt equally to the consummated crime and equates simple preparatory acts to the endeavor¹⁷; it detests the impunity of conspiracy and other manifested resolutions; it criminally persecutes personal states and characters where even the shadow of conduct is missing, such as the possession of harmful or scandalous objects, with the consequent increase in “possession” crimes¹⁸; it is unsettled by the collective commission of some infractions, which it confronts with a Mannerist prodigy of precepts that repress or aggravate the encounter, agreement, meeting, gang, brotherhood, grouping, association, organization, mob, or pack of miscreants or aspiring criminals¹⁹; it persecutes foreigners who enter or remain irregularly in the country^20,21, etc.

For these and other “factual situations,” there will be crimes, qualified types, specific aggravations, special aggravating circumstances, aggravations of aggravations, without caring for legislative technique, the intimate coherence of the rules, their systematic relations, the extension of the precepts, or propriety in the use of language. The Penal Code will progressively resemble a regulation, perhaps an ordinance—a term more pleasing to the military climate of this legal order. As one might imagine, the broadest powers will be granted to the police, whether by allowing them to draft their regulations regarding the use of force or by freeing them from the safeguards of necessity and proportionality when restoring public order, protecting third parties, preventing escapes, pursuing fugitives, or pressing detainees²².

In the end, this panorama very concretely realizes the warning that the act of coercive application of the law, in which there should be no creation of any legal norm, could harbor a foundational moment. The police, that miniature army, become a power in which the distinction between the violence that establishes and the violence that maintains the law has been eliminated²³. The law itself will not allow the protective dimension to be distinguished from the coercive one within it. Since everything is condensed into an apparatus of coercion, public force does not pretend to be a sublimation of violence either: it is pure institutionalized violence (Naucke, 2000, pp. 382 and 383).

It would be useless to search here for the sense of humanity, absent from the arsenal of punishments and the catalog of crimes, both animated by the principle of inequality before the law. Authoritarianism erases the concept of the neighbor, crucial for a democracy. “That another is equal to me, even if he thinks differently, and even if he is my enemy, is what characterizes the democratic sense. And that we try to crush the adversary however possible, the idea not mattering—what matters is to pummel, to destroy—is what characterizes authoritarianism” (Jiménez de Asúa, 1989, p. 181).

4. The far right: ideology and strategy

The contemporary era reveals shades, degrees, and levels of the described phenomenon, even if its axis—the principle of domination and the disregard for the human element in the different—remains unscathed. For this reason, every authoritarian legal order has an inevitable point of arrival: the destruction of the personality of law²⁴. This result is ostensible in the pure forms of authoritarianism, when the transpersonal impulse, allied with philosophical irrationalism, engenders totalitarian structures like those the world knew during the first half of the 20th century, not to mention the tyrannical and oligarchic-dictatorial surrogates that would follow. But it is no less notorious in the impure forms of political authoritarianism, characterized in penal matters by fragility, inconstancy, and volubility; in a word, the insecurity dictated by fear.

Is it perhaps feasible to extirpate it with a radical remedy? To move from the prophylaxis of crime—that absurd dream of 19th-century positivism—to the social panacea? What a civilizing ideal it would be to transmute the ius puniendi into a beneficent agent, the definitive emotional anesthesia for people accustomed to believing that their primary need is insecurity! After all, fear, the most ancient emotion, which protects animals from dangers, manifests in man as a craving for security. Whoever guarantees security against omnipresent evils will have also conquered their freedom²⁵. The master of fear will be able to manage those who have renounced their freedom. With this, we arrive at the extreme right and its singular concept of democracy.

In the core of the extreme right beat two invariable components of authoritarianism: the enhancement of the group and the panegyric of the inequality of human beings.

Ideally, conservative thought proclaimed the nation as the keystone of the State’s unity, an attitude to which we owe almost all the wars of the second half of the 19th century. However, nationalism knows how to clothe itself in other theoretical or propagandistic attires, or both at once, without losing the bellicose hostility that distinguishes it. During the 20th century, it appeared as a blood community, national spirit, and popular union. Today it proposes ethnic or religious identities, legendary visions of history, or a closed national State²⁶. Less alarming calling cards, a “low-intensity” message for the masses who surf the internet aimlessly (Méndez, 2020, p. 39)²⁷. Even so, the message conveys that the individual’s personality depends on their assuming their group membership. What it conceals is that the personality thus acquired does not confer freedom. The freedom of the extreme right constitutes a quid independent of any supposed innate properties of the human family. It is the product of a political attribution. An individual may possess cognitive faculties, consciousness of self and the other, motivation, emotion, sensitivity, moral direction of conduct, anticipation of the future, and presentiment of death; but if he is not part of the group or, even if integrated, behaves against the herd, he will neither be recognized as a member nor possess full legal capacity.

The inequality defended by these doctrines appeals to the systematic observation of facts, the multiplicity of factors that decide everyone’s fate. While freedom is an artificial creation, a scion of political voluntarism, inequality is allegedly certified by biology and social formations. It is illusory to palliate differences not susceptible to suppression. Rather, they must be treated with respect, with the understanding that respect does not mean recognition of the diverse. Each person must remain separated from others, and within one’s own, the keynote will be inequality harmonized in the national union. Faced with the disjunction of freedom or equality, with which the difference between the political right and left is theoretically illustrated, the extreme right opts for an answer that inscribes it in illiberal and anti-egalitarian ideologies (Bobbio, 1995, p. 163). That is, the individual is free to affirm his right to inequality.

It will be understood that such a conception can emerge triumphant in political praxis thanks to the concentration of power and the annulment of dissent. The extreme right, like the yearned-for grey totalitarianism, if it manages to seize the State government through the vote, does not do so because it considers democracy a procedure for the philosophical-juridical discussion of parties. Democracy is only a means to certain ends, which render it superfluous once achieved²⁸. If the superfluous becomes annoying, the extreme right will act accordingly. Parliament will be sidelined until it surrenders as a mock body²⁹. The judiciary will be assaulted in two stages: first, with the public mockery of adverse judges; then, through the ad hoc appointment of addicted magistrates (Stanley, 2019, p. 34; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2022, pp. 94-99). It will be necessary to recompose the constitutional court so that it correctly applies the Constitution, empowered by partial reforms or substituted by a charter granted by grace³⁰. The military, paramilitary, and penitentiary administration of the State will be strengthened. The autonomy of universities, academies, and other study centers will suffer under the reduction of public resources, the appointment of their governing bodies, the registration of students, and the “synchronization” of professors³¹. It will also be necessary to finely adjust the tuning with the press, fraternizing with the adept, reviling the rebellious, and buying the independent.

The list of tasks could be extended ad nauseam. Each new bead will be inserted into the necklace while keeping legal forms. Except one, fundamental. The belief in absolute values, undeniable truths, does not resign itself to losing the government in an unfavorable vote, for the national community is always the majority. It will alter the votes of the adventitious majority, accuse its leaders of being traitors, incite sedition, or resort to the pearl of the anti-democratic vade mecum: the coup d’état³².

As we write these pages³³, the extreme right governs countries in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. It is a small assortment, but on the rise, and includes very populous nations (India, the United States of America, and Russia). The aggressive-defensive reconstruction of real or fictitious events shifts according to the particular circumstances of each region, from bogeymen like communism, passing through myths, pagan beliefs, and monotheistic churches, imperial memories, war exploits, and rural customs, to the public pointing out of freethinkers, infidels, immigrants, Indians, Blacks or mestizos, feminists, criminals, etc. Now, the demagoguery of the narrative—superficial, petty, and of immediate objectives—is one thing, and ideology is another. The most elaborate and influential ideology of the extreme right became known in the seventies, partly as a reaction to the Parisian events of May 1968 and partly due to the stagnation of political conservatism in France³⁴.

Despite its name, the French “New Right” has little that is novel. What is unprecedented is the global onslaught against the United Nations and the European Union, the foundational documents of human rights, the progress of the singularization of such rights, and multiculturalism. Everything else in its philosophical armor is stale: the irrationalism of Friedrich Nietzsche, the political voluntarism of Carl Schmitt, sprinkled with ingredients of anthropology, ethology, and neo-fascism. This renewed right defines itself through an organicist vision of society, ethnic identity as a constituent element of the community, the inequality of individuals, the cultural opposition of peoples, the non-existence of humanity as a congregating ideal, and an absolute repudiation of the doctrine of the rights of man. These are components woven with accurate observations, sophisms, and citations of illustrious precedents of philosophical thought. It does not seem like a patchwork of delirious paragraphs, like The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Rosenberg)³⁵, a book surpassed in argumentative coherence and attitude by these ideologists. Their disposition, far from cynical, is one of calculated hypocrisy.

Every ordered society is necessarily an organic society in which “the diversity of the antagonistic forces that compose it are balanced and synthesized by the power and transcendence of the State’s principle of authority.”³⁶ Authority exercises its power, not from a society founded on contractual bonds, but over a national-popular community, a living being that transcends simple individuals and is endowed with a collective memory, which confers identity and personality upon it (Pinedo, 1986, pp. 37-38). If politically ordered society demands hierarchy, the community demands something more: the internal synchrony of individuals with the external order³⁷. Only in an order of this ilk does the pure idea of freedom exist³⁸.

The organic conception of society derives from the lifeworld revealed by physical anthropology and the social formations observed by cultural anthropology (de Benoist, 2020, p. 44). From this gathering of elements, some biological and others social, emerges the ethnic identity of each community. Not only free conduct but also the expression of thought is defined by cultural belonging³⁹. Recognizing personal ethnic identity goes in unison with the recognition of the alien identity, saving the differences that separate it from one’s own. Indeed, for the New Right, “a politics of recognition must not be understood as the alibi of relativism.⁴⁰”

Axiological relativism presupposes the basic equality of all human beings. The present doctrine, which defines itself as pluralist (de Benoist, 2024, p. 81), notes that in nature there is nothing that equals us and, on the contrary, everything contributes to differentiating us from one another. The fundamental diversity of people must be esteemed a good, just as the effort to level them and reduce culture to a world civilization⁴¹ is an evil—the worst threat gravitating over the world. Each culture has its collective identity, ordering itself with others in a peculiar “ethnic pluralism,” refractory to immigration—which would endanger both the host culture and that of the guest—, the multiracial society and multiculturalism⁴². To protect the local community and, incidentally, the immigrant as well, so that both may reaffirm their collective singularity, it would be convenient to thwart arriving immigration and stimulate the return of those already immigrated to their countries of origin⁴³.

At this point, it is easy to guess that the bête noire of the New Right is called liberalism⁴⁴. Its individualistic concept of society is false⁴⁵. Human dignity confers no equality whatsoever upon individuals because dignity is an abstract concept, predicated on a non-existent subject (humanity), improper for political and legal language⁴⁶. Consequently, one must garrote the firstborn of liberalism, the doctrine of universal rights of man, which hides a religious trap, a naturalistic fallacy, and a capitalist delegitimization of hierarchies in each community⁴⁷.

Let us say two words about the methodology of the propaganda and political action of the movement. The New Right appeared with the intention of invigorating predecessors accused of passivity, defeatism, and a lack of strategy. The proselytizing methodology of the young movement, in turn, would become the keynote of all extreme right leaders. It consists of dissembling, roiling, and lying.

For now, the points of contact with ideologies of the past are dissembled, especially the trinomial of fascism, Nazism, and racism, whether by (I) denying the crimes committed by their leaders, militants, and stooges; (II) hiding the monstrous facets behind some positive achievements of the corresponding regimes; or (III) affirming that those ideologies belong to history, while the modern right opens the people’s eyes to the future. This strategy was born in France and has proven most successful in Italy thanks to the tactical modalities indicated in the second and third place⁴⁸.

To roil implies tangling things that the understanding knows how to discern, adulterating facts, confusing the listener with sophistries—including macroscopic violations of the rules of logic⁴⁹—, distorting ideals until the less informed part of the electorate cannot differentiate reality from fiction, truth or falsehood, virtue or perversity, manifest design, and veiled purposes. The road to power for the extreme right in the United States of America was paved with this asphalt⁵⁰.

Lastly, though not least in importance, the recourse to the lie, which in the extreme right acquires systematic edges. It is about the lie as an effect and lying as an action, knowingly affirming things that effectively do not correspond to reality. The extreme right has opened an inexhaustible sewer of mendacity from which emanate global conspiracies, alien corruption, the ruin of institutions, the crumbling of the national economy, public tolerance of crime, generalized insecurity, impostures, incongruities, misconduct of the adversary, etc. An ancient resource of low politics, the falsehood reveals the true nature of the extreme right when its leaders employ the barefaced lie⁵¹. In public activity, this is equivalent to insulting or punching the listener; it represents an act of violence, the marrow of fascism in action (Corner, 2022, p. 25)⁵². Premeditated lying is also known. It precedes the treacherous attack, without unleashing it yet. This class of fabrication can result in being more effective than the shameless lie. There is one of long local tradition: feigning peace and attachment to legality with a pastoral smile while hiding under the cloak the garrote that will murder them.

5. Penal practices of far-right institutions

The question of security obsesses the extreme right. It is a mania that extends from public safety proper to all manner of issues: security in schools and universities, security in healthcare, security in sports and recreation, security in the home and at work, security by day and by night, security in the church and the cemetery, for the consensus society does not guarantee peaceful rest to the dead.

These and so many other spheres of human endeavor must be addressed through criminal law, with the relentless application of laws that are as harsh as possible. The investigation of the causes of crime and official statistics on its quantitative trend can be calmly dispensed with. What is required is more police on the streets, more severe sentences, “and less ‘political interference’ in police action and the courts in this regard” (Mudde, 2021, p. 58). Except that in legal politics, “less politics” means the opposite of what the forms state: more politics and less law. That is why the interventions of the extreme right in the field of crimes and penalties remain on the margins of criminal law. They are simple penal practices.

We theoretically represent criminal law as a great legal relationship formed by the concepts of law, crime, and penalty, a discontinuous series of specialized legal relationships—each of the crimes in particular—and by the jurisdictional realization, in general and special proceedings, of the provisions that associate penalties with them. The extreme right goes to the heart of the legal-punitive relationship to alter the quality, the correlative position of its subjects, and the legal source of the bond. Everything else is secondary. Theories of crime and punishment can be left to the innocuous solace of criminal law scholars. Nor is it anxious to present the country with a punitive code replacing the old one if the advertising announcement of bills highlighting provisions of militarized combat against criminality suffices⁵³.

The State and, where appropriate, the community of States, is the active subject of the legal-penal relationship. When a crime has been committed, the ius puniendi evolves into a punitive claim, a timeless characteristic of punitive law becomes patent: being realizable only jurisdictionally. By virtue of this, only courts of justice hear criminal cases, only judges can pronounce sentences of acquittal or conviction, and it falls to no one but them to decide the incidents of the execution of sanctions. The application of rules regulating crime and penalty is reserved for a specific public agent; it is not the concern of other State organs, and much less of private individuals. But this does not satisfy the extreme right and its ill-concealed contempt for the judiciary. It replaces the judge, a temperate organ par excellence, with a private subject or a public agent acting as an autonomous employee. This is the hidden meaning of the latest innovations afflicting a pair of justification defenses very dissimilar in their foundation: legitimate defense and the fulfillment of a duty⁵⁴. The focus is directed so that the active subject of the defense may be, in addition to the assaulted private individual, the policeman who “defends” him, who, therefore, will not have to submit his protective action to the stricter requirements of the fulfillment of a duty. The extreme right has thus upended legitimate defense in Chile and Brazil⁵⁵. Certainly, there is a more direct method to achieve the identical objective. It lies in authorizing the police to kill citizens in the fulfillment of their duty. Peru employed it in 2007 and, again, in 2020⁵⁶.

The culprit is the passive subject of the ius puniendi. That the human person fits within the subjective extension of the terrible right gives rise to no doubts. What remains to be resolved are the conditions according to which an individual may be deemed legally imputable or capable of punishment. This is a problem half empirical and half speculative, because it depends on scientific knowledge of the biology and psychology of human development and also on the concept of man assumed by each legal order. The law that contemplates him as an essentially free being, but one who forges his freedom in contact with others, will tend to modulate his penal capacity in accordance with the concrete circumstances—biological, psychological, and social—of the individual exercise of freedom, taking into account his age and identity with himself over time. These conditionings seem to the extreme right an annoying dust to be shaken off. The age of penal capacity will be reduced to twelve years or less. Children must see in the nursery school an apprenticeship for the prisoner, for there are already penalties awaiting them in childhood, even very long ones⁵⁷. If the condemned is an adult, the extension of the ius puniendi becomes unextended. Not because the culprit is considered a serf of the penalty, as was thought until the irruption of modern penitentiary law, since the serf was subject to his lord but retained certain liberties. The adult culprit targeted by the extreme right is rather the object of the penalty, its material object, to put it in the nomenclature of the theory of crime. As things have no rights, the penitentiary legislation of Italy and Brazil, pioneer countries in the matter with their laws of 1975 and 1984, respectively, now strips them from postpartum female inmates, detainees suspected of maintaining ties with criminal associations, and those sentenced to penalties of medium or long duration⁵⁸.

Above all, the extreme right attacks the source of the legal relationship denominated ius puniendi. As it does not consider it a reciprocal bond regulated by law, but a unidirectional bundle of prerogatives whose center of imputation is the power of the State, the government will take upon itself the enterprise of creating, modifying, or repealing the existing Criminal Law. To coat the mission with a patina of legality, it will resort to autonomous normative power: decrees, regulations, and law-making provisions, or else laws approved by acclamation, assuming it counts on a propitious Constitution, an enabling act, or an abundant parliamentary majority, which amounts to the same thing.

The North American federal government has made prodigal use of executive orders. This concept is alien to the constitutional law to which we Hispanic Americans are accustomed. The President of the United States of America does not have a constitutionally regulated regulatory power. But given that the Constitution imposes on him to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, the superiors of the White House have long interpreted Article II, Section 3, in the sense that it enables them to issue directives to their subordinates throughout the federal administration (Kelly et al., 1983, pp. 424-425). It is assumed that such orders are internal and, consequently, should not affect the rights of the citizen. However, this is precisely what the flock of orders issued since January 2025 is provoking. Not a few impinge on criminal matters: some favor the death penalty, others hinder access to the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, and there are those that expel or order the transfer of undesirable foreigners without the formalities of extradition. The graphology of the grounds denotes how the issuer of the orders feels the possession of the right to punish vibrating in his hand⁵⁹.

Countries that possess regulatory power run a serious risk if they fall into the jaws of the extreme right. The police regulations and government intervention in penitentiary questions are there to prove it. If the State lacks a penal execution law, all the better. Security police legislation will not represent a problem either if there is a way to administratively normalize the use of force as direct physical violence, legitimate coercion, necessary rigor, or indispensable torments to protect the citizenry.

Finally, law-making provisions. We speak of decree laws in the proper sense and legislative decrees, those which Chilean constitutional practice, to distinguish them from decree-laws in the improper sense, calls decrees with the force of law. The Italian Constitution provides for both possibilities, although the doctrine most zealous of the principle of legality does not agree that it falls to the government to establish or modify crimes and penalties through decree laws⁶⁰. However, the persons occupying the Palazzo Chigi do not seem to have qualms about orchestrating broad reforms to punitive legislation, whether codified or not, through decree-laws. Decreto Sicurezza number 48, of 2025, which sanctioned as a decree-law a motion languishing in Parliament, later converted into law thanks to the trick of the vote of confidence, in truth performed a feat of fraud consisting of selling a pig in a poke. It transformed the will of the government into a legislative decree without a prior enabling law. It is as if, facing the Executive Power, there were a “Government Junta,” a cenacle of legislators appointed and directed… by the President of the Government.

6. And now, what?

In 1932, a few months before the suicide of German democracy, Hans Fallada published a novel that won him celebrity. It was titled Kleiner Mann, was nun? The Spanish translation (1960) preferred to omit the subject of the title, “little man,” leaving only the question, “And now, what?”.

The narrative, soon brought to the cinema screen, describes with vivacious realism, at times nostalgic humor, and a highly agile style the vicissitudes of a young couple and their little son amidst the social ravages caused by the financial speculation of the late twenties. Millions of workers in forced unemployment, petty bourgeois on the verge of poverty, poor people fallen into misery, enriched profiteers, hustlers, scroungers, leeches of commerce, and exploiters of industry. It is a description that does honor to the Neue Sachlichkeit, an artistic trend that corrected the literary realism of the second half of the 19th century with new combinations of images and words, discovering objectively—without the personal divagations of expressionism nor singing hymns to the glory of the nation—the terrible social reality.

Among the anthology of characters in the book, beings mostly absorbed and anguished, the protagonist sees indifference, distrust, contempt, hatred, and thuggery grow. He loses his work and finds no new placement. He is humiliated; the police chase him off the sidewalks of Berlin for his ragged appearance. In the end, he asks his wife, sobbing, how he is going to be able to look anyone in the face after what he has suffered. She answers, “You can always look at me! Always, always! You are with me, we are together.”

The salvation of Junge, the troubled husband, did not come only from the love of his indefatigable consort, Lämmchen. In the harsh circumstances that persisted in crushing the humble home, the social security system succored the unfortunates for some time. Junge resisted the temptation to steal to survive and, what seems significant in that predicament, instinctively disdained the attractive promises of the emerging National Socialist party. In short, this little man maintained the personal integrity of a man. His wife, who during the husband’s unemployment had to feed her own by knitting for other families, with her answer did nothing besides remind him of it.

That is called dignity. Dignity is not the patrimony of any nation, ethnicity, or people. The same happens with democracy if by this we understand the government of each member of the people for each of its members. With the little flame of dignity of a set of minimal lives, in the joys, miseries, hopes, and pains of little men and little women, democracy is built. It is also defended from its enemies.

And now, what? Well, not to contemplate in silence the destruction of democracy where it is exposed to internal demolition. To become conscious of oneself, of the value inherent to everyone, that sovereignty belongs first to the individual, never to the majorities, only at the end to the State. Here begins the defense of democratic society. And one shields it with optimism. The extreme right is pessimistic. It does not believe in the future, nor in a criminal law worthy of the human person⁶¹. This existential and juridical pessimism condemns it beforehand to failure.

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Funding: This article has not received funding associated with the public, commercial, or for-profit sectors. Its elaboration was entirely assumed by the author.

Conflict of Interest: The author declares no conflicts of interest in relation to this article or with other authors, institutions, or entities that could influence its content.

Contributions (CRediT Taxonomy): The author declares their contributions to this research article, using the CRediT taxonomy: Conceptualization: (100%); Formal analysis: (100%); Investigation: (100%); Writing – original draft: (100%); Writing – review & editing: (100%).

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Notes

^*The present text translates, updates, and considerably expands a lecture delivered at the University of Florence (Italy) on February 13, 2025. The author thanks Professors Matías Bailone (Buenos Aires), Salo de Carvalho (Rio de Janeiro), Lucia Risicato (Messina), and Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni (Buenos Aires) for their bibliographical collaboration.

He also especially thanks the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Faculty of Law of the University of Tarapacá for the approval given to the publication of this article. Another Chilean university journal refused to publish it for reasons he ignores, as one of the editors embarrassingly informed him in the third week of December 2025.

¹“The citizens’ freedom, once the restrictive limitations protecting its confines were lost, became weakened, defenseless, and turned towards destruction.” This is how Hannah Arendt (2023, p. 17, editorial translation) summarizes the deceit.

²In Roman law of the republican era, even magistrates whose coercion was in principle limitless, such as the patrician consuls, needed the approval of the citizenry to execute a person condemned for a capital crime. For their part, the right of life and death of the tribunes of the plebs was founded on the constitution of the plebs itself, in the power of their representatives. To fail to respect the provocatio or the norm of the populus implied acting as a private citizen, exposing the magistrate to the same penalties that were imposed on private individuals in similar cases. See Mommsen (1976, pp. 28 and 31).

³“Using the Germans’ effective expression, as the law of the fist (Faustrecht)” (de Ruggiero, 2005, p. 370, editorial translation).

⁴We put the term in quotation marks, which belongs to the language in which anarchist thought of the 19th century was properly expressed, since today it is used in a distorted and factious way. Later we will see that such trickery abounds in the extreme right’s rhetoric, whose concept of freedom is neither universal nor aspires to the suppression of government and law, as the old anarchists defended. In the legal field, latter-day libertarians want to establish or, where appropriate, eternalize the “guaranteeism of inequality and privilege.” (Ferrajoli, 2024, p. 10).

Regarding the collectivist anarchism (or libertarian communism) of the pair of thinkers with whom the expression ‘libertarian’ is associated in the history of political ideas, see Bakunin (n.d., pp. 15-66) and Kropotkin (n.d., pp. 62-74).

⁵Primitivism, in criminal law, is not synonymous with remote times. The qualification is cultural rather than chronological. Therefore, the primitive can be contemporary, and the past, in turn, can offer stages of high cultural refinement. This phenomenon allows us to account for penal survivals, where fossilized customs from bygone ages are reproduced today, such as aberrant forms of imputation, collective responsibility, and punishment for the mere harm caused (or supposed). See Alimena (1915, pp. 104-108).

⁶In the sentimental structure of the human being, hatred, a primary emotion, can only be experienced by someone who resembles us in some way, and it will grow to the extent that this person or their acts are more equivalent to us. Instead, if something is alien, unusual, or strange to us, we might fear it and crush it or exterminate it, as is done with pests and vermin, but not hate it, nor even despise it or diminish its importance. See Mira y López (1954, pp. 124 and 145).

⁷The slogan Buttiamo via la chiave! (Let’s throw the key away) is pushed even further. It is a deceitful phrase, since crime figures are comparatively low, but it exposes the prevailing mentality in present-day Fascist Italy. A critique of its complete lack of empirical foundation, in Bortolato and Vigna (2020).

⁸It is striking that the novel Chilean Ministry of Public Security, created by Law number 21.730, of February 5, 2025, which is tasked with crime prevention, must also deal with preventing “incivilities,” in other words, offenses against civility or rudeness that the legal diction functionally assimilates to the reduction of the risk of violent or criminal acts (art. 20).

⁹Although it sounds like a contradictio in terminis, there are organizations that claim to be democratic but only recognize one party or annul circumstantially minority parties, which may forget about ever reaching a majority. The latest offspring of populist democracies bears the strange name of “illiberal democracy”, a democracy without democracy (Bobbio, 2024, p. 246).

¹⁰It is no coincidence that the Hungarian government successfully proposed to the Budapest Parliament in April 2025 the denunciation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, claiming that the country signed it but did not ratify it. In international law, a legally formalized treaty is denounced, and this was not the case for Hungary. The real reason was that for the current Hungarian government, the court had lost respectability and seriousness, as it ordered the arrest of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense of Israel due to the war in Gaza. See Versek (2025). The United States of America also signed, but did not confirm, the Rome Statute. An executive order from the federal government in January 2025 withdrew the country from an entity it helped found, the World Health Organization. In both situations, national majorities that are minorities in the European Union (Hungary) and the United Nations (North America) have decided.

¹¹Anticipating by thirty years the democratic decline of parliamentary regimes, Francesco Palazzo (1994) pointed out the following: “In its specific meaning as a limit on the regulatory acts of the Executive Power in favor of the legislative source, the reservation of law presupposes the possibility not only of formally distinguishing acts emanating from the Legislative Power from those emanating from the Executive Power, but, above all, of substantially differentiating the political forces that are protagonists or somehow active in the process of forming the legislative will, regarding the political forces operating in the executive sphere. In effect, if an identity were established between the two, the ratio of the reservation of law would lose much of its meaning” (p. 67; editorial translation).

¹²“The maximum expression of inequality is represented by special jurisdictions, courts of exception, and extraordinary commissions” (Jiménez de Asúa, 1950, p. 1306; editorial translation). Recently, an episode of legal-penal archaeology, the secret court, has revived, like the Vehmgericht, which sowed terror in late Middle Ages Germany and whose members were hooded. Modern technology makes it possible to do more than just mask the judge, keeping their identity hidden behind a veiled screen, without their name even appearing in the record of the hearings. Article 226 “Y” of the Chilean Code of Criminal Procedure is part of this dehumanization of justice and objectification of the defendant. On the “Holy Vehm,” see Hütter (1793) and Pichon (1971, pp. 130-132). A devastating critique of the modern “faceless judges” in de Rivacoba y Rivacoba (1994, pp. 19-20).

¹³The Decree-Law number 48, of April 11, 2025, imposed by the government on the Italian Parliament, modified the Penal Code to punish the blocking of streets or railways with one’s own body (an aggravated act if carried out by a “gathering of people”), damages (also aggravated) to movable or immovable property intended for the exercise of public functions that are committed “with the purpose of injuring the honor, prestige, or decorum of the institution to which the property belongs,” and participating in a prison riot or even passively disobeying the orders of prison agents. This last became a criminal offense for “indocile” immigrants during their stay in “reception centers.” See Risicato (2025, pp. 482 and 485-489).

In Chile, we already knew about the matter due to the reforms that followed the social protest of the spring of 2019, when the legal order, already badly battered by modifications in recent decades, plummeted in free fall toward the chasms of authoritarianism.

Let us consider the crime of Article 268 septies, introduced into the Code by Law number 21.208, of January 30, 2020. It punishes whoever “completely” interrupts the movement of persons or vehicles on public roads. Experience would show that the adverb shields powerful trade associations, not the poor devils who invade the streets. Laws 21.494, of November 16, 2022; 21.555, of April 10, 2023; and 21.594, of September 8, 2023, shattered the escape of detainees, whose guiding scheme read, like any civilized code, to extract from a detention center or allow the exit of a detainee. And so, it became a crime to enter, or rather, to introduce things there. Article 304 bis punishes whoever “should enter, attempt, or allow to enter [sic] by any means into a penitentiary establishment intercoms, telephones, parts thereof, telephone chips, or other technological elements that allow communicating with the outside” (ingresar [to enter] in Spanish means to go into a place, an action predicated of a man, because things do not “enter” by themselves). The prisoner who, without authorization, should have these things in his possession also commits a crime (Art. 304 ter: penalty, up to five! Years of supplementary imprisonment), even if the fact does not amount to a preparatory act of a true crime.

¹⁴“Values are not only independent of valuable things, but are also positively the condition for them. They are that by which things—in the broadest sense, objects and real objective situations of all kinds—have the character of “goods,” that is, by which they are valuable. This assertion can be translated into Kantian terms: values—insofar as they refer to objective relations—are “conditions of possibility” of goods” (Hartmann, 2011, p. 160; editorial translation).

¹⁵“Only that which is valuable should be, and everything that is valuable must be” (García Máynez, 1990, p. 45). The thought that every duty is founded on a value, not the other way around, because value in no way consists of something being owed, belongs to Max Scheler (2001, pp. 271 and 272).

¹⁶On the problem of the protected legal interest in this crime, see Gajardo (2020, pp. 95-104).

¹⁷Authoritarianism has learned from its extreme variant, totalitarianism, the desire to punish the rebellious will against the legal order. Hence, “the unsuitable act must also be incriminated, that every crime must be considered consummated already at the moment of the attempt, that all efforts to distinguish the preparatory act from the executive act are futile efforts: every act is sufficient reason for punishability” and, in general, that “the defense front against crime is placed in more advanced positions” (Bettiol, 1995, p. 75; editorial translation).

¹⁸A nebulous concept, suitable for the criminal law of the Old Regime, an excrescence in a mature democracy. See Schröder et al. (2016) and, above all, Salvadori (2016).

¹⁹Today, some legal doctrine wishes to rename plurisubjective crimes with the confusing name of “status” crimes. It is asserted that these crimes would externalize a subjective dangerousness capable of destabilizing society, due to which the punishment acts as a reaction that communicatively nullifies it. See Pastor (2005, pp. 61-66).

²⁰The Legislative Decree number 92, “On Security,” of May 28, 2008, added to the Italian Penal Code, as a common aggravating circumstance, that the perpetrator had committed the act while illegally present in the country’s territory. The Constitutional Court declared the circumstance illegitimate in June 2010. Even so, another legal provision punishes the irregular entry and stay of a foreigner with a conspicuous fine, whose foreseeable non-payment is substituted by expulsion. Such offenses proliferate in the European Union. See Risicato (2019, pp. 25-26 and 32-33).

²¹The Decree-Law number 1094, of June 19, 1975, which was the statute for foreigners in Chile during the military tyranny, punished the foreigner who entered the country or attempted to leave it clandestinely with a custodial sentence of up to five years, after which they were to be expelled. A bill currently being processed in Parliament seeks to reintroduce the offense and tighten precautionary measures against undocumented immigrants. See Girao (2024, pp. 22-24). Judging by the prevailing winds, the domicile of the irregular immigrant, whether or not they have committed a crime, will be jail or the administrative concentration camp, a reality in the United States of America, El Salvador, Italy, Hungary, and Albania.

²²In Chile, we have notable specimens. Recall the spirit printed in the privileged defenses (Article 10, section 6, of the Penal Code) and the crime of unlawful constraints (Article 150 D) by Law number 21,560, of April 10, 2023. These are serious initiatives, which have not received all the doctrinal attention they would require. See Torres (2023) and Medina (2023).

²³“The ignominious aspect of this authority—which is noticed by few because its attributions rarely justify the most brutal interventions but can operate with all the greater blindness in the most defenseless sectors—consists in that in it the division between violence that founds and violence that conserves the law has been suppressed. If the former is required to show its titles of victory, the latter is subjected to the limitation of not having to propose new ends. The police are emancipated from both conditions [...] The assertion that the ends of police power are always identical or connected with those of remaining law is profoundly false” (Benjamin, 2006, pp. 182-183; editorial translation).

²⁴A penal law is inhuman, according to Zaffaroni (2020, pp. 157-162). However, as long as personality and otherness are constitutive elements of the logical-abstract concept of Law, such legal systems constitute an inhuman negation of Law, “a dictate of force and an act of imposition” (de Rivacoba y Rivacoba, 1995, pp. 208; editorial translation).

²⁵Liberty, the counterpart of fear, is “the emotion of the possible. Because to free oneself is equivalent to abandoning security, to facing risks” (Delumeau, 2002, p. 33; editorial translation).

²⁶Which should not be confused with the closed commercial state of Fichte (1991), a philosopher who was suspicious that in a State everything would be fixed by itself and everyone would find a job to feed their family in the game of supply and demand, in circumstances that “no one is guaranteed in the slightest the persistence of their situation by the persistence of their work, since men want to be completely free to annihilate each other” (p. 93; editorial translation). What we call the closed national State in the text can be indistinctly opened or closed to commerce. Its essence is not economic but political, in the sense of who holds and against whom the power of domination is applied.

²⁷But, the author adds, “In the long run, low intensity is more effective, without being exclusive either, but in fact complementary to the use of high intensity in armed conflict, police repression, or the combination of legality and the use of force.”

²⁸Note that antipathy towards democracy is not the sole domain of the far right. It is shared with the radical right, if it is true that its acceptance of the rules of the democratic game excludes the rights of minorities, the rule of law, and the separation of powers. See Mudde (2021, p. 25).

²⁹Mudde (2021, pp. 154-155).

³⁰The prototype of the phenomenon is Hungary under the Hungarian Civic Union. After winning the 2010 elections through an electoral system that allowed it an overrepresentation in Parliament, the party modified the quorums required for constitutional reforms with the aim of enacting a new Constitution thanks to the narrow majority it already possessed. The new document (2011), tailored to its needs, reduced the independence of the Judiciary and the powers of the constitutional court, enshrined intolerance towards homosexuality as the basis of society, and enabled electoral legislation that corners dissidents. The regime defines itself as an illiberal democracy, a democracy without minorities that has replaced the rule of law with the honor of the nation. It is not surprising that young people are leaving the country, nor that it has become the most corrupt and impoverished country in the European Union, with a ruined social security system and low life expectancy for its inhabitants. See Bárd (2021, pp. 51 and 53-55) and the report by Hammerschmid (2024).

³¹The Hungarian government has been very active in schools. It forced teachers to affiliate with a centralized body, which requires them to “serve the interests of the nation” and indoctrinates children in the “glorious mythical past of Hungary.” It is an ideology in which “culture, civilization, and art, products of the intellectual life it defends, only come from the members of the chosen nation” (Stanley, 2019, p. 54; editorial translation). See also Hammerschmid (2024). The intervention in the authorities, faculty, students, curricula, and libraries of schools and universities by far-right governors in the United States of America is causing real devastation in recent times, including the ostracism and banishment of dissident faculty. See Stanley (2025, pp. 109-149).

³²The examples are fresh in memory. Seditious calls addressed to “real Americans” or “Brazilian patriots” ended in failed attempts at institutional breakdown in Washington and Brasília. The instigators had different fates. One, after regaining power, immediately approved the pardon of the main rebels. The other, who lost it, was tried and convicted with his accomplices for a coup d’état. The decree of the North American federal government dates from January 20, 2025. It states that it “ends a grave national injustice committed against the American people over the past four years and begins a process of national reconciliation” (we translate the passage from the White House website, like others consulted later). A pardon in reverse, like the inverted amnesties of the Ibero-American dictatorships, for which the principle of equality before the law also did not apply. See Rivacoba y Rivacoba (1995, p. 210). Batista and Borges (2023, pp. 903–101) dogmatically deal with the crime of attempted coup d’état and its perpetration on January 8, 2023, in the Brazilian capital.

³³December 10, 2025, the day the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is commemorated.

³⁴A “thought of the vanquished, a vanquished thought. To decipher contemporary right-wing ideologies, it is always worth remembering that they are elaborated under the sign of defeat” (de Beauvoir, 1983, p. 15).

³⁵The legal and penal theory of the Nazi regime’s ideologue (Rosemberg, n/d, pp. 319-334). The synthesis: Law and politics are two different manifestations of the same will serving the supreme racial value (p. 321).

³⁶“In such a society, the various parts enjoy real autonomy, but the interest of each of them is subordinate to the whole” (de Benoist, 1982, p. 86).

³⁷“Order must be, should be at the heart of everyone. To be a man of order is not only to support a system aimed at the ordering of society, but to be order oneself. To decide the obligations one is willing to impose on oneself before imposing them on others, the responsibilities one is going to assume before the rights one is going to grant oneself, the renunciations one is going to consent to before the privileges one is going to enjoy” (de Benoist, 1982, p. 90; editorial translation). Behind these phrases we discern the counterfigure of the Kantian golden rule, that iron rule that considers it legitimate to do to others everything one would be willing to suffer oneself.

³⁸“There is no individual liberty without collective liberty. Political equality derives from citizenship as an essential condition, meaning belonging to the people, and not from a belief in natural equality” (Pinedo, 1986, p. 40; editorial translation).

³⁹“One can radically criticize the community one belongs to, but this criticism will inevitably arise from this very belonging. (I can hate France while being French, but it is only as a Frenchman that I can hate it)” (de Benoist, 2015b, p. 52; editorial translation).

⁴⁰“Respecting the right to difference does not mean rejecting all possibility of moral judgment about this difference—to suggest that all values are equal is to say that none are valid—but only not allowing oneself to arbitrarily universalize this judgment and imposing the necessary prudence to pronounce on it in terms of equity” (de Benoist, 2015b, p. 58, editorial translation). The mention of equity is deliberate. The author does not use the broader term justice, because justice implies equality, which he rejects in numerous passages of his works.

⁴¹“I call right-wing here, for the sake of understanding, the attitude that consists in considering the diversity of the world, and consequently the relative inequalities that it necessarily produces, as a good, and the progressive homogenization of that world, advocated and carried out by the bimillennial discourse of egalitarian ideology, as an evil. I call right-wing the doctrines that consider that the inequalities relative to existence motivate power relations whose product is historical becoming, and that estimate that history must continue; in short, that ‘life is life, that is to say, a struggle, both for nations and for men’” (Charles de Gaulle)” (de Benoist, 1982, p. 44; editorial translation) see also (p. 58). We ignore the origin of the quote from De Gaulle, which the author omits. It seems logical for a soldier who fought against the enemy who had invaded his homeland, but the political career of the famous French general does not seem to authorize invoking him in an apology for right-wing extremism.

⁴²Here we run into one of the many sophisms of the New Right: “All universalism has a lot of latent racism insofar as it sets as a norm, as a universal value, the excessive projection of a particular system of values and norms; likewise, insofar as it is based on a thought that, instead of going from the singular to the universal, on the contrary deduces the definition of every particular from an abstract conception founded a priori” (de Benoist, 2015a, p. 118; editorial translation). That is, the universalism of human rights, the ideal of ending the practice of discrimination on the basis of race, would be racist.

⁴³(de Benoist, 2015a, p. 118 cf. p. 153). Compare the statements of Pinedo (1986, p. 141) on the need to ensure the ethnic and cultural specificity of Europeans, “threatened by the strong growth of allogenes.” In truth, Europe, from the Greek wide face, is a rather heterogeneous continent from multiple perspectives, starting with its ethnic roots, languages, and cultural traditions.

⁴⁴Repeatedly and in various publications, Benoist describes it as the “main enemy” of “all those of us who work for the overcoming of the modern world.” See, among others (Benoist, 2019), particularly the Introduction and chapter I (What is Liberalism?).

⁴⁵The study of the nature of man would show that, “far from the individual being the basis of collective existence, it is rather the collectivity that constitutes the basis of individual existence, for both Darwin and Aristotle” (de Benoist, 2024, p. 37; editorial translation).

⁴⁶(de Benoist, 2024, p. 37, cfr. p. 45). We note for our part that dignity as a specific virtue of man (Pico della Mirandola), a guiding idea of humanity (Kant), or the value par excellence of Law (M. E. Mayer) possesses precisely a moral value, extremely important for liberal political theory and the legal doctrine of the Rule of Law.

⁴⁷The limitation of the sovereignty of nation-states, which became the norm of public international law since 1949, sounds exceedingly unpleasant to the New Right. To get rid of the trap and liquidate the cultural alienation of capitalist society, peoples would have to “adopt an anti-individualist ideology and strategy, through which the spaces of resistance can be disciplined and structured by a will for liberation, which can only be sovereign and political” (de Benoist and Faye, 1986, p. 424).

⁴⁸“Now that fascism [1964] is a past historical reality, it is no longer possible to maintain the same attitude. Before the idealization proper to myth, what is imposed is the separation between the positive and the negative, not with a theoretical purpose, but also with a practical function in view of a possible political struggle. The label of ‘fascist’ or ‘neo-fascist’ should therefore not be accepted outright: one should say fascist (if appropriate) in relation to what was positive in fascism and not what was negative” (Evola, n.d., p. 8). Regarding the influence of the French New Right on the currents gathered in the governing party in Italy, Serri (2025, pp. 51-60). Evola fed Benoist, and the latter seasoned the dish for the contemporary taste of Italian right-wingers. See (Urban Crespo, 2014, pp. 38-39).

⁴⁹This illogical logic must take into account that far-right politicians are people of very rudimentary education. An example of their way of understanding reductio ad absurdum is the following: if the opponent of the far-right candidate or ruler’s migratory policy argues that the reception centers proposed or already installed by him are disguised concentration camps, he will reply that the comparison dishonors the memory of those who died in Auschwitz. Associated with ignorance is bad faith if the author of the reply knows that the interlocutor is referring to para-judicial detention centers—of unpleasant memory not only in Germany, but in many places in the world, which is why they must be immediately removed from the political discussion—and, in any case, the insult consisting of accusing the other of an offense.

⁵⁰The bibliography in English is gigantic. In our language, Stanley’s (2019, pp. 61-78) is worth reading. Consult, as a direct example, the Executive Order of January 20, 2025, Defending woman from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal Government. The American president maintains that efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex represent an attack on women, because they deprive them of their dignity, security, and well-being. We must be careful not to imagine that this defense of women against women is a simple speech of charlatans, because immediately afterward the country’s attorney general is ordered to disregard the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence and not a single cent of the public treasury is to be allocated to the promotion of gender equality, not even to acquire the medications required by prisoners of a gender diverse from the “unmodifiable biological reality” of their sex (section three, letter “f”, and section four, letter “c”). Nevertheless, there is a point of charlatanry in statements of this kind, because they not only try to deceive about the facts but also hide the declarant’s purpose, misrepresenting their intention. See Frankfurt (2013, pp. 45-46). Thus, loquacity goes beyond lying and enters the domains of fraud.

⁵¹The most blatant infraction of the political practices of the United States of America has been the lies of its sitting president. They are so numerous that there are statistics on their number, content, and occasion. See Levitsky and Ziblatt (2022, pp. 230-233).

⁵²Political violence is closely linked to right-wing extremism. In Europe and the United States, far-right attacks exceed those of the far-left in number and consequences (Mudde, 2021, pp. 122-128; Barbera, 2025, pp. 406-407).53 Hungary has a penal code sanctioned in 2012. FIDESZ, the governing party, presented it as a paradigm of its severe criminal policy. There is no shortage of provisions that confirm it: lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 14 to 12 years, conservation of “social dangerousness” (a concept inherited from the communist era), very long or directly perpetual sentences, with limited or non-existent possibilities of conditional release, punishment of those who support or assist illegal immigration, etc. However, much more important are the principles and rules of the 2011 Constitution, mentioned supra, note 30. It declares admissible —other European constitutions prohibit it—life imprisonment and, furthermore, regulates as a fundamental right the self-defense against unlawful attacks on person or property. See Küpper (2020, pp. 326-328).

In October 2025, the President of the Argentine government announced at the Ezeiza Penitentiary Complex the submission of a Penal Code Bill to Congress. It contains 920 articles, which, among others, prohibit conditional release for repeat offenders and those sentenced to life imprisonment (art. 34) and determine fifty years as the maximum threshold for temporary sentences in the case of a concurrence of crimes (art. 98).

For two decades, Argentina has been swept by an avalanche of penal reforms, some of which are unconstitutional. See Zaffaroni (2025, pp. 1-4). In fact, under the guise of adequately confronting illicit associations, a state of siege not provided for by the Constitution has recently been projected by law.

⁵⁴The foundation of legitimate self-defense lies in the in extremis safeguarding of rights or legal assets, while the fulfillment of the police duty to protect third parties is based on the regular defense of objective law, which is part of the state function of realizing (establishing and defending) the law. See Posada (1928, pp. 435 and 445) and Jellinek (2000, p. 539). For this reason, the active subject of legitimate self-defense can only be a private citizen. See de Rivacoba y Rivacoba (1965, p. 254).

⁵⁵Regarding Chile, remember what was noted supra, note 22. Law 13.964, of December 24, 2019, called the “Anti-Crime Package,” added a paragraph to Article 25 of the Brazilian Penal Code that stipulates that, when the requirements for defense are met, a public security agent who repels an aggression or danger of aggression against a victim held as a hostage during the commission of a crime is also considered to be acting in legitimate self-defense. It is “the legalization of death sentences without due criminal process, disguised as legitimate self-defense” (Leal et al., 2019, p. 31).

⁵⁶The Legislative Decree number 982, of June 22, 2007, and Law number 31012, of March 28, 2020, add to the catalog of general grounds for exemption in article 20 of the Penal Code, one of which describes acting in compliance with a duty (number 8), this other, which is number 11: “The personnel of the Armed Forces and the National Police of Peru who, in compliance with their constitutional function and in the use of their weapons or other means of defense, in a manner compliant with regulations, cause injury or death”. The provision has been heavily criticized for its incompatibility with the Constitution and international treaties signed by Peru. See Chaparro and Bautista (2025, pp. 265-268).

⁵⁷A bill from Libertad Avanza seeks to reduce the age of imputability to twelve years, based not on any scientific knowledge, but on the claim that the security situation in Argentina is alarming “due to the absolute abandonment of victims by populist governments and the exorbitant protection afforded to criminals.” Since “adult crimes warrant adult penalties,” the proposed internment measure will have a maximum of ten years for children under fifteen, and twenty years if the minor was sixteen years old when committing the crime as a member of a gang. See Morabito (2024)

⁵⁸Italian Decree-Law number 48 of 2025 (cited supra, note 13), made the suspension of the execution of the sentence optional for convicted pregnant women or mothers of children under one year of age, prohibiting it if there is a risk that she will commit further crimes. Cfr. Risicato (2025, pp. 489-490). In turn, the “Anti-crime Package” of the government headed by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (see supra, note 55), increased the maximum time of sentences involving deprivation of liberty from thirty to forty years, ordered a differentiated disciplinary regime (solitary confinement) for two renewable years for the convicted person or pre-trial detainee who commits a premeditated crime or subverts the order or discipline of the prison, or who is suspected of being part of or maintaining links with a criminal association. Criminal lawyers and criminologists have denounced the unconstitutionality, inhumanity, and foolishness of such measures (de Carvalho, 2020; Ribeirao et al., 2020; de Vasconcelos and Chiari, 2025).

⁵⁹See, in particular, the order of January 24, 2025, Enforcyng the Hyde Amendment, on abortion, and the order of January 20, 2025, Restoring de death penalty and protecting the public safety. The latter states that for too long politicians and judges opposed to capital punishment have challenged and subverted the law of the country, calling it unconstitutional or pardoning the inmates. Consequently, the Order instructs the Attorney General to savagely pursue crimes punishable by death, especially if the act involves the murder of a public official or was committed by an alien resident without permission in the country (section two). It is chilling to read in section four that the Attorney General must take all necessary measures “to ensure that each state that allows capital punishment has a sufficient supply of drugs nedded to carry out lethal injection”.

⁶⁰The reasons are varied and all of great weight, from the need for such norms to be subsequently ratified by Parliament, which, if it does not happen, exposes them as unjust vexation of the subjects who had to suffer them in the interim, to the undemocratic nature of rules approved without hearing all the forces represented in Parliament. Cf. Risicato (2025, pp. 474-476).

⁶¹“It is not possible to march toward the future with depression or to let pessimism immobilize [us] [...] If San Martín had thought like some depressed and pessimistic people, he would not have crossed the Andes; nevertheless, Chile is independent, despite Cancha Rayada” (Zaffaroni, 2018; editorial translation).