Response to the reviewers
Response to the reviewers

Summary/Abstract: In the essay ‘Why I Write’ (1946), George Orwell describes writing a book ‘as a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.’ Why then do we write, Orwell asks. Orwell identifies four motives: Sheer egoism and the desire to be clever; aesthetic enthusiasm – all writing above a railway guide has some aesthetic consideration; historical impulse and the desire to set the record straight; and finally, political purpose and the desire to push the world in a certain direction. By nature, Orwell defines himself as someone in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth, someone who in a peaceful age might have written ‘ornate or merely descriptive books.’ Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, and Orwell became a master of political writing. As he puts it, ‘I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.’ Our motivation for writing this book was ‘to get a hearing’ and to draw attention to the existence of a globally interconnected radical Right and its importance for world politics and the study of International Relations. But as Orwell recognizes, no writer is wholly public spirited and anyone who has written a book hopes that it will be noticed and engaged with. To have World of the Right discussed in this Forum is thus highly rewarding and gratifying, and we are grateful to the editors and the reviewers for treating our arguments in such a careful, thoughtful and productive manner. Our times might not (or at least not yet) be quite as urgent as those that compelled Orwell, but there is little doubt that the world that we have come to know is in turmoil and rapid transformation. World of the Right does not have all the answers to the questions generated by this geopolitical moment. The world looked different when we started researching the book in 2015. President Trump’s first election victory was a vague possibility, a worst-case scenario that most pundits dismissed in favour of Hillary Clinton. BREXIT had not happened, AfD was an obscure German abbreviation, and NATO was strong transatlantic partnership. By the time we completed the book, Trump’s ‘second coming’ was looking like a foregone conclusion, numerous European countries had tacked rightwards, and global governance sounded increasingly like an old-dated moniker. Today, a few months into the Trump administration, few doubt the existence of a global radical Right, or its implications for world politics and the discipline of International Relations. As we ponder the questions and comments raised by the reviewers in this rapidly changing world, we offer a set of tentative and incomplete answers to them. We hope it is the beginning of a conversation about crucial issues that demand the attention of scholars of global politics.

• Details
• Contents