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The Cultured Thug Handbook: A Guide to Radical Right-Wing Thought
The radical right is the ultimate challenge to liberalism, and the Cultured Thug is its avatar, the man who can both fight and think. Few have attempted to summarize radical right-wing thought both comprehensively and on its own terms. This book does just that.
The Cultured Thug Handbook sets out 45 key concepts in plain language. From the Deep State to Asabiyyah, from Patriarchy to the Friend–Enemy Distinction, all the major ideas are here. These are the ideas that built our world.
This book pulls no punches, and boldly asserts ideas considered taboo today, but utterly sane and normal for all of human history up until five minutes ago. It is indispensable for understanding the political right of today.
The Cultured Thug Handbook sets out 45 key concepts in plain language. From the Deep State to Asabiyyah, from Patriarchy to the Friend–Enemy Distinction, all the major ideas are here. These are the ideas that built our world.
This book pulls no punches, and boldly asserts ideas considered taboo today, but utterly sane and normal for all of human history up until five minutes ago. It is indispensable for understanding the political right of today.
453 pages, Paperback
Published November 20, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 9, 2025
The Cultured Thug Handbook: A Guide to Radical Right-Wing Thought (Imperium Press 2024) skrevs av författaren och förlagsägaren Mike Maxwell (Maxwell startade och driver det utmärkta förlaget Imperium Press).
Som titeln antyder presenterar författaren en mängd koncept och idéer från den radikala högern, dessa hämtas från ett brett historiskt spektrum som sträcker sig från Aristoelses Endoxa till Spandrells Bioleninism. Boken är utmärkt strukturerad och den består av följande tre delar:
1. Ett tiostegsprogram som demolerar liberalismens lögner.
2. Illiberala koncept.
3. De stora idéerna.
Varje kapitel är koncist, informativt, välformulerat och avslutas med några korta rader som summerar de viktigaste insikterna. Utöver detta innehåller boken en nyttig ordlista av termer och en hel del boktips för dem som vill fördjupa sig något av de 45 koncept som presenteras.
Maxwell har i den här boken en tendens att lite väl ofta understryka sin poänger med hjälp av kraftuttryck (som i våran mening skär sig med bokens ton) men vi antar att det är tematiskt korrekt med tanke på bokens titel. För oss var den absoluta majoriteten av koncepten inte något nytt men att läsa boken gav oss ändå en nyttig repetition som ofta manade till reflektion. Vi antar att målgruppen snarare är folk som är på väg högerut i sin intellektuella resa och för dem är detta säkerligen en monumental bok.
Vi ger, i vanligt ordning, författaren själv det sista ordet:
“As we near the end of our survey of radical right-wing thought, you've noticed that this thought matches up hand in glove with what the greatest thinkers of all time have always told us. The radical right owns the history of ideas, because what it stands for is just what great men have always said. You've also noticed that everyone in any position of power today regards these ideas as demonic. Every law, every moral imperative of polite society, every structural incentive has been carefully crafted to hold these things at bay and even to erase them.”
s.390
Som titeln antyder presenterar författaren en mängd koncept och idéer från den radikala högern, dessa hämtas från ett brett historiskt spektrum som sträcker sig från Aristoelses Endoxa till Spandrells Bioleninism. Boken är utmärkt strukturerad och den består av följande tre delar:
1. Ett tiostegsprogram som demolerar liberalismens lögner.
2. Illiberala koncept.
3. De stora idéerna.
Varje kapitel är koncist, informativt, välformulerat och avslutas med några korta rader som summerar de viktigaste insikterna. Utöver detta innehåller boken en nyttig ordlista av termer och en hel del boktips för dem som vill fördjupa sig något av de 45 koncept som presenteras.
Maxwell har i den här boken en tendens att lite väl ofta understryka sin poänger med hjälp av kraftuttryck (som i våran mening skär sig med bokens ton) men vi antar att det är tematiskt korrekt med tanke på bokens titel. För oss var den absoluta majoriteten av koncepten inte något nytt men att läsa boken gav oss ändå en nyttig repetition som ofta manade till reflektion. Vi antar att målgruppen snarare är folk som är på väg högerut i sin intellektuella resa och för dem är detta säkerligen en monumental bok.
Vi ger, i vanligt ordning, författaren själv det sista ordet:
“As we near the end of our survey of radical right-wing thought, you've noticed that this thought matches up hand in glove with what the greatest thinkers of all time have always told us. The radical right owns the history of ideas, because what it stands for is just what great men have always said. You've also noticed that everyone in any position of power today regards these ideas as demonic. Every law, every moral imperative of polite society, every structural incentive has been carefully crafted to hold these things at bay and even to erase them.”
s.390
November 29, 2024
A very well-structured book, not at all the pot-boiler crib-sheet for fashionable jargon I was expecting. There’s a lot more culture than thug, it has to be said, though there's some effing and blinding.
As a recovering pluralist liberal I'm going to have some thoughts.. Maxwell returns several times to the idea that self-sovereignty is impossible, and that, in the end, a single person - a King - is needed to locate authority, anything else tending towards lies and corruption:
"The sword can’t wield itself. As Filmer said, the hammer can’t build a house without the carpenter. The law can’t be sovereign, only a king can."
Is law like a hammer? I'd suggest the hammer and the carpenter are one thing, that doesn't quite know it's one thing. The carpenter part is men, and the hammer part their mutual regulation. This is how correct speech or behaviour is arranged, or the unwritten English constitution. God, Sovereignty, Congregation and Law are all one thing. Each believer, as an element of the sovereign, is able to rule over himself via the others. 'God' is in the cutout loop that hides the 'believer-as-law-taker' from the 'believer-as-law-enforcer'. Social judgement is, or should be, literally the voice of conscience.
Is that sustainable, or is a King needed to keep the thumos up and the oligarchy down? Not sure. Talk of “folk-soul” aside, is Maxwell sure? 2025 America will show us.
Maxwell's good on the bind native liberals are in. To choose or to instantiate a different way-of-being is still to act as a liberal. Or, if beginning from a pre-liberal embedded identity (in our case, a liberal one), to reject liberalism is to become liberal (this is a chapter on Heidegger.) Unless the NPC firmware-update meme is much truer than anyone can conceive, there's just no mass-concensual way out of the liberal frame. So when the neighbouring chapter is on Schmitt and the political.. ok, now I see where the thug comes in..
As a recovering pluralist liberal I'm going to have some thoughts.. Maxwell returns several times to the idea that self-sovereignty is impossible, and that, in the end, a single person - a King - is needed to locate authority, anything else tending towards lies and corruption:
"The sword can’t wield itself. As Filmer said, the hammer can’t build a house without the carpenter. The law can’t be sovereign, only a king can."
Is law like a hammer? I'd suggest the hammer and the carpenter are one thing, that doesn't quite know it's one thing. The carpenter part is men, and the hammer part their mutual regulation. This is how correct speech or behaviour is arranged, or the unwritten English constitution. God, Sovereignty, Congregation and Law are all one thing. Each believer, as an element of the sovereign, is able to rule over himself via the others. 'God' is in the cutout loop that hides the 'believer-as-law-taker' from the 'believer-as-law-enforcer'. Social judgement is, or should be, literally the voice of conscience.
Is that sustainable, or is a King needed to keep the thumos up and the oligarchy down? Not sure. Talk of “folk-soul” aside, is Maxwell sure? 2025 America will show us.
Maxwell's good on the bind native liberals are in. To choose or to instantiate a different way-of-being is still to act as a liberal. Or, if beginning from a pre-liberal embedded identity (in our case, a liberal one), to reject liberalism is to become liberal (this is a chapter on Heidegger.) Unless the NPC firmware-update meme is much truer than anyone can conceive, there's just no mass-concensual way out of the liberal frame. So when the neighbouring chapter is on Schmitt and the political.. ok, now I see where the thug comes in..
December 21, 2024
A fascinating intro to what the cover terms the thought of the "radical right". However I think a better term for the thinking in this book would be the thought of the illiberal (or preliberal) right, or the thought of the pre-French Revolution right. That is all to say, the thought of the right for almost all of history minus the last ~250 years. The radical right we are talking about is not the right of such loonies as Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, or thoughtless, inflammatory internet trolls. Rather this is the right of an array of figures such as Homer, Confucius, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Spengler, Evola, and more.
This conception of the right, at least in thinking, is far more traditionalist and elitist than the right of contemporary America. It does not think Trump is the future of a successful right wing. It is interested in monarchy, the values of the traditional family as led by a patriarch, duties and obligations, and other topics related to hierarchy. It is totally disenchanted with our current obsession with equality and mass democracy, as it sees them as the tools that our current government uses to hide its real form: an unaccountable oligarchy rooted in the administrative (deep) state.
The book starts with the fact obvious to anyone who was paying attention that during his first term, Trump was not the one with real power. This was obvious from the fact that the border wall went (largely) unbuilt, his own staff was busy undermining him, and he was under investigation for the majority of his term. Clearly, somebody else was calling the shots. Trump did not decide what is called the "Schmittian Exception", or who gets to make and break the rules.
The book then moves from here to the root of the problem: liberalism. This is not to say the modern Democrat party, but the ideology coming from figures such as Locke, Rousseau, and the Founding Fathers. This is the central hypothesis of the book. It goes on to cover other topics, notably Chesterton's Fence, bioleninism and the progressive stack or hierarchy of privilege and oppression, the Kosher sandwich and the phenomenon of the cuckservative who fails to conserve anything, and other topics that any dissatisfied conservative has likely thought about but not been able to bring into focus. All of these threads are connected back to the original problem of liberalism in one way or another.
The final section of the book covers important philosophers and thinkers of the right from thousands of years ago to today, and assigns each thinker a critical concept of the radical right, and attempts to tie them together into one coherent vision. Crucially, the author also attempts to make this vision positive rather than negative, he proposes a path forward and does not just criticize the current system we live under.
I do not agree with everything in this book, I think there are a few elements related to modern technology in particular that it fails to address. The idea of localism is very difficult in light of modern communications and the internet, as an example. However, this book is still easily deserving of 5 stars. It was able to bring many thoughts and intuitions that I had vaguely swirling into sharp relief, and it also offers a way forward for the future, away from the so called "conservative" ideas of our day that have failed to conserve anything of value over the last 100 years. Clearly a different approach is needed, and this book seems to contain some of its seeds.
This conception of the right, at least in thinking, is far more traditionalist and elitist than the right of contemporary America. It does not think Trump is the future of a successful right wing. It is interested in monarchy, the values of the traditional family as led by a patriarch, duties and obligations, and other topics related to hierarchy. It is totally disenchanted with our current obsession with equality and mass democracy, as it sees them as the tools that our current government uses to hide its real form: an unaccountable oligarchy rooted in the administrative (deep) state.
The book starts with the fact obvious to anyone who was paying attention that during his first term, Trump was not the one with real power. This was obvious from the fact that the border wall went (largely) unbuilt, his own staff was busy undermining him, and he was under investigation for the majority of his term. Clearly, somebody else was calling the shots. Trump did not decide what is called the "Schmittian Exception", or who gets to make and break the rules.
The book then moves from here to the root of the problem: liberalism. This is not to say the modern Democrat party, but the ideology coming from figures such as Locke, Rousseau, and the Founding Fathers. This is the central hypothesis of the book. It goes on to cover other topics, notably Chesterton's Fence, bioleninism and the progressive stack or hierarchy of privilege and oppression, the Kosher sandwich and the phenomenon of the cuckservative who fails to conserve anything, and other topics that any dissatisfied conservative has likely thought about but not been able to bring into focus. All of these threads are connected back to the original problem of liberalism in one way or another.
The final section of the book covers important philosophers and thinkers of the right from thousands of years ago to today, and assigns each thinker a critical concept of the radical right, and attempts to tie them together into one coherent vision. Crucially, the author also attempts to make this vision positive rather than negative, he proposes a path forward and does not just criticize the current system we live under.
I do not agree with everything in this book, I think there are a few elements related to modern technology in particular that it fails to address. The idea of localism is very difficult in light of modern communications and the internet, as an example. However, this book is still easily deserving of 5 stars. It was able to bring many thoughts and intuitions that I had vaguely swirling into sharp relief, and it also offers a way forward for the future, away from the so called "conservative" ideas of our day that have failed to conserve anything of value over the last 100 years. Clearly a different approach is needed, and this book seems to contain some of its seeds.
December 20, 2024
Imperium Press is one of many dissident Right publishers which have fortunately brought many great ideas stifled by modern liberal academia back into the limelight. 'The Cultured Thug' is a book written by its leader, Mike Maxwell, and serves as an excellent, easy to read primer for someone who is 'redpilled' but wants an ideological grounding for their beliefs, whether it be for debate purposes or self-affirmation. While there is much to be said about Maxwell's emphasis on what the Academic Agent would call the 'School of Race' and how he tends to let his naturalistic, Darwinian, and empirical perspectives dominate the discourse in a way that is by no means reflective of the Right as whole, any borderline dogmatism is offset by the inherent value in the truths and potentialities that the reader will encounter as he as introduced to a forbidden realm of intellectual thought, a sort of Shangri-La of ideas that the regime does not want you to think about.
The book can be cut up into three parts; an introduction which seeks to delegitimize the current liberal order, a collection of fundamental principles underlying Rightist thought, and finally an overview of many important thinkers. It is this latter part where I feel that the book betrays its true value as a launching-pad for further study. At the end, Maxwell instructs the reader to throw the book away; I feel this is a bit harsh, I can see this book being passed along from one 'initiate' to another.
The book can be cut up into three parts; an introduction which seeks to delegitimize the current liberal order, a collection of fundamental principles underlying Rightist thought, and finally an overview of many important thinkers. It is this latter part where I feel that the book betrays its true value as a launching-pad for further study. At the end, Maxwell instructs the reader to throw the book away; I feel this is a bit harsh, I can see this book being passed along from one 'initiate' to another.
May 30, 2025
Does a fantastic job of pulling together the key points of the ideas that matter, and presenting them in an accessible and colloquial manner. It’s a fun and serious book that deserves to be in every young man’s reading list!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews