In Les Lumières sombres (Gallimard, 2026; forthcoming English translation from Polity Press), Arnaud Miranda traces the genealogy of “neoreaction” — the current born at the crossroads of libertarianism and Silicon Valley that, from Curtis Yarvin to Nick Land, has set its sights on the death of democracy. Reset interviewed Dr. Miranda about the durability of his categories, his relationship to neoliberalism, his positioning within the ideological architecture of Trumpism, and his reception in Europe.
Let’s start with the title. Les Lumières sombres — the Dark Enlightenment, borrowing Nick Land’s original phrase. Why this choice? Is it a useful analytical category?
I chose this title for its concise, aestheticized quality, and because it conjures up a whole imaginary. But it’s not, in my view, the most effective analytical category. The one I defend on scientific grounds is “neoreaction,” which also has the advantage of being an indigenous term — one claimed by the actors themselves. Its first occurrence is found in Curtis Yarvin, who takes on the label of reactionary: he states that he could be described as a reactionary, an ultra-reactionary, or a neoreactionary. A journalist picked up the term in 2010, and the movement’s own figures ended up adopting it as their own.
Do you think “neoreaction” is a precise category?
Yes. It’s important to take the measure of the different traditions within right-wing thought, and in particular of a distinction that isn’t hermetic — there are borderline cases, authors who cut across categories — but that remains, heuristically, decisive: the one between conservatism and reaction. Conservatism is driven by a will to preserve and maintain political stability. It doesn’t seek to substantially change the regime or bring about a revolution, but to preserve certain moral, religious, and political values within a given framework. Reaction, by contrast, holds that it’s too late to defend those values and seeks to transform the political regime itself. In relation to democracy, the two positions diverge sharply: the conservative, even when not democratic, doesn’t necessarily want to overthrow democracy — he seeks rather to transform it, or at least to secure a certain number of values within it; the reactionary, on the other hand, wants to put it to death. In this sense, these actors are indeed reactionaries.
There are, however, new elements, which is why I take the prefix “neo” seriously. The first concerns the history of political ideas: it’s the libertarian inheritance, which doesn’t belong to the reactionary tradition. We’re not used to seeing reaction and libertarianism intertwined in this way. There are precedents, points of overlap, but the combination remains unusual. The second is the techno-accelerationist character, which goes further than the seeds of technophilia present in the reactionary tradition, in the Conservative revolution, or in fascism. In Julius Evola’s thinking, for instance, there is certainly a form of acceleration, but never as an end in itself: it’s always in the service of regeneration. Here we’re dealing with something singular — a technological acceleration willed for its own sake, valued as such, destined to transcend humanity. For Nick Land, accelerationism is acceleration for its own sake, because capitalism coincides with this technological acceleration.
Coming back, then, to Nick Land and the phrase he coined, The Dark Enlightenment, which you chose as the title of your book. Is it just an evocative image?
Not only, actually: Les Lumières sombres, “the Dark Enlightenment,” packs almost everything this current stands for into just a few words. It expresses, precisely, its relationship to modernity. This isn’t a straightforward critique of modernity, but a defense of scientific modernity — what Peter Thiel calls “the Baconian spirit”: a science aimed at the progress of humanity. What this current rejects, instead, is the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment: equality, universality, the moral project.
The Dark Enlightenment, then, is what modernity could have been without the Enlightenment — Baconian scientific modernity without Rousseau. The dark side of the Enlightenment: the one they would have wanted to have, had that emancipatory project never existed. Finally, there’s a Star Wars reference built into the phrase, and with it a nod to mass culture and geek culture. In the expression itself, we see a collision between an intellectual tradition — philosophical Enlightenment thought, a genuine body of ideas rooted in the history of ideas — and this unexpected reference to pop culture, to the world of the internet. That’s part of why the term was so well chosen and caught on the way it did: it condenses the specificity of “neoreaction” into two words.
Let’s turn to the question of continuity between “neoreaction” and neoliberalism. You argue that neoreaction represents a break with neoliberalism. I’m not entirely convinced: among others, Quinn Slobodian, in Hayek’s Bastards, has recently insisted on the continuity between neoliberalism and paleolibertarianism — one of the right-wing libertarian currents that strongly influenced neoreaction…
I think it all depends on how one defines neoliberalism. When I set these currents against liberalism, and especially against neoliberalism, I’m using a very narrow definition. I associate it with the New Public Management of the 1980s and ’90s: the project of collaboration between the state and private actors, in which the state’s role is to facilitate the emergence of markets competitive enough to be efficient.
In that sense, one absolutely cannot say that neoreaction is neoliberal, insofar as a central element of this neoliberalism is the idea of competition. Neoreactionaries, however, oppose that idea fiercely. Thiel’s conception of capitalism, as expressed in Zero to One, comes down to a single formula: he no longer believes in the capitalism of competition, but in the capitalism of monopoly. So, this is neither neoliberalism nor, for that matter, liberalism — provided liberalism is understood as grounded in the idea of competition. In Nick Land, likewise, the conception of capitalism has nothing liberal about it: it’s a Nietzschean conception, overlaid with a rather bizarre Deleuzianism — Nietzsche and Deleuze collided with capitalism. It isn’t a liberal conception of economic activity; it’s a profoundly predatory one, which makes little real sense within a liberal framework. Another example: Yarvin is a fierce critic of liberalism, and more specifically of neoliberalism, which strikes him as an aberration.
What’s the most significant difference between neoliberalism and neoreaction, then?
To draw the contrast a bit crudely: in the libertarian or post-libertarian perspective of these authors, the state should be torn down and replaced by the model of the firm; in the neoliberal perspective, by contrast, the state should allow the market to function properly and guarantee a certain form of competition. So, we have the idea of replacing the state with the model of the firm, rather than a collaboration between the two.
That said, I’m entirely open to another interpretation, such as Slobodian’s. However much these authors present themselves as libertarians eager to replace the state, they in fact benefit from it and bleed it dry exactly as neoliberals do: Thiel received Department of Defense funding for Palantir, Musk benefits from public funding for SpaceX. So, the whole question comes down to how narrowly one defines neoliberalism.
So neoreaction would like to produce, at least in theory, a new kind of restructuring of global capital. How so?
One author who’s helped me a great deal in thinking this through is the economic historian Arnaud Orain. In his book Le monde confisqué (eng. tr. The Confiscated World), he argues that capitalism, from the early modern period onward, has moved through liberal phases of competition and illiberal, antiliberal phases of predation. In his view, we’ve now entered a rather antiliberal phase, marked by the emergence of state-companies that don’t compete with one another so much as prey on one another over resources and territory. It’s no longer simply a matter of conquering market share — it’s a matter of conquering resources and territory.
One last thing, on Peter Thiel. His great critique is an antiliberal critique of liberal capitalism: the worst thing that ever happened to Silicon Valley, he essentially says, is the iPhone. The raw invention is just the smartphone, and after that every company scrambles for small slices of that huge market by creating apps that differ from one another but ultimately create no value and simply carve up fragments of the market among themselves. Through this critique, Thiel is also taking aim at a conception of technology he considers too liberal: the idea that innovation should foster the pacification of social relations and an increasingly horizontal set of relationships. In his view, that’s not the case at all. He’s deeply antiliberal — and not only in an economic sense: he’s antiliberal politically too, opposed to the idea that commerce produces peace. The idea is that it’s now time to move on to something else — a capitalism that’s no longer just a capitalism of innovation, but one that proceeds through predation and the creation of monopolies.
The predation and militarism you mentioned imply a particular relationship between Big Tech and the state. Neoreaction wants to eliminate the state, but needs the state to carry out its program. It requires a transitional phase — how is that conceived?
If I said neoreaction wants to abolish the state, I wasn’t precise enough: it isn’t neoreaction itself that wants to abolish it — it’s its libertarian inheritance, its libertarian inspiration, that tends toward wanting that. Libertarians, and anarcho-capitalists in particular, like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, want, ideally, to abolish the state. But the post-libertarian turn of the 2000s, with Curtis Yarvin and also Peter Thiel, corresponds to a realization: that anarcho-capitalist ideal of abolishing the state doesn’t work — it’s completely unrealistic. What’s at stake, then, isn’t abolishing the state or seceding from it, but overthrowing it by seizing control of it. Then, once control has been seized, changing its form so as to shrink it down to a bare minimum. It isn’t about destroying it, but about replacing how it functions: moving from a democratic, bureaucratic state to a corporate state that concerns itself only with the essentials — security and the conditions for prosperity. That’s neoreaction’s ideal today.
Then there’s the question of whether this really amounts to a coup d’état, or something more like a capture. What’s distinctive about these authors is that it’s both at once. Their conception of a coup — Yarvin states this very clearly and explicitly — isn’t that of a revolution. Quite the opposite: to believe that it’s the people who must carry out the revolution is still to think in democratic terms. In the ideal coup, the people barely notice that anything is happening at all. Their idea of a coup is elitist: a change in how the state apparatus functions, a cleansing, a reset — they sometimes speak of a “reboot,” see Yarvin. It’s about redefining the bureaucratic machine. To my mind, this is indeed a coup d’état.
Is what the second Trump administration is doing in line with this program? Yarvin himself, for that matter, has publicly been embraced as one of Trumpism’s key intellectual references…
It was the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that really brought Yarvin into the media spotlight — until then he’d been fairly unknown. Why? Because DOGE carried the idea of destroying the bureaucracy in order to bring about regime change. It wasn’t simply the old mantra of “trimming the fat off the mammoth,” as they say in France — stripping the state down to keep only the essentials — it was also laying the groundwork for a change of regime. That was built into DOGE’s outlook. Yarvin, for that matter, had spelled out exactly the procedure to follow, saying the transition needed to be entrusted to a CEO.
As for the first part of your question: I think one first has to recognize Trumpism’s many different strands. In the book, I distinguish three fairly clearly defined ideological poles. First, there’s national-populism, dominant in 2016 with Steve Bannon, the true architect of Trump’s first campaign. National-populism failed to become Trumpism’s real ideological engine, because there weren’t intellectuals persuasive enough, and above all because populism doesn’t really have an architecture: since it has to chase after the people’s desires, an ideology of this kind can’t have a solid architecture of power. Starting in the late 2010s, during Trump’s first term, a number of Trumpists — Peter Thiel among them, very active during that period — set out to think through what they called “Trumpism after Trump,” enriching it with new ideologies.
What are the other two ideological poles?
The other two poles emerge at that same moment. First, post-liberalism, put forward mainly by Catholic authors: radicalized conservatives who, in my view, crossed over into reaction, because it was no longer simply a matter of defending values, but of redefining the reading of the American Constitution in illiberal terms — that is, of privileging the religious community over individual rights. The last pole, finally, is neoreaction, with the fusion of major Silicon Valley players and Trumpism. What’s most distinctive about Trumpism today is that we’re dealing with a kind of composite coalition. There’s still that national-populist element, which remains the core of Trump’s public discourse and allows him to hold on to his electorate; then there are the radicalized religious conservatives, who genuinely want a regime change to restore religious values, community, and so on; and then there are those tech players counting on using Trumpism to their own advantage.
How does Trump manage to synthesize these different strands? Does he succeed?
Trump manages to hold all this together in a rather surprising way, precisely because he never chooses between these ideologies. He presents himself as entirely anti-ideological — either as completely mad, or as perfectly pragmatic, a deal-maker and nothing more. And he simply promises revolution; he promises to force open a breach in American history. That gives each current the incentive to climb aboard, because it’s “now or never,” and each accepts compromise with the others. But there are already cracks between these currents. That was the case with the first turbulence of the Epstein affair, in June 2025, when the national-populists felt Trump had betrayed their base by not releasing the client list, while the other ideological camps, the other intellectuals, couldn’t see at all why that affair should matter next to the political revolution underway. There has also been tension, particularly early this year, around foreign-policy interventions, which the national-populists — who are anti-interventionist — view very unfavorably, whereas neoreaction and Silicon Valley more broadly are rather in favor, for reasons of military-industrial interest no less than ideological ones: they saw the intervention in Venezuela, for instance, as excellent for American interests.
So, tensions do exist, and the biggest one — the one likely to cause the most trouble down the road — is the one pitting the religious wing against Silicon Valley: the post-liberals and national-populists on one side, neoreaction and Silicon Valley on the other. On one side, a fundamentally transhumanist, accelerationist project; on the other, rather technophobic values, invoked in the name of preserving human nature. We’re already seeing post-liberals critical of all this, and Steve Bannon has rebranded his movement Humans First, against AI. Some figures are nonetheless trying to bridge the two sides: J.D. Vance is the best example of this, and when Peter Thiel talks about the Antichrist in his lectures, that has, to my mind, only one function — translating themes that are alien to religious audiences into a language they can hear. To speak of technological acceleration to a religious person is to speak of the devil, unless the whole thing is reworked with theological concepts to suggest that one isn’t simply a master of technology, but is also very much concerned with theological questions. That, to me, is what’s at stake in this ideological coalition around Trump. And of course, it isn’t only about ideology.
Moving outside the United States: is neoreaction succeeding elsewhere in the world?
The only real case so far of these ideas being exported is Argentina: around the Milei government, and Luis Caputo in particular, there are figures drawing on neoreaction — something that isn’t happening anywhere else, as far as I know.
As for other regions and other transnational circuits, I think it would be very interesting to understand what’s happening on the Chinese side: how Chinese intellectuals, who read a great deal of American ideological output — particularly the conservative and reactionary strands — are receiving neoreaction.
Has the reception in Europe been at all significant?
For Europe, the phenomenon remained fairly marginal until 2024; since then it’s gained importance. I’ve tried to trace, particularly in France, the circulation of these ideas from the late 2000s onward. There’s a first reception, starting in the early 2010s, by engineers who spent time in the United States and translated the texts of libertarian and post-libertarian neoreactionaries into French on their own blogs, or commented on them. In France, in particular, there’s an engineer who studied in France and then worked in tech, who was already actively promoting these ideas back in 2011–2012. They then circulated in forums that presented themselves as liberal, but which actually belonged more to French libertarianism. By the late 2010s, a collective running the blog RAGE undertook a much more systematic translation of these authors: they conducted interviews with them, promoted them, and wrote texts of their own that they presented as neoreactionary. The channels of transmission remained fairly narrow — only a few thousand people followed them — it stayed very niche.
The interesting point is that these authors are, for the most part, engineers, when you look at their backgrounds, and that at first they presented themselves as liberals rather than as far-right. What interested them was above all the libertarian dimension rather than the far-right one. Even the collective I mentioned, RAGE, initially presented itself as non-reactionary; that’s since changed, because they came to see the advantage in claiming the label of far-right and reaction for themselves.
Why did the phenomenon stop being marginal from 2024 onward?
Because things changed that year, for two reasons. Sticking with France for a moment: neoreactionary authors found channels within the far right, particularly through a French influencer, Julien Rochedy, who had previously been tied to the Rassemblement National. Also, from that year on, the French far right became visibly interested in these perspectives — initially as a result of their media exposure within American far-right circles, since part of the French far right follows widely listened-to American podcasts, some of which mentioned, or occasionally hosted, neoreactionary figures. Finally, it’s worth noting that following Yarvin’s interview with the New York Times, mainstream French media — not just far-right outlets — also gave the phenomenon considerable coverage. The far right then found itself compelled to take a position on these ideas.
And what are the positions of the French far right regarding neoreaction?
I’d say there are two far rights. On one side, there’s a far right that sees it as a trap, because it’s a variant of capitalism; this anti-modern far right presents itself as anti-capitalist, in the name of preserving tradition, against neoreaction’s technophilia. Added to this is a line of argument that, out of anti-Americanism, one must oppose these ideas, since they would be a variant of American imperialism threatening French sovereignty. On the other side, there’s a much more open far right, which sees all this as an opportunity to renew its own discourse: to shift the far right’s obsession with Islam and immigration toward more positive visions of what a technophilic far-right project could look like, projected onto AI, robotics, and so on.
The best example — one I couldn’t include in the book, because I wasn’t aware of it at the time — is Yarvin’s trip to France in 2025. There he had two notable meetings: with Éric Zemmour and with Renaud Camus. Zemmour greatly admired Yarvin’s thinking, found it brilliant. When Zemmour was later interviewed by a journalist from Le Figaro about that meeting, he stated that now, whenever he’s asked about immigration, he responds only by talking about “robots and AI” — meaning it allows him to renew his discourse on those topics in line with neoreaction. With Renaud Camus, the great figure of the French far right who’s had international resonance, by contrast, there was total disagreement. The only party-level reception, if one exists, is centered more around Zemmour: in Sarah Knafo’s recent campaign for Mayor of Paris, there was a very anti-bureaucratic message — the idea that officials should stop being paid to do nothing — with a heavy emphasis on AI. She barely spoke of immigration or Islam, even though for a time that had been that political force’s core strength and doctrinal heart. So, there’s a divide here, and in France, it strikes me as fairly symptomatic.
And in Italy?
My impression is that things are a bit different in Italy, particularly because the phenomenon connects to a much more technophilic heritage than that of the traditionalist French far right. Meloni’s evolution strikes me as very interesting in this regard: an initially very enthusiastic form of Trumpism, which then gradually fades as she grasps a rather significant incompatibility — between a kind of “Trumpophilia,” for lack of a better term, and sovereigntism. A largely surface-level sovereigntism, no doubt, since it isn’t all that firm, but a sovereigntist discourse nonetheless: you can’t defend deregulation and sovereigntism at the same time — it isn’t possible. American tech companies are pushing for deregulation in Europe and for the conquest of European markets. So, in my view, this is a very complicated position to hold. There’s a major challenge here for far-right parties: managing to sort this out, to defend a European sovereignty that presupposes building up an entire industrial fabric — precisely what Trumpism, at least in its technological variant, intends to dismantle in order to take advantage of a European market that still lags behind American companies.
Cover photo: PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel speaks on the last day of the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP)
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