Yet today's opponents of Europe ignore the fact that their 19th-century predecessors, while amassing ample evidence of the imminent demise C Level Contact List of the West, thereby positioned themselves in a lively debate within Europe. Indeed, his intellectual C Level Contact List constructs were largely products of the European spirit. In his cultural-historical study The Icon C Level Contact List and the Ax , James Billington pointed to a "significant phenomenon" that has perennially marked Russian intellectual history: the figure of the "Western prophet who looks to Russia with his eyes searching for the realization of ideas that in the West itself they do not get the attention they deserve»3.
Throughout the nineteenth century, among these "Western prophets" were European mystics, romantics, utopians, reactionaries, and conservative Christians such as Francois-René de Chateaubriand in France, Joseph-Marie de Maistre in C Level Contact List Piedmont-Sardinia, Juan Donoso Cortés in Spain, and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel in Germany. In the course of their lively intellectual dialogue with their Russian spiritual brothers, they provided them with copious apocalyptic C Level Contact List illustrations of European decline. The dynamics of this debate were already recognized and commented on in the 1850s. «Where did (...) we get the idea or, better said, this melodramatic talk that the C Level Contact List West is a decrepit old man who has already taken everything could of life, whose life is ending, etc.?».
It was the Russian literary critic C Level Contact List Nikolai Chernyshevsky who asked this question , and he answered it himself immediately: "From those boring and silly Western books and articles, that's where we get it."4. This venerable old-fashioned intellectual exchange between Europe's 'West' and 'East' continues, amazingly, to this day. Today's "conservatives" in Russia tend to get excited about the "tyranny of minorities" in Europe, the "dictatorship of the C Level Contact List Western creed" or, more recently, the new "kingdom" of values in the European Union. However, their C Level Contact List omissions are often only pale imitations of the works of Western paleoconservatives or nouvelle droite (new right) intellectuals such as Paul Gottfried, Alain de Benoist or Guillaume Faye.