Order Out of Chaos: The Political Theology of Jordan Peterson
Keywords:
Conservatism, evolution, psychology/psychoanalysis, death of God, nihilism, materialism, rationality, biology
Abstract
Jordan Peterson has risen to prominence as a genuine public intellectual on the New Right within a North American context that (unlike Europe) generally eschews the elitism of educated intellectuals. He has tried to construct a coherent ontological system in order to rejuvenate previously dead cultural forms without recourse to unenlightened fundamentalisms. Critiquing Enlightenment rationality from a post-metaphysical perspective, Peterson seeks to ground a Darwinian materialism in an affective-drive theory of subjectivity. It is only the religious imaginary that holds the key for the renewal of the West, and which can combat the dark-black shadow of nihilism that hangs over Western civilization. Synthesizing psychoanalysis with evolutionary biology, neuroscience, religious anthropology, and existentialism, Peterson forges an ontological structure that endeavors to invert the death of God and re-establish a conservative political project upon a resurrected religious metanarrative.
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Aulén, Gustaf (2010). Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement [1931]. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Brinton, Crane (1965). The Anatomy of Revolution: Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Vintage Books.
Brooks, David (2018). “The Jordan Peterson Moment.” New York Times. January 25, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html.
Burgis, Ben (2020). “On Lobsters, Logic and the Pitfalls of Good Rhetoric.” In Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson, 209–24. Winchester: Zero Books.
Burgis, Ben, Conrad Hamilton, Matthew McManus, and Mario Trejo, eds. (2020). Mythand Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson. Winchester: Zero Books.
Freud, Sigmund (1961). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. II.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 17–52.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze). Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze. Trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Jaurès, Jean (2002). “Necessary and Admirable Decisions” [1901–1908]. In The French Revolution: Conflicting Interpretations, Fifth Edition, ed. Frank A. Kafker, James M. Laux and Darline Gay Levy, 123–29. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company.
Johnson, Dominic (2016). God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human. New York: Oxford University Press.
Johnston, Adrian (2014). Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Marchart, Oliver (2007). Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Malabou, Catherine (2013). “Postface: The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constan- cy.” In Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, 1–72. New York: Columbia University Press.
McManus, Matthew (2020). “Peterson, Classical Liberalism and Post-Modernism.” In Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson, 23–106. Winchester: Zero Books.
Mead, George Herbert (1972). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist [1934]. ed. Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Murray, Douglas (2017). The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. London: Bloomsbury Continuum.
Peterson, Jordan B. (1999). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. New York: Routledge.
Peterson, Jordan B. (2006). “Religion, Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and the Constituent Elements of Experience.” Archive for the Psychology of Religion 28: 135–80.
Peterson, Jordan B. (2007). “A Psycho-ontological Analysis of Genesis 2–6.” Archive for the Psychology of Religion 29: 87–125.
Peterson, Jordan B. (2018). 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Toronto: Penguin Random House.
Peterson, Jordan B., Caitlin M. Burton, and Jason E. Plaks (2015). “Why Do Conservatives Report Being Happier Than Liberals? The Contribution of Neuroticism.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 3.1: 89–102.
Peterson, Jordan B., Shona M. Tritt, Elizabeth Page-Gould, and Michael Inzlicht (2016). “Ideological Reactivity: Political Conservatism and Brain Responsivity to Emo- tional and Neutral Stimuli.” Emotion 16.8: 1172–85.
Plato (1997). Plato: Complete Works. ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Sim, Stuart (2000). Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History. New York: Routledge.
Smirnov, Artem (2019). “Tiomnyi intellektual: Jordan Peterson i konservatism” intellectual: Jordan Peterson and Conservatism]. Logos 29 (4): 1–30.
Stevens, Anthony (1982). Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self. New York: William Morrow & Co.
Tabak, Mehmet (2012). Dialectics of Human Nature in Marx’s Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tismaneanu, Vladimir (1998). Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tileagă, Cristian (2013). Political Psychology: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Woods, Ellen Meiksins (1998). The Retreat from Class: A New “True” Socialism [1986]. New York: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj (2006). The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Žižek, Slavoj (2009). First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. New York: Verso.
Published
2021-01-20
How to Cite
Feldmann, J. R. (2021). Order Out of Chaos: The Political Theology of Jordan Peterson. Stasis, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-21-10-2-156-180
Section
Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
