The chapter provides a detailed analysis of global managerialism, the core ideological content of the radical Right’s understanding of the world. In this view, the essence of contemporary world politics is not the age-old story of realist power politics, the liberal tale of progress through institutions, or the corrosive spread of neoliberal capitalism. It is instead the rise to power of a global liberal managerial elite, the so-called New Class of experts and bureaucrats. Detached and unmoored from their national identities and cultures, the interests of this elite lie in yet further globalisation and liberalisation that erodes traditional national values and local communities. This managerialist sociology provides the radical Right and its supporters with a common enemy – the global liberal elite – which may have different faces in different geographical locations, but that nevertheless facilitates powerful equivalences and transversal alliances that spans nations and regions.

This chapter explores the protean character of Christian Platonism in the Romantic Age. If the Enlightenment was frequently shaped by a critique of dogma, tradition and superstition, the Romantics were concerned with the loss of culture, the exaltation of abstract reason, and a longing for the transcendent. Platonism offered a means for revitalizing Christianity, caught between the cultured despisers of religion in the Enlightenment, and the annexation of creation to the mechanistic thought of the emergent natural sciences.

Throughout the Banims’ fiction, violence is presented as forcing a strange unity, a troubled merging of identities. If the Act of Union is a rough stitching together of nations, it is precisely with this uneven stitchwork that the Banims concern themselves, giving voice to a fragile post-Union Irish identity. Those elements of the Banims’ work that have confounded critics or irritated readers – the multiple voices, the shifting discourses, the bewildering degree of detail – might be understood as what Slavoj Žižek calls the truthfulness of their rendering of violence, truthful in their ability to induct readers into alternative ways of seeing or knowing. Violence is present not simply at the level of content but in the narrative form, pocked and scored by the collision of English and Irish languages, and the clash between written and oral cultures. Characters lacking any stable sense of self inhabit tales without clear purpose or form, but that weakness is also their strength. The problem of violence is translated into possibility, as these texts break with conventional ideas about self and word, identity and language.