Vanguardism as a distinctive form of radical politics is evidence that the left–right spectrum is not actually a straight line but is shaped more like a horseshoe. Measured in one way, the extremes are far apart, but the ends also begin to converge and often exhibit a great deal of similarity. Whether they are advocates of more equality or its enemies, vanguardist cadres have articulated ideologies and forged political movements that are eerily similar to one another. A comparative study of this brand of extremist politics that accounts for its convergence is definitely needed.

Phillip Gray’s systematic analysis is a good first cut at this ambitious task: he has synthesized a vast range of material into a readable comparison of the vanguardist movements that have formed since the end of the nineteenth century. Such movements always have totalitarian aspirations, Gray argues (pp. 3–4), but many never succeed in capturing power or building totalitarian states. The focus of this study is the movement itself as the vanguard of leaders and ideologists conceive of it. Gray shows that there is a common vanguardist syndrome operating within a disparate array of revolutionary movements that have emerged since the rise of mass politics.

Gray argues that vanguardism as an ideal-type consists of six interdependent elements (p. 9). The key one is what he calls “category-based epistemology,” according to which some distinctive social group or fraction of the whole population is said to be so positioned that it can discern “the actual dynamics influencing, shaping, and (in a sense) determining the direction of History, society, and human development” (p. 12). The self-appointed vanguard of this fraction sees more clearly than the rank and file the path forward to a beneficial reconstruction of society, because this advance guard has discovered the inner workings of historical change (the second element in the syndrome) through its development of a science of seeing (the third element), making it possible to bring about a total reconstruction of social life (the fourth element) after the enemy that prevents this emancipation (the fifth element) has been vanquished by the movement that the vanguard party leads (the sixth element). Vanguardist movements vary depending on which type of disadvantaged social grouping is thought to be “epistemologically privileged”: class, nation, race, faith, or (more generically) the subaltern of the oppressed. A chapter is devoted to the analysis of each of these variations, with Leninism, Fascism, and Nazism constituting the classical forms of vanguardism that have given way in the course of time to a welter of hybrids and new species.

The book could serve as a useful undergraduate text in a course about political ideologies, but the author’s understandable hostility toward vanguardism prevents him from fully entering into the mindset of the leadership cadres that direct these movements. Each version is dissolved mechanistically into the same six elements, but that method inevitably robs these ideological families of the life force that would have made them plausible to their adherents.

To orient the reader, it might have been helpful to situate vanguardism more precisely within the larger galaxy of authoritarian ideology, past and present. A contrast is drawn with technocracy (p. 35), and vanguardism is clearly different from the divine right of kings or classical forms of paternalism and guardianship. Across its many variants, vanguardism can be described as modern, illiberal, populist, and revolutionary. It has adapted certain kinds of democratic ideas to its hierarchical purposes, but it is fundamentally hostile to pluralism and always exhibits a will to monopoly. It does not accept the philosophical legitimacy of competition.

Vanguardism, we could say, is the toxic form of identity politics. Its aspirations are always supremacist. Some part thinks (or is told) that it ought to be treated as if it were the whole. Gray describes this part as the “epistemologically privileged population,” but that seems inexact to me. In Leninist theory, for example, it is not the case that proletarians as a class can know what nobody else can know. On the contrary, Leninism (like every other form of vanguardism) is predicated on the assumption that the bulk of the identity group in whose name the vanguard claims to speak does not know what the vanguard knows, because consciousness develops unevenly within the identity group, shading off as it does into the surrounding populace. It would be more accurate to say that the vanguard is epistemologically privileged in comparison to the mass of the identity group, because it is the advance guard that claims to have figured out what the ordinary members cannot see—how it has become possible for the bottom fraction of society (the oppressed identity group) to vault to the top and why such a reversal would be beneficial from the standpoint of the whole. This self-styled vanguard has convinced itself that a particular interest is actually the universal interest, in the name of which the avant-garde then claims the further epistemological privilege of deciding who exactly belongs to the identity group it is seeking to mobilize. Lenin gets to decide who the proletarians are in whose name he exercises power, because he is the one who figured out how the proletarians could turn themselves into the ruling class when such a result would have seemed improbable to the ordinary factory worker or Russian peasant.

Recasting the first element of the syndrome in this way would eliminate the awkwardness in Gray’s analysis of some of the more recent forms of vanguardism. Religious movements like the Islamic State, for example, would never conceive of themselves as the Vanguard of God (p. 172)—because the Creator cannot be led by His creatures—but rather as the vanguard of the faithful, whose consciousness of the way out of their oppression develops unevenly. Likewise, extremist environmentalist groups do not consider themselves the Vanguard of the Earth (p. 199)— which, as a biosphere, cannot be epistemologically privileged—but rather as the vanguard of some subaltern and disaffected populace that is only latently green for want of sufficient environmental consciousness. In ascribing an epistemological privilege to the larger mass that the vanguard claims the right to guide on the basis of its own superior insight, Gray has incorrectly specified what is surely the most essential feature of the vanguardist syndrome.

That defect notwithstanding, this book offers a useful starting point for the analysis of a whole family of authoritarian ideologies that shaped the face of the twentieth century. The golden age of vanguardism has passed, it would seem, but some of its essential ideas still grip the illiberal imagination of populist movements operating on both ends of the political spectrum.