Canadian historical sociologist
Ricardo Duchesne is a Puerto Rican-born Canadian historical sociologist and was until 2019 a professor at the University of New Brunswick's Saint John campus. His main research interests are Western civilization, the rise of the West, and multiculturalism. Duchesne's views on immigration and multiculturalism are considered to be racist and white nationalist. He has denied being a racist to the mainstream press, but has described himself as being "the only academic in Canada, and possibly the Western world, who questions the ideology of diversity while advocating white identity politics."
Biographical information and career overview.
Duchesne was born in Puerto Rico. His mother, Coralie Tattersall Duchesne, was a British citizen born in Kolkata, India; his father, Juan Duchesne Landrón, was a medical doctor of Afro-Puerto Rican and French heritage. His parents met when his mother was studying at the Sorbonne; they were wed in Tangier, had three children while living in Madrid, and three more, including Ricardo, after they moved to Puerto Rico in 1956. His parents divorced in 1970 and Ricardo Duchesne's mother immigrated to Montreal, where she became active in the local cultural scene as an actress and playwright. He immigrated and joined her there in the mid-1970s when he was 15 years old. In Montreal he studied History at McGill University, and later at Concordia University under the supervision of George Rudé. In 1995, he received a doctorate in Social &amp; Political Thought at York University for his 1994 dissertation, "All Contraries Confounded: Historical Materialism and the Transition-to-Capitalism Debate", and was appointed assistant professor in the department of social science at the University of New Brunswick's Saint John (UNBSJ) campus. He took an early retirement from his position in 2019, following complaints of racism and hate speech.
Of his siblings, his older brother, Juan Ramón Duchesne Winter, has become a professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Pittsburgh with a special interest in indigenous cultures. Their sister Giselle Duchesne Winter is a Spanish-language poet and short story writer. Another sister, Rossana Duchesne Winter, is an archival researcher who investigates little-known aspects of Puerto Rican history; she has helped document the history of Duchesne family members who were notable jazz musicians, including Puerto Rican relatives who played in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. Their grandfather Rafael Duchesne Mondriguez was a significant jazz clarinetist and composer who played as a soloist with the Harlem Hellfighters, the American regimental band that introduced jazz music to Europe, as part of his military service during the First World War. After the war he returned to live in Puerto Rico where he taught music and continued to perform and compose. Ricardo Duchesne's uncle, José "Keko" Luis Duchesne Landrón, was a saxophonist and a member of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico from 1969 to 1980.
Ricardo Duchesne is married to the dance choreographer Georgia Rondos. They have two children.
Ideas.
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.
"Themes".
Duchesne's first book, "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization", published in 2011, criticizes the work of world historians such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, who he argues portray history in terms that support the egalitarian idea that all cultures are equally significant, devaluing Western civilization and its contributions in the process. Duchesne challenges historians, such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Roy Bin Wong, whose work posits Chinese economic and intellectual pre-eminence prior to 1800, and maintains that the culture of the West has always been "in a state of variance from the world" at least since classical antiquity, characterized by successive revolutions and continuous creativity in all fields of human endeavor. He traces the West's restlessness and creative spirit to what he considers to be the unique aristocratic culture of Indo-Europeans, characterized by an ethos of heroic individualism, relatively weak kinship ties, war bands bound together by voluntary oaths of loyalty and fraternity, skilled horse-riding and the use of wheeled vehicles such as chariots.
"Reception".
A number of academics and historians praised Duchesne's writing in "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization", noting in particular the breadth of scholarship demonstrated throughout the book. Martin Hewson, politics and international studies professor at the University of Regina, points to "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization" as the leading book in what he describes as a trend toward "post-multicultural history". Hewson states that "The main achievement of post-multicultural world history is to have established that there were numerous critical non-economic divergences between Europe and other regions. The West was both peculiar and inventive across many domains." David Northrup noted that "although "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization" may well upset or infuriate world historians, they have much to gain from reading it, since it presents summaries and critiques of a great many works in comparative world, European, and Asian history." However, he found the book "deliberately and openly tendentious" and, assessing how the various elements of the argument presented in the book fit together, concluded that the book's effort at “[s]tringing all of these pieces together coherently is more imaginative than persuasive". Steve Balch, Director of The Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University, said ""The Uniqueness of Western Civilization" is old-school scholarship at its best: consequential, closely reasoned, richly evidenced, and professionally courteous." Thomas D. Hall, although critical of the book in many respects and finding that it "gives a sense of pontificating from on high", concludes that "despite my stylistic critiques [it] shows a very wide range of scholarship and many deft syntheses. It is an impressive book." Eric Jones' review considered the book to excel in its analysis and critique of other scholars, while pointing out that Duchesne's "method, like that of the revisionists [whom Duchesne criticizes], owes too much to Marxist-style rhetoric". He expressed doubt concerning Duchesne’s thesis attributing the progress of the West to aristocratic competitiveness inherited from “invading, prestige-hungry Indo-European steppe nomads”, saying that “these hoary, contentious themes are really several orders of magnitude more speculative than the tracts of early modern history where Duchesne fences with the most fashionable of the revisionists." Christopher Beckwith has argued that there was never any European group that had the characteristics Duchesne attributes to such Indo-European nomads, suggesting that in this respect Duchesne's theory "simply will not stand up to careful historical analysis". Peter Turchin, while considering the book "interesting and thought-provoking", criticised it for "allowing ideology to drive the agenda" and also noting serious methodological issues that he claimed the book shared with other scholarly work in the field.
Scholars of Asian history had particular concerns about the work. Mark Elvin, a professor of Chinese history, describes "Uniqueness" in the "Canadian Journal of Sociology" as an "alpha-delta book - with some very good and some unnervingly bad components." He expresses doubt about Duchesne's theses and notes that Duchesne lacks the familiarity with non-Western history and cultures that would be needed to do the kind of comparative work that the book professes to contain. A review by Geetanjali Srikantan, a historian of India, is more critical than Elvin's, criticising his reliance on a non-representative set of secondary sources and pointing out that "non-Western theorists" are not analyzed in the text. She asserts that Duchesne fails to provide “a coherent description of Western culture”, maintaining that the connection Duchesne draws between Western predominance and the ancient “‘aristocratic warlike culture’ of the Indo-Europeans” rests on shaky ground because the definition of Western culture offered by Duchesne is so vague. She observes that the book contains factual "discrepancies that one does not expect in an academic text" and concludes that "It is clearly alarming that such scholarship has had positive reviews."
"Uniqueness" was placed on the neo-Nazi internet site "Stormfront"'s 2011 list of "books recommended for white nationalists." Kevin McDonald, an evolutionary psychologist and white supremacist known for his antisemitic conspiracy theories, wrote a 22 page review in which he praised the book as "a brilliant work written by an exceptionally wide-ranging scholar and thinker." McDonald would go on to publish much of Duchesne's subsequent work in "The Occidental Quarterly", which McDonald edits. Gerald Russello, writing in The Dorchester Review, praised "Duchesne's marshalling of enormous amounts of data and his obviously wide reading...", asserting that "His thesis about the Indo-Europeans and the differences he perceives between the West and other cultures is based on solid historical and archeological research".
In a review in the journal "The European Legacy", right-wing academic Grant Havers wrote that Duchesne "brings to his study an erudition that is matched only by Marx, Spengler, and Voegelin. Ricardo Duchesne demonstrates his mastery of anthropology, philosophy, religion, economics, and especially world history". Havers also criticised Duchesne's work for attributing the prominence of the West to an aristocratic "Nietzschian ideal of pagan greatness" and for de-emphasising the importance of Christianity, which Havers sees as the "founding faith" of the West, "whose egalitarianism in undermining aristocratic pride made the modern democratic West possible".
Subsequent work.
Duchesne has voiced vehement criticisms of political correctness, multiculturalism, and immigration. He has bemoaned what he describes as a "relentless occupation of the West by hordes of Muslims and Africans", and states that "only out of the coming chaos and violence will strong White men rise to resurrect the West." Duchesne also criticizes some conservatives for advancing the idea that Western political identity is based on universal liberal democratic values that are true for all human beings. He argues that liberalism is uniquely Western and that Western identity is also deeply connected to the ethnic character of Europeans. More recently, Duchesne has argued that civic nationalism is consistent with a strong collective sense of ethnic national identity.
In mid-2014, he created the blog "Council of European Canadians" with the stated purpose that "Canada should remain majority, not exclusively, European in its ethnic composition and cultural character [because] Canada is a nation created by individuals with an Anglo/French-European heritage, not by individuals from diverse races and cultures." Legal scholar Amy Lai describes Duchesne's twitter account as "race-obsessed", stating that "In fact, Duchesne never hides his racial politics in his social media posts, which are consistently dripping with his obsession with skin color and the superiority of the white race." Jonathan Turcotte-Summers has described him as a "race war advocate." Duchesne has denied being a racist to the mainstream press, but has nonetheless become more comfortable with white identity politics in the articles he writes for his blog. After he founded the blog, the views he expressed in it began to seep into his classroom and lectures, giving rise to complaints from students and other faculty members.
Duchesne claims, in his book "Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians" (2017), to support white identity politics, within the constitutional framework of Canadian multiculturalism. A critic of the overall philosophy of multiculturalism and of immigration to Canada, Duchesne shares with white nationalism the belief that "Euro-Canadians" should maintain both a demographic majority and dominance of Canada’s culture and public life. He has shown support for white nationalism, including by providing a positive endorsement and cover blurb for a book entitled "The White Nationalist Manifesto." He has appeared as a featured guest on various white supremacist media outlets and he spoke at a forum of the National Citizens Alliance, a fringe political party known for its advocacy of white nationalism and far-right conspiracy theories.
Duchesne’s 2017 book, "Faustian Man In A Multi-Cultural Age" (portions of which had been first published in the white nationalist magazine The Occidental Quarterly), further advanced the presence of white nationalism in Duchesne’s writing, connecting his assertions about the uniqueness of the Western spirit to theories about the genetic characteristics of European man. Whereas his first book had been published by an academic press, this one was published by Arktos Media, a frequent distributor of far-right extremist writing, described as "an obvious and committed alt-right publishing company". In the preface and first chapters of the book Duchesne describes himself as following an intellectual journey from liberal preconceptions of racial equality to explicit avowal of Western race-based identity. The first chapter credits this transformation in part to “visiting… forbidden places”, listing the names of a series of journals and websites associated with white nationalism, neo-nazism and the alt-right.
In his other 2017 book, "Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians", he argues that Canada is not a "nation of immigrants" but a nation created by Anglo and French pioneers and settlers. The