Book Review: “The Cultured Thug Handbook” by Mike Maxwell

The editor-in-chief of Imperium Press finally delivers his long awaited right-wing compendium

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Affirming the legitimacy of a genuinely rightist intellectual tradition

Ever since my earliest correspondence with Mike Maxwell, the editor-in-chief at Imperium Press, Mike had mentioned that he was working on an encyclopedia of sorts, one that would catalogue the most enduring concepts found in right-wing literature. Owing to our close collaboration (culminating in the publication of my two most recent books), I knew Maxwell to be a voracious reader of an impossibly wide ranging number of topics, as well as an excellent communicator of ideas.  As such, I eagerly awaited the moment I could get my hands on the final product. Now, almost five years later, it is finally here (and well worth the wait).

Hot on the heels of Keith Woods’ Nationalism: The Politics of Identity comes Mike Maxwell’s The Cultured Thug Handbook, a crash course of its own in rightist philosophy and vocabulary. While Maxwell’s book works towards a similar end as Woods’ (that is, to provide a robust intellectual defense of illiberal and nationalistic particularism), his approach is entirely different - though by no means less effective. Maxwell builds his defense from the ground up, and along the way, develops a sort of political dictionary before arriving at his final destination: a blueprint for his titular cultured thug.

Written in a masculine lingua franca, Maxwell understands the kind of man his cultured thug is likely to be, taking special care to neither condescend to him nor speak in terms too lofty or iridescent. Terse, unyielding, and uncomplicated, The Cultured Thug Handbook works to activate the pater familias lying dormant within his reader.  With the tone and discipline of a compassionate older brother, Maxwell walks his reader through the problems of liberal democracy, and ultimately, back to an understanding of politics that more closely resembles the ancient city than it does today’s hypermodern mass society.    

Time and time again, we hear from our opposition about how anti-intellectual we are, about how our worldview lacks a rational basis, about our lack of artistic and creative prowess, and so on.  Of course, such statements could not be further from the truth.  Our heritage has a long and thoughtful history, one which Mike Maxwell catalogs admirably.  His work elaborates the ideas of Homer, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Filmer, de Maistre, List, Nietzsche, Veblen, Spengler, and Heidegger (just to name a few).  If nothing else, The Cultured Thug Handbook is a meticulously well-researched and fastidiously cited bit of conceptual history that is sure to enlighten even the radicals among his readership.  

Let it be said, however, that The Cultured Thug Handbook is not simply a stroll through our intellectual past; it is very much up to date with the cutting edge of rightist rhetoric and theory.  In this book, Maxwell draws upon every corner of rightist political culture, from the ancients to the counter enlightenment, all the way to the modern period (citing works from the great American conservatives like Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried in equal measure to those representatives of the internet era, such as Spandrell and Mike Enoch) to make his case against the present-day liberal regime.  

Most impressive of all is Maxwell’s use of history’s greatest minds in service of better understanding Western morality and metaphysics. Mike calls upon Hegel and Schmitt to elucidate the moral themes found within the Book of Job.  He utilizes post-structuralists like Deleuze and Derrida - in conjunction with Alan Watts and W.V.O. Quine - to justify differential ontology.  Mike employs a Confucian rectification of names to dispel our political confusion by returning to a proper etymological basis for the terms so often bastardized by even the best educated of Westerners.  In The Cultured Thug Handbook, Maxwell effortlessly cuts through the fog of sophistic bullshit, rendering some of the most complicated political ideas digestible for his audience.  

Drawing upon a vast array of thinkers and works, Maxwell also manages a spirited and serious attempt at reviving something akin to a pagan morality and worldview - rediscovering, in the process, an ever present origin, as it were.  And he does it in style, too, managing to quote Team America: World Police while making frequent comparisons to popular films like The Godfather. Though his chosen subject matter is dense and serious, Mike’s prose is not.

The Cultured Thug Handbook could easily extend into a series of texts, for as comprehensive as this work is, Maxwell’s book primarily occupies itself with foundations and first principles.  I don’t doubt that his audience, upon finishing this first book, will demand a Cultured Thug Handbook, Volume 2.  

In addition to enlisting the most highly regarded thinkers of old alongside the most popular thinkers of today (including such towering figures as Curtis Yarvin, Ed Dutton, and Jean Francois Gariepy) and explaining novel concepts of the rightist corpus, The Cultured Thug Handbook fully explores the meaning behind critical dialectics which dominate contemporary discourse, like nationalism versus globalism, the HLvM, and particularism versus universalism. 

Maxwell’s book manages a synthesis of both the original works published by Imperium Press and its reprints, thereby serving as a decoder ring to Mike Maxwell’s ethos and philosophy of life. At nearly 400 pages (the e-book, that is; the paperback is nearly 500 pages long) The Cultured Thug Handbook is a serious undertaking for the politically uninitiated and the radical alike, though I can assure you it is certainly worth the effort. Show your support for Mike by subscribing to his Kultur Dads podcast here and here.  You can join his podcast network, Hearthfire by subscribing here.  And, of course, pick up a copy of The Cultured Thug Handbook from his website or at Amazon.