Principally influenced by thinkers of the German Conservative Revolution,[2] de Benoist is opposed to Christianity, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, neoliberalism, representative democracy, egalitarianism, and what he sees as embodying and promoting those values, namely the United States.

[8] From the age of 15, de Benoist became interested in the nationalist right; he started a career as a journalist in 1960 by writing literary pieces and pamphlets for Coston's magazine Lectures Françaises, generally in defence of the French colonial empire and the pro-colonial paramilitary organization Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS).

[10] According to philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, de Benoist possessed an intellectual curiosity that was lacking among his elder colleagues like Dominique Venner (1935–2013) or Jean Mabire (1927–2006), and the young journalist led them to discover a conceptual universe "that they could not imagine", no more than its "possible ideological exploitations".

[18] The Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) was founded in January 1968 in order to serve as a metapolitical, ethnonationalist think-tank promoting the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite.

[27][28] In the 1970s, de Benoist adapted his geopolitical view-points and went from a pro-colonial attitude towards an advocacy of Third-Worldism against capitalist America and communist Russia,[29] from the defence of the "last outposts of the West" towards anti-Americanism,[30] and from a biological to a cultural approach of the notion of alterity, an idea which he developed in his ethnopluralist theories.

[31] De Benoist's works, along with others published by the think tank, began to attract public attention in the late 1970s, when the media coined the term Nouvelle Droite to label the movement.

[39] In 1979 and 1993, two press campaigns launched in French liberal media against de Benoist damaged his public reputation and influence in France by claiming that he was in reality a "closet Fascist" or a "Nazi".

The journalists accused de Benoist of hiding his racist and anti-egalitarian beliefs in a seemingly acceptable public agenda, replacing the doomed hierarchy of races with the less suspicious concept of ethno-pluralism.

[48] Although the extent of the relationship is debated by scholars, de Benoist and the Nouvelle Droite are generally viewed as influential on the ideological and political structure of the Identitarian movement.

[49] In his early writings, de Benoist was close to pro-colonial movements and followed an ethno-biological approach of social science,[51][24] endorsing apartheid as the "last outpost of the West" at a time of "decolonization and international negrification".

[1][31] Scholars have questioned whether this evolution should be regarded as a sincere ideological detachment from the biological racism of his activist youth,[52] or rather as a meta-political strategy set up to disguise non-egalitarian ideas behind more acceptable concepts.

[1] Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus describes the key idea of de Benoist in those terms: "[T]hrough the use of meta-politics, to think the ways and means that are necessary in order for European civilization, based on the cultural values shared on the continent until the advent of globalization, to thrive and be perpetuated.

"[56] In 2000, he disavowed Guillaume Faye's "strongly racist" ideas regarding Muslims after the publication of The Colonization of Europe: Speaking Truth about Immigration and Islam.

[55] In 2006, de Benoist defined identity as a dialogical phenomenon, inspired by Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue and Ich und Du concept.

[40] He stands instead for the political autonomy of each and every group, favouring an integral federalism built on the principle of subsidiarity, which in his views would transcend the nation state and give way for both regional and Europe identities to thrive.

[55][61] De Benoist believes that knowledge of ethnic and religious traditions is a duty that must be passed on to following generations, and he has been critical of the idea of a moral imperative to cosmopolitanism.

[59] De Benoist is a critic of the primacy of individual rights, an ideology that he sees embodied in humanism, the French Revolution, and the ideas of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

While not a communist, de Benoist has been influenced by the Marxist analysis of the nature of capitalism and conflicting class interests developed by Karl Marx in Das Kapital.

[55] In 1991, the editorial staff of his magazine Eléments described the danger of adopting a "systematic anti-egalitarianism [that could] lead to social Darwinism, which might justify free-market economy".

[65] De Benoist has supported ties with Islamic culture in the 1980s,[66] on the grounds that the relationship would be distinct from what he saw as the consumerism and materialism of the American society and from the bureaucracy and repression of the Soviet Union alike.

[68] De Benoist's influences include Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Jünger, Martin Buber, Jean Baudrillard, Georges Dumézil, Ernest Renan, José Ortega y Gasset, Vilfredo Pareto, Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Arnold Gehlen, Stéphane Lupasco, Helmut Schelsky, Konrad Lorenz, the Conservative Revolutionaries including Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler, the non-conformists of the 1930s, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johannes Althusius, interwar Austro-Marxists, and communitarian philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor.

[69] Roger Griffin, using an ideal type definition of fascism, which includes "populist ultra-nationalism" and "palingenesis" (heroic rebirth), argues that the Nouvelle Droite draws on such fascist ideologues as Armin Mohler in a way that allows Nouvelle Droite ideologues like de Benoist to claim a "metapolitical" stance but which nonetheless has residual fascist ideological elements.

[72] They note that de Benoist's rejection of the French Revolution's legacy and the allegedly abstract Rights of Man ties him to the same Counter-Enlightenment right-wing tradition as counter-revolutionary Legitimists, fascists, Vichyites, and integral nationalists.