“The Current Crisis of Democracy” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 273 KB):
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De Benoist, Alain. “The Current Crisis of Democracy.” Telos Vol. 2011, No. 156 (Fall 2011), pp. 7-23. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/the_current_crisis_of_democracy-anglais.pdf >.
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“What is Sovereignty?” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 172 KB):
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De Benoist, Alain. “What is Sovereignty?” Telos, vol. 1999, no. 116 (Summer 1999), pp. 99-118. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_sovereignty.pdf >.
Note: On the topic of this essay, see also Alain de Benoist, “The First Federalist: Johannes Althusius,” Telos, vol. 200, no. 118 (Winter 2000), pp. 25-58, <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/the_first_federalist_althusius.pdf >. We would also like to mention that excellent research articles in the Spanish language on this matter of sovereignty and federalism have been collected in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 37, “Federalismo Poliárquico Neoalthusiano” (Noviembre 2012), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2012/11/elementos-n-37-federalismo-poliarquico.html >. (We have made Elementos N° 37 available for download on our site: Elementos Nº 37 – Federalismo).
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Money
By Alain de Benoist
Of course, everybody prefers to have a little bit more than a little bit less. “Money does not buy happiness, but it does contribute to happiness” — as the saying goes. We need to find out, however, what happiness means. Max Weber wrote in 1905: “A man by ‘his nature’ does not want to earn more money; he only wants to live as he is accustomed to live and earn as much as it is necessary for him.”
Numerous investigations have pointed out a relative contrast between the rising standard of living and the level of satisfaction among individuals. Past a certain threshold, having more money does not mean more happiness. In 1974, in his studies, Richard Easterlin established that the average level of satisfaction expressed by the population has remained virtually unchanged since 1945, despite spectacular increase in wealth in developed countries. (This “Easterlin paradox” has been recently confirmed.) The failure of indices to measure material growth, such as the GDP, in order to assess the level of real well-being, is also well noted — especially at the level of a given community. There is no such service for undisputed choices that would be able to compute individual preferences in terms of social preferences.
It is tempting to see money as a power tool. Unfortunately, the old project of radical separation between power and wealth (one is either rich or powerful) will continue to be a dream. Once upon a time man was wealthy because he was powerful; today he is powerful because he is wealthy. The accumulation of money has rapidly become not the means for market expansion (as some believe), but the goal for the production of commodities. Capitalism has no goal other than boundless profit and endless accumulation of money. The skill to accumulate money obviously gives discretionary power to those who have it. Speculation with money dominates global governance. Speculative banditry remains the preferred method of capitalist hoarding of wealth.
Money should not be confused with currency. The birth of currency can be explained by the development of mercantile exchange. It is only through trade exchange that objects acquire their economical dimension. And it is also through exchange that the economic value is obtained with complete objectivity, given the fact that exchanged goods must skirt the subjective side of a single actor — so that goods can be measured in terms of the relationship between different actors.
As a general equivalent, currency is intrinsically a factor of unification. Reducing all goods to one common denominator automatically makes all exchanges homogeneous. Aristotle already observed: “All things that are traded must be somehow comparable. For this purpose currency was invented, which later became, in a way, an intermediary. It is a measure of all things.” By setting up a perspective from which the most diverse things can be evaluated through single numbers, currency makes all things “equal” ; it therefore, reduces all mutually distinguishing qualities to a simple logic of “more and less.” Money is the universal standard which ensures the abstract equivalence of all commodities. As a general equivalent it reduces all quality to sheer quantity. The market value is only capable of a quantitative differentiation.
But at the same time exchange also equalizes the personalities of those who are in the “business” of trade. By showing the compatibility of their offer and their demand, it establishes the interchangeability of actors’ desires. Ultimately, any exchange leads to the interchangeability of all human beings, who thus become objects of their own desires.
The Monotheism of the Market
“The rule of money, writes Jean-Joseph Goux, is the reign of the unique measure from which all things and all human activities can be assessed…. What we observe here is the ‘monotheistic mindset’ regarding the notion of value as a general equivalent for all things. This money rationality, based on a single standard of value, is fully consistent with “theological univalence.” This can be called the rule of ‘market monotheism.’ Money, writes Marx, is as a commodity, which leads to total alienation because it produces global alienation of all other commodities.”
Money is much more than just money — and it would be a big mistake to believe that money is “neutral.” No less than science, no less than technology or language, money cannot be neutral. Twenty-three centuries ago, Aristotle observed that “human need is insatiable.” Well, “insatiable” is the right word here; there is never enough of it. And yes, because there is never enough of it, there cannot be a surplus of it either. The desire for money is a desire that can never be satisfied because it feeds on itself. Any quantity of it whatsoever must be increased to the point that better must always mean more.
The thing, of which one can always have more, one will never have enough of. That is the reason why ancient European religions continuously warned against the passion for money:
The Gullweig myth in the Norse mythology
The twilight of gods “(ragnarökr)
All these werethe consequences of the lust for money (the “Rheingold Curse“).
“We are running the risk,” Michael Winock wrote a few years ago, “of seeing money and financial success become the only standard of social prestige, the only purpose of life.” This is where we are now. Nowadays, everybody craves money all over the world. The Rightwing has been for ages its most devout servant. The institutional Left, under the guise of “realism,” espoused the principles of the market economy — that is to say, the liberal management of capital. The language of economics has become ubiquitous. Money has become an obligatory rite of passage in all forms of desires that express themselves on the trade register.
The money system, though, will not last long. Money will be destroyed by money — by hyperinflation, bankruptcy and hyper-debt. Probably, one will grasp by then that one can only be rich by what one gives to others.
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Alain de Benoist is a philosopher residing in France. His websites are: http://www.alaindebenoist.com/ and http://www.revue-elements.com/. This article was originally published in Elements, January-March, 2011
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De Benoist, Alain. “Money.” The Occidental Observer, 24 January 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/01/money/>.
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Immigration: The Reserve Army of Capital
By Alain de Benoist
Translated from French by Tom Sunic
In 1973, shortly before his death, the French President Georges Pompidou admitted to have opened the floodgates of immigration, at a request of a number of big businessmen, such as Francis Bouygues, who was eager to take advantage of docile and cheap labor devoid of class consciousness and of any tradition of social struggle. This move was meant to exert downward pressure on the wages of French workers, reduce their protesting zeal, and in addition, break up the unity of the labor movement. Big bosses, he said, “always want more.”
Forty years later nothing has changed. At a time when no political party would dare to ask for further acceleration of the pace of immigration, only big employers seem to be in favor of it — simply because it is in their interest. The only difference is that the affected economic sectors are now more numerous, going beyond the industrial sector and the hotel and catering service sector — now to include once “protected” professions, such as engineers and computer scientists.
France, as we know, starting with the 19th century, massively reached out to foreign immigrants. The immigrating population was already 800,000 in 1876, only to reach 1.2 million in 1911. French industry was the prime center of attraction for Italian and Belgian immigrants, followed by Polish, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants. “Such immigration, unskilled and non-unionized, allowed employers to evade increasing requirements pertaining to the labor law” (François-Laurent Balssa, « Un choix salarial pour les grandes entreprises » Le Spectacle du monde, Octobre, 2010).
In 1924, at the initiative of the Committee for Coalmining and big farmers from the Northeast of France, a “general agency for immigration” (Société générale d’immigration) was founded. It opened up employment bureaus in Europe, which operated as suction pumps. In 1931 there were 2.7 million foreigners in France, that is, 6.6 % of the total population. At that time France displayed the highest level of immigration in the world (515 persons on 100,000 inhabitants). “This was a handy way for a large number of big employers to exert downward pressure on wages. … From then on capitalism entered the competition of the workforce by reaching out to the reserve armies of wage earners.”
In the aftermath of World War II, immigrants began to arrive more and more frequently from Maghreb countries; first from Algeria, then from Morocco. Trucks chartered by large companies (especially in the automobile and construction industry) came by the hundreds to recruit immigrants on the spot. From 1962 to 1974, nearly two million additional immigrants arrived to France of whom 550,000 were recruited by the National Immigration Service (ONI), a state-run agency, yet controlled under the table by big business. Since then, the wave has continued to grow. François-Laurent Balssa notes that
when a workforce shortage in one sector occurs, out of the two possible choices one must either raise the salary, or one must reach out to foreign labor. Usually it was the latter option that was favored by the National Council of French Employers (CNPF) and as of 1998 by its successor, the Movement of Enterprises (MEDEF). That choice, which bears witness of the desire for short-term benefits, delayed advancement of production tools and industrial innovation. During the same period, however, as the example of Japan demonstrates, the rejection of foreign immigration and favoring of the domestic workforce enabled Japan to achieve its technological revolution, well ahead of most of its Western competitors.
Big Business and the Left; A Holy Alliance
At the beginning, immigration was a phenomenon linked to big business. It still continues to be that way. Those who clamor for always more immigration are big companies. This immigration is in accordance with the very spirit of capitalism, which aims at the erasure of borders (« laissez faire, laissez passer »).“While obeying the logic of social dumping, Balssa continues, a “low cost” labor market has thus been created with the “undocumented” and the “low-skilled,” functioning as stopgap “jack of all trades.” Thus, big business has reached its hand to the far-left, the former aiming at dismantling of the welfare state, considered to be too costly, the latter killing off the nation-state considered to be too archaic.” This is the reason why the French Communist Part (PCF) and the French Trade Union (CGT) (which have radically changed since then) had, until 1981, battled against the liberal principle of open borders, in the name of the defense of the working class interests.
For once a well-inspired Catholic liberal-conservative Philippe Nemo, only confirms these observations:
In Europe there are people in charge of the economy who dream about bringing to Europe cheap labor. Firstly, to do jobs for which the local workforce is in short supply; secondly, to exert considerable downward pressure on the wages of other workers in Europe. These lobbies, which possess all necessary means to be listened to either by their governments or by the Commission in Brussels, are, generally speaking, both in favor of immigration and Europe’s enlargement — which would considerably facilitate labor migrations. They are right from their point of view — a view of a purely economic logic […] The problem, however, is that one cannot reason about this matter in economic terms only, given that the inflow of the extra-Europe population has also severe sociological consequences. If these capitalists pay little attention to this problem, it is perhaps because they enjoy, by and large, economic benefits from immigration without however themselves suffering from its social setbacks. With the money earned by their companies, whose profitability is ensured in this manner, they can reside in handsome neighborhoods, leaving their less fortunate compatriots to cope on their own with alien population in poor suburban areas. (Philippe Nemo, Le Temps d’y penser, 2010)
According to official figures, immigrants living in regular households account for 5 million people, which was 8% of the French population in 2008. Children of immigrants, who are direct descendants of one or two immigrants, represent 6.5 million people, which is 11% of the population. The number of illegals is estimated to be between 300,000 to 550,000. (Expulsion of illegal immigrants cost 232 million Euros annually, i.e., 12,000 euro per case). For his part, Jean-Paul Gourevitch, estimates the population of foreign origin living in France in 2009 at 7.7 people million (out of which 3.4 million are from the Maghreb and 2.4 million from sub-Saharan Africa), that is, 12.2% of the metropolitan population. In 2006, the immigrating population accounted for 17% of births in France.
France is today experiencing migrant settlements, which is a direct consequence of the family reunification policy. However, more than ever before immigrants represent the reserve army of capital.
In this sense it is amazing to observe how the networks on behalf of the “undocumented,” run by the far-left (which seems to have discovered in immigrants its “substitute proletariat”) serve the interests of big business. Criminal networks, smugglers of people and goods, big business, “human rights” activists, and under- the-table employers — all of them, by virtue of the global free market, have become cheerleaders for the abolition of frontiers.
For example, it is a revealing fact that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their books Empire and Multitude endorse “world citizenship ” when they call for the removal of borders, which must have as a first goal in developed countries the accelerated settlement of the masses of low-wage Third World workers. The fact that most migrants today owe their displacement to outsourcing, brought about by the endless logic of the global market, and that their displacement is precisely something capitalism strives for in order to fit everybody into the market, and finally, that each territorial attachment could be a part of human motivations — does not bother these two authors at all. On the contrary, they note with satisfaction that “capital itself requires increased mobility of labor as well as continuous migration across national borders.” The world market should constitute, from their point of view, a natural framework for “world citizenship.” The market “requires a smooth space of uncoded and deterritorialized flux,” destined to serve the interests of the “masses”, because “mobility carries a price tag of capital, which means the enhanced desire for liberty.”
The trouble with such an apology of human displacement, seen as a first condition of “liberating nomadism,” is that it relies on a completely unreal outlook of the specific situation of migrants and displaced people. As Jacques Guigou and Jacques Wajnsztejn write, “Hardt and Negri delude themselves with the capacity of the immigration flows, thought to be a source for new opportunities for capital valuation, as well as the basis for opportunity enhancement for the masses. Yet, migrations signify nothing else but a process of universal competition, whereas migrating has no more emancipating value than staying at home. A ‘nomadic’ person is no more inclined to criticism or to revolt than a sedentary person.” (L’évanescence de la valeur. Une présentation critique du groupe Krisis, 2004).
“As long as people keep abandoning their families,” adds Robert Kurz, “and look for work elsewhere, even at the risk of their own lives — only to be ultimately shredded by the treadmill of capitalism — they will be less the heralds of emancipation and more the self-congratulatory agents of the postmodern West. In fact, they only represent its miserable version.” (Robert Kurz, « L’Empire et ses théoriciens », 2003).
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
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Alain de Benoist is a philosopher residing in France. The above article was first published in the quarterly Eléments, “L’immigration; armée de réserve du capital” (April-June 2011, Nr. 139).
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De Benoist, Alain. “Immigration: The Reserve Army of Capital.” The Occidental Observer, 23 August 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/08/immigration-the-reserve-army-of-capital/>. (See this essay in PDF format here: Immigration – The Reserve Army of Capital).
Note: This is one of Alain de Benoist’s most widely known articles. It was originally published in French as “Immigration, l’armée de réserve du capital” (Eléments, No. 139, April-June 2011, pp. 26-28; republished in Au bord du gouffre [Paris: Krisis, 2011]). It is available in German translation as “Pompidous Irrtum. Masseneinwanderung nach Frankreich” (Junge Freiheit, No. 16, 15 April 2011, p. 20), in Spanish translation as “Inmigración: El Ejército de Reserva del Capitalismo” (published online: Area Identitaria, 4 February 2013, <http://areaidentitaria.blogspot.com/2013/02/la-inmigracion-ejercito-de-reserva-del.html >), in Italian translation as “L’immigrazione, l’armata di riserva del capitale” (Diorama letterario, No. 303, May-June 2011, pp. 10-13), in Portuguese translation as “Imigração: o exército de reserva do capital” (published online: Legio Victrix, 21 November 2011, <http://legio-victrix.blogspot.com/2011/11/imigracao-o-exercito-de-reserva-do.html >), in Polish translation as “Imigracja: armia rezerwowa kapitalu” (published online: Nacjonalista.pl, 25 August 2011, <http://www.nacjonalista.pl/2011/08/25/alain-de-benoist-imigracja-armia-rezerwowa-kapitalu/ >), in Lithuanian translation as “Imigracija: kapitalo rezerviné armija” (published online: Nacionalistas, 21 March 2014, <http://ltnacionalistas.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/alain-de-benoist-imigracija-kapitalo-rezervine-armija/ >).
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“Confronting Globalization” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 57.4 KB):
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De Benoist, Alain. “Confronting Globalization.” Telos, Vol. 1996, No. 108, (Summer 1996). <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/confronting_globalization.pdf >.
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Democracy Revisited: The Ancients and the Moderns
by Alain de Benoist
Translated by Tomislav Sunic from the author’s book Démocratie: Le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985).
“The defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy,” wrote George Orwell.1 This does not seem to be a recent phenomenon. Guizot remarked in 1849: “So powerful is the sway of the word democracy, that no government and no party dares to live, or thinks it can, without inscribing this word on its banner.”2 This is truer today than ever before. Not everybody is a democrat, but everybody pretends to be one. There is no dictatorship that does not regard itself as a democracy. The former communist countries of Eastern Europe did not merely represent themselves as democratic, as attested by their constitutions;3 they vaunted themselves as the only real democracies, in contrast to the “formal” democracies of the West.
The near unanimity on democracy as a word, albeit not always a fact, gives the notion of democracy a moral and almost religious content, which, from the very outset, discourages further discussion. Many authors have recognized this problem. Thus, in 1939, T.S. Eliot declared: “When a word acquires a universally sacred character . . . , as has today the word democracy, I begin to wonder, whether, by all it attempts to mean, it still means anything at all.”4 Bertrand de Jouvenel was even more explicit: “The discussion on democracy, the arguments in its favor, or against it, point frequently to a degree of intellectual shallowness, because it is not quite clear what this discussion is all about.”5 Giovanni Sartori added in 1962: “In a somewhat paradoxical vein, democracy could be defined as a high-flown name for something which does not exist.”6 Julien Freund also noted, in a somewhat witty tone:
To claim to be a democrat means little, because one can be a democrat in a contradictory manner—either in the manner of the Americans or the English, or like the East European communists, Congolese, or Cubans. It is perfectly natural that under such circumstances I refuse to be a democrat, because my neighbor might be an adherent of dictatorship while invoking the word democracy.7
Thus we can see that the universal propagation of the term democracy does not contribute much to clarifying the meaning of democracy. Undoubtedly, we need to go a step further.
The first idea that needs to be dismissed—an idea still cherished by some—is that democracy is a specific product of the modern era, and that democracy corresponds to a “developed stage” in the history of political regime. 8 This does not seem to be substantiated by the facts. Democracy is neither more “modern” nor more “evolved” than other forms of governance. Governments with democratic tendencies have appeared throughout history. We note that the linear perspective used in this type of analysis can be particularly deceiving. The idea of progress, when applied to a political regime, appears devoid of meaning. If one subscribes to this type of linear reasoning, it is easy to advance the argument of the “self-evidence” of democracy, which, according to liberals, arises “spontaneously” in the realm of political affairs just as the market “spontaneously” accords with the logic of demand and supply. Jean Baechler notes:
If we accept the hypothesis that men, as an animal species(sic), aspire spontaneously to a democratic regime which promises them security, prosperity, and liberty, we must then also conclude that, the minute these requirements have been met, the democratic experience automatically emerges, without ever needing the framework of ideas.9
What exactly are these “requirements” that produce democracy, in the same manner as fire causes heat? They bear closer examination.
In contrast to the Orient, absolute despotism has always been rare in Europe. Whether in ancient Rome, or in Homer’s Iliad, Vedantic India, or among the Hittites, one can observe very early the existence of popular assemblies, both military and civilian. In Indo-European societies kings were usually elected; in fact, all ancient monarchies were first elective monarchies. Tacitus relates that among the Germans chieftains were elected on account of their valor, and kings on account of their noble birth (reges ex nobilitate duces ex virtute sumunt). In France, for instance, the crown was long both elective and hereditary. It was only with Pippin the Short that the king was chosen from within the same family, and only after Hugh Capet that the principle of primogeniture was adopted. In Scandinavia, the king was elected by a provincial assembly; that election had then to be confirmed by the other national assemblies.
Among the Germanic peoples the practice of “shielding”—or raising the new king on his soldiers’ shields—was widespread.10 The Holy Roman Emperor was also elected, and the importance of the role of the princely electors in the history of Germany should not be neglected. By and large, it was only with the beginning of the twelfth century in Europe that elective monarchy gradually gave way to hereditary monarchy. Until the French Revolution, kings ruled with the aid of parliaments which possessed considerable executive powers. In almost all European communities it was long the status of freeman that conferred political rights on the citizen. “Citizens” were constituent members of free popular communes, which among other things possessed their own municipal charters, and sovereign rulers were surrounded by councils in the decision-making process. Moreover, the influence of customary law on juridical practice was an index of popular “participation” in defining the laws. In short, it cannot be stated that Europe’s old monarchies were devoid of popular legitimacy.
The oldest parliament in the Western world, the althing, the federal assembly of Iceland, whose members gathered yearly in the inspired setting of Thingvellir, emerged as early as 930 A.D. Adam von Bremen wrote in 1076: “They have no king, only the laws.” The thing, or local parliament, designated both a location and the assembly where freemen with equal political rights convened at a fixed date in order to legislate and render justice.11 In Iceland the freeman enjoyed two inalienable privileges: he had a right to bear arms and to a seat in the thing. “The Icelanders,” writes Frederick Durand
created and experienced what one could call by some uncertain yet suggestive analogy a kind of Nordic Hellas, i.e., a community of freemen who participated actively in the affairs of the community. Those communities were surprisingly well cultivated and intellectually productive, and, in addition, were united by bonds based on esteem and respect.12
“Scandinavian democracy is very old and one can trace its origins to the Viking era,” observes Maurice Gravier. 13 In all of northern Europe this “democratic” tradition was anchored in a very strong communitarian sentiment, a propensity to “live together” (zusammenleben), which constantly fostered the primacy of the common interest over that of the individual. Such democracy, typically, included a certain hierarchical structure, which explains why one could describe it as “aristo-democracy.” This tradition, based also on the concept of mutual assistance and a sense of common responsibility, remains alive in many countries today, for instance, in Switzerland.
The belief that the people were originally the possessor of power was common throughout the Middle Ages. Whereas the clergy limited itself to the proclamation omnis potestas a Deo, other theorists argued that power could emanate from God only through the intercession of the people. The belief of the “power of divine right” should therefore be seen in an indirect form, and not excluding the reality of the people. Thus, Marsilius of Padua did not hesitate to proclaim the concept of popular sovereignty; significantly, he did so in order to defend the supremacy of the emperor (at the time, Ludwig of Bavaria) over the Church. The idea of linking the principle of the people to its leaders was further emphasized in the formula populus et proceres (the people and the nobles), which appears frequently in old texts.
Here we should recall the democratic tendencies evident in ancient Rome, 14 the republics of medieval Italy, the French and Flemish communes, the Hanseatic municipalities, and the free Swiss cantons. Let us further note the ancient boerenvrijheid (“peasants’ freedom”) that prevailed in medieval Frisian provinces and whose equivalent could be found along the North Sea, in the Low Lands, in Flanders, Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Finally, it is worth mentioning the existence of important communal movements based on free corporate structures, the function of which was to provide mutual help and to pursue economic and political goals. Sometimes these movements clashed with king and Church, which were supported by the burgeoning bourgeoisie. At other times, however, communal movements backed the monarchy in its fight against the feudal lords, thus contributing to the rise of the mercantile bourgeoisie.15
In reality, most political regimes throughout history can be qualified as mixed ones. “All ancient democracies,” writes François Perroux, “were governed by a de facto or de jure aristocracy, unless they were governed by a monarchical principle.” 16 According to Aristotle, Solon’s constitution was oligarchic in terms of its Areopagus, aristocratic in terms of its magistrates, and democratic in terms of the make-up of its tribunals. It combined the advantages of each type of government. Similarly, Polybius argues that Rome was, in view of the power of its consuls, an elective monarchy; in regard to the powers of the Senate, an aristocracy; and regarding the rights of the people, a democracy. Cicero, in his De Republica, advances a similar view. Monarchy need not exclude democracy, as is shown by the example of contemporary constitutional and parliamentary monarchies today. After all, it was the French monarchy in 1789 that convoked the Estates-General. “[D]emocracy, taken in the broad sense, admits of various forms,” observed Pope Pius XII, “and can be realized in monarchies as well as in republics.” 17
Let us add that the experience of modern times demonstrates that neither government nor institutions need play a decisive role in shaping social life. Comparable types of government may disguise different types of societies, whereas different governmental forms may mask identical social realities. (Western societies today have an extremely homogeneous structure even though their institutions and constitutions sometimes offer substantial differences.)
So now the task of defining democracy appears even more difficult. The etymological approach has its limits. According to its original meaning, democracy means “the power of the people.” Yet this power can be interpreted in different ways. The most reasonable approach, therefore, seems to be the historical approach—an approach that explains “genuine” democracy as first of all the political system of that ancient people that simultaneously invented the word and the fact.
The notion of democracy did not appear at all in modern political thought until the eighteenth century. Even then its mention was sporadic, frequently with a pejorative connotation. Prior to the French Revolution the most “advanced” philosophers had fantasized about mixed regimes combining the advantages of an “enlightened” monarchy and popular representation. Montesquieu acknowledged that a people could have the right to control, but not the right to rule. Not a single revolutionary constitution claimed to have been inspired by “democratic” principles. Robespierre was, indeed, a rare person for that epoch, who toward the end of his reign, explicitly mentioned democracy (which did not however contribute to the strengthening of his popularity in the years to come), a regime that he defined as a representative form of government, i.e., “a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are of their own making, do for themselves all that they can do well, and by their delegates do all that they cannot do themselves.” 18
It was in the United States that the word democracy first became widespread, notably when the notion of “republic” was contrasted to the notion of “democracy.” Its usage became current at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially with the advent of Jacksonian democracy and the subsequent establishment of the Democratic Party. The word, in turn, crossed the Atlantic again and became firmly implanted in Europe—to the profit of the constitutional debates that filled the first half of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America, the success of which was considerable, made the term a household word.
Despite numerous citations, inspired by antiquity, that adorned the philosophical and political discourse of the eighteenth century, the genuine legacy drawn from ancient democracy was at that time very weak. The philosophers seemed more enthralled with the example of Sparta than Athens. The debate “Sparta vs. Athens,” frequently distorted by bias or ignorance, pitted the partisans of authoritarian egalitarianism against the tenets of moderate liberalism. 19 Rousseau, for instance, who abominated Athens, expressed sentiments that were rigorously pro-Spartiate. In his eyes, Sparta was first and foremost the city of equals (hómoioi). By contrast, when Camille Desmoulins thundered against Sparta, it was to denounce its excessive egalitarianism. He attacked the Girondin Brissot, that pro-Lycurgian, “who has rendered his citizens equal just as a tornado renders equal all those who are about to drown.” All in all, this type of discourse remained rather shallow. The cult of antiquity was primarily maintained as a metaphor for social regeneration, as exemplified by Saint-Just’s words hurled at the Convention: “The world has been empty since the Romans; their memory can replenish it and it can augur liberty.” 20
If we wish now to continue our study of “genuine” democracy, we must once again turn to Greek democracy rather than to those regimes that the contemporary world designates by the word.
The comparison between ancient democracies and modern democracies has frequently turned into an academic exercise. 21 It is generally emphasized that the former were direct democracies, whereas the latter (due to larger areas and populations) are representative democracies. Moreover, we are frequently reminded that slaves were excluded from the Athenian democracy; consequently, the idea emerged that Athens was not so democratic, after all. These two affirmations fall somewhat short of satisfying answers.
Readied by political and social evolution during the sixth century b.c., as well as by reforms made possible by Solon, Athenian democracy entered its founding stage with the reforms of Cleisthenes, who returned from exile in 508 b.c. Firmly established from 460 b.c., it continued to thrive for the next one hundred and fifty years. Pericles, who succeeded Ephialtes in 461 b.c., gave democracy an extraordinary reputation, which did not at all prevent him from exercising, for more than thirty years, a quasi-royal authority over the city. 22
For the Greeks democracy was primarily defined 23 by its relationship to two other systems: tyranny and aristocracy. Democracy presupposed three conditions: isonomy (equality before laws); isotimy (equal rights to accede to all public offices); and isegory (liberty of expression). This was direct democracy, known also as “face to face” democracy, since all citizens were allowed to take part in the ekklesía, or Assembly. Deliberations were prepared by the boulé(Council), although in fact it was the popular assembly that made policy. The popular assembly nominated ambassadors; decided over the issue of war and peace, preparing military expeditions or bringing an end to hostilities; investigated the performance of magistrates; issued decrees; ratified laws; bestowed the rights of citizenship; and deliberated on matters of Athenian security. In short, writes Jacqueline de Romilly, “the people ruled, instead of being ruled by elected individuals.” She cites the text of the oath given by the Athenians: “I will kill whoever by word, deed, vote, or hand attempts to destroy democracy…. And should somebody else kill him I will hold him in high esteem before the gods and divine powers, as if he had killed a public enemy.” 24
Democracy in Athens meant first and foremost a community of citizens, that is, a community of people gathered in the ekklesía. Citizens were classified according to their membership in a deme—a grouping which had a territorial, social, and administrative significance. The term démos, which is of Doric origin, designates those who live in a given territory, with the territory constituting a place of origin and determining civic status. 25 To some extent démos and ethnos coincide: democracy could not be conceived in relationship to the individual, but only in the relationship to the polis, that is to say, to the city in its capacity as an organized community. Slaves were excluded from voting not because they were slaves, but because they were not citizens. We seem shocked by this today, yet, after all, which democracy has ever given voting rights to non-citizens? 26
The notions of citizenship, liberty, or equality of political rights, as well as of popular sovereignty, were intimately interrelated. The most essential element in the notion of citizenship was someone’s origin and heritage. Pericles was the “son of Xanthippus from the deme of Cholargus.” Beginning in 451 b.c., one had to be born of an Athenian mother and father in order to become a citizen. Defined by his heritage, the citizen (polítes) is opposed to idiótes, the non-citizen—a designation that quickly took on a pejorative meaning (from the notion of the rootless individual one arrived at the notion of “idiot”). Citizenship as function derived thus from the notion of citizenship as status, which was the exclusive prerogative of birth. To be a citizen meant, in the fullest sense of the word, to have a homeland, that is, to have both a homeland and a history. One is born an Athenian—one does not become one (with rare exceptions). Furthermore, the Athenian tradition discouraged mixed marriages. Political equality, established by law, flowed from common origins that sanctioned it as well. Only birth conferred individual politeía. 27
Democracy was rooted in the concept of autochthonous citizenship, which intimately linked its exercise to the origins of those who exercised it. The Athenians in the fifth century celebrated themselves as “the autochthonous people of great Athens,” and it was within that founding myth that they placed the pivot of their democracy. 28
In Greek, as well as in Latin, liberty proceeds from someone’s origin. Free man *(e)leudheros (Greek eleútheros), is primarily he who belongs to a certain “stock” (cf. in Latin the word liberi, “children”). “To be born of a good stock is to be free,” writes Emile Benveniste, “this is one and the same.” 29 Similarly, in the German language, the kinship between the words frei, “free,” and Freund, “friend,” indicates that in the beginning, liberty sanctioned mutual relationship. The Indo-European root *leudh-, from which derive simultaneously the Latin liber and the Greek eleútheros, also served to designate “people” in the sense of a national group (cf. Old Slavonic ljudú, “people”; German Leute, “people,” both of which derive from the root evoking the idea of “growth and development”).
The original meaning of the word “liberty” does not suggest at all “liberation”—in a sense of emancipation from collectivity. Instead, it implies inheritance—which alone confers liberty. Thus when the Greeks spoke of liberty, they did not have in mind the right to break away from the tutelage of the city or the right to rid themselves of the constraints to which each citizen was bound. Rather, what they had in mind was the right, but also the political capability, guaranteed by law, to participate in the life of the city, to vote in the assembly, to elect magistrates, etc. Liberty did not legitimize secession; instead, it sanctioned its very opposite: the bond which tied the person to his city. This was not liberty-autonomy, but a liberty-participation; it was not meant to reach beyond the community, but was practised solely in the framework of the polis. Liberty meant adherence. The “liberty” of an individual without heritage, i.e. of a deracinated individual, was completely devoid of any meaning.
If we therefore assume that liberty was directly linked to the notion of democracy, then it must be added that liberty meant first and foremost the liberty of the people, from which subsequently the liberty of citizens proceeds. In other words, only the liberty of the people (or of the city) can lay the foundations for the equality of political and individual rights, i.e., rights enjoyed by individuals in the capacity of citizens. Liberty presupposes independence as its first condition. Man lives in society, and therefore individual liberty cannot exist without collective liberty. Among the Greeks, individuals were free because (and in so far as) their city was free.
When Aristotle defines man as a “political animal,” as a social being, when he asserts that the city precedes the individual and that only within society can the individual achieve his potential (Politics, 1253a 19–20), he also suggests that man should not be detached from his role of citizen, a person living in the framework of an organized community, of a polis, or a civitas. Aristotle’s views stand in contrast to the concept of modern liberalism, which posits that the individual precedes society, and that man, in the capacity of a self-sufficient individual, is at once something more than just a citizen.30
Hence, in a “community of freemen,” individual interests must never prevail over common interests. “All constitutions whose objectives are common interest,” writes Aristotle, “are in accordance with absolute justice. By contrast, those whose objective is the personal interest of the governors tend to be defective.” (Politics, 1279a 17sq). In contrast to what one can see, for instance, in Euripides’ works, the city in Aeschylus’ tragedies is regularly described as a communal entity. “This sense of community,” writes Moses I. Finley, “fortified by the state religion, the myths and traditions, was the essential source of success in Athenian democracy. 31
In Greece, adds Finley, “liberty meant the rule of law and participation in the decision- making process—and not necessarily the enjoyment of inalienable rights.”32 The law is identified with the genius of the city. “To obey the law meant to be devoted with zeal to the will of the community,” observes Paul Veyne.33 As Cicero wrote, only liberty can pave the way for legality: “Legum…servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus“ (“We are the servants of the law in order that we can be free,” Oratio pro Cluentio, 53.)
In his attempt to show that liberty is the fundamental principle of democracy (Politics, VII, 1), Aristotle succeeds in de-emphasizing the factor of equality. For the Greeks equality was only one means to democracy, though it could be an important one. Political equality, however, had to emanate from citizenship, i.e., from belonging to a given people. From this it follows that members of the same people (of the same city), irrespective of their differences, shared the desire to be citizens in the same and equal manner. This equality of rights by no means reflects a belief in natural equality. The equal right of all citizens to participate in the assembly does not mean that men are by nature equal (nor that it would be preferable that they were), but rather that they derive from their common heritage a common capacity to exercise the right of suffrage, which is the privilege of citizens. As the appropriate means to this téchne, equality remains exterior to man. This process, as much as it represents the logical consequence of common heritage, is also the condition for common participation. In the eyes of the ancient Greeks it was considered natural that all citizens be associated with political life not by virtue of universal and imprescriptible rights of humans as such, but from the fact of common citizenship. In the last analysis, the crucial notion was not equality but citizenship. Greek democracy was that form of government in which each citizen saw his liberty as firmly founded on an equality that conferred on him the right to civic and political liberties.
The study of ancient democracy has elicited divergent views from contemporary authors. For some, Athenian democracy is an admirable example of civic responsibility (Francesco Nitti); for others it evokes the realm of “activist” political parties (Paul Veyne); for yet others, ancient democracy is essentially totalitarian (Giovanni Sartori). 34 In general, everybody seems to concur that the difference between ancient democracy and modern democracy is considerable. Curiously, it is modern democracy that is used as a criterion for the democratic consistency of the former. This type of reasoning sounds rather odd. As we have observed, it was only belatedly that those modern national governments today styled “democracies” came to identify themselves with this word. Consequently, after observers began inquiring into ancient democracy, and realized that it was different from modern democracy, they drew the conclusion that ancient democracy was “less democratic” than modern democracy. But, in reality, should we not proceed from the inverse type of reasoning? It must be reiterated that democracy was born in Athens in the fifth century b.c. Therefore, it is Athenian democracy (regardless of one’s judgments for or against it) that should be used as an example of a “genuine” type of democracy. Granted that contemporary democratic regimes differ from Athenian democracy, we must then assume that they differ from democracy of any kind. We can see again where this irks most of our contemporaries. Since nowadays everyone boasts of being a perfect democrat, and given the fact that Greek democracy resembles not at all those before our eyes, it is naturally the Greeks who must bear the brunt of being “less democratic”! We thus arrive at the paradox that Greek democracy, in which the people participated daily in the exercise of power, is disqualified on the grounds that it does not fit into the concept of modern democracy, in which the people, at best, participate only indirectly in political life.
There should be no doubt that ancient democracies and modern democracies are systems entirely distinct from each other. Even the parallels that have been sought between them are fallacious. They have only the name in common, since both have resulted from completely different historical processes.
Wherein does this difference lie? It would be wrong to assume that it is related to either the “direct” or “indirect” nature of the decision-making process. Each of them has a different concept of man and a different concept of the world, as well as a different vision of social bonds. The democracy of antiquity was communitarian and “holist”; modern democracy is primarily individualist. Ancient democracy defined citizenship by a man’s origins, and provided him with the opportunity to participate in the life of the city. Modern democracy organizes atomized individuals into citizens viewed through the prism of abstract egalitarianism. Ancient democracy was based on the idea of organic community; modern democracy, heir to Christianity and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, on the individual. In both cases the meaning of the words “city,” “people,” “nation,” and “liberty” are totally changed.
To argue, therefore, within this context, that Greek democracy was a direct democracy only because it encompassed a small number of citizens falls short of a satisfying answer. Direct democracy need not be associated with a limited number of citizens. It is primarily associated with the notion of a relatively homogeneous people that is conscious of what makes it a people. The effective functioning of both Greek and Icelandic democracy was the result of cultural cohesion and a clear sense of shared heritage. The closer the members of a community are to each other, the more likely they are to have common sentiments, identical values, and the same way of looking at the world, and the easier it is for them to make collective decisions without needing the help of mediators.
In contrast, having ceased to be places of collectively lived meaning, modern societies require a multitude of intermediaries. The aspirations that surface in this type of democracy spring from contradictory value systems that are no longer reconcilable with unified decisions. Ever since Benjamin Constant (De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes, 1819), we have been able to measure to what degree, under the impact of individualist and egalitarian ideologies, the notion of liberty has changed. Therefore, to return to a Greek concept of democracy does not mean nurturing a shallow hope of “face to face” social transparency. Rather, it means reappropriating, as well as adapting to the modern world, the concept of the people and community—concepts that have been eclipsed by two thousand years of egalitarianism, rationalism, and the exaltation of the rootless individual.
Notes
1. George Orwell, Selected Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), p. 149.
2. François Guizot, De la démocratie en France (Paris: Masson, 1849), p. 9.
3. Georges Burdeau observes that judging by appearances, in terms of their federal organization, the institutions of the Soviet Union are similar to those of the United States, and in terms of its governmental system the Soviet Union is similar to England. La démocratie (Paris : Seuil, 1966), p. 141.
4. T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1939).
5. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du pouvoir (Geneva : Cheval ailé‚ 1945), p. 411.
6. Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1962), p. 3.
7. “Les démocrates ombrageux,” Contrepoint (December 1976), p. 111.
8. Other authors have held exactly the opposite opinion. For Schleiermacher, democracy is a “primitive” political form in contrast to monarchy, which is thought to correspond to the demands of the modern state.
9. “Le pouvoir des idées en démocratie,”Pouvoir (May 1983), p. 145.
10. Significantly, it was with the beginning of the inquiry into the origins of the French monarchy that the nobility, under Louis XIV, began to challenge the principles of monarchy.
11. The word “thing,” which designated the parliament, derives from the Germanic word that connoted originally “everything that is gathered together.” The same word gave birth to the English “thing” (German Ding: same meaning). It seems that this word designated the assembly in which public matters, then affairs of a general nature, and finally “things” were discussed.
12. “Les fondements de l’État libre d’Icelande: trois siècles de démocratie médiévale,” in Nouvelle Ecole 25-26 (Winter 1974–75), pp. 68–73.
14. Cf. P.M. Martin, L’idée de royauté‚ … Rome. De la Rome royale au consensus républicain (Clermont-Ferrand: Adosa, 1983).
15. Here “democracy,” as in the case of peasants’ freedoms as well, already included social demands, although not “class struggle”—a concept ignored by ancient democracy. In the Middle Ages the purpose of such demands was to give voice to those who were excluded from power. But it often happened that “democracy” could be used against the people. In medieval Florence, social strife between the “popolo grosso” and the “popolo minuto” was particularly brisk. On this Francesco Nitti writes: “The reason the working classes of Florence proved lukewarm in defense of their liberty and sympathized instead with the Medicis was because they remained opposed to democracy, which they viewed as a concept of the rich bourgeoisie.” Francesco Nitti, La démocratie, vol. 1 (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1933), p. 57.)
16. This opinion is shared by the majority of students of ancient democracies. Thus, Victor Ehrenberg sees in Greek democracy a “form of enlarged aristocracy.” Victor Ehrenberg, L’état grec (Paris: Maspéro, 1976), p. 94.
17. Pius XII, 1944 Christmas Message
18. M. Robespierre, “On Political Morality,” speech to the Convention, February 5, 1794.
19. On this debate, see the essay by Luciano Guerci, “Liberta degli antichi e liberta dei moderni,” in Sparta, Atene e i `philosophes’ nella Francia del Setecento (Naples: Guido, 1979).
20. Camille Desmoulins, speech to the Convention, March 31, 1794. It is significant that contemporary democrats appear to be more inclined to favor Athens. Sparta, in contrast, is denounced for its “war-like spirit.” This change in discourse deserves a profound analysis.
21. Cf., for example, the essay by Moses Finley, Démocratie antique et démocratie moderne (Paris: Payot, 1976), which is both an erudite study and a pamphlet of great contemporary relevance. The study is prefaced by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who, among other errors, attributes to Julien Freund (see n. 7, above) positions which are exactly the very opposite of those stated in the preface.
22. To cite Thucydides: “Thanks to his untainted character, the depth of his vision, and boundless disinterestedness, Pericles exerted on Athens an incontestable influence.… Since he owed his prestige only to honest means, he did not have to truckle to popular passions.… In a word, democracy supplied the name; but in reality, it was the government of the first citizen.” (Peloponnesian War II, 65)
23. One of the best works on this topic is Jacqueline de Romilly’s essay Problèmes de la démocratie grecque (Paris: Hermann, 1975).
24. Romilly, Problèmes de la démocratie grecque.
25. The word “démos” is opposed to the word “laós,” a term employed in Greece to designate the people, but with the express meaning of “the community of warriors.”
26. In France, the right to vote was implemented only in stages. In 1791 the distinction was still made between “active citizens” and “passive citizens.” Subsequently, the electorate was expanded to include all qualified citizens able to pay a specified minimum of taxes. Although universal suffrage was proclaimed in 1848, it was limited to males until 1945.
27. On the evolution of that notion, see Jacqueline Bordes, ‘Politeia’ dans la pensée grecque jusqu’à Aristote (Paris : Belles Lettres, 1982).
28. Nicole Loraux interprets the Athenian notion of citizenship as a result of the “imaginary belonging to an autochthonous people” (Les enfants d’Athéna. Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la divison des sexes [Paris: Maspéro, 1981]). The myth of Erichthonios (or Erechtheus) explains in fact the autochthonous character and the origins of the masculine democracy, at the same time as it grafts the Athenian ideology of citizenship onto immemorial foundations.
29. Emile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vol. 1 (Paris : Minuit, 1969), p. 321.
30. On the work of Aristotle and his relationship with the Athenian constitution, see James Day and Mortimer Chambers, Aristotle, History of Athenian Democracy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1962).
31. Finley, Démocratie antique et démocratie moderne, p. 80.
32. Finley, Démocratie antique et démocratie moderne, p. 141.
33. Veyne adds: “Bourgeois liberalism organizes cruising ships in which each passenger must take care of himself as best as he can, the crew being there only to provide for the common goods and services. By contrast, the Greek city was a ship where the passengers made up the crew.” Paul Veyne, “Les Grecs ont-ils connu la démocratie?” Diogène October-December 1983, p. 9.
34. For the liberal critique of Greek democracy, see Paul Veyne, “Les Grecs ont-ils connu la démocratie?” and Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory (see n. 6 above).
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De Benoist, Alain. “Democracy Revisited: The Ancients and the Moderns.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 2003). Text retrieved from: <http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain14.html >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Democracy Revisited).
Notes: This article is a translated from Alain de Benoist’s book Démocratie: le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), which was fully translated into English as The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos, 2011).
This essay is also available in Spanish translation as “Democracia antigua y “Democracia” moderna”, published in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 41, “Una Crítica Metapolítica de la Democracia Vol. 2” (Febrero 2013), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/02/elementos-n-41-una-critica-metapolitica.html/ >.
Filed under New European Conservative
“On Identity” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 313 KB):
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De Benoist, Alain. “On Identity.” Telos, Vol. 2004, No. 128 (Summer 2004), pp. 9-64. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/on_identity.pdf >.
Note: It is recommended that “On Identity” is read side by side with “What is Racism?” for a clearer understanding of Benoist’s positions.
Additional Notes: Benoist’s “On Identity” was originally published in French as a book by the title of Nous et les autres: Problématique de l’identité (Paris: Krisis, 2007), which is available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/nous_et_les_autres.pdf >. It has also been translated into German as Wir und die Anderen (Berlin: Edition Junge Freiheit, 2008) and into Italian as “Sull’identità”, published in the anthology Identità e Comunità (Napoli: Guida, 2005).
Filed under New European Conservative
Against Nihilism: Julius Evola’s “Traditionalist” Critique of Modernity
By Thomas F. Bertonneau
With the likes of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline he translated for an Italian readership, and Jose Ortega y Gasset, Julius Evola (1898 – 1974) stands as one of the notably incisive mid-Twentieth Century critics of modernity. Like Spengler and Ortega, Evola understood himself to owe a formative debt to Friedrich Nietzsche, but more forcefully than Spengler or Ortega, Evola saw the limitations – the contradictions and inconsistencies – in Nietzsche’s thinking.
Evola differed from Spengler and Ortega in another way: like certain other Men of the Right during the same decades, he involved himself deeply in matters mystical and occult, creating a reputation during the last part of his life as an expert in such topics as Eastern religiosity, alchemy, and the vast range of esoteric doctrines. Hermann Keyserling comes to mind also, as having directed his interest to these matters. Nevertheless, Keyserling, who knew Evola’s work, avoided Evola, rather as Spengler had shied from Keyserling. It would have been in part because Evola’s occult investment struck Keyserling as more blatant and far-reaching than his own and in part because Evola appeared, in the early 1930s, to be sympathetic to Fascism and National Socialism, whereas Keyserling, like Spengler, saw these unequivocally as signs of the spreading decadence of his time and so criticized them from their beginnings.
While Evola’s transient proclivities justified Keyserling’s misgivings, swift mounting mutual distaste put actual distance between Evola and the dictatorships. Had he known, Keyserling might have warmed to Evola. By the time war broke out, the self-styled Baron had explicitly repudiated dictatorial principles. Evola, who had his own theory of race, expressed particular revulsion towards Nazi race-policy and Mussolini’s aping of it in Italy after 1938.
Evola nevertheless makes difficulties for those of conservative temperament who would appreciate his critique of modernity. He could be dismissive of Christianity, at least in its modern form, as a social religion; and like his counterparts on the Left, he despised the bourgeoisie and its values, so much so that at least one of his biographers has compared him, by no means implausibly, to Frankfurt-School types like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno. Yet Evola’s all-around prickliness belongs to his allure. Thus in a 1929 article, “Bolchevismo ed Americanismo,” Evola condemns with equal fervor Muscovite communism and American money-democracy, as representing, the both of them, the mechanization and dehumanization of life. Unlike the Marxists – and unlike the Fascists and National Socialists – Evola saw the only hope for Western Civilization as lying in a revival of what he liked to capitalize, on the one hand, as Tradition and, on the other, as Transcendence; he thus rejected all materialism and instrumentalism as crude reductions of reality for coarse minds and, so too, as symptoms of a prevailing and altogether repugnant decadence.
I. Evola scholar H. T. Hansen sets out the details of his subject’s political involvements, making a generous exculpatory case, in the article that serves as introduction to the English translation of Men among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1951). I direct readers to that article and to Evola’s own Autodifesa, which the same volume offers as an appendix to the main text, should they be interested in the particulars. Evola’s analysis of modernity interests me in what follows more than his vanishing political affinities in the Italy of his early maturity. Evola’s passionate distaste for the vulgarity of such things as democracy (that fetish of the modern world), “the social question,” and economics – which, as E. Christian Kopff points out in a recent article at the online journal Alternative Right, he regarded as “demonic” – belongs to his absolute conviction that the West has been locked in a downward-spiraling crisis of nihilism since the Eighteenth Century at the latest. The break-up of the Holy Roman Empire in the wars of religious factionalism presaged the break-up of coherent wisdom in the self-nominating Enlightenment’s war against faith. The era of the nation-state, as Evola sees it, disestablished the principle that political authority derives from a transcendent source. Evola admired what he calls the Ghibellinism of the Empire although he defends it against its modern detractors without nostalgia. One can never go back; one must deal with conditions, as they exist.
Evola seems to have conceived Men among the Ruins, its title already commenting on existing conditions, and Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul (1961) as a dual introduction to his masterwork, Revolt against the Modern World (1934).
In Men among the Ruins, Evola assesses the contemporary crisis, the “disease” and “the disorder of our age,” paradoxically: Totalitarianism, a grim trend fully abetted by eager widespread conformism, is, in effect, a type of chaos such that the maximum of illegitimate coercion exists in a society simultaneously with the maximum of riotous lawlessness; meanwhile the proliferation of dazzling technical gadgetry, in fascination with which the masses believe themselves to be participating in progress, coexists with a descent from the social and ethical refinements of medieval civilization into various resurgences of degrading primitivism. One might think of the way in which the Internet is bound up with pornography and gambling. In Evola’s scheme, the Reformation, the rise of science, and the Industrial Revolution mark stages of descent, not of ascent, in the history of viable socio-political forms. For Evola, the modern exaltation of the instrumental, the practical, and the material is tantamount not only to a petulant rejection of every “higher dimension of life” but also to a perverse embrace of “spiritual formlessness.”
Thus the degradation of the person, a term that Evola uses in a special way, belongs to a regime that achieves control, entirely for the sake of control, by encouraging the lowest appetitive urges of that desperate but useful creature, the mere numerical individual. Evola here avails himself frankly of Ortega’s category of the mass man, whose sole quality consists in his unavoidable overwhelming quantity.
Evola identifies the proximate source of these trends in “the subversion introduced in Europe by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848” although analysis could trace both outbursts to prior stages and events. In equality, the central fetish of revolutionary subversion, Evola sees a phenomenon neither natural nor properly cultural that suggests the deeply seated aversion of a reputedly liberated consciousness to the actual, graduated structure of reality. In particular, as Evola remarks, contemporary humanity has cut itself off entirely from the only context that could clarify a man’s worth for him and integrate him into a meaningful life: that concinnity of “sovereignty, authority, and legitimacy” by which “every true State” achieves “transcendence of its own principle.” More Platonist than Christian – perhaps in certain moods, as I have suggested, anti-Christian – Evola insists that the meaning of a polity consists solely in its embodying “a higher order,” through which alone its “power” derives. A traditional polity, being essentially hierarchical, will thus never adopt the face of democracy; indeed, its aristocrats will rule by “absoluteness,” in the sense that their stewardship of order, their “Imperium,” will always take direction from their spiritual participation in the same “aeterna auctoritas” that bestows intelligibility on the physical cosmos.
The social classes of the traditional polity recognize the authority embodied in their governors by its outward signs of dignity and justice proper to regal persons. Democracy represents the opposite principle to these (insofar, that is, as it can be said to represent any principle): democracy is dissolute; it liquefies all achieved structure and all justified value-subordination in its amoeba-like abolition of true differences.
One might note that a faint echo of what Evola would recognize as genuine order informs even so late a stage of modernity as the American founding, with its references to a “Creator.” Nevertheless, Evola’s assertion that the polity and its governors must make manifest a transcendent order – cosmic, divine, and paternal – lies so far from the prevailing definition of existence that even most of those calling themselves conservative must gape at it in dumb non-understanding. Modern practice has crassly inverted the traditional vision of order, orienting itself downwards to the chthonic, the animistic, and the maternal. Democracy, for Evola, belongs with this infantilizing abasement of life, as does the obsessive and vacuous notion, as he sees it, of individuality. Here too the prevailing mentality must recoil – how could anyone not advocate for the individual? Is not the sanctity of the individual the indispensable basis of Anglo-Saxon society? Is not the Bill of Right a set of guarantees for the individual?
But Evola rigorously distinguishes the individual from the person, valorizing the latter. “The person,” Evola writes, “is an individual who is differentiated through his qualities, endowed with his own face, his proper nature, and a series of attributes that make him who he is and distinguish him from all others.” By distinction, “the individual may be conceived only as an atomic unit… a mere fiction of an abstraction.” Persons, being actually individuated, hold rank as “peers” in the differentiated company; in “the will to equality,” by contrast, Evola sees only “the will to what is formless.”
Evola also insists on distinguishing “the organic State” from “the totalitarian State,” linking the former to individuation within a functioning hierarchy (to persons) and the latter to the featurelessness of democracy: “A state is organic when it has a center, and this center is an idea that shapes the various domains of life in an efficacious way; it is organic when it ignores the division and the autonomization of the particular and when, by virtue of the system of hierarchical participation, every part within its relative autonomy performs its own function and enjoys an intimate connection with the whole.” Evola writes that, “In totalitarianism we usually find a tendency toward uniformity and intolerance for any autonomy and any degree of freedom, [and] for any intermediate body between the center and periphery, between the peak and the bottom of the social pyramid.” In a society where Tradition governs, the “axiom… is that the supreme values… are not liable to change and becoming.” In a liberal society where democracy governs (which will be indistinguishable from a dictatorship), “there are no principles, systems, and norms with values independent from the period in which they have assumed a historical form, on the basis of contingent… and irrational factors.”
Evola refuses to retreat from the two phases of a stark judgment: First that “the beginning of the disintegration of the traditional sociopolitical structures, or at least what was left of them in Europe, occurred through liberalism,” which is the direct precursor of revolution; and second that “the essence of liberalism is individualism.” Because the notion of equality amounts to “sheer nonsense” and constitutes a “logical absurdity,” any implementation of equality will necessarily entail a destruction of that which, by existing really and actually, offends democratic sentiment. Thus for Evola democracy itself is nihilism.
II. Where Men among the Ruins takes on the task of describing our post-catastrophic predicament, Ride the Tiger prescribes how a genuinely individuated person might comport himself in a culturally devastated and morally degenerate environment. Ride the Tiger nevertheless also analyzes the topics that fascinate Evola, generally the grand spectacle of civilization in deliquescence and particularly the outward forms of the dominant corruption. The reader finds then, in Ride the Tiger, chapters devoted to “The Disguises of European Nihilism,” “[The] Collapse of Existentialism,” “Covering Up Nature – Phenomenology,” “The Dissolution of Modern Art,” and “Second Religiosity,” among many others. In respect of the mid-Twentieth Century situation Evola urges his readers not to mistake the ongoing visible disintegration of the bourgeois world for the primary cataclysm in whose shattered landscape they live: “Socially, politically, and culturally, what is crashing down [today] is the system that took shape after the revolution of the Third Estate and the first industrial revolution, even though there were often mixed up in it some remnants of a more ancient order, drained of their original vitality.” Evola remains steadfastly loyal to that “more ancient order,” in the resurrection of whose vitality the wellbeing of persons in a hostile world is implicated.
Nihilism, in Evola’s discussion of it, knows how to conceal and dissimulate itself, how to smile, soothe, and cajole. The ability to ferret out nihilism’s hiding places and to penetrate its masks thus plays a key role in the continued autonomy of the individuated person or “aristocrat of the spirit.” Evola takes Nietzsche’s trope of “The Death of God” as usefully designating a particular “fracture… of an ontological character” that afflicts the contemporary scene. Through this “fracture,” Evola writes, “human life loses any real reference to transcendence,” and in its train the innumerable “doubles and surrogates” of “the God who is Dead” rise into prominence. Thus “when the level of the sacred is lost,” only empty formulas – ideologies – persist, like the “categorical imperative” posited by Kant or the “ethical rationalism” (as Evola names it) promulgated by Mill and his followers. Lurking beyond the scrim of these and other constructions, Evola sees “nihilism already visible.” For example, nihilism bodies forth in “the Romantic hero: the man who feels himself alone in the face of divine indifference” and who “claims for himself exceptional rights to what is forbidden.”
After Romanticism, the spirit of negation appears under the label of “the absurd,” with its axiom of universal non-meaning and its dramatis personae of “lost youth,” “teddy boys,” and “rebels without a cause.” Hollywood and commercial culture continuously reinvent these limited types.
With a reference to Kopff’s recent article, I mentioned earlier how Evola characterizes modern economic theory as “demonic.” Evola applies this label irrespective of whether the theory under scrutiny advocates a view rooted in Karl Marx or in Adam Smith because both represent masquerading nihilism. A rational concept of wealth becomes a “demonic” theory when the idea of money and its relation to goods, first, reduces itself to something entirely abstract and, next, inflates itself until it is the central and dominating Mumbo-Jumbo of a polity. It matters not whether the prevailing ideology is socialism or capitalism: “The error and illusion are the same,” namely that “material want” is the cause of all “existential misery” and that abundance generates happiness and lawfulness. In a stunning sentence, whose import almost no currently serving politician could grasp, Evola offers that, “the truth of the matter is that the meaning of existence can be as lacking in one group [rich or poor] as in the other, and that there is no correlation between material and spiritual misery.” Evola remarks that all of modern politics tends towards “socioeconomic messianism.”
According to Evola, virtually all of modern and Twentieth Century philosophy is evasion or deception. Ride the Tiger’s chapters on Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre – not to mention Nietzsche – exposit the view that these thinkers, too, partake in the process of reducing reality to nothingness. Nietzsche, in Evola’s commentary, participates in the reduction of Transcendence to immanence: “Once the idols have fallen, good and evil have been surpassed, along with all the surrogates of God, and this mist has lifted from one’s eyes, nothing is left to Nietzsche but ‘this world,’ life, the body.” The Übermensch is Nietzsche’s ersatz-Transcendence. Evola ranks the Übermensch, a deferred futurity that supposedly justifies action now on its non-present behalf, as “not very different from Marxist-communist ideology,” with its sinewy image of Socialist Humanity. Nietzsche’s Will and Power are mere guises of “formlessness.” Husserl strikes Evola also as misguided, engaging in the old project of Saving the Appearances by de-realizing the appearances even further and so cutting off consciousness from its contact both with nature and Transcendence. As for Heidegger, as Evola sees things, the Dasein-philosopher has failed to go beyond Nietzsche and like his precursor has reduced life to desperate immanence. Heidegger’s doctrine “is a projection of modern man in crisis, rather than of modern man beyond crisis.”
Nihilism can counterfeit itself in the guise of spirituality and religion. Thus what Evola calls “modern naturalism” and “the animal ideal” is linked to what he calls, while borrowing the term from Spengler, “second religiosity.” The labels “modern naturalism” and “the animal ideal” refer to the “back to nature” idea that the history of concepts traces to an original codification in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “The natural state for man has never existed,” writes Evola, because “at the beginning [man] was placed in a supranatural state from which he has now fallen.” A de-individuating descent to the bosom of Mother Earth remains impossible by definition for culturally mature persons. Thus “every return to nature is a regressive phenomenon, including any protest in the name of instinctual rights, the unconscious, the flesh, life uninhibited by the intellect, and so forth.” The neo-Chthonic movements familiar on the modern scene belong to “second religiosity.” Like the “second religiosity” of the ancient world, that of the modern world is effeminate, matriarchal, and anti-intellectual; it is also thoroughly anti-spiritual. “Second religiosity” permeates modern life in “sporadic forms of spirituality and mysticism, even in irruptions from the supersensible.” However, such “symptoms” definitely “do not indicate re-ascent” to anything genuinely metaphysical.
Evola died before environmentalism found its pseudo-Gospel in the scientifically now-discredited “Global Warming” hysteria, before organized feminism began its systematic emasculation of Western institutions, and before these trends had coalesced in Mountebanks and Priests-of-Atargatis like “Gaia” theorist James Lovelock and ex-Senator Albert “We-are-the-Enemy” Gore. Readers may take Evola as prescient when he writes that, “nothing is more indicative of the level of… neospiritualism than the human material of the majority of those who cultivate it.” Evola notes that, “mystification and superstition are constantly mingled in neospiritualism, another of whose traits, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, is the high percentage of women (women who are failures, dropouts, or ‘past it’).” In a metaphor, Evola compares these manifestations of “escapism, alienation, and confused compensation” to “the fluorescence that appears when corpses decay.”
III. It might seem to have entailed an insuperable contradiction when, in my introduction, I wrote that Hermann Keyserling had shunned Evola because Evola’s investment in occult ideas stood in uncomfortable excess to Keyserling’s own; whereas, at the end of the foregoing section I reported on Evola’s critical hostility to “mysticism” and “superstition,” using his own terms from Ride the Tiger. There is no actual contradiction. Evola’s idea of Transcendence lies not so distant from similar ideas in the work of Giambattist Vico, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Eric Voegelin, and Richard Weaver. Evola, whose literary education was large, knows from the ancient texts that the sequence of intense visionary experience – followed by virile propagation of an at-first essentially religious order – lies at the inception of all known complex societies and civilizations. The similitude of mythic or prophetic foundations suggests that they all correspond to a singular source even though they cannot tell us, in modern rational language, what that source is.
Whether it is Homer’s “Dike” (“Justice”) whose origin is Zeus, the Hebrew’s “I am that I am,” the Middle Kingdom’s “Dao,” or the beatific vision in Plato, Augustine, and Dante – the formative effect of the experience is to establish a notional hierarchy of structures, oriented to that which is “above” the human world, which, while announcing itself as eternal Being, takes physical form through human creative activity in the actual world. Founding visions organize people anagogically. That is an historical fact. Even Spengler, a rigorous skeptic, writes, in The Decline (Vol. I), that, “a Culture is born when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality… and detaches itself, a form from the formless.” Toynbee, quirkily Catholic, writing in Civilization on Trial (1948), recognizes Christianity as a vision of life that “arose out of the spiritual travail which was a consequence of the breakdown of the Graeco-Roman civilization” and which forecast the shape of a successor-civilization amidst the ruins of the old. As for Voegelin, in Israel and Civilization (1956), he writes: “Cosmological symbolization is neither a theory nor an allegory. It is the mythical expression of the participation, experienced as real, of the order of society in the divine being that also orders the cosmos.”
Evola, while prickly and eccentric, may nevertheless claim lively company in the convergent testimonies of so many legends and sagas from antiquity and the middle ages. Evola’s great work, Revolt against the Modern World, makes explicit the philological and anthropological bases of his convictions concerning Tradition. Evola divides Revolt into two parts: First, a comprehensive description of the structures and assumptions of those historical societies that body forth Tradition; Second, a “genealogy” of modern decadence. In Part One of Revolt, Evola draws heavily on James G. Frazer, Franz Cumont, Georges Dumézil, Fustel de Coulanges, and other scholars who, without prejudice, had attempted to understand primitive and archaic customs and institutions, as it were, from the inside out. Evola admires ancient and historical societies for the virility of their structures – royalty, aristocracy, priesthood, warrior, worker, and serf – which, in his view, allowed people to integrate themselves in a meaningful, living arrangement with others, including their superiors, with a minimum of invidious friction. Every station in the hierarchy has its privileges, but every station also has its obligations to the stations below it, just as each has its duties to the whole.
Modern people find in social hierarchies, and such institutions as castes and guilds, something arbitrary and limiting, but Evola insists that traditional estates and vocations allowed for a natural sorting-out of talents and potentials and that they permitted people, by apprenticeship and initiation, to realize personal progress in a well-defined context. Evola also remarks that, especially in medieval society, certain institutions cut across the estates, so that a man whose trade, say, was a cobbler, might, as a member of one or another lay order, attain social recognition for activity outside that by which he earned his bread. Hans Sachs, in Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger, is by trade a shoemaker, but his peers celebrate him as an artist-adept of Stabreim and Minnelied. The Church, too, cut across the estates and offered avenues of mobility. By constant implication, Evola suggests that, insofar as happiness concerns us, people have been happier in traditional societies than they are, despite material comforts, in modern society. Evola is aware, as was Nietzsche, that the dissolution of forms exacerbates resentment and that modern people are more resentful than their predecessors.
Evola goes so far as to defend the attitudes of Aristotle and the Old Testament to slavery, attitudes that occasion reflexive dudgeon in modern commentary: “Let us set aside the fact that Europeans reintroduced and maintained slavery up to the nineteenth century in their overseas colonies in such heinous forms as to be rarely found in the ancient world; what should be emphasized is that if there ever were a civilization of slaves on a grand scale, the one in which we are living is it.” Modern people wear the badge of their “dignity” brazenly. Yet “no traditional civilization ever saw such great masses of people condemned to perform shallow, impersonal, automatic jobs.” It is the case furthermore that, “in the contemporary slave system the counterparts of figures such as lords or enlightened rulers are nowhere to be found,” but only rather “the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society.” Must one say that this makes no brief for slavery? Rather it condemns the parochialism and self-righteousness of liberals and democrats, and castigates the spiritually destructive tedium of the bureaucratic functions on which liberal-democratic society bases itself.
In the same paragraph from which I draw the foregoing lines, Evola mentions the Soviet slave-labor camps, which attest for him the evil inherent in “the physical and moral subjection of man to the goals of collectivization.”
As any admirer of chivalry must, Evola deplores feminism and female enfranchisement, both belonging, in his view, to the trend of the purely quantitative individual, with his infantilized egocentrism. “A practical and superficial lifestyle of a masculine type,” Evola writes, “has perverted [woman’s] nature and thrown her into the same male pit of work, profits, frantic activity, and politics.” It follows that, “modern woman in wanting to be for herself has destroyed herself” because “the ‘personality’ she so much yearned for is killing all semblance of female personality in her.” But Evola never spares anyone: “We must not forget that man is mostly responsible for [female] decadence… In a society run by real men, woman would never have yearned for or even been capable of taking the path she is following today.” As Kopff writes: “Evola rejected the Enlightenment Project lock, stock, and barrel, and had little use for the Renaissance and the Reformation. For Evola those really opposed to the leftist regime, the true Right, are not embarrassed to describe themselves as reactionary and counterrevolutionary.”
IV. Part Two of Revolt against the Modern World traces the pedigree of the existing nihilism-crisis by providing “a bird’s eye view of history.” Naturally, Evola refuses to follow standard historiography, dismissing roundly its most basic assumption – namely that the original human societies were primitive and that civilization is a late stage in the social development of humanity. Evola similarly rejects the related Darwinian idea that complex entities evolve from primitive entities. In both instances he sees things the other way around, not out of egocentric crankiness, but rather as he writes, because Tradition itself, to which he defers, sees things the other way around. He takes seriously, for example, the archaic poet Hesiod’s five phases of humanity from the didactic poem Works and Days; he takes seriously Plato’s “Atlantis” story from the tandem dialogues Timaeus and Critias, and he admits as respectable similar model polities or societies that the variety of myth and literature locates in an antediluvian age. In the Hesiodic scheme, the earliest men were those of the Golden Race after which came the Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Races. Hesiod famously vows that he wished he did not belong to the degenerate Iron Race, so wicked and unsalvageable is it. In Plato’s “Atlantis” story, the original Atlanteans are demigods, who live in a technically and morally perfected state; but their descendants become gross, materialistic, and degenerate.
Before one dismisses this framework as an instance of irremediable credulity, one should carefully note two things. The first is that unlike the ideologues whom he criticizes, who place their Social Justice or their Master Race in the indefinite future, Evola places the irreproducible model-polity in an irretrievable past, from which locus it can justify no reality-altering agenda; it can only serve as a remote measure for conscientious persons who seek standards other than contemporary ones. The second is that Evola thinks by habit in mythopoeic terms, as did Plato and Giambattist Vico; and it is through symbols and metaphors that he defeats the mechanistic-literalistic pseudo-cognition that he deplores. Like Plato and Vico – and like P. D. Ouspensky, who also entertained the idea of cycles of civilization and destruction, and who was certainly not a fantasist – Evola would advise honest people to begin their contemplation of human achievement from a position of humbleness rather than arrogance. I note that this tenet, central to Evola’s ethos, excuses him from the charge of Gnosticism. Despite Evola’s many references to esoteric knowledge, he never qualifies such knowledge as miraculously or uniquely vouchsafed him. He asserts that he has teased it out of myth, saga, and folklore by diligent study.
One might also note that in the last fifty years archeology has steadily deepened the chronologies of complex human associations and of material achievement; and that in the same period the once-discredited idea of a primordial human language from which all others descend has reappeared, quite respectably, in the “Nostratic” and “World” hypotheses. Why, one might ask, as long as the theory of African Genesis remains formally unobjectionable, should anyone object to Evola’s theory of Far-Northern or Hyperborean ethogenesis, formally speaking? The theory of the Hyperborean Ur-Tradition explains cultural diffusion as adequately as the standing theory; the preference for which is a matter largely of sanctified prejudice. Indeed, a “boreal” first formation of high culture in no way makes impossible a prior equatorial appearance of Homo sapiens, considered under a purely biological category. As Evola points out, many southern people place their culture-ancestors in a northern homeland. Of course, the main interest in Revolt, Part Two, is in the diagnosis of modern corruption.
What is Evola’s history of that corruption? In a remote first collapse in “the regression of the castes,” as Evola calls the long-term degenerative process, “the regality of blood replaced the regality of spirit,” and this alteration corresponded with an insurgency of “The Civilization of the Mother” over the original “Patriciate.” Much later – in the Late Medieval Period – “a second collapse occurred as the aristocracies began to fall and the monarchies to shake at the foundations,” when “through revolutions and constitutions they became useless institutions subject to the ‘will of the nation.’” Next comes the collapse from an already-narrowed nation-consciousness to the paradoxical undifferentiated collectivism of the bourgeois society of mere individuals, where equality is the tyrannical Shibboleth and absolute conformity the mode. Next, out of the incipient collectivism of the bourgeois society, comes “the proletarian revolt against capitalism,” in which Evola discerns “a reduction of horizon and value to the plane of matter, the machine, and the reign of quantity.” The phenomenon is a nadir, entirely “subhuman.” Thus, “in the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution it is possible to detect a ruthless ideological coherence.”
As his early article “Bolschevismus ed Americanismus” should lead one to guess, Evola never spares the United States: “America too, in the essential way it views life and the world, has created a ‘civilization’ that represents the exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition.” In words reminiscent of Spengler’s diction, Evola describes the United States “a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking in any background of transcendence.” Whereas “Soviet communism officially professes atheism,” Evola remarks, and whereas “America does not go that far”; nevertheless, “without realizing it, and often believing the contrary, it is running down the same path in which nothing is left of… religious meaning.” According to Evola, “the great majority of Americans could be said to represent a refutation on a large scale of the Cartesian principle… they ‘do not think and are.’” Evola links American anti-intellectualism with the proliferation in the United States of “the feminist idiocy,” which travels in tandem with “the materialistic and practical degradation of man.”
In its conclusion, Evola’s Revolt forecasts a new “dark age,” for which his preferred term is the Vedic Kali Yuga. America will assimilate the crusading impulse of Soviet communism and will begin to try to universalize its destructive pseudo-values through imperialistic aggression; the Imperium will be a short-lived calamity leading to global wreckage. When Evola speaks thusly in 1934, one listens, and dismissing him becomes difficult.
What is one to do then with a writer of foresight, whose literacy and education remain indubitable, who nevertheless serves up his social and political analysis, however trenchant it is, in the context of an alternate history, the details of which resemble the background of story by Lord Dunsany or Clark Ashton Smith? I am strongly tempted to answer my own question in this way: That perhaps we should begin by reassessing Dunsany and Smith, especially Smith, whose tales of decadent remnant-societies – half-ruined, eroticized, brooding over a shored-up luxuriance, and succumbing to momentary appetite with fatalistic abandon – speak with powerful intuition to our actual circumstances. I do not mean to say, however, that Evola is only metaphorically true, as though his work, like Smith’s, were fiction. I mean that Evola is truly true, on the order of one of Plato’s “True Myths,” no matter how much his truth disconcerts us.
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Bertonneau, Thomas F. “Against Nihilism: Julius Evola’s ‘Traditionalist’ Critique of Modernity.” The Brussels Journal, 29 March 2010. <http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4371 >.
Notes on further reading: For a larger introduction to Evola’s thought, see H.T. Hansen’s “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors” in Evola’s Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002), available online here: <http://www.juliusevola.com/julius_evola/texts/MenAmongtheRuins.pdf >. Also significant in this regard is Evola’s autobiography The Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009). For a record of written works by Evola and translations, see the World Catalogue: <http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AEvola%2C+Julius%2C >.
For an interesting evaluation of Evola’s thoughts on authority and the state as well as the ideas of other traditionalists, see Alain de Benoist’s “Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power” (originally published in: TYR: Myth, Culture, Tradition, vol. 3 [Atlanta: Ultra, 2007–2008]), available online here: <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/11/spiritual-authority-and-temporal-power/ >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Spiritual Authority & Temporal Power).
For a notable critical analysis of Evola’s philosophy from a New Right perspective, see: Alain de Benoist, “Julius Evola, réactionnaire radical et métaphysicien engagé. Analyse critique de la pensée politique de Julius Evola,” Nouvelle Ecole, No. 53–54 (2003), pp. 147–69. Available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/julius_evola.pdf >. This essay was also translated into Spanish as “Julius Evola, Reaccionario Radical y Metafísico Comprometido. Análisis crítico de su pensamiento político” (originally published in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos Nº 16 [9 Junio 2011], published online on the ISSUU site), available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/julius_evola_reaccionario_radical.pdf > (alt. link). There is also a recent translation of this essay into English as “Julius Evola, Radical Reactionary and Committed Metaphysician: A Critical Analysis of the Political Thought of Julius Evola” (The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 [Spring 2015], pp. 17-62). In this analytical essay, Benoist agrees with some of Evola’s ideas, such as his critique of nationalism, the support of the imperial idea, the basic anti-egalitarian idea, and certain ethical principles. However, Benoist also criticises and rejects other ideas and attitudes in Evola’s thought, including many (although not all) of his metaphysical and religious principles, his rigid elitism, his contempt for social and popular principles, his rejection of the value of collective identities (such as ethnicity), his lack of true organicism and rejection of the value of community solidarity (in the anti-individualist sense), and his hostility to feminine values. Benoist’s basic conclusion is that Evola is an interesting thinker worthy of study, but who must be studied with a critical eye.
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