Men Among the Ruins:
Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist by Julius Evola
Reviewed by E. Christian Kopff
Baron Julius Evola (1899-1974) was an important Italian intellectual,
although he despised the term. As poet and painter, he was the major Italian
representative of Dadaism (1916-1922). Later he became the leading Italian
exponent of the intellectually rigorous esotericism of René Guénon (1886-
1951). He enjoyed an international reputation as the author of books on magic,
alchemy and eastern religious traditions and won the respect of such important
scholars as Mircea Eliade and Giuseppe Tucci. His book on early Buddhism, The
Doctrine of Awakening,1 which was translated in 1951, established his
reputation among English-speaking esotericists. In 1983, Inner Traditions
International, directed by Ehud Sperling, published Evola’s 1958 book, The
Metaphysics of Sex, which it reprinted as Eros and the Mysteries of Love in
1992, the same year it published his 1949 book on Tantra, The Yoga of Power.2
The marketing appeal of the topic of sex is obvious. Both books,
however, are serious studies, not sex manuals. Since then Inner Traditions has
reprinted The Doctrine of Awakening and published many of Evola’s esoteric
books, including studies of alchemy and magic3, and what Evola himself
considered his most important exposition of his beliefs, Revolt Against the
Modern World.4
In Europe Evola is known not only as an esotericist, but also as a
brilliant and incisive right-wing thinker. During the 1980’s most of his books,
New Age and political, were translated into French under the aegis of Alain de
Benoist, the leader of the French Nouvelle Droite.5 Books and articles by Evola
have been translated into German and published in every decade since the
1930’s.6
Discussion of Evola’s politics reached
With the publication of Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a
Radical Traditionalist,11 English speakers can read Evola’s political views for
themselves. They will find that the text, in Guido Stucco’s workman-like
translation, edited by Michael Moynihan, is guarded by a double firewall.
Joscelyn Godwin’s “Foreword” answers Jay Kinney’s hysterical diatribe of 1990.
Godwin defends publishing Evola’s political writings by an appeal to “academic
freedom,” which works “with the tools of rationality and scholarship, unsullied
by emotionality or subjective references” and favors making all of Evola’s
works available because “it would be academically dishonest to suppress
anything.” Godwin’s high praise for The Doctrine of Awakening implicitly
condemns Kinney’s ignorance. Evola’s books on esoteric topics reveal “one of
the keenest minds in the field . . . The challenge to esotericists is that when
Evola came down to earth, he was so ‘incorrect’ – by the received standards of
our society. He was no fool; and he cannot possibly have been right . . . so
what is one to make of it?”
Godwin’s “Preface” is followed by an introduction of more than 100 pages
by Austrian esotericist H. T. Hansen on “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,”
translated from the 1991 German version of Men Among the Ruins,12 with
additional notes and corrections (called “Preface to the American Edition”).
Hansen’s introduction to Revolt Against the Modern World13 is, with Robin
Waterfield’s Gnosis essay, the best short introduction to Evola in English. His
longer essay is essential for serious students, and Inner Traditions deserves
warm thanks for publishing it. The major book on Evola is Christophe Boutin,
Politique et Tradition: Julius Evola dans le siècle (1898-1974).14
Readers of books published by Inner Traditions might have guessed
Evola’s politics. The Mystery of the Grail,15 first published in 1937, praises
the
Visionary Among Italian Conservative Revolutionaries Evola was not only
an important figure in Guénon’s Integral Traditionalism, but also the leading
Italian exponent of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, which included Carl
Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Gottfried Benn, and Ernst Jünger.17 From 1934-43,
Evola was editor of what we would now call the “op-ed” page of a major Italian
newspaper (Regime Fascista) and published Conservative Revolutionaries and
other right-wing and traditionalist authors.18 He corresponded with Schmitt19,
translated Spengler’s Decline of the West and Jünger’s An der Zeitmauer (At the
Time Barrier) into Italian and wrote the best introduction to Jünger’s Der
Arbeiter (The Worker), “The Worker” in Ernst Jünger’s Thought.20
Spengler has been well served by translation into English, but other
important figures of the Conservative Revolution had to wait a long time. Carl
Schmitt’s major works have been translated only in the past few decades.21
Jünger’s most important work of social criticism, Der Arbeiter, has never been
translated.22 The major scholarly book on the movement has never been
translated, either.23 It is a significant statement on the limits of expression
in the United States that so many leftist mediocrities are published, while
major European thinkers of the rank of Schmitt, Jünger and Evola have to wait
so long for translation, if the day ever comes. It is certainly intriguing that
a New Age press has undertaken the translation and publishing of Evola’s books,
with excellent introductions.
The divorced wife of a respected free market economist once remarked to
me, “Yale used to say that conservatives were just old-fashioned liberals.”24
People who accept that definition will be flabbergasted by Julius Evola. Like
Georges Sorel, Oswald Spengler, Whittaker Chambers and Régis Debray, Evola
insists that liberals and communists are in fundamental agreement on basic
principles. This agreement is significant, because for Evola politics is an
expression of basic principles and he never tires of repeating his own. The
transcendent is real. Man’s knowledge of his relationship to transcendence has
been handed down from the beginning of human culture. This is Tradition, with a
capital T. Human beings are tri-partite: body, soul and spirit. State and
society are hierarchical and the clearer the hierarchy, the healthier the
society. The worst traits of the modern world are its denial of transcendence,
reductionist vision of man and egalitarianism.
These traits come together in what Evola called “la daimonìa
dell’economia,” translated by Stucco as “the demonic nature of the economy.”25
Real men exist to attain knowledge of the transcendent and to strive and
accomplish heroically. The economy is only a tool to provide the basis for such
accomplishments and to sustain the kind of society that permits the best to
attain sanctity and greatness. The modern world denies this vision.
In both individual and collective life the economic factor is the most
important, real, and decisive one . . . An economic era is already by
definition a fundamentally anarchical and anti-hierarchical era; it represents
a subversion of the normal order . . . This subversive character is found in
both Marxism and in its apparent nemesis, modern capitalism. Thus, it is absurd
and deplorable for those who pretend to represent the political ‘Right’ to fail
to leave the dark and small circle that is determined by the demonic power of
the economy – a circle including capitalism, Marxism, and all the intermediate
economic degrees. This should be firmly upheld by those today who are taking a
stand against the forces of the Left. Nothing is more evident than that modern
capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on
which both systems are based is identical.26 Most conservatives do not like the
leftist hegemony we live under, but they still want to cling to some aspect of
modernity to preserve a toehold on respectability. Evola rejected the
Enlightenment project lock, stock and barrel, and had little use for the
Renaissance and the Reformation. His books ask us to take seriously the attempt
to imagine an intellectual and political world that radically rejects the
leftist worldview. He insists that those really opposed to the leftist regime,
the true Right, are not embarrassed to use words like reactionary and counter
revolutionary. If you are afraid of these words, you do not have the courage to
stand up to the modern world.
He also countenances the German expression, Conservative Revolution, if
properly understood. Revolution is acceptable only if it is true re-volution, a
turning back to origins. Conservatism is valid only when it preserves the true
Tradition. So loyalty to the bourgeois order is a false conservatism, because
on the level of principle, the bourgeoisie is an economic class, not a true
aristocracy. That is one reason why at the end of his life, Evola was planning
a right-wing journal to be called The Reactionary, in conscious opposition to
the leading Italian conservative magazine, Il Borghese, “The Bourgeois.”
For Evola the state creates the nation, not the opposite. Although Evola
maintained a critical distance from Fascism and never joined the Fascist
Party,27 here he was in substantial agreement with Mussolini and the famous
article on “Fascism” in the Enciclopedia Italiana, authored by the philosopher
and educator, Giovanni Gentile. He disagreed strongly with the official
philosophy of 1930’s
Evola saw his mission as finding men who could be initiated into a real
warrior aristocracy, the Hindu kshatriya, to carry out
Egalitarianism, Fascism, Race, and Roman Catholicism Despite his
criticism of the demagogic and populist aspects of Fascism and National
Socialism, Evola believed that under their aegis Italy and Germany had turned
away from liberalism and communism and provided the basis for a return to
aristocracy, the restoration of the castes and the renewal of a social order
based on Tradition and the transcendent. Even after their defeat in World War
II, Evola believed that the fight was not over, although he became increasingly
discouraged and embittered in the decades after the war. (Pain from a crippling
injury suffered in an air raid may have contributed to this feeling.)
Although Evola believed that the transcendent was essential for a true
revival, he did not look to the Catholic Church for leadership. Men Among the
Ruins was published in 1953, when the official position of the Church was still
strongly anti-Communist and Evola had lived through the 1920s and 1930s when
the
After the times of De Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortés, and the Syllabus
have passed, Catholicism has been characterized by political maneuvering . . . Inevitably,
the Church’s sympathies must gravitate toward a democratic-liberal political
system. Moreover, Catholicism had for a long time espoused the theory of
‘natural right,’ which hardly agrees with the positive and differentiated
right, on which a strong and hierarchical State can be built . . . Militant
Catholics like Maritain had revived Bergson’s formula according to which
‘democracy is essentially evangelical’; they tried to demonstrate that the
democratic impulse in history appears as a temporal manifestation of the
authentic Christian and Catholic spirit . . . By now, the categorical
condemnations of modernism and progressivism are a thing of the past . . . When
today’s Catholics reject the ‘medieval residues’ of their tradition; when
Vatican II and its implementations have pushed for debilitating forms of
‘bringing things up to date’; when popes uphold the United Nations (a
ridiculous hybrid and illegitimate organization) practically as the
prefiguration of a future Christian ecumene – this leaves no doubt in which
direction the Church is being dragged. All things considered, Catholicism’s
capability of providing an adequate support for a revolutionary-conservative
and traditionalist movement must be resolutely denied.29 Although his 1967
analysis mentions Vatican II, Evola’s position on the Catholic Church went back
to the 1920’s, when after his early Dadaism he was developing a philosophy
based on the traditions of India, the Far East and ancient Rome under the
influence of Arturo Reghini (1878-1946).30 Reghini introduced Evola to Guénon’s
ideas on Tradition and his own thinking on Roman “Pagan Imperialism” as an
alternative to the Twentieth Century’s democratic ideals and plutocratic
reality. Working with a leading Fascist ideologue, Giuseppe Bottai (1895-1959),
Evola wrote a series of articles in Bottai’s Critica Fascista in 1926-27,
praising the
Evola’s articles enjoyed a national succès de scandale and he expanded
them into a book, Imperialismo Pagano (1928), which provoked a heated debate
involving many Fascist and Catholic intellectuals, including, significantly,
Giovanni Battista Montini (1897-1978), who, when Evola published the second
edition of Men Among the Ruins in 1967, had become the liberal Pope Paul VI.
Meanwhile, Mussolini was negotiating with Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) for a
reconciliation in which the Church would give its blessings to his regime in
return for protection of its property and official recognition as the religion
of
Evola later regretted the tone of his polemic, but he also pointed out
that the fact that this debate took place gave the lie direct to extreme
assertions about lack of freedom of speech in Fascist Italy. Evola has been
vindicated on the main point. The Catholic Church accepts liberal democracy and
even defends it as the only legitimate regime.
Those who want to distance Evola from Fascism emphasize the debate over
Pagan Imperialism. For several years afterwards Fascist toughs harassed Evola,
until he won the patronage of Roberto Farinacci, the Fascist boss of
Despite what is generally thought, I was not at all irritated by Doctor
Julius Evola’s pronouncements made a few months before the Conciliation on the
modification of relations between the Holy See and
Evola accepts the Traditional division of man into body, soul and spirit
and argues that there are races of all three.
While in a ‘pure blood’ horse or cat the biological element constitutes the
central one, and therefore racial considerations can be legitimately restricted
to it, this is certainly not the case with man, or at least any man worthy of
the name . . . Therefore racial treatment of man can not stop only at a
biological level.36 Just as the state creates the people and the nation, so the
spirit forms the races of body and soul. Evola had done considerable research
on the history of racial studies and wrote a history of racial thought from
Classical Antiquity to the 1930’s, The Blood Myth: The Genesis of Racism.37
Evola knew that in addition to the tradition of scientific racism, represented
by Gobineau, Houston Steward Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg, and Landra was one
that appreciated extra- or super-biological elements and whose adherents
included Montaigne, Herder, Fichte, Gustave Le Bon, and Evola’s contemporary
and friend, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, a German biologist at the University of
Berlin.38
Hansen has a thorough discussion of “Evola’s Attitude Toward the Jews.”
Evola thought that the negative traits associated with Jews were spiritual, not
physical. So a biological Jew might have an Aryan soul or spirit and biological
Aryans might – and did – have a Semitic soul or spirit. As Landra saw, this was
the end of any politically useful scientific racism. The greatest academic
authority on Fascism, Renzo de Felice argued in The Jews in Fascism Italy that
Evola’s theories are wrong, but that they have a distinguished intellectual
ancestry, and Evola argued for them in an honorable way.39 In recent years,
Bill Clinton was proclaimed America’s first black president. This instinctive
privileging of style over biology is in line with Evola’s views.
Hansen does not discuss Evola’s views on Negroes, to which Christophe
Boutin devotes several pages of Politique et Tradition.40 In his 1968
collection of essays, The Bow and the Club,41 there is a chapter on “America
Negrizzata,” which argues that, while there was relatively little miscegenation
in the United States, the Telluric or Negro spirit has had considerable
influence on the quality of American culture. The 1972 edition of Men Among the
Ruins ends with an “Appendix on the Myths of our Time,” of which number IV is
“Taboos of our Times.”42 The two taboos discussed forbid a frank discussion of
the “working class,” common in
At the end of Men Among the Ruins, instead of the Appendix of the 1972
edition, stands Evola’s 1951 Autodifesa, the speech he gave in his own defense
when he was tried by the Italian democracy for “defending Fascism,” attempting
to reconstitute the dissolved Fascist Party” and being the “master” and
inspirer” of young Neo-Fascists.44 Like Socrates, he was accused of not
worshipping the gods of the democracy and of corrupting youth. When he asked in
open court where in his published writings he had defended “ideas proper to
Fascism,” the prosecutor, Dr. Sangiorgi, admitted that there were no such
passages, but that the general spirit of his works promoted “ideas proper to
Fascism,” such as monocracy, hierarchism, aristocracy or elitism. Evola
responded.
I should say that if such are the terms of the accusation,45 I would be
honored to see, seated at the same bank of accusation, such people as
Aristotle, Plato, the Dante of De Monarchia, and so on up to Metternich and
Bismarck. In the same spirit as a Metternich, a Bismarck,46 or the great
Catholic philosophers of the principle of authority, De Maistre and Donoso
Cortés, I reject all that which derives, directly or indirectly, from the
French Revolution and which, in my opinion, has as its extreme consequence
bolshevism; to which I counterpose the ‘world of Tradition.’ . . . My
principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born
person considered sane and normal.47 Evola’s Autodifesa was more effective than
Socrates’ Apology, since the jury found him “innocent” of the charges. (Italian
juries may find a defendant “innocent,” “not guilty for lack of proof,” or
“guilty.”) Evola noted in his speech, “Some like to depict Fascism as an
‘oblique tyranny.’48 During that ‘tyranny’ I never had to undergo a situation
like the present one.” Evola was no lackey of the Fascist regime. He attacked
conciliation with the
Inner Traditions and the Holmes Publishing Group49 have published
translations of most of Evola’s esoteric writings and some important political
books. Will they go on to publish the rest of his oeuvre? Joscelyn Godwin,
after all, wrote, “It would be intellectually dishonest to suppress anything.”
Evola’s book on Ernst Jünger might encourage a translation of Der Arbeiter.
Riding the Tiger50 explains how the “differentiated man” (uomo differenziato)
can maintain his integrity in the Dark Age. It bears the same relation to Men
Among the Ruins that Aristotle’s Ethics bears to his Politics and, although
published later, was written at the same time.51 There are brilliant essays in
The Bow and the Club, but can a book be published in contemporary
The most challenging book for readers who enjoy Men Among the Ruins is
Fascism Seen from the Right, with its appendix, “Notes on the Third Reich,”52
where Evola criticizes both regimes as not right-wing enough. A world
respectful of communism and liberalism (and accustomed to using the word
“Fascist” as an angry epithet) will find it hard to appreciate a book critical,
but not disrespectful, of il Ventennio (the Twenty Years of Fascist rule). I
would suggest beginning with the short pamphlet, Orientamenti (Orientations),53
which Evola composed in 1950 as a summary of the doctrine of Men Among the
Ruins.
Hansen quotes right-wing Italians who say that Evola’s influence
discourages political action because his Tradition comes from an impossibly
distant past and assumes an impossibly transcendent truth and a hopelessly
pessimistic view of the present. Yet Evola confronts the modern world with an
absolute challenge. Its materialism, egalitarianism, feminism, and economism
are fundamentally wrong. The way out is through rejecting these mistakes and
returning to spirit, transcendence and hierarchy, to the Männerbund and the
Legionary Spirit. It may be discouraging to think that we are living in a Dark
Age, but the Kali Yuga is also the end of a cosmic cycle. When the current age
ends, a new one will begin. This is not Spengler’s biologistic vision, where
our civilization is an individual, not linked to earlier ones and doomed to die
without offspring, like all earlier ones.54
We are linked to the past by Tradition and when the Dark Age comes to an
end, Tradition will light the way to new greatness and accomplishment. We may
live to see that day. If not, what will survive is the legionary spirit Evola
described in Orientamenti:
It is the attitude of a man who can choose the hardest road, fight even
when he knows that the battle is materially lost and live up to the words of
the ancient saga, ‘Loyalty is stronger than fire!’ Through him the traditional
idea is asserted, that it is the sense of honor and of shame – not halfway
measures drawn from middle class moralities – that creates a substantial,
existential difference among beings, almost as great as between one race and
another race. If anything positive can be accomplished today or tomorrow, it
will not come from the skills of agitators and politicians, but from the
natural prestige of men both of yesterday but also, and more so, from the new
generation, who recognize what they can achieve and so vouch for their idea.55
This is the ideal of Oswald Spengler’s Roman soldier, who died at this post at
Pompeii as the sky fell on him, because he had not been relieved. We do not
need programs and marketing strategies, but men like that. “It is men, provided
they are really men, who make and unmake history.”56 Evola’s ideal continues to
speak to the right person. “Keep your eye on just one thing: to remain on your
feet in a world of ruins.”
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End Notes
1. La dottrina
2. Lo Yoga della
3. Introduzione alla magia quale scienza del’Io, 3 volumes,
4. Rivolta contro il mondo moderno,
5. Robin Waterfield gives a useful bibliography at the end of his Gnosis essay
(note 8, below) p. 17.
6. Karlheinz Weissman,
“Bibliographie” in Menschen immitten von Ruinen, Tübingen, 1991, pp. 403-406,
e.g., Heidnischer Imperialismus, Leipzig, 1933; Erhebung wider die moderne
Welt, Stuttgart, 1935; Revolte gegen die moderne Welt, Berlin, 1982; Den Tiger
Reiten, Vilsborg, 1997.
7. Thomas Sheehan, “Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and
Alain de Benoist,” Social Research 48: 1981, pp. 45-73; Franco Ferraresi,
“Julius Evola: tradition, reaction and the Radical Right,” Archives européennes
de sociologie 28: 1987, pp. 107-151; Richard Drake, “Julius Evola and the
Ideological Origins of the Radical Right in Contemporary Italy,” in Peter H.
Merkl, (ed.), Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations, Berkeley,
1986, pp. 61- 89; idem, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in
Contemporary Italy, Bloomington, 1989.
8. Robin Waterfield, “Baron Julius Evola and the Hermetic Tradition,” Gnosis
14:1989-90, pp. 12-17.
9. Elémire Zolla, “The Evolution of Julius Evola’s Thought,” Gnosis 14: 1989-
90, pp. 18-20.
10. Jay Kinney, “Who’s Afraid of the Bogeyman? The Phantasm of Esoteric
Terrorism,” Gnosis 14: 1989-90, pp. 21-24.
11. Gli uomini e le rovine,
12. H. T. Hansen,
“Julius Evolas politisches Wirken,” Menshen immitten von Ruinen (note 6, above)
pp. 7-131.
13. H. T. Hansen, “A Short Introduction to Julius Evola” in Revolt
Against the Modern World, Rochester, VT, 1995, ix-xxii, translated from
Hansen’s article in Theosophical History 5, January 1994, pp. 11-22.
14. Christophe Boutin, Politique et Tradition: Julius Evola dans le siècle,
1898-1974;
15. Il mistero del Graal e la tradizione ghibellina dell’Impero,
16. René Gu non, Crise du monde moderne (
17. H. T. Hansen,
“Julius Evola und die deutsche konservative Revolution,” Criticón 158
(April/Mai/June 1998) pp. 16-32.
18. Diorema: Antologia della pagina special di “Regime Fascista,” Marco
Tarchi, (ed.)
19. Lettere di Julius Evola a Carl Schmitt. 1951-1963,
20. L”Operaio” nel pensiero di Ernst Jünger (
21. The Concept of the Political, New Brunswick, NJ, 1976; The Crisis of Parliamentary
Democracy, Cambridge, MA, 1985; Political Theology, Cambrige, MA, 1985;
Political Romanticism, Cambridge, MA, 1986. Recent commentary includes Paul
Gottfried, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory,
22. Ernst Jünger, Der
Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt, Hamburg, 1932, was translated into Italian in
1985.
23. Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932.
Stuttgart, 1950, revised and expanded in 1972, 1989, 1994, 1999.
24. Panajotis Kondylis, Conservativismus: Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang,
Stuttgart, 1986, devotes 553 pages to this theme.
25. My impression is that daimonìa dell’economia implies “demonic
possession by the economy.” In Orientamenti (see note 53, below), Evola writes
of “l’allucinazione e la daimonìa dell’economia,” “hallucination and demonic
possession.”
26. Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist,
27. Evola applied for membership in the Fascist Party in 1939 in order to
enlist in the army as an officer, but in vain for reasons discussed by Hansen
(note 26, above) xiii. The application was found by Dana Lloyd Thomas, “Quando
Evola du degradato,” Il Borghese,
28. Evola cites
Heinrich Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde: Eine Darstellung der
Grundformen der Gesellschaft, Berlin, 1902; A. van Gennep, Les rites du
passage, Paris, 1909; The Rites of Passage, Chicago, 1960.
29. Men Among the Ruins (note 26, above) pp. 210-211; Gli uomini e le
rovine (note 11, above) pp. 15-151. “A ridiculous hybrid and illegitimate
organization” translates questa ridicola associazione ibrida e bastarda.
30. Elémire Zolla gives the essentials about Reghini’s influence on Evola in
his Gnosis essay (note 9, above).
31. Imperialismo Pagano,
32. Richard Drake, “Julius Evola, Radical Fascism, and the Lateran Accords,”
Catholic Historical Review 74, 1988, pp. 403-319; E. Christian Kopff. “Italian
Fascism and the
33. Yvon de Begnac, Taccuini Mussoliniani, Francesco Perfetti, (ed.),
34. “L’Equivoco
35. Sintesi di
dottrina della razza, Milan, 1941; Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre ,
Berlin, 1943.
36. Sintesi di dottrina della razza (note 35, above) p. 35. Since Hansen
(note 26, above) 71 uses the German translation (note 12, above) 90, the last
sentence reads “Fascist racial doctrine (Die faschistischen Rassenlehre)
therefore holds a purely biological view of race to be inadequate.”
37. Il
38. Ludwig Ferdinand
Clauss, Rasse und Seele. Eine Einführung in den Sinn der leiblichen Gestalt,
Munich, 1937; Rasse ist Gestalt, Munich, 1937.
39. Renzo de Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History,
40. Boutin (note 14, above) pp. 197-200.
41. L’Arco e la clava,
42. Gli uomini e le rovine (note 11, above) Appendice sui miti
43. Gli uomini e le rovine (note 11, above) p. 276: la tabuizzazione che porta
fino ad evitare l’uso della designazione “negro,” per le sue implicazioni
“offensive.”
44. J. Evola, Autodifesa (Quaderni di testi Evoliani, no. 2) (
45. Banco degli accusati is what is called in
46. At this point, according to Autodifesa (note 44, above) p. 4, Evola’s
lawyer, Franceso Carnelutti, called out, “La polizia è andata in cerca anche di
costoro.” (“The police have gone to look for them, too.”)
47. Men Among the Ruins (note 25, above) pp. 293-294; Autodifesa (note 44,
above) pp. 10-11.
48. Bieca is literally “oblique,” but in this context means rather “grim,
sinister.”
49. Holmes Publishing Group (Edwards, WA) has published shorter works by Evola
edited by the Julius Evola Foundation in Rome, e.g. René Guénon: A Teacher for
Modern Times; Taoism: The Magic of Mysticism; Zen: The Religion of the Samurai;
The Path of Enlightenment in the Mithraic Mysteries.
50. Cavalcare la
51. Gianfranco de Turris, “Nota del Curatore,” Cavalcare la
52. Il Fascismo,
53. Orientamenti (
54. J. Evola, Spengler e “Il tramonto dell’Occidente” (Quaderni di testi
Evoliani, no. 14) (
55. Orientamenti, (note 53, above), p. 12; somewhat differently translated by
Hansen (note 26, above) p. 101.
56. Orientamenti (note 53, above) p. 16. Hansen (note 26, above) p. 93
translates “It is humans, as far as they are truly human, that make history or
tear it down,” reflecting the German (note 12, above) p. 118: “Es sind die
Menschen, sofern sie wahrhaft Menschen sind, die die Geschichte machen oder sie
niederreissen.” The parallel sentence in Men Among the Ruins (note 11, above)
p. 109: sono gli uomini, finché sono veramente tali, a fare o a disfare la
storia, is translated by Stucco (note 26, above) p. 181: “It is men who make or
undo history.” He omits finché sono veramente tali, but gets the meaning of
uomini right.