Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist By Julius Evola Inner Traditions, 2002 (Translated from the revised Italian edition of 1972; First Edition 1953) 310 Pages, $22.00 ISBN 0-89281-905-7

Brief Introductory Review Tradition The State Elites & History The Church Culture & Worldview Institutions The Occult War United Europe Evola's Influence

Elites & History Evola qualifies Pareto's idea of the "circulation of elites." What history really shows is a "regression of castes." First there are ruling priests, then warriors, then plutocrats, and finally revolutionaries. Marxism caused the "social question," not the other way around. Work-worship is part of the problem. Cultural creation and leadership are actions, deeds, not work. Calling them "work" proletarianizes the higher spheres. Historicism is based on the transition from a civilization of being to a civilization of becoming. People stopped looking to eternity, and began deifying flux. Evola condemns Hegel's philosophy of history, plus Hegel's formulation of the Absolute State. For good measure, he discountenances Transcendental Idealism, too. Contra Hegel, the past merely provides the conditions for history; the past does not determine the future. More fundamentally, Evola insists that the Real is not necessarily the Rational, nor the Rational the Real. Historicism's search for the Rational is subversive. "Conservative" Hegelianism is just as bad: it posits the principle that everything that exists is rational, and so promotes acceptance of the decadent status quo. "Men Among the Ruins" reviews the main themes of Evola's political philosophy, but it was written with an eye to developments in Italy. Evola says that, to begin a new historical cycle, Italy must make a choice of traditions. The nationalist history taught in Italian schools is actually a hoax. The medieval struggle between the Ghibellines, who supported the Holy Roman Empire, and the Guelphs, who supported the Communes, was really a conflict of supra-national castes. It was not a conflict of German versus Italian. It might be said of Evola that he did not think that Hitler had the right idea, but that Frederick Barbarossa nearly did. The Communes, the young Italian city-states, were on the road to decadence that eventuated in the French Revolution. As for the Risorgimento, there was good reason why it was regarded with the same horror as Communism was later. Both were stages in the same process. Masons led the national revolutions, and wrote the historiography in a way that obscured the deeper causes. In more recent times, Italy's true path had been with the Dreikaiserbund of Hohenzollern Germany, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, and Romanov Russia. Those empires did not embody Tradition perfectly, but they could have formed a barrier against the spread of ever less Traditional forms. In any case, Italy should certainly have remained with the Triple Alliance in the First World War. The Allies on whose side Italy finally fought (including Evola as an artillery officer) were the champions of chaos. After the war, Fascist Italy chose the Roman version of Tradition, however imperfectly realized. This was the correct choice, as was the alliance with Germany and the war they fought together. Unfortunately, that was the World War that Italy lost. The opposites in the nature of Italy are Roman and Mediterranean. A renewal must choose to crystallize around the former. Only a minority can be expected to have the virtues of the Roman Tradition. That, however, is all that any society needs. A nation is drawn upward by its elites. Evola insists that Anglo-American society is naturally civilian, even pacifist. This is because of its origin in the bourgeois caste. In a democracy, there can only be soldiers. The other major European possibility, the Prussian, is militaristic because it comes from the Order of the Teutonic Knights. The knights were not mere soldiers, but warriors. The warrior-based society, with its hierarchy and high ethics, has the higher right as opposed to democracies. This does not mean that warriors need be the actual governors; the barracks is not the ideal state. Rather, the Traditional state is imbued by the military virtues. When war occurs, it is not a mere negative for the warrior state. In the just war, Uranian light fights against telluric chaos. Just wars can occur even between good men, who also battle the chaos in themselves. Warrior hierarchies come next lower in the scheme of things than priestly hierarchies, of course, but the warrior ethic is nonetheless fundamentally ascetic. Evola gets some consolation from the belief that modern war requites a cold, lucid heroism, divorced from sentiment and patriotism. Modern war means the de-individualizing of force. Evola cautions that future wars will be meaningless from the point of view of Tradition. Still, warriors and not soldiers will fight those wars. They will lack the hatred that characterized the wars of the democratic era. Next

The sections of this review may be read sequentially. Please note that the sections do not correspond to the divisions of the book.

Copyright © 2002 by John J. Reilly