Revolt Against the Modern World

An Italian aristocrat who led a magical order in the 1920s, Evola is a fascinating and controversial figure who has become influential in the New Right. Even though I am a Leftist, I find many of his ideas important and helpful—along with his fellow “traditionalists.” Rene Guenon and Fritjof Schuon. Evola believes we are in a period of accelerating decline known as the Kali Yuga, the age of iron and materialism, where the true spiritual knowledge has been almost entirely lost. He argues there is no way to stop the destruction of this civilization and it is best to focus… show more.

Of the trinity of essential, prescient works that describe the decadence of the West—Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, René Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World, and Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World—I would pick the latter, with Hermann Hesse’s warning that it is a “really dangerous” book. And so it is. It is difficult not to be swept away by this radical rethinking of history. Only later does one begin to realize that it is, after all, a phenomenally well-built... fantasy. But its Wagnerian scope and intrinsic power make it one of the… show more.