Together with Rene Guenon, Julius Evola is considered one of the greatest Traditionalist thinkers.

Traditionalism can be defined in a rough first approximation as rejection of modernity, not in favour of what comes after it, postmodernity, but in favour of the world modernity sought to destroy in the name of freedom, equality, rationality, and the market, the world of higher spiritual values.

Evola's traditionalism is focused on the great men of great soul, on whether there are such men anymore, what it would take to fashion them, and what they could accomplish, these "men among the ruins."

Below you will find three videos about Evola's thought. The first is his analysis of Fascism "from the Right." Next is a general overview of his revolt against the modern world presented as a commentary on his 1950 "Orientations." Finally, you can learn about Evola's traditionalist reflections on Hitler's Nazi Germany.

Evola is important for us to study for many reasons. One is that we tend to call everything to the right of the post-WWII liberal consensus "fascism," sometimes also using other terms interchangeably, like Nazi, neo-Nazi, reactionary, far-right, racist, and so on. But that can be confusing, since it does not help us distinguish among thinkers and positions on the right. For instance, if fascism is far-right, indeed, if it is as far right as one can go, then how can a traditionalist like Evola criticize it "from the Right"? To understand that, we need to understand what Evola meant by the Right and what he thought of Fascism. That's the topic I cover in the video (and transcript) below.

Fascism Viewed from the Right

Transcript:

Julius Evola – Fascism Viewed From The Right

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me. 

My plan today is to go over the main arguments of Julius Evola’s book, fascism viewed from the right. Before we even get into the contents of the book, let’s stop to think about the title. 

How is fascism usually understood and used as a word today? As a rule, liberals call anything to the right of liberalism fascist, and leftists call anything to right of themselves fascist. So fascism has come to mean something like “the enemies to the right of us.” 

In everyday political topography, fascism is essentially synonymous with the far right end of the political spectrum. It should therefore come as a surprise that there could be a viewpoint to the right of fascism on the basis of which to assess fascism. The title implies that fascism and the right are distinct. Fascism may be a phenomenon of the right, but it does not exhaust the right. We will have to follow along with Evola’s arguments to see how the true right as he conceives of it is distinct from fascist doctrine. 

This study will have the benefit of giving us a clearer presentation of fascism and of the right than we would normally get from a liberal or leftist perspective. That doesn’t mean that it is the last word or that it is immune from liberal or leftist criticism. But it helps us become familiar with the thing itself and not with a cheap, distorted substitute. 

For the most part I am going to be reading out passages so that the book can speak for itself. Naturally I’m leaving some parts out but this should be enough to give you an impression of the main points. 

Evola begins his essay by observing that at the time he is writing in the early 70s there is no unified Italian Right:

“A significant sign of confused ideas and today’s narrow horizons is established by the fact that in Italy today liberals and many other proponents of democracy can be considered as men of the Right, a situation that would have appalled representatives of a real traditional Right, because when such a Right existed, liberalism and democracy were notoriously and justly considered as currents of revolutionary subversion, more or less as radicalism, Marxism and Communism appear today in the eyes of the so-called parties of order.”

So you see, the idea that anyone can be on the right who is a liberal or who supports democracy is here rejected at the outset. So is the identification of the political right with the economic right, an identification he calls absurd. It is Marxists who acknowledge no difference between the capitalist, the right, the conservative and the bourgeoisie. But as Evola writes, “between the true right and the economic right there is not only no common identity, but on the contrary, there is a clear antithesis.” We’ll see later that Evola opposes the economic takeover of the state and the prioritization of economic interests above all other interests. 

The next point is about the term “the Right.” It is used polemically within a party system to refer to the antithesis of various lefts. But “in principle…the right represents or ought to represent a higher demand. It ought to be the recipient and affirmer of values linked directly to the idea of the true state: values that are in a certain sense central and superior to every practical opposition, according to the superiority inherent in the very concept of authority or sovereignty taken in its fullest sense.” In other words, the true concept of the right should not see it as a player in the preconstituted field of party politics as one among a number of alternatives. Instead, it is directly linked to the idea of the state as something above party politics. 

“Ideally, the concept of a true right, what we mean by the right, out to be defined in terms of forces and traditions that acted formatively on a group of nations, and sometimes also on supranational unifications, before the French Revolution, before the advent of the Third Estate and the world of the masses, and before bourgeois and industrial culture, with all its consequences and its games, which consist of actions and concordant reactions that have led to the contemporary chaos and to all that threatens to destroy the little that still remains of European culture and European prestige.” Incidentally, that means that to understand the true right on its own terms means to have before us the pre-modern alternative as free from distortion as possible. The traditionalists may be one source for insights into the premodern or nonmodern. In political theory and political philosophy, the writings of Leo Strauss are in my opinion indispensible for that task.

Moving on, Evola recognized that democrats and communists then as now tend to call national forces “neo-fascist” but he says that this creates a situation “full of errors.” There are those, he writes, who maintain “ideological loyalty” to fascist Italy and who have “made Mussolini and Fascism into objects of a ‘myth’ instead of focusing on “political ideas that should be taken seriously in themselves and for themselves.” The defenders of fascism ignore its negative sides and the critics of fascism only “tendentiously emphasize the most problematic sides so as to discredit all of it or make people hate it.” Some try to delegitimize fascism by linking it to Italy’s defeat in WWII but Evola believes, like Plato, that the truth of a doctrine or principle is not ascertained by its victory or defeat in war. As Evola puts it, Fascism wouldn’t be proved right if Italy had won the war, either. 

In this next passage, you’ll hear him giving voice to an idea that may be familiar to you from Alexander Dugin’s concept of a fourth political theory. “We must energetically oppose anyone,” he writes, “who claims that the choice must be between Fascism or anti-Fascism in any attempt to exhaust every political possibility and discussion. One consequence of this simple polarity is, for example, that no one can be anti-democratic without automatically being ‘Fascist’ – or Communist. This closed circle is absurd.” In other words, Evola opposes the bipartite division of political ideologies into fascist and anti-fascist and the tripartite division into communist, democratic (i.e. liberal democratic), and fascist. Neither model exhausts the relevant political alternatives. In particular, you can be anti-democratic without either a communist or a fascist. 

So what was the merit of fascism, for Evola? It was “above all to have revived in Italy the idea of the state and to have created the basis for an active government, by affirming the pure principle of authority and political sovereignty.” 

Fascism was opposed to “the hollow conception of the state which is supposed to limit itself to protecting the negative liberties of the citizens as simple empirical individuals, guaranteeing a certain well-being and a relatively peaceful communal life together.” It was also opposed to “the idea of a pure bureaucracy of public administration.” It supported the superiority of the state, the preeminence of the state in respect to people and nation. Evola writes “the formula that the people is the body of the state and the state is the spirit of the people, if adequately interpreted, brings us back to the classical idea of a dynamic and creative relationship between form and matter. The state is the form conceived as an organizing and animating force, according to the interpretation given to matter and form in traditional philosophy, starting with Aristotle.” The state is not the product of a social contract of individuals that preexist it in a state of nature, as with the political theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, those thinkers of what Leo Strauss called the first and second wave of modernity. I

Evola thinks that the general doctrine of the state in fascism is, from the view of the right, “absolutely positive.” “We find ourselves right in the orbit of healthy, traditional political thought,” he says. It was necessary that “the principle of the preeminence of the state before everything that is simply people and nation should be articulated further through the ideal opposition between state and society. Under the term society are united all those values, interests and dispositions that enter into the physical and vegetative side of the community and the individuals that compose it. In reality, there is a fundamental antithesis of doctrine between political systems that focus on the idea of the state and those that focus on the idea of society (the social type of state). The second type of system includes the varieties of theories based upon the concept of natural rights, contract theory with a utilitarian base, and democracy.” Evola says that fascism had developed the state-society distinction but not as completely as could have been done, and with certain compromises in practice as we’ll see. 

We can ask here about the distinction between the political and the social levels. Evola argues that we should define the political level in part in terms of transcendence, where you are dealing with “a certain ideal high tension that brings us not only beyond hedonistic values of simple material well being but also eudemonistic ones that include spiritual well being.” Evola says that fascism recognized the need for transcendence but its initiatives and customs in that regard were “superficial and contrived.” 

Evola criticizes any obsession with the rationlising of existence, especially “the tendency to render service to an ideal that is not political but social and which belongs to physical comfort, and to marginalize and discredit everything that is comprised of existential tension, heroism, and the galvanizing force of myth.” He suggests that when people become bored of prosperity and comfort, we will see a rise of “forms of blind, anarchic and destructive revolts embraced by a youth that, precisely in the most prosperous nations, notice the absurdity and senselessness of an existenece that is socialized, rationalized, materialistic, and dominated by the so-called consumer culture.”

Against that tendency, Fascism was correct to want to maintain “a climate of high tension” through “a certain liturgy or mystique of power and sovereignty” but Evola says we have to “recognize the line beyond which there is only self-parody or insincerity in a system limited by the incongruity between principles and intents, on one hand, and a given human substance, on the other.” In other words, although the basic idea of a mystique of power and sovereignty that transcends materialistic culture is correct, the practice fell far short of the ideal. 

So we have seen that Evola asserts the superiority of the state. Does that superiority amount to a sacralization of the state? If, he says, we criticize the fascist doctrine of the state on those grounds, we are presupposing a dualism between “the world of the state and the spiritual world, the world of the sacred.” This dualism entails “desecrating and reducing to the material all that is politics, power and authority, and, on the other hand, denying reality to all that is spiritual and sacred.” Yet “in traditional states, one or another form of the consecration of power and authority constituted the fulcrum and legitimation of the entire system. If authority and sovereignty do not possess some type of spiritual chrism in principle, they do not even deserve to be called by these names, and the entire system of the true state turns out to lack any solid gravitational center for everything that cannot be reduced to a mere administrative and social system instead of contributing to the climate of high tension.” This idea that the true state must have a sacral character owing to the chrism of authority is key for Evola in this book.

Evola criticizes Mussolini for “failing to directly confront the serious problem of the ultimate chrism or spiritual sanction of the state.” Mussolini had said that “the state has no theology, but it has a morality,” to which Evola responds that “every morality, if it is to have a profound justification and an intrinsically normative character, if it is not to be a mere convenience of communal living, must have a ‘transcendent’ basis, through which it brings us to a plane no different from the religious one, where theology too receives its form.”

Here I’d like to point out that Evola says that “even elements like struggle and heroism, loyalty and sacrifice, contempt for death and so on,” things that are positive for the right, “can take on an irrational, naturalistic, tragic and dark character when the higher and in a certain way transfiguring reference point is lacking, of which it is said that it necessarily belongs to a level that transcends the domain of simple ethics.” So these virtues of the right are perverted and distorted when they lack their transcendent, sacred context.

The next point concerns the relation of state and people. Evola criticizes fascism for its confusion when it comes to combining the centrality of the state with an emphasis on the people or the fatherland. That is because “the sentiments of fatherland and nation” have “a prepolitical and naturalistic character similar to that of the sentiment of family, especially compared to what instead unites men on the political level on the basis of an idea and a symbol of sovereignty.” Patriotism has in it something of a mob aspect that Evola opposes. In other words, fascism had a populist element but Evola argues that the true principles of the right are not populist. He therefore criticizes fascism for its hybridism and collapsing two very distinct ideological worlds.

From the perspective of a true right, fascism can also be criticized for its totalitarianism. “The principle of a central authority that cannot be controverted becomes degenerate when it is affirmed through a system that controls everything, regiments everything and intervenes in everything,” Evola writes. “The traditional state is organic, but not totalitarian.” “It is differentiated and articulated, and admits zones of partial autonomy. It coordinates forces and causes them to participate in a superior unity, while recognizing their liberty. Exactly because it is strong, it does not need to resort to mechanical centralizing, which is required only when it is necessary to rein in a shapeless and atomistic mass of individuals and wills, from which, however, disorder can never be truly eliminated, but only temporarily contained…. It does not meddle with everything. It does not substitute itself for everything. It does not aim at a barracks-style regimentation of society in the negative sense nor at a leveling conformism instead of free acknowledgement and loyalty… The traditional image is that of a natural gravitation of parts and partial unities around a center that commands without compelling and acts out of prestige with an authority that can, of course, resort to force, but abstains from it as much as possible.” Finally, “the evidence of the effective force of a state is found in the measure of the margin it can concede to a partial, rational decentralization.” In other words, the true state is opposed to total, systematic state interference. 

Accordingly, Evola was also critical of those cases when fascism acted as a “school teacher exercising pressure not on the political and objective level but on the level of one’s personal moral life.” For instance, he opposed the pro-natalist campaign, both because it rested on what he thought was an erroneous opinion concerning quantity (it is not always that the greater quantity is more powerful but often in political history the smaller numbered groups are the main and most powerful actors) and because in the case of Italy specifically, the population was already “excessive” and there was therefore no need for a demographic campaign, which could only make things worse.

Evola also opposed the pseudo-pedagogical side of fascism in relation to the regulation, i.e. the repression and inhibition of sex. He thought that the liberty of the person should be respected and should aim at a high tension instead of at moralization. 

What, then. is the meaning of liberty in the fascist state? Here Evola writes that, “the principal cause of the existential crisis of contemporary man is the attainment of negative liberty, with which, in the end, one does not know what to do, given the lack of sense and the absurdity of modern society. In truth, personality and liberty can be conceived only on the basis of the individual’s freeing himself, to a certain degree, from the naturalistic, biological and primitively individualist bonds that characterize the pre-state and pre-political forms in a purely social, utilitarian and contractual sense.” So freedom here is a sort of self-transcendence of the kind Isaiah Berlin considered under the name positive liberty. That is, the higher self should transcend the lower self, and the state should encourage this impulse. But there is also a downward self-transcendence, where the individual transcends himself in the direction of collectives and demogagic movements. For Evola, if we are going to use the term totalitarian at all to refer to left and right then we should say that leftist totalitarianism represents downward or catagogic self-transcendence whereas the totalitariainism of the right is upward or anagogic self-transcendence. The only thing they have in common is their opposition to “the limited and hollow regime of the bourgeois individual.” Otherwise they are fundamentally opposed. 

Next, Evola is critical of the fascists for their idea of a one-party state, which he calls an absurdity. “Because it belongs exclusively to the world of parliamentary democracy, it is only irrationally that the idea of a ‘party’ can be preserved in a regime opposed to everything that is democratic. Saying ‘party’ on the other hand means saying part, and the concept of party implies that of a multiplicity, through which the sole party would be the part that wants to become the whole, in other words, the faction that eliminates all the others, without, for all that, changing its nature and elevating itself to a higher level, precisely because it continues to consider itself as a party.” He juxtaposes to the concept of the party the concept of the order as “the backbone of the state, participating, to a certain degree, in the authority and dignity that gathers, indivisible, at the top of the state.” So the fascists should not upon coming to power have formed a one-party state but rather a fascist order.

Evola is also critical of the cult of leadership around Mussolini and again, of the mass party elements in fascism, which are in contrast to its state-centric anagogic principle. These two things are related: a mass can be created around the magnetic figure of a personality, but then “when the current that generates the magnetic force field fails, instantaneously all the [magnetized] particles drop off the magnet and are scattered in an ephemeral quantity, demonstrating how contingent the preceding state of formless aggregation was.” The state is more than the cult of the leader. Here Evola contrasts two attitudes towards the leader: the traditional pathos of distance and the contemporary pathos of nearness. Classically, the leader was someone of an almost different nature, almost super-human. Now people want a leader who is essentially “one of us,” a good friend, the kind of person you would like to have a beer with, who expresses the will of the people. This, he says, is “anti-traditional and incompatible with the ideals and ethos of the true Right.” The leader should not be one of the people but should be an elite, not of course in the financial but in the spiritual sense.

On the topic of the military type as a human ideal and the militarization of existence, Evola writes that “there is little to object to, once we emphasize in this regard that we are dealing essentially with a style of behavior, an ethic that can also have an autonomous value, independently of obligatory military ends. The ‘military’ training in its positive, living aspects, not what the soldier learns in the ‘barracks’ must correct everything that can proceed from states of irrational and emotional aggregation by a ‘mob’ and the ‘people’…” Here we are talking about “discipline and love of discipline,” in contrast to “the dangers of the bourgeois spirit and the stagnation of a vapid existence.” He calls the military style “the most important factor of stability for a political and social organism,” the antithesis to a “culture of affluence or consumer culture with its spiritually suffocating activity.” The characteristics he emphasizes here are service as honour, command and obedience, responsibility, distaste for gossip, and a manly solidarity based on true liberty. 

Evola writes about turning the uniforms of public functionaries into a symbol or ritual through the de-bureaucratising of the bureaucray. Instead of the grey bureaucrat you have the militarized state functionary. But distinct from this true conception is the blackshirts, he says, which reflect the confused state of Italian fascism rather than the principles of the right. 

The next point Evola criticizes as absurd is representation based on universal suffrage and the principle of one man one vote. Here’s what he writes about that: “This basis is absurd and indicates more than anything else the individualism that, combined with the pure criterion of quantity and of number, defines modern democracy. We say individualism in the bad sense because here we are dealing with the individual as an abstract, atomistic and statistical unity, not as a ‘person,’ because the quality of a person – that is, a being that has a specific dignity, a unique quality and differentiated traits – is obviously negated and offended in a system in which one vote is the equal of any other, in which the vote of a great thinker, a prince of the Church, an eminent jurist or sociologistic, the commander of an army, and so on has the same weight, measured by counting votes, as the vote of an illiterate butcher’s boy, a halfwit, or the ordinary man in the street who allows himself to be influenced in public meetings, or who votes for whoever pays him. The fact that we can talk about ‘progress’ in reference to a society where we have reached the level of considering all this as normal is one of the many absurdities that, perhaps, in better times will be the cause of amazement or amusement.”

You cannot ensure the preeminence of a public interest, especially a transcendent political one, on the basis of the democratic principle of representation, which leads the individual to restricting himself only “to advancing the protection (even if dishonestly) of interests of an inferior type in his personal electoral program, or in his party’s.” Parties “do not recognize interests and considerations that transcend” their own narrow political ideology and their commitment to the defense of the basic interests of some group of voters. Correct representation represents not individuals and their material interests but rather groups, like the nobility, the scholars, the army and so on. These are bodies or corporations, that is, they form a unity of various elements of productive activity in hierarchical solidarity. Such corporate unity is distinct from the union movement, which also represents a unity but only of one class against another class. He criticizes Fascism for its halfway measures on the anti-union front, though he judges it positively for its corporatism in principle.

In the economic sphere, Evola supported national economic independence, autarchy and austerity. He contrasted that to “apparently generalized prosperity and thoughtless living from day to day beyond one’s means, along with a frightening state debt balance, leading to extreme economic and social instability, growing inflation, and an invasion of foreign capital.” Just as a real man does not go overboard in taking care of his body, becoming its slave, the true state should not go overboard in taking care of its economy. There are extremes in either direction. Evola thought that the post-war world had gone to the extreme of elevating economic interests above all others and in that way making man a homo economicus. As he writes, “at the point in which the economic interest becomes dominant, it is natural that man becomes the subject of the laws of the economy, which acquire an almost autonomous character, until other interests are reaffirmed and a superior power intervenes.”

If we begin “with the principle of the preeminence of politics over the economy and the return to the idea of a true state,” then the “monstrous development of capitalism in the direction of unfettered productivity can be limited, with the ultimate end of restoring the economy and everything that is economic to the subordinate position in which it becomes only a means to an end, and a circumscribed dominion within a much vaster hierarchy of values and interests.” On this point Evola says fascism was too much a hurried movement whereas it should have stopped to ask the question of “the ideal culture to strive for, definitely or in principle.” 

On the issue of race in fascism, Evola says that Mussolini often confused race and nation. “No historical nation is a race,” he writes. The basic idea here seems to be that only the idea of race should be applied only to the elites as a “special breed.” Extending the concept of race to the people as a mass is another example of downward self-transcendence, so to speak. The fascists turned to racism out of 3 factors. The lately developed hostility toward the Jew Evola says he writes about in a separate work, so we don’t have the full details here, but he does say that he regards this factor as the most incidental of the three. The second factor “was the concept of a type of national ‘racial’ consciousness…linked to the conquest of Ethiopia and the creation of the African empire” – in other words, a national identity formed as a function of colonial exploits. The third and most important factor was the problem of forming “a new type of Italian.” 

The concept of racism was employed to help cause a select type to arise – and Evola approves of this aim in principle. The state should actively form the nation as its matter into a higher type. Here Evola talks about not only the physical race but of character, which he calls the race of soul, and he refers “to an ideal that is Classical, even Hellenic.” He opposes the lower racism of the body as well as vulgar anti-semitism but supports racism in this “classical or Hellenic sense” as the formation of a noble soul. 

He laments the fact that there were not enough such people of race in Italy to support what we might call the inner truth and greatness of fascism. “What must we think of the foundations on which Fascism rested in part,” he asks,” when we see the ease with which the hysterical popular masses disappeared like snow in the Sun, when the wind changed direction, and when we consider the number of ex-fascists today who, accordingly, do not hesitate to declare that in the preceding period they were in bad faith, were acting out of mere conformism or opportunism, or had been brainwashed?”

In the last chapter, Evola discusses the democratic punishment or criminalization of the defense of fascism – a point that should interest us. Such punishment is absurd for the following reason, at least: 

“It will appear very clear to those who have followed us up to this point that those who would like to condemn or attack fascism as a whole would find themselves compelled also to condemn ideas and principles that did not belong only to fascism but were important in other, earlier systems as well. In these terms, it would be necessary to define as more or less ‘fascist’ the greater part of the states that history describes from distant ages, when they are based on a principle of authority and hierarchy and admit nothing similar to absolute democracy, liberalism or socialism.” And isn’t that what some have done today, describe any form of authority and hierarchy as fascist? Evola saw it coming…

We are near the end now and can summarize “the most essential traits of the type of state and regime that could be defined starting from a movement with a fascist character, which would overcome the various oscillations and confusions present in earlier reconstructive currents in a direction that is decisively of the right,” as Evola says. 

1. “The clear stance against every form of democracy and socialism is the first characteristic of the state of which we spoke.” 

2. “The trust state will be oriented against both capitalism and communism.”

3. “At its center will stand a principle of authority and a transcendent symbol of sovereignty. The most natural incarnation of such a symbol is the monarchy. The need to confer a chrism on this transcendence is of fundamental importance.” 

4. “Monarchy is not incompatible with legal dictatorship…the sovereign can confer exceptional unitary powers on a person of special stature and qualification, still on a legal basis” as Schmitt also argued. 

5. “The state is the primary element that precedes nation, people and society. The state – and with the state everything that is properly constituted as political order and political reality – is defined essentially on the basis of an idea, not by naturalistic and contractual factors. Not a social contract but relations of loyalty and obedience, of free subordination and honor, are the bases of the true state, which does not acknowledge demagoguery and populism.” 

6. “The true state is organic and unified without being totalitarian. It allows for the possibility of a large margin of decentralization. Liberty and partial autonomy stand in relation to loyalty and responsibility according to a precise reciprocity” 

7. “The true state does not acknowledge the system of parliamentary democracy and party rule. It can admit only corporative representations” in a corporative or lower house and in the upper house there should be “an extraordinary tribunal to guarantee the preeminence of the political principle, having higher goals which are not only material and short term.” 

8. It is against one man one vote. “The majority of a healthy and ordered nation should not be involved in politics.” 

9. The political party “which is a necessary organ for a movement in a period of transition and struggle should not be replaced by a single party once in power but it should constitute something like an order, which will participate in the dignity and authority concentrated in the center and assume some of the functions that in earlier, traditional regimes belonged to the nobility as a political class in key positions of the state.” 

10. “The sphere of politics and power should be, by its very nature and function, free from economic influences, influences by economic groups or special interests.” 

11. The class spirit should be eliminated and with it the trade union movement. 

12. “The defence of the principle of true justice will entail denouncing what is today continually promoted as ‘social justice’ a justice that services only the lowest classes of society (the so-called ‘working classes’) and works to the detriment of other classes, effectively leading to injustice.” 

13. The true state “will be hierarchical because it acknowledges and creates respect for the hierarchy of true values”

14. There will be an atmosphere of the highest possible tension, but not of forces agitation.

15. There will not be intrusion of what is public into the field of private life but rather great freedom and great responsibility. 

And is this possible? “A doctrine of the state can only propose values to test the elective affinities and the dominant or latent vocations of a nation. If a people cannot or does not want to acknowledge the values that we have called traditional and which define a true Right, it deserves to be left to itself” and “at most we can point out to it the illusions and suggestions of which it has been or is the victim.” If that does not lead to a sensible result, then this people “will suffer the fate that it has created by making use of its ‘liberty.’”

Thank you for your time and attention. That completes our overview of the main arguments Julius Evola makes in his book Fascism Viewed From The Right. If you found this helpful and interesting, please like the video, share it and subscribe to the channel if you’re not already subscribed.  

Source text: Julius Evola, Fascism Viewed From The Right, trans. E. Christian Kopff (London: Arktos, 2013)

Against the Modern World

Notes on the Third Reich

Transcript: Hi everybody, I’m Michael Millerman and this is Millerman Talks.

Today I’d like to talk to you about Julius Evola’s Notes on the Third Reich, a follow up to his book Fascism Viewed From the Right, which I’ve discussed on this channel before.

Notes on the Third Reich was originally published in 1974. Its intention is “to highlight the multiplicity and even the heterogeneity” of the components of National Socialism, as Evola writes at the end of his study. My goal is to give you a comprehensive overview of Evola’s book and therefore of his assessment of Nazism and Hitler. I’ll be quoting extensively from the book throughout.

If you find this kind of presentation helpful, please like the video and subscribe to the channel.

Evola begins by giving three reasons why it is more difficult in the case of Nazism than in the case of Fascism to distinguish between intrinsically valid principles and contingent elements:

(1) First, the negative elements that…are generally emphasized when people speak of ‘Nazism’ – concentration camps, persecution of the Jews, responsibility for starting the Second World War, Hitler’s ideas – should be separated from the rest. In other words we cannot, in Evola’s view, start our analysis with the things that are most often emphasized and that are front in center – in standing out so starkly, they may keep out of our sight other things that are important to understand.

(2) Second, the central and overwhelming role that was held by a given individual in Germany, even more than in Italy…has cast everything else into the shadows for many.

Although it is natural to want to focus on Hitler when talking about National Socialism, doing so can stop us from assessing adequately the various principles that were in play, whereas identification and analysis of principles is what Evola is particularly concerned to do well. So we must guard against having Hitler’s shadow cast so completely over the study that nothing else is visible.

(3) Finally, in the case of the Third Reich abroad, but also in contemporary Germany, the entire period from the end of the Weimar Republic to the Second World War has hastily been called ‘Nazism,’ as if we were dealing with something completely unitary and homogeneous. There is no appropriate consideration, Evola writes, of the particular factors that played a role in the birth and construction of the Third Reich, with the notable tensions and divergences that subsisted behind the totalitarian structure” (15).

For these reasons, Evola considers it necessary first “to review the antecedents and the complex ideological and political situation in Germany before Hitler came to power,” which he begins to do in Chapter 1, to which we now turn.

“The social chaos that was the inevitable consequence of Germany’s defeat, the collapse of the previous regime, the disastrous clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and the growing unemployment” all led to a situation where communist ideas were being taken more seriously than ever before in Germany.” In these circumstances, Hitler tried to bring German workers to national Socialism by drawing them away from international socialism, which had found its place in Germany after WW1 due to the “inadequacy, weakness, and inconsistency” of the “social democratic, and liberal political forces of the parliamentary Weimar Republic” (17).

However, “‘national’ in Germany did not have the same meaning it had in Western Europe. [and] It is in the volkisch idea that we can see the precursor that played an important role in Hitlerism. Hitler,” Evola writes, “was always talking about the Volk.

The Volksgemeinschaft or community understood in terms of the Volk, a race-people, will be the slogan of his Third Reich, where…it will play a rather problematic role” (20).

For Hitler, the national was not opposed to the social. Thus, while Marxism was “an anti-national movement” fatal to German peoplehood, the “appeal to…German national and racial pride” was itself “first of all essentially thinking of the masses and the working class” (20). The alternative in other words is not national versus social, since German nationalism was itself social. “This was therefore the first component of Nazism,” according to Evola: its mass, working-class, national character (20).

The next point to which he draws our attention is that the situation in Germany was different from the situation in Italy. Italian fascism did not have any deeply rooted tradition to go back when it came to “fighting red subversion and putting the state back on its feet” (20). In Germany, however, “remnants survived with deep roots in that hierarchical world, which was at times still feudal, focused on the values of the state and its authority that were part of the earlier tradition, in particular Prussianism” – and even before Hitler there had been “those, especially intellectuals, who, beginning from that traditional legacy, sought to promote a movement that wanted to restore and, at the same time, to renew” (2021). The goal to restore and at the same time to renew was “the source of the frequently used formula of ‘conservative revolution’” which was “not simply a return to yesterday” but rather a revolution as “the elimination of the negative.”

If you don’t already know, the conservative revolutionaries were a group of what we might call internal dissidents to national socialism who opposed it from the right.

Here Evola quotes Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s remark that “to be conservative does not mean to remain attached to what has been but to live and act starting from what has a lasting value” (21). Indeed, the term “Third Reich” comes from Moeller van den Bruck’s 1923 book called Germany’s Third Empire” or – in German – Reich. Among the German conservative revolutionary thinkers who preceded and partially influenced Hitler, there was a “a spiritual orientation…[and] the emphasis was placed on a revolution that was above all spiritual” (21).

Besides volkish nationalism and conservative revolutionary thinking, Evola mentions “another current…[that] presented aspects that were mostly existential. Its origin,” he writes, “must be brought back to what was called ‘the generation of the frontline,’” especially of those “combatants who saw the war as an experience….a test that, in the best of them, had provoked a process of purification and liberation” – for instance, in Ernst Junger (22) : “For Junger, the Great War had been destructive and nihilistic, only…in relation to everything that is mere rhetoric, the ‘idealism’ of the big hypocritical words, the bourgeois conception of existence” (23).

Besides these theoretical influences were political groups of “veterans of the national Right” (24-26). All this together formed the “general context” for “anti-Marxist and non-democratic Germany before the National Socialist Party established itself on the national scene” (27).

Evola writes that “if there had been an agreement among these various currents and, especially, if there had been men with the stature of leaders capable of confronting the situation, a ‘conservative revolution’ would have been possible…” but “things went in another direction” (27).

He discusses the “perpetration of excesses” that came in the wake of the burning of the Reichstag, as a result of the fact that the subsequent “Decree for the Protection of the People and State” was enforced “not only by the police but also by Hitler’s” paramilitary brownshirts (28). “If we are to formulate a judgment from the general point of view of the Right,” he writes, “we should say that in every state worthy of the name, measures like this one are necessary under certain circumstances. It is because nothing similar took place in Italy, to the greater glory of the holy democracy, that the cancer represented by Communism and its fellow travelers has spread to an alarming degree in post-war Italy and has sunk roots so deep that its extirpation seems unlikely without a civil war” (28).

Yet Evola is critical of the law that conferred full powers on Hitler, the enabling law. More precisely, he says that it should not have lasted from 1933 until 1945. “Even without adhering to the fetish of the so-called rule of law of liberal inspiration,” he reasons, “we ought to see this situation as excessive. It is not right to perpetuate and virtually institutionalize what can be legitimate only in particular temporary situations. The ethical bonds, which are necessarily indeterminate and elastic, between the responsibility held by one part (from on high), and trust and fidelity by the other, cannot replace definite statements of law that, even in an authoritarian state of the Right, must be established to prevent ‘dictatorial leaders’” (30).

In other words, as he argued in his book Fascism Viewed from the Right, a temporary dictator is not incompatible with the doctrine of the true state, but the dictator should not become absolute and permanent. Even worse, Evola regards Hitler’s rule as a dictatorship based on the masses and on a rejection of the king, whereas correct dictatorship is not based on mass support and is only a temporary interruption in the rule of the king. Indeed, Evola harshly criticizes Hitler for his “unparalleled vulgarity” when it comes to hating the monarchy (35).

Evola also criticizes as anti-traditional Hitler’s unification of the German state, to the extent that it was premised on destroying “the individual regional entities that in their partial autonomy and sovereignty corresponded to the various kingdoms, principalities and free cities of the federation of which the Second Reich was composed” (30). This “system of a superior central authority combined with a small group of political units that enjoyed partial autonomy had an organic and qualitative character” that reflects the principles of the true state better than the leveling centralization that Hitler effected (31).

This is a recurring point in Evola’s two books: partial autonomy that preserves qualitative differences is a principle compatible with the right, whereas totalitarian centralization is not.

We next turn to the issue of leadership. In Nazism, “everything gravitated around a man with exceptional abilities for captivating, transporting, arousing and fanaticizing the people, while he himself presented under more than one aspect the traits of a possessed person, as if an extraordinary force were acting through him, giving him lucidity and iron logic in action, but depriving him of every sense of limit” (35).

Just as he had done in the case of Fascist Italy, Evola criticizes Nazi Germany’s cult of leadership, which was no substitute for sound political principles: “the complete ideological collapse of Germany after 1945…shows how superficial was the effect of [Hitler’s] magnetic action on the masses, despite the power of the ‘myths’ and the strict totalitarian organization” (36). Yet, the ideology or worldview of the Third Reich was not even worth preserving, since it contained many inconsistencies and was on the whole muddy, confused, and out of line with the true teaching as Evola understands it. But we will come to that shortly.

Evola points out that when Hitler created the unified German state through the anti-traditional measures of levelling centralization, the diverse thinkers of the conservative revolution realized “the gap that existed between their ideals and the new state, seeing in this state a falsification or profanation of their ideals and blaming it for a break with the preceding tradition” (36). Some of them left Germany, while others stayed to try to exert an influence over the development of Nazism.

This is an important point because it shows us that the thinkers of the conservative revolution were critics of national socialism from the right or from the side of tradition.

Usually, fascism and national socialism are treated together as the far-right end of the political spectrum, where you have liberalism, then communism to its left and Nazism and fascism to its right. That model, of course, does not leave any conceptual space for the conservative revolution as non-fascist, non-Nazi right-wing anti-liberalism. One of the reasons we should Evola, as well as the thinkers he influenced, is to remind ourselves that there is more to the political spectrum than is implied by the model of three political theories.

The next topic for us to consider is the relationship of the State to the People or the place of the State in Nazi policy.

As I discussed in my video on fascism viewed from the right, Evola believes that the state should be preeminent in relation to the people. He is critical of Hitlerism because for Hitler, “the state was conceived as a secondary and instrumental reality, while the primary formative, moving and bearing force was supposed to be the Volk with the Fuhrer as its representative and incarnation” (37). This difference between Italian

Fascism and German national-socialism concerning the preeminence of the state helps to distinguish the two movements at the doctrinal level: the State is primary in Fascism but secondary in Nazism.

In this context, Evola quotes Ernst von Salomon’s opinion that “every attempt to move the essential accent from the state to the people, from authority to the collective, should be considered an absurd and abject betrayal of the true goal of the national movement…there could not be…any bridge between the state idea and the populist one of the essence of the nation.” Yet in their aversion to demagoguery, the German Right, who had the truer teaching, proved politically inferior to Hitler, who was able to politicize and fanaticize a mass movement through propaganda, and whereas the right had hoped to make use of Hitler, the opposite happened (39).

Such successes as the German state had, Evola argues, were due to its unique combination of volk and fuhrer, on one hand (a combination that is not in accordance with the traditional state, as I’ve have already said), and, on the other hand, the legacy of “Prussian dispositions” among the people and the administration. These dispositions include “a love for discipline, [and] the spirit of impersonal and eventually heroic dedication and fidelity,” which Evola regards as distinct from blind fanaticism (41-2).

However, the Prussian disposition was not enough to counteract certain plebian tendencies in Nazism and in Hitler himself. For instance, Evola criticizes the tendency in German national-socialism to provide so much social assistance to the lower classes that they are guaranteed a “maximum of bourgeois comfort” as he puts it, and he expresses distaste for all Hitler’s talk about the “nobility of labour,” because from the viewpoint of the right, the state should not romanticize the workers, the masses, or the lower classes.

To show this similarity of Nazism and Communism with respect to its assessment of the masses, Evola mentions the following old joke. What’s the difference between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia? The Soviet state is proletarian, and the Nazi state is prolet-arian. In other words, both are based on the working classes, but in the German case it is the Aryan working class (42).

Evola writes that, “the presence of a proletarian aspect in Nazism is undeniable, as in the figure of Hitler himself, who had none of the traits of a ‘gentlemen’ of an aristocratic type” (43).

This vulgar, proletarian character runs counter to what the traditional right expects from its leadership and from its doctrine of the state (in other words, it runs counter to the elite aristocracy of noble souls). Similarly, Evola criticizes Nazi initiatives at consolidating the social community under the banner of the Volk to the extent that these initiatives made voluntary work obligatory and ended up thoughtlessly and counterproductively mixing the nobility with the peasants in a failed attempt at political national education (43).

Incidentally, if you want to read something truly amazing about what can happen when the nobility and the peasants mix, have a look at Book 8 of Plato’s Republic sometime, when he discusses the transformation of oligarchy into democracy.

Evola turns next to economic policy, where he finally has some nice things to say. He speaks supportively of Hitler’s war against the trade unions, praising in “completely positive terms” the occupation of union headquarters, the arrest of trade union leaders, and the confiscation of union property (44), as well as the Nazi Party’s opposition to finance capitalism, which he opposes to entrepreneurial or productive capitalism (45).

He likewise sees in Nazi economics some “salutary limits” on “the principle of ‘levelling integration,’” since the state left scope for the development of private industry and did not undertake wholesale nationalization of all businesses. Evola finds positive features in the trade policy of the Third Reich, as reflected in the following phrase from the time:

“We should not buy from countries where the goods are cheapest, but instead from those where we can pay for them primarily with our own exports” (46) - in other words, he endorses the principles of autarky and independence. And although, as we have seen, he did not condone Hitler’s vulgar proletarianism, Evola does consider positive the Third Reich’s defense of the dignity of the peasant farmer as well as state protection of the “inalienable hereditary plot or farm,” which was “transmitted…to preserve through the generations” (47), lest it fall “into the hands of the class of wealthy bourgeois speculators” (48). These various economic initiatives evince a “healthy anti-modern spirit” and “are to be judged among the most positive” features of the Third Reich, according to Evola.

The next major topic he discusses after the economy is race. The party program distinguished between the juridical category of “member of the state,” on one hand, and the biological or racial category of “true citizen,” on the other (49). “Hitler,” Evola writes, “had considered scandalous the fact that, for so long, the ethnic-racial concept of citizenship was not taken into account, that acquisition of citizenship could ‘take place no different from admission to an automobile club’; that is, all it would take is ‘a request so that, by the decision of a bureaucrat, something happens that not even Heaven can do: a stroke of a pen and a Zulu or a Mongol becomes a pure German’” (49).

Hitler had said that an ethnically German streetsweeper was more honorable than a foreign king (49) – an idea that for Evola reflects Hitler’s “purely plebian spirit” (50). Moreover, for Hitler, the state was a vehicle or vessel whose purpose it was to hold and protect the race, so that the state is “not an end but a means” - namely the means by which a superior race produces a superior culture (51). The state, then, exists to defend the race.

Evola is quite critical of Nazi race theory. “The role that ‘myth’ played in all this is clear,” he writes, “as well as its confusing the concept of ‘race’ with the concept of nation (which ends up basically democratizing and degrading the former). Further, no thought was given to defining in positive, even spiritual, terms the concept of ‘Aryan.’ It implicitly allowed every German to think that he was preeminently the ‘Aryan’ to whom was attributed the creation and origin of every higher culture. This was the incentive for a baleful arrogance that was more than nationalist (and completely foreign to the traditional Right)” (52).

Although some of the upper Nazi echelons held that within the German race there was a higher, elite Nordic element, this idea could not but lead to “ironic reflections” among the people, since, as Evola writes, “Hitler was not at all a pure ‘Nordic’ type, nor were his closest collaborators and the heads of the party” (53). Hitler’s view that a German streetsweeper was more honorable than a foreign king Evola calls “a demagogic aberration” (53). He is not opposed to the idea of rank or superiority, provided that the stress is on spiritual rank and superiority. Excessive emphasis on biological race can lead to a “lifeless, spiritually bastardized” racial purity (54), such as he observes among the Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch populations of his time.

Now of course we cannot consider Hitler and the issue of race without saying something about Hitler’s policies towards the Jews, so Evola naturally turns to that topic next. “We should recognize,” he writes, “that in Hitler anti-Semitism played the role of a true idee fixe, of which, in this almost paranoid aspect, it is not possible to completely explain its origins and which had tragic consequences. In his writings and speeches, Hitler over and again attributes to the Jew the cause of every evil. He truly believed that the Jew was the only obstacle to the creation of an ideal German national society, and he made this obsession an essential ingredient in his propaganda. Apart from Marxism [still quoting], for Hitler all Bolshevism has been the creation and tool of Judaism. The same holds true for Western ‘capitalist plutocracy’ and the Masons. These are all theses,” Evola notes, “of which he should have recognized the one-sided character early on. We may wonder whether Hitler, in his ‘fixation,’ was not the victim of one of the tactics of what we have elsewhere called the ‘occult war,’ a tactic consistent with turning all our attention to concentrate on only one particular sector where the fighting forces are acting, while distracting our attention from other sectors where their activity can continue almost undisturbed” (54-55).

Evola does not deny the existence of a “Jewish problem” but he is critical of the “obsessive fanaticism” with which it was treated in Germany (55). In “some professional fields,” he objects, it would be “difficult to prove” that “being a Jew gives a particular, undesirable stamp to the relevant activity,” whereas the Nazis assumed that “Jewishness as a way of being” as such was everywhere detrimental for Germans and Germany. Evola does suggest that there may be characteristics of Jewishness as a way of being that should be avoided or against which it would be necessary to protect oneself, but in this work, he does not go into detail on that point.

Instead, he finishes the discussion on race and the Jewish question with the following sentence: “We need to remember that, if we can indicate the presence of Jews in various modern intellectual, ideological and artistic currents that incontestably entail subversion and denaturing, this activity would never have been possible, unless the terrain had been prepared for quite some time, not by Jews, but by ‘Aryans’ [in quotation marks], and often in irreversible terms” (60).

So, you see, he blames ultimately not the Jews but the worse sort among the Germans themselves for preparing the grounds of their own subversion.

The last thing I want to say about this section is that Evola mentions Paul Lagarde’s separation of “the Jew who was faithful to his own tradition, whom Lagarde respected to a certain degree, from the secularized modern Jew,” for it is the secularized modern Jew, according to Evola, to whom were attributed rootless cosmopolitanism, (empty) rationalism, and other denaturing characteristics. In other words, in some way Evola is suggesting, at least in my view, that it was an error to blame the Jews and not, instead, to consider more carefully the non-Jewish sources of secularized modernity. To do so would be to privilege the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns over the Jewish question.

We have three more chapters to cover.

The theme of chapter five is “worldview.” Evola “ascribe[s] as a merit to National Socialism” that it “felt the need” to struggle for its worldview (61). But “in defining the worldview…there was no success in achieving anything solid and unitary…with reference to the ethical, spiritual and religious plane” (61). He gives the example that National Socialism “was opposed to every kind of atheism” (61) but also turned against Christianity because of its Semitic or Hebraic strands (62). Evola calls the anti-Christian polemics as well as the attempts to Aryanize Christianity “rationalisations and sophistries” (62) – or ideological inconsistencies, we might say.

Another example of a confused worldview is Hitler’s “Wagner infatuation,” since Hitler failed “to recognize the degree to which, aside from the greatness of his Romantic art, Wagner must be held accountable for the distortion of many Germanic and Nordic traditions and sagas” (62). A third example is that whereas Nazi theorists saw in modern science “ ‘a creation of the pure Aryan spirit’” they unfortunately also failed to recognize “that if technological conquests were due to modern science, so was the most destructive and irreversible spiritual devastations of the modern age, the desacralizing of the universe” (63).

Evola is particularly critical of the Nazi rejection of the division between body and soul (63) and hence its rejection of transcendence. A “lack of comprehension for the dimension of transcendence constituted an insuperable handicap” even in “the field of symbols,” where, for instance, the restoration of “runes” or “ancient Germanic signs” could not find its proper interpretation and was instead treated in a “truly primitive and profane” manner (64). About the Swastika in particular, Evola writes that “Hitler and his associates had absolutely no clue” about notions concerning its orientation or the direction of its movement (65). Finally, where there did exist thoughtful books with a coherent worldview closer to the principles of the true teaching, “official Nazi circles took no notice” of them and “wilfully ignored” them” (67).

In the next chapter Evola discusses some ideas present in the German context that might have corrected Hitlerism in the direction of the principles of the true Right. Two such ideas are the Order (like the Order of Teutonic Knights, which formed the “first small cell of Prussianism”) and the Mannerbund, “men’s associations” comprised of a cadre of elites “defined by an exclusively virile solidarity and a type of special chrism” (69-70).

Both the Order and the Association were preferable to the Party as the basis for the State (70). But although there were initiatives to develop a “cultural order,” they, “encountered a sort of handicap,” as Evola writes, “in the fact that an order in the true sense presupposes a chrism, a spiritual basis,” which was lacking in Nazism (74).

The topic of the last chapter is “the ideology that was the foundation of the foreign policy of the Third Reich, and in particular of Hitler” (80). Again, Evola states here that “the most negative aspect of Hitlerlism is represented by the fundamental and fatal part that the radicalism of and irredentistic ethnic nationalism played in it” (80). Hitler “did not stop with ethnic-nationalist integration, but advanced in a direction close to a hegemonic Pan-Germanism” and inter-European colonialism, based on the idea, false for Evola, of Aryan supremacy (81). Every “properly Hiterlian component” in German foreign policy,

for Evola, worked against the true right “ideal of a European New Order” that could have “referred to…an organic, solidary and synergistic coordination of states and communities whose characteristic traits and independence were respected” (83).

We are now at the end of Evola’s study. His closing paragraph reminds us that there may be principles and ideas present in national socialism “that should not be disowned today, just because they figured in the Third Reich and were often distorted by it” (86). In short, for Evola it is possible to reject many characteristic features of National Socialism and of Hitlerism without automatically assuming that there was no principle or idea in it of any value, since all valuable ideas must be liberal democratic or leftist. It is this post-war “democratic brainwashing” (86) that he says has led to “an incredible ideological vacuum” in the worldview of “present-day Germany” and perhaps of the West more broadly. We, for our part, can regard Evola’s books on Nazism and Fascism as an effort to sort through the rubble of those defeated, discredited movements to uncover what if anything can be preserved for a true teaching that avoids their vulgar errors and theoretical confusions.

Dugin on Evola

An infamous contemporary student of Traditionalism is the Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin. I have translated a talk of his about Italian political thought in relation to his own political theory. It includes reflections on Evola, including Dugin's disagreements with Evola, particularly concerning Heidegger. You can find that here.