Julius Evola’s Fascism Viewed from the Right is a work of political criticism first published in Italian in the mid-1960s and reissued with additional notes in 1970; the English edition, translated and introduced by E. Christian Kopff, appeared in 2013. Evola—an Italian thinker who had been his country’s leading Dadaist poet before turning to esotericism and traditionalist philosophy—wrote the book to judge Mussolini’s regime not by its successes or failures but by its principles. The result is neither a defense nor a prosecution of Fascism as it actually existed, but an attempt to measure it against an older European idea of the state.
“Fascism, however, in fact performed this function only up to a certain point, mainly because of the remnants of the past that survived into the Twenty Years.”
At the center of the book stands a distinction Evola insists on from the first page: the political Right has nothing to do with the economic Right. Liberalism and democracy, he argues, were themselves revolutionary subversions, and any “Right” that counts liberals among its members has already surrendered the ground it claims to defend. A genuine Right, in his account, is the heir of the forces and traditions that shaped European nations before 1789—before the Third Estate, before the world of the masses, before bourgeois and industrial culture. He is candid that no such Right existed in Italy when he wrote, and that the term itself is strictly inappropriate to a parliamentary system that presupposes a loyal opposition rather than a contest over the state’s transcendent authority.
How the Case Against Fascism Is Built
The Editor’s Frame and Evola’s Career
E. Christian Kopff’s introduction to the 2013 Arktos edition lays out the book’s textual history before anything else. The original Italian, Il fascismo visto dalla destra; Note sul terzo Reich, appeared in Rome in 1974, the year of Evola’s death. Kopff supplied the introduction’s footnotes; the editor, John B. Morgan IV, supplied those to the text itself, bracketing Evola’s own second-edition notes inside the main body so they can be told apart. Foreign-language sources were swapped for English editions where possible, untranslated works stay in the original, and the websites were checked in December 2012.
By the early 1960s Evola felt his most important books were behind him—Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins, Ride the Tiger—and wrote The Path of Cinnabar as a retrospective. He then turned to the two movements he knew from personal experience. The first version came out in 1964 as Fascism: Essay of a Critical Analysis from the Point of View of the Right; a reprint with added notes followed in 1970 under the title we have. The biography Kopff sketches is deliberately wide: the young Evola was Italy’s leading Dadaist poet and painter between 1916 and 1922, then the country’s chief exponent of René Guénon’s esotericism, earning an international name for books on magic, alchemy and Eastern traditions, and the respect of Mircea Eliade and Giuseppe Tucci. Only The Doctrine of Awakening appeared in English during his lifetime. North American reception came slowly and mostly hostile—Thomas Sheehan, Franco Ferraresi and Richard Drake blamed him for neo-Fascist terrorism—until the journal Gnosis ran pieces by Robin Waterfield and Elémire Zolla in 1990, alongside an editor’s essay that misstated his bibliography and concluded his esotericism fell outside the Western tradition.
Never a Party Member
Evola never joined the Fascist Party, and across Mussolini’s two decades he published critiques of specific initiatives: the Concordat with the Vatican, the violence of the squadristi, and Fascist flirtation with National Socialist racial doctrine. His attack on the Concordat failed to move Mussolini, but his critique of “scientific racism” impressed him enough that he endorsed a German translation of a book on race, Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race. Criticising the squadristi brought their attention until Roberto Farinacci, the Fascist boss of Cremona, took him under protection; from 1934 to 1943 Evola edited the opinion page of Farinacci’s Il Regime Fascista. The harassment stopped, though at the outbreak of the Second World War his attempt to resume his Great War commission was refused—on the grounds that he had declined to fight a duel with a journalist.
Principles Against Contingency
The book’s method turns on a distinction. Some Italians defended Fascism wholesale, from the March on Rome to Mussolini’s resignation, under the motto Il Duce ha sempre ragione!; committed Leftists and timid compromisers denied the regime any virtue at all. Evola calls both positions absurd and analyses Fascism against principles set out in Revolt Against the Modern World. He cares about principles, and insists that human failings and historical accidents—”the contingent”—should not be held against men or movements unless they can be shown to follow from mistaken principles. He hunts those principles in Mussolini’s major speeches and initiatives and in the Enciclopedia Italiana article “The Doctrine of Fascism,” officially Mussolini’s, usually attributed to Giovanni Gentile. His verdict is that the regime was often sound in principle but collapsed in the war crisis because two generations of liberal and radical propaganda since the Risorgimento had demoralised the Italians. Kopff’s introduction digresses here on Left and Conservative readings of the Risorgimento, on Garibaldi, Mazzini, Victor Emmanuel and Cavour, before returning to Evola’s account of a true Right: a strong central state that creates the nation and its people rather than the reverse, with a king at the moral and political centre.
The Warrior’s Path
Kopff also addresses the tension between Evola’s spiritual mastery and his political engagement, a sticking point for religious traditionalists. Where Guénon saw spiritual fulfilment as passive withdrawal from the material world until its collapse, after which a new brahmin caste would restore a Golden Age, Evola held that active involvement in the world is itself a route to realisation—the warrior’s way is not inferior to the brahmin’s, and in the best traditional state the king embodied both. Kopff points to Revolt Against the Modern World and the earlier Essays on Magical Idealism as evidence, and sorts out a chronological confusion: Ride the Tiger was written before Men Among the Ruins, the two intended as a pair, related as Aristotle’s Ethics to his Politics. He calls the present book a model of traditionalism permeating all of life—meditation, initiation, politics, mountain climbing—committed, principled and disinterested.
What the Word ‘Right’ Can Mean
Evola opens his own text by restricting the inquiry to Fascism’s general aspect and level of principles. No Right worthy of the name exists in Italy as a unified, organised force with a precise doctrine, he says; what passes for the Right is defined only by generic opposition to Marxism and Communism, gathers contradictory tendencies, and wrongly counts liberals and democrats among its number—men a real traditional Right would have appalled, since liberalism and democracy were once justly considered revolutionary subversion. He denounces the identification of the political Right with the economic Right as a Marxist fraud; between the two there is clear antithesis. Italy itself was unified under ideologies derived from the Revolution of the Third Estate and the “immortal principles” of 1789, transplanted into the Risorgimento. The “historic Right” barely held upright, lacked the courage to reach root evils, and was basically bourgeois rather than aristocratic; its crowning foreign-policy achievement, the Triple Alliance, could have pulled Italy away from French revolutionary ideology toward the traditional states of Central Europe, but misfired, and the historic Right left no precise ideological legacy, becoming moderate liberalism. When the Alliance ended, Italy entered the First World War on the side of the Entente—defending democracy despite autocratic Russia—and returned to the Risorgimento direction. The term “Right,” Evola argues, is strictly inappropriate anyway, presupposing a duality within a parliamentary party regime; older regimes knew at most an English pre-Victorian arrangement of a governmental party and a loyal opposition that never questioned the transcendent state. The true Right should represent a higher demand: recipient and affirmer of values bound to the true state, central and superior to practical opposition. He laments his contemporaries’ amnesia about the old regime, and refers readers to Men Among the Ruins for systematic doctrine.
Against the Myth of Neo-Fascism
The second chapter takes up the label “Neo-Fascism,” given by democrats and Communists to national forces opposing both; accepting it unreservedly creates errors and serves enemies. The acceptance flows from talk of “nostalgics,” and Fascism has undergone mythologising: most people’s attitude is emotional rather than critical, especially among ideological loyalists to yesterday’s Italy, who made Mussolini and Fascism a myth, fixating on a historically conditioned reality and the man at its centre instead of political ideas with normative value. Idealising is the counterpart, and anti-national forces practise the reverse—systematic denigration, emphasising every problematic side to discredit the whole.
A Normative Standpoint
The vast literature on Fascism, Evola notes, contains nothing written from his own perspective; when not partisan it is sociological, historicist or socio-economic, using categories of a “modern” mentality blind to the principles behind his discrimination.
The Dyarchy and the Monarchy
Critics of the Fascist regime often charged that Mussolini’s respect for the monarchy sapped the movement’s revolutionary force. Evola turns the charge on its head. Had Italy possessed a genuine monarchy—one that intervened energetically in moments of crisis rather than serving as a decorative symbol of sovereignty—Fascism would never have arisen at all. The crisis preceding the March on Rome would have been resolved by a “revolution from above,” the only revolution admissible within a traditional regime, followed by a reorganisation of the state’s ineffective structures. Because Italy lacked such a monarchy, events took another course: the sovereign allowed Mussolini to carry out the revolution from above within limits, perhaps to preserve the late-liberal fiction of a king who reigns but does not govern.
Doctrinally, Evola insists, the dyarchy was no mere hybrid compromise. Traditional chrism can accommodate duality. Ancient Rome contemplated a dictatorship destined to integrate the legitimate order in emergencies, and traditional constitutions knew the pairing of rex and dux, or rex and imperator. The first term incarnates pure, sacred, intangible sovereignty; the second receives extraordinary powers in tempestuous times and demands a specially endowed personality, since he cannot draw authority from symbolic function ex officio. Richelieu, Metternich and Bismarck partly reproduced this duality beside their sovereigns. Mussolini’s dignity, Evola argues, would not have been diminished as a loyal great Chancellor—largely his function until the King of Italy created the Empire. In the Second Reich’s authoritarian constitutionalism, Wilhelm II fired Bismarck, yet honoured him as hero and greatest statesman.
On the crisis of 1943 Evola makes no value judgment about how the dyarchy collapsed, essentially through violence amid wartime events. Juridically, little can be objected to Vittorio Emanuele III’s conduct; a palace conspiracy headed by Acquarone and Badoglio may be admitted. Formally, Mussolini presented himself to the King after the Grand Council denied confidence, ready to resign. The sovereign retreated to abstract constitutional prerogatives and the liberal caricature of the King’s non-responsibility; instead the unwritten bond of loyalty should have intervened. The King had agreed to add the lictors’ fasces to the dynasty’s coat of arms and allowed state authority to be raised by Fascism. Those whose loyalty dissolved and who served the second Fascism can claim legitimacy; Mussolini’s resentment pushed him toward taking sides against the person of the monarch—hence the proclamation of the “social” Republic, compared to degenerative regressions after psychic trauma. An editorial note records that Mussolini proclaimed the Republic by direct personal initiative without consulting anyone, after July 25, 1943; the author was at Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg when Mussolini arrived, just after his liberation by Otto Skorzeny. Mussolini met Fascist leaders, made no reference to the institutional problem, dismissed them about nine in the evening, and next morning prefaced the first order of the day with the Republic’s proclamation. Hitler’s influence should not be excluded—he had contempt for monarchy, incompatible with the Führer principle. Through events having the character of Nemesis, the Italian monarchy was doomed to end without greatness or tragedy.
The One-Party State and the Cult of the Leader
The true state, Evola holds, does not admit partitocrazia; parliamentary reform was positive, but the one-party state is absurd. “Party” means part, implying multiplicity; the sole party is the part wanting to become the whole, the faction eliminating others without changing its nature. Given permanent institutional character, the Fascist Party became a state within the state—militia, federal police, Grand Council—to the prejudice of an organic, monolithic system. In the conquest phase a party is fundamental as a crystallising centre; afterward its survival as party is absurd. Valid forces should insert themselves into the state’s hierarchies, occupy key positions, constitute an elite bearing the idea—an “order,” like the nobility as political class in Central European states. Fascism maintained itself as party, duplicating government; declaring party and militia “in the service of the nation” did not overcome the gap. Its mass character, with everyone holding the “card,” produced superficial, conformist adherents who changed colours at the crisis; Communism and National Socialism were more exclusive and selective. The goal should have been an Order, the state’s backbone. Party remnants caused interferences: squadristi deemed adequate for tasks needing competence; the Party accepted reputed men with merely formal adhesion, such as members of the Royal Academy of Italy.
The cult of the leader was a negative aspect—Mussolini’s prestige bordering on the tribunician and Napoleonic, emphasis on his person, a democratic inclination to “go to the people,” not despising piazza applause. After the “oceanic” meetings at Palazzo Venezia, the people repaid him in 1945. Statements claiming Fascism as “true” democracy contradict his doctrine—the Perugia speech of 6 October 1926 and the Milan speech of 1 November 1936 sit inconsistently with the Udine speech of September 1922: “I do not worship the new divinity, the masses.” Such mass-magnetism is ephemeral, like metal particles dropping when the current fails—explaining Italy and still more Germany.
Democracy, Militarism, and Representation
The democratic element’s importance, Evola argues, stems from the monarchy’s weakness; Fascism, the only force capable of elevating the Italian state, was nonetheless ambiguous due to its problematic source—though this belongs to historical contingency. Mussolini was influenced by Nietzsche and Spengler, who predicted a new era of “great individuals” of the “caesarean” type destined to succeed democracy. Mussolini, likely feeling himself such a figure, allegedly ignored that Spengler’s “caesarism” belongs to the dark close of a cultural cycle—the phase of Zivilization opposed to Kultur, the “Sunset of the West,” not positive in itself unless corrected by a superior tradition and diverse chrism. In Italy, possibilities produced an equilibrium or temporary reconciliation with positive aspects until monarchical Fascism of the Twenty Years faced a hard test of strength.
Evola then separates the military component of Fascism from the masses and their screaming leaders. He quotes Mussolini (1934) on becoming a military, militaristic, warrior nation endowed with obedience, sacrifice and dedication, and (1925) that everyone should consider himself a soldier even without the grey-green uniform—at office, factory, dockyards or farm. The author distinguishes “military” from “paramilitary” and reserves objection to “militarism.” From the traditional Right’s viewpoint, a militarising of existence and the soldier as general symbol is acceptable as a style of behaviour and ethic with autonomous value independent of obligatory military ends; positive “military” training must correct what proceeds from irrational, emotional aggregation by a “mob” and the “people.” Fascism tried to instil discipline into individualistic Italians, saw the “dangers of the bourgeois spirit,” and despised “the stagnation of a vapid existence.” The military orientation connects naturally with the political, opposing the “social” element; military style is active and anti-rhetorical depersonalisation, the most important factor of stability for a political and social organism, just as army and monarchy in mutual solidarity were essential pillars of the true state before the revolution of the Third Estate, democracy and liberalism. Primo de Rivera spoke of an “ascetic and military sense of life”—antithetical to the “culture of affluence” with its suffocating activity creating multiple “protests.”
An essential aspect of military ethic is service as honour. Fascism introduced uniforms for state functionaries to overcome the bureaucratic spirit and dignify bureaucracy—opposing the grey, squalid bureaucrat eyeing paycheque and pension with the functionary for whom service to the state was first an honour presupposing special vocation. “Militarisation” as de-bureaucratising the bureaucracy contrasted with the regressive bureaucratising of military life; the uniform served as symbol or ritual, opposite to a mechanistic totalitarian system.
The “Second Colonialism” and the Levelling of Peoples
Evola turns to the postwar landscape and finds that the older colonial question has lost its meaning, because the Western peoples themselves have been reduced. What survives is a concealed economic colonialism—a “second colonialism”—in which America and Russia compete for influence over nominally independent coloured peoples, binding them through foreign capital and industry. The new non-European nations, he argues, have traded one yoke for a worse one: they broke free of the old colonial powers only to Westernise, adopting White culture, ideologies, political forms and lifestyles, and demanding “development” so as to become grotesque facsimiles of White states. They oppose the Whites only on the Whites’ own terms. Everything converges toward a general levelling, with power relationships and spheres of influence deciding the outcome more nakedly than before. Japan once looked like an exception—traditional culture coexisting with external modernisation—but after the Second World War that equilibrium tilted steadily toward modernisation, its last bulwarks falling one after another.
Mussolini’s Formative Racism and the “Inner Race”
The third factor of Fascist racism matters most to Evola, because it shows continuity with what Mussolini always professed. Mussolini believed racism in the proper, positive sense—distinct from anti-Semitism and from defending the prestige of the “Italian race” before coloured peoples—could help form a new type of Italian, differentiated from the fragile, anarchic temperamental substance of a people that was never a homogeneous race. Fascism’s future, Mussolini thought, depended less on transmitting ideas and institutions than on a formative action producing a selected type. The ambition to create “a new way of life” and “a new type of Italian” was present from the regime’s beginnings, well before Nazi influence could be invoked—Hitler had not yet attained power in 1929. In his report to Parliament on the Vatican accords, Mussolini spoke of state action that, “continually transforming the nation,” could reach “its physical aspect,” an idea tied to the general doctrine of the state-people relationship as form and matter.
Evola insists this creative aspect is not imaginary. History shows races not as given primal groups but as groups formed with stable characteristics relative to a culture and tradition, defined by a mode of being—an “interior race.” Israel began as an ethnic compound united by religious tradition, not a pure homogeneous race; in the United States an easily recognisable type was rapidly born from an unlikely ethnic mix through the climate of a given culture. How much greater the possibilities when a real traditional culture is involved. The appeal to race and blood counters individualism, intellectualism and superficial comportment. “Thoroughbred,” étre racé—the terms point to a maximal correspondence with the type of each species, observable not in the masses but in a restricted number of cases. It would be beneficial if true values were defended by men who, in physical race and character, reproduce a higher type rather than showing a painful break between body and spirit. The ideal is Classical, even Hellenic; the hysterical reactions of intellectuals at the mention of race only show they have not come to terms with it.
The 1938 Manifesto of Race and the Aryo-Roman Alternative
The Manifesto of Race of 1938 was compiled as a prelude to the racist turn by a small, heterogeneous group, raked together from here and there, and it was bungled and inconsistent—partly because Italy lacked adequate preliminary studies. It affirmed race as “a purely biological concept” and, apart from the absurd term “Italian race,” asserted Italy’s population was of Aryan origin with Aryan civilisation, without indicating what “Aryan” meant. The Aryan character was reduced to something negative and problematic—not being Hebrew or coloured—with no positive counterpart, no higher criterion of comportment, style, worldview, character or spirit. Foreign influence is plain: Fascist racism should be of “Nordic-Aryan orientation.”
Evola wanted all this reconsidered. He attests that Mussolini was inclined toward such developments. Even before the racist turn he had opposed biological-scientific and collectivising-fanatical racism, as it prevailed in Germany, setting against it a racism emphasising the “inner race” and a traditional, anti-materialist conception of the human being—the inner race serving as the base for formative action. Italy should not refer to the Nordic-Aryan type after the German fashion: the science of origins had ascertained different groups differentiated from a common primal stock—the Hellenic element, especially Doric Sparta, the basal Roman element, and the German element—sharing traits of character, ethics, customs, worldview and culture that attest a single remote origin. The “Aryo-Roman” type could be the centre of crystallisation, integrating Fascism’s “Roman” vocation while remaining independent of German racism. Evola set out these ideas in Synthesis of a Doctrine of Race; Mussolini read it, invited him to meet, approved its theses unconditionally, and agreed to undertake significant initiatives.
The Axis, the War, and the Question of Limits
Diplomatic dealings with Germany leading to the Rome-Berlin Axis, Evola suggests, could have had a deeper, more vocational character; a note observes that the Tripartite Pact offered another basis for “elective affinities,” since Japan was held to rest on an Emperor ruling by divine right and on the samurai nobility and its ethic, though racial, historical and environmental differences precluded any direct relation. The response to the Axis exposes the inmost feelings of part of the “Italian race” and of various Fascist exponents—Galeazzo Ciano being the typical case—in their intolerance of, resistance to and lack of sympathy for rapprochement with Germany. Other factors explain the rapprochement: concrete common interests, personal sympathy between the two dictators, affinities on populist aspects. Mussolini was especially impressed that Hitler’s Germany clearly continued the German and Prussian ethic, tradition and conception of the state.
Fascism’s doctrine logically opposed both the Western democracies and capitalism, with the United States as extreme expression, and Communism and Soviet Russia—West and East. Italy’s military alignment in the war followed in principle from that logic; in theory there is nothing to object to, and it would be illegitimate to judge the ideology’s intrinsic value by the war’s outcome. The real problem, especially for Germany, is the degree to which the war was conducted with knowledge of possibilities and a sense of limits. After the collapse of the Western front, with only England resisting and awaiting invasion, only a minority could doubt a decisive German victory or foresee Italy’s involvement in events Mussolini could not control. A parenthetical notes that Mussolini tried to prevent the war’s outbreak with an initiative that found no good will, especially from France, and had earlier proposed the Quadripartite Pact of Germany, England, Italy and France, which clashed with his partners’ ideological biases and narrow horizons. Evola lays dire consequences at the door of Hitler’s lack of a sense of limits, his fanaticism and megalomania—the obsession with the myth of people and race, “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.” Had Germany limited itself to rising again as a great European power with a sense of limit, Europe’s state today would differ.
Croce, the Dark Side of War, and What Victory Would Have Meant
A note takes up Benedetto Croce: opponent of Italy’s intervention against Germany in the First World War, admirer of Hegel, until 1925 a defender of the strong state, who publicly stated he desired the enemy’s victory and favoured it “with thought, sentiment and action,” understanding the Allies as conducting “a war of religion”—as Eisenhower called the war in Europe a “crusade”—though the atheist Soviet Union figured among the Allies and played a decisive part. After Italy’s collapse Croce expressed bitter repentances, greeted with silence by those who exalt Croce the anti-Fascist. Evola adds that in some cases it is hard to say how far the lack of preparation and incompetence of the high commands was bound up with sabotage or treason.
For non-anti-Fascists, corrective developments could have followed a won war, above all through the veterans’ fighting spirit renovating the regimes’ cadres while the basic ideas stood.
The book’s method is what gives it its peculiar character. Evola refuses both the slogan of the loyalists—Il Duce ha sempre ragione—and the blanket condemnation of the Left, calling both positions absurd. He looks for Fascism’s principles in Mussolini’s major speeches and in the official article on the doctrine of Fascism in the Enciclopedia Italiana, and he holds that human failings and historical accidents should not be counted against a movement unless they can be shown to follow from mistaken principles. This is why the book can praise the regime’s doctrine of the state as “absolutely positive” while condemning much of what the regime actually did.
The single most important idea Evola draws out is the pre-eminence of the state over people and nation. Mussolini’s claim that “the nation is created by the State” is, for Evola, a recovery of the classical relation of form to matter: the state gives the nation self-awareness, will, and form, just as Aristotle’s form shapes inert material. He connects this to the Roman idea of imperium and to the trinomial “authority, order and justice,” which he reads as the renewal of a tradition common to every great European state. Fascism’s Roman myth, he argues, was its most audacious gesture—a leap across centuries to regain contact with the only truly valid legacy on Italian soil—even if official Fascism never deepened that symbol beyond its political surface.
Against this standard, the deviations loom large. Evola calls the “ethical state” of Giovanni Gentile a degradation: a state that treats its citizens as schoolchildren, that takes the man by the hand like a father with his son, lowers the leader to the rank of an officious pedagogue. The pronatalist campaign, the preoccupation with sexual morality, the puritanical policing of private life—all of this he attributes to Fascism’s bourgeois component and sets against the older, warrior ethos, which he insists was never moralistic. His formula for the true state, borrowed from Walter Heinrich, is omnia potens but not omnia faciens: all-powerful in ultimate decisions, but not meddling in everything, commanding by prestige rather than by compulsion, conceding a wide margin to spontaneous liberty.
The Party, the Leader, and the Men Who Replaced Principles
Evola’s critique of Fascist practice turns on three institutions he thinks were structurally wrong. The one-party state he dismisses as a contradiction in terms: a party is by definition a part, and a sole party is the faction that has swallowed the whole without changing its nature. What Fascism should have produced, he argues, was an Order—a selective elite inserted into the state’s hierarchies, like the nobility that served as a political class in the Central European states—rather than a mass party whose card every Italian carried and whose members changed colors the moment the crisis came. He notes, with some bite, that Communism and National Socialism were in this respect more exclusive and more serious.
The cult of the leader he treats as a democratic infection. Mussolini’s tribunician posturing, his taste for piazza applause, his “going to the people”—Evola reads all of it as a mass-magnetism as ephemeral as iron filings dropping when the current fails, and he observes dryly that the people repaid Mussolini in 1945. The dyarchy with the monarchy, by contrast, he defends in principle: a dual sovereignty of rex and dux has traditional warrant, and had Italy possessed a true monarchy capable of a revolution from above, Fascism would never have been needed. What he condemns is the king’s retreat into abstract constitutional prerogatives in 1943, when an unwritten bond of loyalty should have counted for more than legal form.
What the Book Is Finally Arguing
Read as a whole, the book is less a history than a thought experiment: what would a state look like if it were built on the principles the Right claims to hold? Evola finds in Fascism fragments of an answer—the corporative idea of organic productive unity, the militarization of existence as an ethic of service and honor, autarchy as a Stoic discipline of independence—and he finds each fragment compromised by what he calls “the contingent”: trade-unionist remnants, pan-corporatist dreams, bureaucratic regimentation, the incoherent racism of the 1938 Manifesto of Race, which he criticizes for reducing race to a purely biological concept while offering no positive criterion of the “inner race” he himself championed. His own alternative, an “Aryo-Roman” type drawing on Hellenic, Roman, and German elements without subservience to German racism, is presented as the road not taken.
The book closes on the war and its aftermath. Evola argues that Italy’s alignment with Germany followed logically from Fascist doctrine, and that the outcome of the war says nothing about the ideology’s intrinsic worth; what he blames is the absence of a sense of limits, above all Hitler’s obsession with the myth of race. He ends by attacking Italy’s “exceptional” laws against Fascism as a juridical absurdity—legislation that punishes the defense of something it never rigorously defines, in a democracy whose own definitions are multiple and discordant. A democracy, he writes, may defend itself against violent conquest of power, but not against ideas.
A Traditionalist’s Reckoning
The book’s significance lies in the position it occupies rather than in any influence it has had. It is a critique of Fascism written from a point further right than Fascism itself—a standpoint from which the regime appears as a half-finished attempt to restore something older than the nation-state. That stance has made Evola a difficult figure for every camp: unsympathetic to the regime he analyzes, never a party member, harassed by the squadristi until Roberto Farinacci took him under protection, and yet equally hostile to the liberal and democratic order that replaced it. Kopff’s introduction frames the book as a model of a traditionalism that permeates all of life—meditation, initiation, politics, even mountain climbing—and contrasts Evola’s active, warrior conception of spiritual realization with René Guénon’s passive withdrawal. Whether one accepts that framing or not, the book remains an unusual document: a rigorous, unsentimental inventory of what Italian Fascism promised, what it delivered, and what its most committed critic on the Right believed it should have been.
