Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins is a work of political philosophy: a sustained critique of modern society written from the standpoint of a “radical traditionalist” who believed the West had entered an irreversible phase of decline. Composed of sixteen chapters plus an appendix (Evola’s self-defense), it was written in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the author—an Italian thinker who had moved through Dadaism, Idealist philosophy, and an uneasy relationship with Fascism—set out to diagnose what he saw as the spiritual and political collapse of the modern world and to sketch the principles by which a traditional order might one day be rebuilt. The English edition, translated by Guido Stucco and edited by Michael Moynihan, presents these postwar reflections alongside extensive editorial apparatus: a foreword by Joscelyn Godwin, a preface and introduction by H. T. Hansen tracing Evola’s political biography, and Evola’s own preface to the third Italian edition of 1972.
“It was the Napoleonic Code that made “property” neutral and “private” in the inferior and individualistic sense of the word; with this code, property ceased to have a political function and bond.”
The book’s central claim is that the political forms of modernity—liberalism, democracy, socialism, communism—are not separate diseases but interconnected stages of a single process of subversion, and that the only coherent response is a “revolutionary conservatism” grounded in principles held to be immutable. Evola does not argue for the restoration of any particular past institution; he argues that Tradition itself is metahistorical and dynamic, a force of ordering “from above” that expresses itself through different forms in different ages. The task of those who still stand upright “among the ruins” is to hold to the idea rather than to any fallen institution.
From Subversion to the Ruins of the Modern State
The Symbol on the Cover and the Editorial Frame
The English volume opens with apparatus rather than argument. A note explains the valknut on the cover: an old Norse emblem of three interlocked triangles, its name joining valr—the slain of battle—to knut, a knot, and tied in tradition to Odin’s power over men. The Eddas call it Hrungnir’s Heart; its meaning is lost. The editors record that modern heathen groups have used it, and so have white identitarian movements that claim Evola as an inspiration, and they say plainly that this digital edition was prepared as a dedication to self-identified identitarians of the alt-right and kindred currents. Readers are directed to Revolt Against the Modern World first and Riding the Tiger afterward.
The table of contents maps the whole: an editor’s note, acknowledgments, Joscelyn Godwin’s foreword, H. T. Hansen’s preface to the American edition and his long introduction on Evola’s political endeavors, Evola’s own preface to the third Italian edition of 1972, sixteen chapters, and an appendix, “Evola’s Autodifesa.” The editor’s note fixes the terminology—Tradition, Idea, Land, Leader, Orders, the State, and “Mothers” in a sense drawn from Bachofen, all capitalized—and follows the 1972 Volpe edition of Rome; “Fascism” is capitalized only for Mussolini’s historical movement. Footnotes are Evola’s unless marked as editorial.
Godwin’s Foreword
Godwin observes that Evola’s voice now carries further than it did in his lifetime; this is the ninth of his books in English. He presents Evola as a rare universal man—philosopher, engineering student, artillery officer, Dadaist poet and painter, journalist, alpinist, linguist, orientalist, political commentator—universal too in a vertical dimension that gave his talents a single direction. Evola’s aim, Godwin says, was the identity of the Self with the Absolute, pursued first through philosophy lived at white heat, then through esoteric discipline and ascetic trial; his character was set before he was twenty.
Godwin then names the second obstacle: Evola’s extreme right-wing politics. He judges Men Among the Ruins not Evola’s best book and insists it must never be a gateway—that role belongs to Revolt Against the Modern World—yet suppressing anything is intellectually dishonest. The academic approach, he suggests, resembles a bomb-disposal unit handling explosive material at arm’s length, and he invokes academic freedom. Hansen’s introductory study, first published as the preface to the German edition of 1991, supplies the factual ground for serious criticism. Those who react only emotionally, Godwin adds, are beyond help; Evola differs from the mere fanatic because he writes with the vertical dimension in view, and books like The Hermetic Tradition and The Yoga of Power reveal a mind whose personal experience gave him the key to self-transformation.
Hansen’s Revisions and the Passport Affair
Hansen’s preface notes that a decade has passed since his German introduction. Books and anthologies on Evola have multiplied, and since the 1998 centenary public discussion is no longer taboo, above all in Italy. His overall assessment stands, but some points need revision—chiefly Evola’s presumed relationship to Mussolini. Rather than rewrite an old text, Hansen flags the passages needing correction and sets out the new facts, leaving conclusions to the reader. He points to Piero di Vona of Naples, whose Metafisica e politica in Julius Evola treats metaphysics and politics as inseparable in Evola’s case.
The new facts concern the forged passport Evola supposedly used in wartime Vienna. The American scholar Dana Lloyd Thomas found in Roman archives that in 1942 the Italian foreign ministry withdrew Evola’s passport to force his return. The ministry was alarmed by his lectures in Germany and Austria declaring “Latinity”—which Fascist officials upheld—unfit for Italians as a whole, and dividing them instead into a higher “Nordic” component and a lower “Mediterranean” one, a wedge feared to split ethnic groups and undermine national unity mid-war. At a Vienna lecture in 1941 Evola went further, denying Italians the right to their own nation and arguing for merging Italy into a “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” The Italian general consul in Rome intervened aggressively and the passport was withdrawn. Evola protested vehemently; Mussolini personally countermanded the measure, but Roman bureaucratic resistance delayed it.
Weininger and the Holy Damned
The editor’s introduction turns to influences, naming Otto Weininger as the third of the “holy damned ones,” after Nietzsche—thinkers destroyed by the strength of their own thought because they lacked a supra-normal realization centered on transcendence.
The Polemic Against National Socialism
Evola’s quarrel with National Socialism ran deeper than politics. He attacked Alfred Rosenberg, the movement’s chief ideologue, largely because Rosenberg bowed to modernity, and he said later that Rosenberg “lacked any understanding for the transcendental dimensions of the sacral.” The central objection was the absence of a transcendent background: a state, Evola wrote in 1937, can be organized in the name of spirit or of matter, and Germany had chosen matter. From that flowed the rest—the cult of the Volk as nature’s guiding principle, a Führer answering only to the people with no legitimation from above, populism, demagoguery, and a racism that was purely biological.
Austria, the Führer Slogan, and the KdF Masses
He opposed the Anschluss and wanted the Austrian monarchy revived, arguing that National Socialism had betrayed the Empire’s ancient aristocratic tradition for a semi-collectivist, equalizing centralism that flattened Germany’s duchies, counties, and cities. By November 1940 he was calling “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” already outdated. After the war he noted that for Hitler the people were the sole principle of legitimacy, with no higher principle tolerated, and that Hitler’s anti-Habsburg polemics bore unparalleled vulgarity. He confessed to shuddering with revulsion at the KdF masses and the “de-proletarianized” Berlin worker.
The SS as Order—and as Surveillance
What attracted him was the idea of a state ruled by an Order, embodied in the SS. In 1941 he argued that beyond party and administration an elite must form the new state’s basis—an ascetic-military Order held by loyalty and honor—and he took the SS, which Himmler modeled on the Teutonic Knights, to be that elite; its castles, initiations, and ethical demands strengthened his conviction, though he thought its ethics borrowed from the Jesuits. The SS meanwhile kept a file on him, attending and archiving his lectures after 1937. A final 1938 report judged him a fanatic and dreamer, a “reactionary Roman” whose plans for a Romano-Germanic Imperium were utopian; it recommended withholding support, curbing his public activity, blocking his entry into leading offices, and watching his propaganda abroad. Himmler read it and fully agreed.
The Berlin Lecture and the Charge of Myth
In an October 1937 Berlin lecture Evola credited National Socialism with a front against liberalism, rationalism, Bolshevism, and the myth of the economy, but demanded more: a supranationalism against internationalist forces and an Olympian elite to supersede rationalism, materialism, and collectivism. His first principal fault was that the new views were composed more of myths than real ideas—unclearly received truths crystallizing irrational passions, working by suggestion, prone to infiltration and unconscious demagoguery, differing from the enemy’s myths only by symbol.
Racial Doctrine Under Attack
Catholic and Fascist critics assailed his racism. Civiltà Cattolica called it abstruse and unscientific; Giorgio Almirante insisted racism must be of “blood, flesh and muscle.” Ugoberto Alfassio Grimaldi said Evola’s racism ended in a special form of anti-racism, that he treated Fascism as a finite, mortal instrument rather than a goal, and quoted La Torre: “We are neither ‘Fascists’ nor ‘anti-Fascists’.” Guido Landra called it an honor to be a biological racist and singled out Evola’s claim that an Aryan can have a Jewish soul. Such attacks helped kill Sangue e Spirito, the bilingual race journal Evola had planned with Mussolini’s pledged support, once the Church and orthodox Fascists swayed Mussolini to the biological line and the German Foreign Office withdrew.
Anti-Semitism of the Spirit
Grimaldi called him a Jew lover, which misses the mark. Evola never attacked orthodox Judaism—he acknowledged the Old Testament’s metaphysical value and treated operative Kabbalah as a viable Western path—and his attacks targeted Jews as the symbol of economic individualism and money hegemony, repeating familiar prejudices. The worst passages concern Corneliu Codreanu, the Iron Guard leader he took as a rare model, whose “shot while escaping” death he blamed on Jews. His articles were more polemical than his books, and much of the tone belonged to the Zeitgeist. Since he prized spiritual attitude, a Jew could espouse Aryan thought: “can an ‘Aryan’ have a Jewish soul or inner race and vice versa? Yes, it is possible.” He indicted Jewry as idea and spiritual race, not as biology.
The Abyss Between Facts and Tradition
The gulf between the world of facts and the world of Tradition admits no bridge; traditionalists must hold to principles, not institutions. “The idea and only the idea”
Sovereignty, the Nation, and the Democratic Regression
Evola begins by arguing that the “nation” is a by-product, an artificial creation that only becomes autonomous and appears a living entity once the tension binding a group around a supra-ordained symbol of sovereignty weakens and crumbles. Since the French Revolution the concept has increasingly signified the people as collectivity and mass. When sovereignty is allowed only as an expression of the “will of the nation,” the creature overtakes its creator: the political class as Order and Mannerbund gives way to demagogues and “servants of the nation,” to democratic rulers who presume to “represent” the people and gain office by flattering and manipulating the masses. The fatal consequence is the inconsistency and cowardice of today’s political class—no absolute sovereign could silence the nobility and clergy, yet nobody now dares blame the “people” or believe in the “nation.” This does not stop ruling classes from deceiving and exploiting the demos, which, feminine by nature, will never have a clear will of its own. The real difference lies in the servile attitude of those lacking moral stature or legitimacy from above—at most a “world of domestics that yearns to be ruled by a pseudo-hero,” as Carlyle put it, rather than a real master.
The Myth of the Nation and the Realism of the Idea
Action through “myths”—formulas lacking objective truth that appeal to the sub-intellectual dimension and the passions—is the inseparable counterpart of this climate; “country” and “nation” display mythic quality, receiving varied contents depending on the wind and the parties, with the common denominator of denying pure sovereignty. Democracy, majority rule based on universal suffrage, is characterized by degradation of the ruling class: the majority, free of qualitative restriction, is necessarily on the side of the lower strata, and winning their votes requires speaking their language and prioritizing their coarsest material interests, always promising but never demanding. Every democracy is thus a school of immorality and an offence to the dignity of a true political class. The substance of every true political organism resembles an Order, a Mannerbund in charge of the imperium, comprising men who see loyalty as the basis of honor. In crisis, generic reference to the “nation” does not suffice unless it assumes a revolutionary overtone. The “nation” is promiscuous; one must emphasize the fundamental duality of origins—masses, in which elementary instincts and hedonistic interests have free play, versus men who differentiate themselves as bearers of complete legitimacy and authority bestowed by the Idea. Only the Idea must be the true fatherland for these men; what unites them should be adherence to the same idea rather than same land, language, or blood. The task is to untie and separate what only apparently appears one entity and reestablish a virile substance as a political elite around which new crystallization occurs. This is the “realism of the idea”—realism because strength and clarity are needed rather than “idealism” and sentimentality; it opposes both the coarse, cynical realism of politicians and the style of those who abhor “ideological prejudices” and can only reawaken vague “national solidarity” by techniques arousing mass excitement. This is inadequate because realization of the idea is already present on the opposite front: supernational blocs based on political ideas—communism, whose aggregating factor beyond “nation” and “country” is being proletarian communists of the Third International; democracy when it pretends to summon “crusades”; and the so-called Nuremberg ideology, which established principles to be upheld without regard to country or nation, “with precedence over the duty of obedience of the individuals toward the State to which they belong.” Hence the insufficiency of the simple notion of “nation” and the need for political integration in terms of a higher idea that alone must be the standard, uniting and dividing factor. The task requires formulating an adequate doctrine, upholding thoroughly studied principles, and from these giving birth to an Order—an elite differentiating itself on a plane of spiritual virility, decisiveness, and impersonality, where every naturalistic bond loses power and value; it will bear a new principle of higher authority and sovereignty, denounce subversion and demagogy, and reverse the downward spiral of top-level cadres and the irresistible rise of the masses. From this elite, as from a seed, a political organism and integrated nation will emerge with the same dignity as nations created by the great European political tradition; anything short of this is quagmire, dilettantism, irrealism, and obliquity.
Liberalism and the Individual
On personality, freedom, and hierarchy, Evola turns to liberalism. The disintegration of traditional sociopolitical structures in Europe began through liberalism; after the stormy, demonic period of the French Revolution, the Revolution’s principles first acted under the guise of liberalism, origin of interconnected forms of global subversion. It is necessary to expose the errors of this ideology and its “immortal principles,”
Military Values Against Bourgeois Culture
Evola opens this stretch by contrasting the Anglo-American volunteer, well-paid military with the warrior ideal he defends. Against the bourgeois reduction of arms to a paid specialty, he asserts that the warrior view of life carries its own spirituality, ethics, and values—expressed in war and the military profession but not exhausted by them—and that these values should lend tone to the whole socio-political order. He is careful to reject both the “barracks as an ideal” and totalitarian regimentation of daily life, which he calls a stiffening, mechanical discipline. What he wants is the primacy of a different ethos: love of hierarchy, obedience and command, courage, honor and loyalty, active impersonality capable of anonymous sacrifice, and frank man-to-man relations—the values of the Mannerbund. The army and warfare are only a detail within a wider order.
War as Inner Struggle
Heroic values receive precise acknowledgment when needed. War, in this view, is not the merely negative thing democracies, humanitarians, and pacifist communism describe; it carries real spiritual and metaphysical possibilities. Evola locates the contrast between these views in a contrast between eras: the traditional world lived as a perennial struggle between Uranian forces of light and order and telluric forces of chaos and matter. A just external war reproduced the inner struggle against the same powers, until a pax triumphalis. Hence the interdependence of the warrior idea with a certain asceticism, inner discipline, and self-mastery—elements of a specific style largely lost as “militaristic” States gave way to democratic and nationalistic ones, where the duty of serving replaced the right to bear arms. The true antithesis, he insists, is not spirit versus militaristic materialism but between two ways of conceiving spirit and culture. An entire Indo-European cycle had analogous warrior elements determinant in all domains, and though hierarchy’s more original form is spiritual—Greek hierarchy means sovereignty of the sacred—warrior structures became the armature of major Western States when the original spiritual level could not be maintained.
The Prussian Spirit and the Political Principle
The Prussian spirit, democracies’ bête noire, is for Evola no anomaly of one people but the same style preserved until recent times in German-speaking lands. As “Frederickianism” it shaped an austere aristocratic military tradition and educated officials on principles unlike mere bureaucracy; it even gave cohesion to great industrial complexes led by quasi-dynastic entrepreneurs obeyed by workers almost in military loyalty. The polemic against it reflects the antithesis between the two components of a collective organism—the social and the political. Antimilitaristic democracy expresses “society,” with material ideals of peace, against the political principle: the Mannerbund, the shaping force of the State, always dependent on a warrior element cherishing honor and superiority. Since sensibility for purely spiritual values has atrophied in the West, the military hierarchy—though not the highest—is almost the only model that can still supply hierarchical values generally and attract human types not yet disintegrated; despite conscientious objectors, a heroic dimension in the Western soul cannot be totally extirpated.
The Case Against Catholicism
Catholicism, Evola argues, cannot support a revolutionary-conservative traditionalist movement. After De Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortés, and the Syllabus, it has gravitated toward democratic-liberal systems; its natural-right theory conflicts with the positive, differentiated right a strong hierarchical State needs. Maritain revived the formula that democracy is essentially evangelical; in the climate of opening to the Left, even the highest hierarchies bestow consecration on Marxism and dialogue with communism. Teilhard de Chardin is about to be rehabilitated, and Vatican II’s “bringing things up to date” points toward a future Christian ecumene. If this is strategy, it is short-sightedness, since left-wing movements are an inverted religion and should not be dealt with. The Church’s decline shows in prioritizing social and moral concerns over supernatural life; the canonization of Don Bosco signals a liberal Protestant spirit reducing religion to social service, and popes who travel to be popular lose the prestige of distance.
Original Christianity and the Ghibelline Compromise
Evola distinguishes original Christianity from Catholicism and voices reservations about “Christianizing politics.” Pure Christianity is valuable on the plane of asceticism but politically problematic: an antithesis exists between Christian morality—love, submission, humility—and ethical-political values of justice, honor, and difference. The precept of returning good for evil opposes striking the unjust, and love has little room in a virile institution where relations among equals rest on loyalty and a healthy love for distance. Christianity was largely corrected in Catholicism through assimilation of Roman and Classical principles, which allowed the medieval Church a traditional formative influence—but only by neutralizing original Christian premises.
The Roman Style as a Normative Measure
Evola opens by sketching the original Roman human type: self-controlled, boldly clear-sighted, terse in speech, coherent in conduct, coldly dominating without vanity or personalism. Its virtues are virtus (virile spirit, not moralism), fortitudo and constantia, sapientia, disciplina (love of a self-given law and form), fides, and dignitas, which in the patrician aristocracy hardened into gravitas and solemnitas. The style prefers deliberate action without grand gestures, realism, clarity, inner equilibrium, suspicion of confused mysticism, love of boundaries, and readiness to unite as free beings for a higher goal. Religio and pietas mean reverent veneration of the gods and trust in a supernatural felt as omnipresent in individual, collective, and historical forces. Not every Roman embodied these traits, but they were the dominant factor and the perceived ideal—and they carry normative value, or at least the value of a measure, needing embodiment only by a social stratum called to inspire others. A footnote credits Günther’s Lebensgeschichte des römischen Volkes.
The Mediterranean Antithesis
“Mediterranean” names merely a geographical space where different cultures and racial powers clashed without producing a typical civilization. Sergi’s anthropological myth of an African-origin Mediterranean race—Pelasgians, Phoenicians, Levantines, half-Semitic populations, Mussolini’s “bastard brothers”—is now passé; Evola uses the term for suspect spiritual and ethnic components in mixed Latin populations and in strata of the Italian people opposing its nobler Roman nucleus. The first Mediterranean trait is love of outward appearances and grand gestures: the type needs a stage, draws motivation from being noticed, and splits between an “I” that plays a role and an “I” that watches as spectator—the antithesis of esse non haberi and of Rome’s anonymous heroes. The Roman style is monumental and monolithic; the Mediterranean choreographic and spectacular, as in French grandeur and gloire. D’Annunzianism exemplifies it. The remedy is to convert the actor-spectator split into careful self-supervision for the sake of style displayed to oneself.
Individualism, Sobriety, and the Rectification of Character
Outwardness breeds personalism degenerating into individualism—the restlessness that ruined the Greek city-states, troubled the early empire, and erupted in medieval Italy’s factions and rivalries; the Renaissance’s splendor derives from it, with the author upstaging the work. Lower still: the pseudo-genius who upholds the opposite thesis to show off, and the shrewdness that “fools” others, which the Mediterranean type equates with intelligence but the Roman feels as degradation. Roman sobriety contrasts with gesticulating exuberance, mania for communication, and feeble sense of hierarchy, whose counterpart is lack of character and verbosity. The Spanish “Pobre in palabras pero in obras largo” and Moltke’s “be more than you appear to be” point to the Roman style. The Mediterranean man shares with Clauss’s “desert race” an explosive, changeable temperament, immediacy of desire, random intuitions; outwardly cheerful, he suffers sudden lows and shuns solitude. Rectification must not proceed by mere antithesis: Nietzsche’s principle of delaying reactions holds, but control must not wither being, as in negative Central-European and Anglo-Saxon traits. Passion is an enrichment if organized within a firmly ordered life; sentimentality is degenerated feeling. The Mediterranean man defends himself while the Nordic man judges himself, yet morbid introspection—psychoanalysis, Dostoyevsky’s guilt complexes—is equally dangerous; simplicity toward one’s soul, strictness with oneself, cordiality with others, are essential. Sexualization of morality and obsession with women mark a degenerating civilization, against the best Roman ethics, which gave women and love their rightful place without puritanism. The Roman qualities are the positive limit, the Mediterranean ones the negative limit, of dispositions.
Form and Presuppositions of a United Europe
Evola turns to the champions of a united Europe, who oscillate between an approximate “empire” (Thiriart, Varange) and “Nation Europa.” The concept of nation can never apply to an organic supernational unity; a “Europe of Fatherlands” and mere federation fail because fatherland and nation belong to a naturalistic plane. Nationalism, with its monstrous appendix imperialism, and chauvinism must be excluded. The correct term is “European Empire”: one cannot be “European” by analogy to feeling Italian or Prussian. A true organic empire differs from imperialism, a deplorable extension of nationalism.
The Idea as Fatherland
Running through every chapter is Evola’s insistence that the true bond between men is neither blood nor soil nor language but adherence to a shared idea. He quotes his own formula from Revolt Against the Modern World: “the idea and only the idea” is the true fatherland. This is what he calls the “realism of the idea”—realism because it demands strength and clarity rather than sentimentality, and because it recognizes that the opposite camp already organizes itself around supernational political ideas, whether the Third International’s proletarian communism or what he calls the Nuremberg ideology with its principles held to take precedence over obedience to one’s own state. Against these, a mere appeal to “nation” or “country” is insufficient; the nation as people and mass is a by-product of the very democratic regression Evola opposes. What is needed is an Order—an elite differentiated on a plane of spiritual virility and impersonality, from which a new political organism might crystallize as from a seed.
This explains the book’s treatment of hierarchy and personality. Liberalism’s basic error, in Evola’s account, is mistaking the person for the individual and claiming for the latter—unconditionally and on egalitarian premises—values that belong only to the former. The person who becomes an individual, refusing organic meaning and every principle of authority, is reduced to a number, a unit in the pack; his usurpation invites the collectivist limitation that eventually destroys him. Hence the progression from liberalism to democracy to socialism to communism is not a series of accidents but a single fall, accelerating as it goes. Tacitus supplies the epigraph for the whole process: in order to overthrow the State they uphold freedom; once they succeed, they will turn against it too.
The Counterfeit of Order
Evola’s critique of totalitarianism is as sharp as his critique of democracy, and this distinguishes him from the authoritarian enthusiasts of his era. The “totalitarian” forms emerging in the twentieth century are, in his terms, a demonic and materialistic counterfeit of the previous unitary political ideal—”the greatest and most savage slavery,” which Plato saw arising out of formless freedom. His chapter on Bonapartism and Machiavellianism draws the distinction carefully: the ancient world separated the rex, whose authority descends from above, from the dux or imperator, a military leader qualified by individual gifts. The essential mark of legitimate leadership is its “upward” rather than “downward” reference—something superhuman must shine forth in the ruler, an immanent transcendence quite different from the charismatic demagogue’s hold over the masses. Napoleon, in Evola’s reading, is the son of the French Revolution whose spirit was actualized rather than denied in his imperial fulfillment; the Bonapartist leader is a demagogical tribune plus a Machiavellian expert in degrading technique.
The same discriminating impulse shapes his treatment of elitism. He acknowledges Pareto’s law of the circulation of elites but faults it for staying on a formal plane, treating every principle and value as mere “derivation” while ignoring the qualitative and spiritual factor. For Evola the primary element is not the abstract phenomenon of elites in power but the change of values and meanings when one elite succeeds another—a shift he understands through the law of the regression of the castes. An aristocracy, he notes, is an indeterminate term: the “best” might be the best gangsters or technocrats. Everything depends on the value-basis of a society, which is why his politics is inseparable from his metaphysics.
The Vertical Dimension
What makes Evola difficult to classify—Godwin compares the academic approach to a bomb-disposal unit handling explosive material at arm’s length—is that his political doctrine rests on experiences and convictions that political analysis cannot easily reach. His fundamental question was where to find absolute certainty, and his answer lay in the Self merging with the “I am who I am,” reached through esoteric teachings that require stepping out of the purely human condition toward what he called the a-human. This is not irrationalism, he insists: the supra-rational goes beyond reason while including it, as intellectual intuition in Dante and Aquinas lies above discursive knowledge. The “human” feeling, he wrote in Imperialismo pagano, is plebeian; antiquity elevated the individual to godhood. Such a standpoint contradicts the human-rights ethics of the modern world, and Evola knew it.
His antibourgeois polemic follows from the same root. When the path of tradition is lost, virtue remains; then ethics; then moralism—the exteriorization of ethics, which he calls the principle of decline and the bourgeois idol unknown to traditional cultures. Traditional law was supernaturally revealed or decreed by Manes, Minos, Manu, Numa; it connected man with energy from above to tame the lowly and enable superhuman ascent. Moralism, by contrast, dams every rise and produces petty beings. Spengler’s observation that Western morality is a “thou shalt,” a will to action at a distance—Luther at one with Nietzsche, popes with Darwinians—marks the difference from the Classical world, India, and China, where the teacher gave an example rather than a command.
A Voice Against Its Time
The book’s reception history is inseparable from its author’s politics. Hansen’s introduction documents Evola’s vexed relations with Fascism and National Socialism: his Diorama Filosofico page in Farinacci’s regime paper, his praise from Mussolini for Sintesi di dottrina della Razza, his attraction to the SS as a would-be Order alongside his polemics against Rosenberg’s lack of transcendence and against the Führer principle’s downward legitimation. The SS kept a file on him; a 1938 report concluded that his plans for a Romano-Germanic Imperium were utopian and that there were no grounds for National Socialism to place itself at his disposal. His “spiritual” anti-Semitism, which allowed that an Aryan might have a Jewish soul and vice versa, drew attacks from biological racists like Landra and Grimaldi, who called him a Jew lover; the planned journal Sangue e Spirito died when Mussolini withdrew support.
Godwin is candid that Men Among the Ruins is not Evola’s best work and should never be the gateway to him—that being Revolt Against the Modern World, with Riding the Tiger to follow. Yet he argues that suppressing anything is academically dishonest, and that Evola differs from mere fanatics because he writes with the vertical dimension in mind. Hermann Hesse, in a 1935 letter, called him “dazzling and interesting, but very dangerous,” predicting that almost no one in Italy would fall for him but that it would be different in Germany. The book’s later life has borne out a version of that prediction: the editor’s note records that the valknut on the cover has been used by white identitarian organizations turning to Evola for inspiration, and that the digital edition was prepared as a dedication to self-identified identitarians of the alt-right. Whatever one makes of that afterlife, the text itself remains what its author intended: a defense of immutable principles against a world he believed was in ruins, written by a man who expected no easy hearing and received none.
