Julius Evola’s The Bow and the Club gathers essays in which a twentieth-century Italian traditionalist attacks the modern world from two directions at once: at the distant principles that sustain it and at the near, everyday habits that betray it. Published in Italian in 1968 and arranged by its author rather than merely collected, the book moves between sweeping civilisational argument and sharp polemic—against democracy, against the “evasive” modern personality, against the cult of work, against sexual liberation and the taste for vulgarity. Its editor, John Bruce Leonard, presents the title as a call to battle: the bow to strike at what is far, the club to beat down what is near.
“the bow, to strike at what is far; the club, to beat down what is near.”
From the Civilisation of Being to the Evasive Man
The Bow and the Club as a Call to Battle
John Bruce Leonard opens the volume by reading its title as a summons to fight. Evola had used The Bow and the Club as the name of an attacking section in his journal La Torre, founded in 1930, and he later glossed the image himself: the bow to strike at what is far, the club to beat down what is near. Leonard presents Evola as a cultural warrior and treats this book, alongside Recognitions, as an accessible doorway into his thought—unlike the forbidding Revolt Against the Modern World or the overly personal The Path of Cinnabar. He defends the collection against charges of decline, pointing to the dense syntheses in its opening chapters, and stresses Evola’s concern for the young. The two weapons, he suggests, figure two kinds of spiritual action: the club as destruction and demolition, even inward; the bow as aim and precision, the tense bow of Nietzsche. Both belong to Heracles, who freed Prometheus and appears once, at the book’s numerical centre. Leonard closes his preface from Cagliari in January 2018.
Civilisations of Space and of Time
Evola sets traditional civilisations—China, India, Japan, archaic Greece and Rome, Egypt, Persia, the megaliths, the European Middle Ages—against the modern world. The former were civilisations of being: atemporal, immutable, rooted in space. The modern world devours space through technology, speed, standardisation and cosmopolitanism, a Faustian restlessness. Traditional peoples, by contrast, devoured time, expressing eternity through cyclical time and rites that return to origins. The Copernican revolution appears as a symptom of the Renaissance shift toward becoming; geocentrism had served as a support for spiritual centredness, not as mere astronomy. Evola calls for a metanoia toward being.
The Evasive Man
Drawing on the analogy between the State and the human being, and on the Stoic hegemonikon, Evola calls democracy regressive—determination rising from below, with no true centre—and says it breeds the evasive man: unstable, formless, incapable of commitment or character. This type spreads even through central Europe, the Nordic countries, Britain, and among aristocrats and artisans alike; professional honour decays and food is fraudulently sold. In daily life the breed shows feebleness, irresponsibility and unfairness: promises to write or phone go unkept, punctuality vanishes, and in serious cases memory itself fails, especially among the young. Weininger is invoked: memory carries ethical and ontological value, tied to the unity of the person, which is why ascetic disciplines strengthen it. The evasive man lies gratuitously, a “feminine” trait, and reacts to reproach with surprise rather than shame. Many who seemed men of composure before the War became unrecognisable after it. Parliamentary corruption is dismissed as beneath discussion, yet the same type spans all parties; even professed men of the Right keep their ideas in a compartment sealed off from their lives. Petty corruption, especially sexual, drifts toward the dolce vita—not freedom but a banal drop in level, leaving the inner sovereign’s space empty, so that disgust and boredom surface in rare lucid moments. The absence of external authority and the absence of inner form are two faces of one phenomenon.
The Third Sex
Homosexuality’s increase marks the last period, and it now reaches simple folk and the lower classes, sparing only the middle class in part. Evola declines to study it directly, calling it pathology, and turns to the law of attraction: a man and woman attract when their masculine and feminine parts sum to an absolute man and woman, as Plato, Schopenhauer and Weininger held—a metaphysical, not merely physical, polarity. Where the sexes are poorly differentiated, a “natural” homosexuality follows from congenital conformation, and moral censure should fall chiefly on male homosexuality, the degradation of a man used as a woman. Other cases arise from extrinsic factors: the Classical Greek eros as divine madness, the Ottoman officer’s licence reported by Lawrence, the Japanese instance—none explained by weak differentiation, so displacement of erotic love onto another object, as psychoanalysis established, adds its explanation. Sexuation, preformed in the embryo from the fifth or sixth month, can regress: as a central authority weakens and lower forces resurface, latent traits of the other sex emerge, and the “third sex” becomes fertile soil for homosexuality. Its precondition is inner yielding, the collapse of the forming power. Its spread among the popular strata is a sign of the times: in egalitarian society, with no castes or Orders, tradition dead and character a luxury, what lies below racial and national difference replaces what lies above, and democracy becomes a general climate.
Words That Have Inverted
A run of word studies contrasts ancient Latin senses with their debased modern heirs.
Natural Law and the Matriarchal Substrate
The argument closes its treatment of law by contrasting a differentiated, hierarchical order—dignity graded by origin, clan, position in the res publica, and vocation—with the “natural law” of the plebs, a communitarian code in which neither individual nor bloodline counted. That community stood from remote times under avenging female and chthonic deities; in legal description plebeians were “Children of the Earth.” Their festivals suspended positive law and restored primordial equality across clan, blood, gender and caste. At Feronia’s temple the stone throne received slaves at manumission, the goddess acknowledging their natural parity with freemen; Bachofen’s Fides and Fidonia shielded the plebs from invidia iura and malignae leges, and freedmen raised them a temple. Ulpian’s rule assigning children born outside positive-law sanction to the mother echoes the archaic matriarchal view, strong among Etruscans, that children belonged first to the mother and bore her name. Ulpian himself, of Phoenician blood, is telling. The natural-law elements gathering force in late Rome run parallel to the rise of bastard strata—one episode in the Asian-Pelasgian counteroffensive against Rome, waged through exotic cults and mores and continued by Christianity’s sanctioning of universal equality. Such principles are not indispensable to society; they establish and sanction a particular type of society, a “social ethic” against a “political ethic.” The opposed principles—difference, suum cuique, hierarchy, virile honour—have always been “according to nature” for a certain type of man. Later positive law merely codifies forms imposed by a charisma-less power or the administrative routine of bourgeois society; the “State based on the rule of law” fetishises emptied law as heaven-descended. With the crisis of the traditional world, the matriarchal substrate resurfaces against the symbol of paternity, and “matter” breaks free of “form” to become sovereign—democracy, the masses, “the people,” “the nation,” even blood-community against the State. Steding is cited: matriarchal natures treat democracy as history’s pinnacle.
The Taste for Vulgarity
Regressive processes show in mores and taste, and their clearest index is the relish for vulgarity—a subconscious pleasure in degradation and self-contamination, kin to the taste for the ugly and deformed. New literary realism fixes not on reality whole but on its squalid corners; “engaged” writing joins such subjects to political agitation. Its authors come from the bourgeoisie, not the world they exhibit, and take pleasure in exploring the base. Vulgar speech now saturates novels, radio and television; since it belongs to no speaker’s class, and middle-class youths, young women and even elderly aristocrats adopt it to seem free and modern, the phenomenon betrays delight in self-abasement. To claims of freedom from convention one should answer that conventions had their aspects—customs intrinsic to a class and its style. Once inferiors aped their betters; now the reverse, and the apers fancy themselves unconventional while being vulgar imbeciles. Dress follows: workers’ jerseys, peasants’ overcoats, untucked knotted shirts, unkempt hair, coarse manners learned from American films. Most striking is women in blue jeans—work trousers; the passivity of men is astonishing, and such girls belonged in labour camps, the proper setting for their “functionality.” The howling-singer fad, widespread in Italy, expresses the same descent to street and alley, the coarse voice’s primitivism; the ecstasy of White audiences before hoarse Negro singing fits the pattern. The Beatles, filling youth with delirious enthusiasm, are a particular case.
Olympian and Promethean Orientations
The spirit may orient itself by either of two opposite conceptions, drawing from this a yardstick for existence. The Olympian orientation—possible as the Promethean—translates into a way of being and a defined attitude toward events, history and thought, and is crucial to all that is truly aristocratic. Prometheanism is fundamentally plebeian, at best usurpation. In the ancient Indo-European world the deities of sovereignty, imperium, order and law were chiefly Olympian. The Promethean line historically ties to everything attacking higher authority, replacing it with values of the lower strata—the “physical,” merely human part of man. Of the two freedoms, sovereign and rebel, humanism and Prometheanism choose the latter even while celebrating personality, dignity and free thought. Even granting the revolutionary picture of hierarchy as mere might, the alleged despots administering dogma were themselves free; the “noble ideologies” of freedom rest on instinctual identification with what is low—the emancipated slave’s freedom, not the lord’s.
The Limits of Sexual Reform
Evola credits Nedelcovic with a certain gentlemanly fairness for demanding that women receive the same sexual freedom men quietly grant themselves. Yet he refuses the conclusion. Women’s nature, he argues, makes erotic experience more absorbing for them than for men, so it is rarer for a woman to reach the inner level where freedom of sex coincides with freedom from sex. Among certain central and northern European stocks the situation may be less unfavourable, since a stronger personality and inner freedom are more easily found among young women there. In principle, though, the existential difference between the sexes still holds: applying the new sexual ethics to women brings not a higher freedom but decomposition and dissolution, with the inevitable counterpart of a lowered level and a trivialising of sexuality itself. The whole movement for sexual revolution, he adds, is compromised from the start by the fallacies of egalitarianism and democracy; its champions lack any sense of the level at which demands superior to petty, hypocritical bourgeois morality could be affirmed, and their starting point is a promiscuous, naturalistic, disintegrated sexuality. Because the call for sexual freedom travels with an attack on hierarchical, virile, aristocratic civilisation, the movement belongs to the present age’s general regression.
Romanness, Germanicness, and the Light of the North
Turning to the ideas of Romanness and Germanicness, Evola treats them as largely retrospective. They were first formulated when renewal movements in Italy and Germany opposed Communism and democracy and sought a return to origins, offering a world-view meant to shape the human type of both nations. Their negative aspects, emphasised today, should not blind anyone to the valid potential they held. A specific problem arose: how the values and traditions of one people could integrate those of the other. Today the preconditions are lacking. Italy is wretched through infatuation with democracy and the growing gangrene of Socialism and Communism, its dissident forces unable to unite into a genuine Right front, while the phenomena of the elusive man, vulgarity, regressive sexology and the third sex are everywhere noticeable. In West Germany it is worse: less advanced subversion, but the past indiscriminately thrown overboard, rampant practical materialism, new generations refusing superior ideas, and any mention of a Weltanschauung treated as suspect.
For Italy the aim was to shape from the people’s essence a superior type embodying the resurfacing of the Aryan-Roman component—Aryan meaning Indo-European origins, not political racism—and overcoming less favourable components. Comparative research, Evola says, shows common elements of character and style among dominant stocks of common origin: ancient Rome, Doric-Achaean Greece, the Germanic populations. Some aspects of German character better preserve the original dispositions. Prussia was called the Rome of the North, the Romans the Prussians of their age; Prussianism carried a nostalgia for the Dorian and Classical world, a Dorianism visible even in the Brandenburg Gate. Discipline, disinterested service, incorruptibility, sobriety, virility, active realism, reserve and simple living, command and obedience—these appeared in the best German and Prussian type far more than in the Italian, the physical heir of ancient Rome. Italians’ fixation on Latinness and Mediterraneanness, their intolerance of things German, reveal dispositions opposing the Aryan-Roman element; contact with Germans would help restore an obscured heritage. Conversely, Evola attended to what aspects of Italian tradition might rectify and integrate the Germanic elements—chiefly the higher level of the general view of life and the idea of the State. The Aryan-Roman element, the Roman formulation of a common Indo-European heritage, could clarify and develop the German spirit: to rediscover the Olympian element of the North and promote the values deriving from it.
A preliminary condition was to clear away the misunderstandings that posit an unbridgeable gulf between Romanness and Nordic Germanicness—arbitrary, one-sided, falsifying conceptions aided by Catholic sectarianism. Guido Manacorda, drawing on motifs shared by French Catholic nationalists like Henri Massis, summed up the opposition as Forest and Temple. The Forest stood for nature above spirit, truth in sub-rational levels, freedom as elementary audacity, a tragic and romantic world-view, the religion of eternal becoming, pantheism, immanentism, natural revelation, individualism, blood and folk and race against State and positive order—Germanicness. The Temple stood for spirit above nature, truth within human reason under divine revelation, linearity, form, Classical measure, theistic transcendence, hierarchy—Romanness. Evola calls this bias and an incapacity for objective discrimination: the antithesis is contradicted by the Germanic and Prussian elements just highlighted. Catholics stress Protestant individualism, correct theologically when it comes to Luther’s free examination but not practically, since the central and northern European peoples preserved an innate discipline, order and respect for authority; it is rather the Latin Catholic peoples who are distinguished by individualism, anarchy and lack of discipline.
The Left-Hand Path and the Beats
Evola draws a sharp line between the traditional “Left-Hand Path” and the mere pursuit of violent sensation. The former begins from a positive, sacred, sacrificial orientation aimed upward at transcending every limit, even while it breaks the law and passes through destruction and orgiastic experience. The latter belongs to the internally shattered, who chase intensity to stay on their feet. Colin Wilson’s title Ritual in the Dark strikes him as apt: celebrating in gloom what elsewhere might be a rite of transfiguration.
The Beats, at their best, use drugs to rupture ordinary consciousness. Norman Mailer conceded the gamble involved. Alongside the hoped-for higher clarity lies the danger of artificial paradises—ecstatic delight and visions empty of spiritual content, then depression on the return to normality, deepening the existential crisis. Everything turns on the fundamental attitude of one’s being. Huxley’s mescaline reports, analogous to high mysticism, contrast with Zaehner’s banal results, since Zaehner sought to repeat and control the experience from a different personal equation. A profoundly traumatised being in confused pursuit cannot expect anything positive from drugs; fleeting openings into “Reality” solve nothing, and most Beats and hipsters lacked maturity and rejected self-discipline on principle.
The New Religion That Never Came
Mailer called the Beats harbingers of a new religion, their excesses transitional forms that tomorrow might yield something like Christianity. Evola calls this nonsense, since no such development occurred. They lack transcendent reference points; Mailer himself said God was in danger of dying—the Western theistic God. Mystic Beats turned to Eastern metaphysics, especially Zen, drawn by sudden enlightening openings through irrationality and the tearing down of idols. But Zen tacitly presupposes an age-old traditional orientation and harsh trials; Suzuki spoke of a baptism of fire preparing satori. Rimbaud’s systematic derangement of the senses might, in a mortally reckless life without guidance, produce such openings—but only as near-miraculous exceptions. The attraction lies in Zen offering spiritual justification for negative anarchy while sparing one the task of giving oneself an inner form.
Sex, Jazz, and Downward Transcendence
The confused need for a supra-rational reference is misdirected when “Being” is confused with “Life,” or when the orgasm and a degenerate Dionysianism are taken as paths to feeling real. Evola repeats his earlier argument: a transcendent conception of sexuality has traditional antecedents, but eros is ambivalent, with regressive and derealising possibilities. The Beat, starting from anguish, is obsessed with the perfect orgasm, following Reich and partly Lawrence, who saw sex as merging the primordial energy of life, mistaken for Being and spirit. The dissipating aspects will predominate: sex will control the self, not the reverse. Complete sexual freedom is trivial as revolt.
Jazz becomes a religion and a means to overcome alienation. Its Negro origins are valued; Mailer’s essay assimilates the Beat to the Negro—the “white Negro”—appreciating the instinctual, violent nature, part of America’s spiritual negrification. Beats displayed promiscuity, white girls giving themselves to Negroes to challenge convention. Identification with frenzied elementary rhythms produces downward self-transcendence, a sub-personal regression to the merely vital, partial possessions leaving one emptier than before—evident in the atmosphere of macumba and candomblé: demonism and trance with no access to a higher realm.
Advice to the Rebellious Young
Little more is to be gleaned from Beats and hipsters; the crisis endures. Only exceptionally does anything of positive value emerge for a Right-wing anarchist. Practical non-conformism, demythologisation and cold detachment from bourgeois institutions are unobjectionable; Evola did not dismiss the movement as a passing trend, since its issues express the age. He then turns to young Italians rebelling against the socio-political situation while interested in Tradition, opposing Left-wing forces yet drawn in theory to ancient lore more positively than the Beats. These are potentially available forces; the problem is guidelines. Ride the Tiger, a manual for the Right-wing anarchist, only partially solves this, being addressed to a differentiated, mature type. First advice: beware biologically conditioned, age-linked enthusiasm; few keep their position by thirty. He speaks of a youth not merely biological but inner and spiritual—not idealism but capacity for enthusiasm, vigour, unconditional devotion, detachment from bourgeois life. Non-conformism’s first prerequisite is strictly anti-bourgeois conduct; Jünger wrote “Better a criminal than a bourgeois”—not literal, but a general orientation.
Against Cogni’s Erotic Mysticism
The views in Cogni’s Io sono te reproduce his earlier Saggio sull’amore.
The Apparatus of Notes
The book closes not with argument but with apparatus: two dense blocks of endnotes, most supplied by the Italian editor and translator, salted with several interpolations by Evola himself. They gloss persons, texts, terms, and events from the preceding chapters, and taken together they form a kind of running commentary on the whole. Early on the editors define the Left-Hand and Right-Hand Paths as two esoteric approaches whose terminology comes from Tantra—literally “weave” or “system”—a word now covering disparate practices. The Right-Hand Path binds itself to law and social convention; the Left-Hand Path, left being associated with the problematic and sinister, breaks from the normative, though it too has its own rules and structured initiatic practices. Anomia, they note, is Greek for “without law.”
Sources and Authorities
The notes identify the authorities behind Evola’s claims. Elémire Zolla’s anthology I mistici dell’Occidente is cited; Plutarch’s De facie in orbe lunae and De sera numinis vindicta are invoked, along with his lost On the Soul as quoted by Stobaeus—”Death and initiation closely correspond”—and Porphyry’s De antro nympharum. “Noetic” derives from nous; the Bhagavad Gita’s path of knowledge is jnana. Al-Hallaj, the Persian Sufi, is described: his blasphemous proclamations inspired rebellion in Baghdad, and after his followers’ failed attempt on the caliphate he was jailed nine years, then beaten and executed—whether for heresy or political unrest remains debated, but Evola’s point stands. Hermeticism, from Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetic Corpus, enters the West from the Renaissance.
Evola’s Own Interventions
Evola’s own notes carry the sharpest edges. The sovereign of “centrality” and “immanent transcendence,” he insists, resembles the initiate more than the priest; Guénon failed to grasp this, insisting supreme spiritual authority is priestly and subordinating royalty to a sacerdotal caste—true only of an abnormal situation, not the primordial higher state. Osiris, murdered by Set and risen as king of the underworld, is reproduced in the Pharaohs as incarnations of Horus living and Osiris dead. The character indelebilis—the indelible seal of Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Orders—is neither erasable nor repeatable. A long note on Christian initiation answers Traditionalist arguments drawn from the Greek Fathers, from hesychasm as a “Christian yoga,” and from Symeon the New Theologian on the laying on of hands. Evola counters that Greek Patristics mingled Christianity with non-Christian mysteriosophy, that apocryphal Gospels and gnosticism fall outside official Christianity, that hesychasm is an isolated vein, and that laying on of hands is at best a blessing or “virtual initiation.” His conclusion is blunt: “what can be initiatory in Christianity is not Christian, and what is Christian in it is not initiatory.”
Glosses on Sex, Myth, and Modernity
The editors gloss Cathars, troubadours, Bachofen, and the Greek bios against “being.” Reich receives a tart note: his orgone theory was rejected scientifically yet influenced Burroughs, Bellow, and Mailer; his therapeutic institute drew denunciation by health authorities, and he refused court, was charged with contempt, sentenced to two years, and died of cardiac arrest in prison, his works banned—while American postwar “democratic brainwashing” psychiatrists absorbed his “sado-masochistic character,” redubbed “authoritarian character.” Shakti, prakrti, Shiva, and Purusha are defined; so are Freud’s pleasure principle and death drive, Malinowski and Mead, Dumézil’s trifunctional hypothesis, libido dominandi and libido servendi, the warrior goddesses Ishtar, Durga, and Hathor-Sekhmet.
The Periodical and the Closing Glosses
A note explains that Il Borghese, until the mid-1970s the most widespread right-wing magazine, had always ignored the traditional Right including Evola; this changed with the student protests, when Evola was asked to write on the subject and published a dozen articles in 1968–9, some reprinted as an appendix to Men among the Ruins, continuing afterward with Il Conciliatore. Leo Longanesi, founder in 1950, is identified. “L’art pour l’art” is defined and traced through Poe, Stefan George, and Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray—Wilde being, the editor adds, a homosexual of the “third sex” Evola discusses. Evola notes “progressive”
The Two Weapons and What They Strike
Leonard’s introduction makes the title the key to the whole volume. Evola had used L’arco e la clava as the name of a section in his journal La Torre in 1930, and when he revived it decades later he explained the image plainly: the bow for what is far, the club for what is near. Leonard reads this as two modes of spiritual action rather than mere invective—the club as demolition, including the demolition of what is base in oneself, and the bow as aim, tension and precision, with Nietzsche’s tense bow somewhere in the background. He ties both weapons to Heracles, who carried a bow from Apollo and a club from Hephaestus and who freed Prometheus, and he notes that Heracles appears exactly once in the book, at its numerical centre. The enemies, then, are of two kinds: the distant false principles and the near, corrosive habits. Leonard also identifies a third category—disputes with fellow Traditionalists and esotericists—which gives the collection some of its inward, intramural energy.
The Metaphysics of Decline
Running beneath the particular polemics is a single diagnosis, stated most densely in the opening chapter. Traditional civilisations—China, India, Japan, archaic Greece and Rome, Egypt, Persia, the European Middle Ages—were civilisations of being: atemporal, rooted in space, expressing eternity through cyclical time and rites that returned to origins. The modern world, by contrast, devours space through technology, speed, standardisation and cosmopolitanism, a “Faustian” restlessness that Evola treats as the symptom of a civilisation given over to becoming. The Copernican revolution figures here less as a scientific event than as a spiritual one, the moment geocentrism—which he reads as the symbolic support for spiritual centredness—was surrendered. What he demands is a metanoia toward being, a turning of the whole orientation of the soul.
The same pattern recurs wherever he looks. Democracy is regressive because it determines authority from below and so has no real centre; the result is the “evasive man,” formless and incapable of commitment, whose unreliability in small promises and whose failing memory betray a deeper dispersion. Following Weininger, Evola treats memory as an ethical and ontological faculty—resistance to the flow of time—so that forgetfulness becomes a moral symptom, not a quirk. The spread of homosexuality, which he calls the “third sex,” is read through the same lens: sexuation is fixed in the embryo but can regress when the inner formative power weakens, and its erosion in egalitarian mass society is a sign of the times rather than a private matter. Even the taste for vulgarity—coarse speech adopted by the middle and upper classes, work clothes worn as fashion, the ecstasy of “howling” singers—belongs to this grammar of self-degradation, a pleasure taken in one’s own abasement.
Reason, Myth and the Initiatic Centre
Evola is careful to refuse the obvious escape route. Modern irrationalism—the cult of Life, of blood and soil, of existence over essence, the Jungian archetypes—revolts against bourgeois rationalism but merely swaps one imbalance for another, since it accepts the same dissociation between reason and its opposite. Both, he argues, are products of a split; the true centre lies anterior to either, in a supra-rational metaphysical clarity symbolised by light and embodied in what he calls the Olympian nucleus of the higher ancient civilisations. Myth and symbol, on this account, are not primitive fancies but carriers of intelligible content, forces that integrate the whole human being.
This is where the long treatment of initiation belongs. Evola defines initiation as a change of state in the strict ontological sense—rebirth into Being rather than into Life—and distinguishes the Greater Mysteries, standing under transcendence, from the Lesser, whose limit is nature. He insists that esoteric knowledge is not arbitrarily hoarded secrecy but truth that only becomes true, and safe, at a certain level of consciousness; the fate of Al-Hallaj illustrates the practical wisdom of keeping it there. The initiate, at the centre of a sacred and political order, was once a visible presence—divine kingship in Egypt, the consecration of kings in the medieval West—before historical Christianity, which he says has no initiatory tradition of its own, drove such centres underground and replaced reality with an imitation of it.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The later essays turn the same instruments on Rome and the North, on the “conservative revolution,” and on the subliminal machinery of modern conformity—advertising, propaganda, the contagious charge of words like “democracy” and “reaction,” the surrender of those who excuse themselves by speaking of “true” democracy rather than refusing the game. Evola’s ideal remains an aristocratic, virile, hierarchical order grounded in honour rather than utility, and his verdict on the age is one of irreversible regression. Readers come to the book for different reasons: some for the Traditionalist metaphysics, some for the aphoristic savagery of the cultural criticism, some as a compact entry into a body of thought whose major work, Revolt Against the Modern World, is far more forbidding. What holds the collection together is the posture Leonard names in his introduction—the bow drawn on distant principles, the club swung at what stands close at hand.
