Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist By Julius Evola Inner Traditions, 2002 (Translated from the revised Italian edition of 1972; First Edition 1953) 310 Pages, $22.00 ISBN 0-89281-905-7

Brief Introductory Review Tradition The State Elites & History The Church Culture & Worldview Institutions The Occult War United Europe Evola's Influence

The State The state is the intrusion of a higher order of reality, naturalized in the social world as a power. The state comes before all natural rights and historical associations. It is certainly on a higher level than mere community. The sovereignty of the state is absolute, since he who is the law has no law. Citing Carl Schmitt, Evola repeats the principle that the sovereign is he who can make exceptions. The state is masculine; society is feminine. Socialism and democracy are essentially anti-state. So is the nation. At most, the nation is formed by the state. Both liberal democracy and Communism are supra-national ideas, but inadequate ones, antithetical to Tradition. An adequate idea is needed to form the Order, the caste or sacred society, which properly embodies the state. Ideally, the Order is the meaning of the state. Evola believed that the world had been on the way to the Finland Station for some time. Eighteenth century liberalism is the font of all later subversions. Equality is illogical. Equal individuals would be indiscernible from each other, and so would necessarily be a single entity. Liberalism confuses persons with individuals. Justice requires inequality. Equality is the will to formlessness. Natural law is a superstition about individuals, who are minuses. Persons are prior to society. They are even prior to the impersonal state described by ideologies. The state is a pyramidal hierarchy of persons of different dignities. At the summit is the monarch, the “absolute person,” who is the opposite of an individual. Freedom means self-mastery. One has the right to govern others in the degree to which one can govern oneself. The ancients saw the superiority of the self-governing man as “mana,” as a sacred force. Those who cannot rule themselves are elevated by being governed by those who can rule themselves. The inferior needs the superior, not the superior the inferior. The state is legitimized by its anagogical function, which is the ability to orient people to the spiritual realm. This should not be confused with the categorical function, the impulse to mere consistency. That is a subversive principle, though both it and the anagogical function are anti-utilitarian. Liberalism is violent. It elevates the principle of human freedom, yet coerces the minority to submit. Totalitarianism is really an extreme form of liberalism, not of the organic state. Liberalism is necessarily external and mechanical. Private property, in the absence of transcendent legitimation, is easily questioned and subverted. The organic state forms around a central idea, a symbol of sovereignty, and a symbol of authority. This center is attractive, like gravity, yet it promotes differentiation. The notion of a “party state” is incoherent. The organic state is anti-partisan. Totalitarianism, in contrast, allows no private sphere. It tends toward bureaucratic hypertrophy. “Statolatry” is an attitude proper to a state not based on a Transcendent idea. The materialist state requires coercion, because its people cannot be connected to it internally. No secular power can properly require an oath. Similarly, it is “sociolatry” to expect someone to sacrifice himself for society. Totalitarianism is honest liberalism. Bonapartism is the extreme form of representative democracy. It makes a difference whether a leader's prestige is based on promises, as in the liberal state, or on demands, as in the Traditional state. A constitutional dictator may be a genius, but the monarch is not chosen for any personal abilities. The Olympian quality he is supposed to embody is not heroic. For that matter, even the true aristocrat is not a superman, but regally impersonal, the embodiment of an idea. True leaders are not Machiavellian, contemptuous of the masses. In states that have more or less embodied Tradition, the ruling caste is not blind to the higher impulses that can be invoked in ordinary people. The Traditional state assumes the existence of heroic and other noble impulses. It is not a system of checks and balances designed to stem human corruption. The economy is not the destiny of the state. The justification for the modern state, the management of the economy, is historically eccentric. Economism is anti-hierarchical. As Evola might have said, the rich are different from us only in that they have more money. Economic autarky is an ethical imperative for the state, just as self-mastery is for the individual. Self-government and austerity are better than mere national prosperity. Next

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Copyright © 2002 by John J. Reilly