Fascism Viewed from the Right

I liked the fact that it was very thorough with its details and provided a structure of information that leads me to want to hang on to the end. I recommend it to someone who loves history and wants a challenge.

Evola is an amazing philosopher and political thinker. In this book he outlines the right wing politucs of italy at the time and compares this to fascism. This book is an excellent read, however Evola starts to split hairs here and there. I wholly revommend this book for anyone interested in fascism.

Julius Evola (1898-1974) an Italian political philosopher saw in fascism an opportunity to revive tradition, or pre-Modern civilizations like that of the Roman Republic, where politics was divorced from economics and parties that vied with each other offering bribes and rewards to electors who would reward the successful bidder with a majority. He viewed the Enlightenment as a misnomer, and argued that deterministic rationalism had repudiated the existential essence of volkgeist Tradition. He saw himself as viewing fascism the right in the context of Italian politics, but in its purist form Fascism was not characterised by opposing interests but was focused on maintaining the spiritual integrity of governing aristocracies. Fascism had promise, but that it had deviated from its ideal. For Evola, Classical Rome provided an ideal where voting rights reflected the contributions individual citizens made to the state, as in the Comitia Centuriata, where numerical strength was countered by the function and dignity of those who were worthy to rule, who were empowered by a phenomenon Friedrich Nietzsche termed the power of distance. The role of the state and its ability to safeguard the integrity of the state are undermined by caesarism, or the ducalism, practised by Mussolini, who Evola feels sacrificed the certainty of a fascist state to the cult of personality and a pretence to believing in egalitarianism, which Evola feels is a strong threat to the stability of modern democracies. Yet following the First World War, Italy's weak and corrupt liberal democratic government and powerless monarchy could find some salvation in the imperfect fascism of Benito Mussolini, who, like Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, set up a diarchy, based on a symbolic monarchy combined with a personality cult. Like Caesar, Mussolini exploited veteran discontent to implement a coup d'état in the 1922 March on Rome, prompting King Victor Emmanuel III to invite Mussolini to form a government. Evola, had hoped that Mussolini's "conservative revolution" would not be an end in itself, but would instead lead to the reinstatement of the type of agrarian, feudal systems overthrown by upheavals like the French Revolution or the Italian Risorgimento. For Evola, the state was organic, rather than a product of the nation; in fact, it was the state that gave form to the nation. Mussolini superficially agreed with Evola, asserting that, "The nation does not beget the State . . . . On the contrary, the nation is created by the State, which gives the people . . . the will, and thereby an effective existence." But Mussolini propelled more towards empire and modernism than towards the dignity of the Italian state. It may be that he never trusted Mussolini to realise his ideal fascist state, for he never joined his party. For Evola, even the idea of party politics was anathema, based as it was on the assumption of dissension within the state.

One of Evolas best Critiques ! The introduction is extremely well written as well .

Excellent book.

I am not a right-wing person at all, but I think Evola's far right perspective on fascism is essential for truly understanding the topic, because he gives a well-reasoned critique of the movement as someone who was actually there at the time and involved with the upper echelons of the party, but still an outsider to the movement. Read the introduction first so you know what you're getting into, and enjoy a well put together book of substantial, intelligent discussion

Rare attempt to look at the fascism beyond leftist clichés. Baron Evola points, that despite all fascist pretensions on aristocratic origins, it's rather populist ideology and practice, curiously synthesizing (or exploiting - both is true) socialist aspirations of the urban proletarians with derisory morals of the petty bourgeoisie. Those two insecure XX century social classes certainly have nothing to do with fascist ideology grandiloquence. Their eagerness to espouse any racist ideology is nothing but a compensation for their total lack of any real nobility of these classes.

a much more sophisticated philosopher than his epigone, Steve Bannon and although Evola is a Eurocentric traditionalist , he has some cultural background and had a complicated and very uneasy relationship with Mussolini. Could be read co-relatively with Gramsci's The Modern Prince for great insight into the Left-Right axis of our times. The tragedy for those with intellect today is the consistent dumbing down of the thinking of the Twenties and Thirties. Alas, in the age of Trump and Twitter, read, read, read!

Before Mussolini there was Julius Evola

An excellent book for those trying to understand the true position of Fascism, and not as one is expected to believe. It also offers interesting criticisms and takes from the traditionalists perspective, and acts as a great incite into such ways of thinking.

I found this book to be the easiest of Evola's works to read through.

Generally, fascism as an ideology seems to be understood from modern liberal perspectives - and its problems are considered through this lens as well. Julius Evola (a so-called 'traditionalist') does not follow these preconceptions of the world and hence his critique of fascism as an ideology is able to drill down into the ideology to a much greater degree than one finds in the surface level liberal critique of fascism as simply concerned with authoritarianism and racism. For anyone interested in either fascist ideology or with the traditionalist ideology of Baron Evola this book is thus a must-read. The only problem with the book is that it is rather short for the price - a fair amount is made up of a (very interesting) introduction - Evola's writing only takes up about a hundred pages. Nonetheless, this translation is excellent and conveys Evola's message well.

Great to source this so quickly for a present