Julius Evola on Race

Growing interest in English speaking countries for the Italian philosopher Julius Evola may be a sign of the revival of the awesome cultural legacy of the Western civilization.

by Tom Sunic

This legacy is awkwardly termed the “traditional – revolutionary – elitist – anti-egalitarian – postmodern thought.” But why not simply call it classical thought?

The advantage of Evola, in contrast to many modern scholars of the same calibre, may be his staggering erudition that goes well beyond the narrow study of race. Evola was just as much at ease writing thick volumes about religion, language and sexuality as writing about legal issues related to international politics, or depicting decadence of the liberal system. His shortcomings are, viewed from the American academic perspective, that his prose is often not focused enough and his narrative often embraces too many topics at once. Evola was not a self-proclaimed ‘expert’ on race — yet his erudition made him compose several impressive books on race from angles that are sorely missing among modern sociobiologists and race experts. Therefore, Evola’s works on race must be always put in a lager perspective.

In this short survey of Evola’s position on race I am using the hard cover of the French translation of ‘Indirizzi per una educazione razziale’ (1941) (‘Eléments pour une éduction raciale’, 1984) and the more expanded ‘Sintesi di dottrina della razza’ (1941), (‘Synthesis of the racial doctrine’), translated into German by the author himself and by Annemarie Rasch and published in Germany in 1943. To my knowledge these two books are not available in English translation. His and Rasch’s excellent German translation of Sintesi had received (in my view an awkward and unnecessary) ‘political’ title; ‘Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre’ (‘Outlines of the fascist racial doctrine’) and is available on line.

 

…the rest HERE

2011-09-09