Against Evola and The Right Wing

by Zoltanous

Introduction

Julius Evola (1898–1974), born Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola in Rome, Italy, emerges as a towering yet polarizing figure in 20th-century intellectual history, celebrated for his eclectic blend of philosophy, esotericism, and radical traditionalism. Raised in a minor aristocratic Sicilian family with strong Roman Catholic roots, Evola rebelled against his upbringing, eschewing formal academic titles despite briefly studying engineering at the Istituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci in Rome. His lack of conventional credentials — he famously rejected bourgeois labels like “doctor” or “engineer”— belied a prodigious self-education, fueled by influences ranging from Nietzsche and Wilde to Eastern mysticism and occult traditions. Evola’s early career unfolded amid the avant-garde, where he gained prominence as a Dadaist painter and poet in post-World War I Italy, only to abandon art by 1922, deeming it commercialized and spiritually hollow. This shift marked the beginning of his lifelong quest to transcend modernity’s materialism.

Evola’s intellectual output was vast and varied, encompassing over 36 books and hundreds of articles. His foundational trilogy — Revolt Against The Modern World, Men Among The Ruins, and Ride The Tiger — articulates his vision of Tradition, a metaphysics rooted in eternal hierarchies and warrior elites, which he saw as antithetical to the decadence of the modern age. Works like The Doctrine of Awakening and The Metaphysics of Sex reveal his deep engagement with Buddhism, Tantra, and esoteric thought, while The Hermetic Tradition underscores his mastery of occultism. During the interwar years, he briefly aligned with Fascism, influencing Italy’s racial laws with a spiritual rather than biological focus, yet distanced himself from Mussolini’s regime, later calling himself a “super fascist” to signify a stance beyond fascism and mere politics in general. His wartime activities remain murky — rumors of ties to the Nazi SD persist — but his postwar influence on Europe’s radical right cemented his legacy.

A polymath with fluency in Italian, German, and French, Evola’s erudition earned praise from figures like Mircea Eliade and Hermann Hesse, though his radical antiegalitarian and antiliberal views drew equal condemnation. Paralyzed by a 1945 Soviet shell in Vienna, he continued writing from Rome until his death in 1974, leaving an oeuvre that defies easy categorization. Yet, for all his scholarly breadth and philosophical audacity, Evola’s ideas invite rigorous scrutiny — a task this critique undertakes with unflinching resolve.

Julius Evola’s Ambiguous Engagement With Fascism

Evola’s relationship with Fascism during Benito Mussolini’s regime (1922–1943) was characterized by a deliberate detachment, reflecting his esoteric intellectual pursuits rather than any deep political commitment. Far from being a central figure in Fascist Italy’s cultural or political spheres, Evola operated on the margins, developing his philosophy of radical traditionalism — a metaphysical view emphasizing spiritual hierarchy, anti-egalitarianism, and a rejection of modernity — without significant official endorsement. He explicitly distanced himself from the Italian Social Republic (RSI), the Nazi-backed puppet state established in northern Italy in September 1943 following Mussolini’s ouster in July of that year. Evola criticized the RSI as a degraded distortion of what he deemed Fascism’s “authentic” principles, particularly its “socialization” policies, which aimed to nationalize key industries and empower workers in a populist bid for legitimacy during the RSI’s final months (1943–1945).

He viewed these measures as a Marxist betrayal of his elitist vision, which prioritized a rigid, pre-modern social order over mass mobilization. However, this is just what Fascism is:

“Mussolini himself, before he knew who would collect around the standards of the new Fascist Republican Party, committed himself to the realization of the original syndicalist and neo-idealist program of Fascism. His original intention was to call his new republic the Italian Socialist Republic—which nonetheless advertised itself as the vehicle of an Italian Socialism, a national Socialism.”

— A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals

“By the time Spirito delivered his communications at the Convention of 1932, these sentiments had united with neo-idealist totalitarian aspirations. The result was variously identified as ‘Fascist communism,’ ‘Fascist Bolshevism’ or ‘Fascist socialism’.”

— A. James Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism

Evola’s wartime writings, such as Metaphysics of War, reveal a theoretical fascination with martial themes, yet he consistently avoided practical involvement in Fascist military or political efforts. His interactions with Nazi Germany were similarly limited; the regime viewed his esoteric ideas with suspicion, and the Waffen-SS reportedly suppressed his activities due to their non-conformist nature. Evola thus positioned himself as a detached observer, prioritizing intellectual pursuits over active participation in the Fascist project.

Post-War Realignment and The Italian Social Movement

After World War II, Evola returned to Italy in 1948, physically impaired from injuries sustained during a 1945 Allied bombing in Vienna, which left him partially paralyzed. He soon aligned himself with the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party founded in 1946 by former Fascist officials and sympathizers aiming to preserve elements of Mussolini’s ideology within a democratic society. In 1949, Evola began contributing to Meridiano d’Italia, a publication edited by Franco Maria Servello, a figure whose political trajectory exemplified the pragmatic reinventions common among ex-Fascists in post-war Italy. Servello briefly engaged in anti-fascist journalism in 1945 before joining the MSI, a shift reflecting the opportunism of many former regime affiliates. His earlier imprisonment by RSI authorities in 1944, alongside Franco De Agazio — another MSI affiliate who secured Allied approval in August 1945 to launch a newspaper amid violent reprisals against Fascists in northern Italy — lent him a veneer of credibility. These reprisals, particularly in cities like Milan, resulted in thousands of deaths as anti-fascist partisans targeted former regime supporters in the chaotic aftermath of the war.

In April 1951, Evola’s post-war career took a dramatic turn when Rome’s Political Police arrested him for alleged ties to the Imperium group, a clandestine far-right faction linked to the Black Legion’s bombings in the late 1940s. Facing trial, Evola strategically enlisted Francesco Carnelutti, a renowned anti-fascist lawyer, to defend him — a choice that underscored his ambivalence toward Fascism. In court, Evola denied being a Fascist but stopped short of embracing anti-fascism or portraying himself as a victim of Mussolini’s regime. Instead, he presented a complex self-portrait: he supported “Fascist ideas” not for their connection to Mussolini’s project, but because they resonated with a pre-modern, hierarchical tradition he traced back to antiquity — a tradition he believed was shattered by the French Revolution of 1789. This aristocratic, anti-egalitarian worldview, he argued, transcended Fascism, aligning with universal principles of order and authority.

Evola’s rhetorical maneuvering reveals a thinker intent on straddling multiple identities — neither fully Fascist nor anti-fascist, but rather a self-styled prophet of a “super-fascism” rooted in pure Platonism. He drew intellectual support from Swiss philosopher Armin Mohler, who positioned him alongside Vilfredo Pareto as a key voice in the Conservative Revolution — a loose intellectual current in interwar Europe that rejected both liberalism and socialism. However, Italian Fascism, as practiced by Mussolini, does not align with this framework. Rather than rejecting the French Revolution, Fascism embraced its legacy as a catalyst for modernity, reinterpreting it as a foundation for a new order that fused nationalism with the social dynamism of socialism. Mussolini’s regime positioned itself as a “third way,” synthesizing capital and labor into a corporatist state — an approach fundamentally at odds with Evola’s rigid, caste-based vision of society.

Within the MSI, Evola sought to purge what he perceived as leftist tendencies, particularly among the party’s younger, more radical members, such as those in the Imperium group. He advocated for a pre-modern hierarchy, presenting himself as an aristocratic sage who opposed the bourgeois upheaval of 1789, the proletarian revolts of 1848, and the Fascist “revolution” of 1922, which he dismissed as a vulgar mass movement led by upstarts rather than noble elites. His ideal society, vaguely sanctified by an undefined divine authority, stood in stark contrast to Fascism’s secular, statist ethos.

Evola’s Paradoxical Influence on Neo-fascism

Evola’s influence on post-war neo-fascism is paradoxical. He disdained Fascism as a formal ideology, valuing it only as a fleeting inspiration for Italy’s wartime struggle, yet his writings — particularly Revolt Against The Modern World and Men Among The Ruins — inspired a generation of extremists. Figures like Pino Rauti, a prominent MSI leader and Evola disciple, blended his ideas with militant anti-communism. By the 1970s, Rauti and others collaborated with Italian security services to counter “red subversion,” a pragmatic move that contradicted Evola’s disdain for modern statecraft. This collaboration ignored the reality that the Italian Republic they served — democratic and anti-fascist — owed its existence to the Allied victory in 1945, achieved through the efforts of the U.S. Fifth Army and British Eighth Army after two years of intense campaigning.

Evola’s followers also clashed with Fascism’s philosophical architect, Giovanni Gentile, whose concept of the Ethical State fused individual and collective destiny in a manner Evola deemed too egalitarian, even communistic. They romanticized the “legionary spirit” — a warrior brotherhood ideal — yet neither Evola nor his acolytes embodied it, not due to a lack of opportunity, but because of their ideological incoherence. The MSI, often regarded as Fascism’s heir, was less a revolutionary vanguard than a refuge for ex-regime elites loyal to the Savoy monarchy, big business, and the Catholic Church, who viewed Mussolini’s project as a means rather than an end.

Historically, Fascism’s claim to be a “Conservative Revolution” is tenuous. It relied on mass mobilization and modernist aesthetics, not a retreat to feudal tradition. Evola, by contrast, embodied a reactionary nostalgia that conflicted with Mussolini’s futurism. His post-war role in shaping neo-fascism — more a cult of personality than a coherent doctrine — rests on this misinterpretation. Today, the connection between Fascism and the MSI’s successors often reduces to superficial symbols: the Roman salute, black shirts, and Mussolini’s image. Beneath these, Evola’s aristocratic radicalism and Fascism’s populist statism remain fundamentally incompatible, their overlap more stylistic than substantive.

This misrepresentation is vividly illustrated in Evola’s own words:

“Fascism appears to us as a reconstructive revolution in that it affirms an aristocratic and spiritual concept of the nation, as against both socialist and internationalist collectivism, and the democratic and demagogic notion of the nation. In addition, its scorn for the economic myth and its elevation of the nation in practice to the degree of warrior nation marks positively the first degree of this reconstruction, which is to re-subordinate the values of the ancient castes of the merchants and slaves to the values of the immediately higher caste.”

— Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War

The Decline of Fascist Influence and Post-War Opportunism

Evola’s influence within Fascist circles began to wane after 1938, when Mussolini aligned Italy with Nazi Germany and enacted the Racial Laws, which targeted Jews and other minorities in a manner modeled on Nazi policies. This shift alienated elements of Italy’s ruling elite, who had once supported Fascism but now distanced themselves, even at the cost of military defeat. Their decisive break came on July 25, 1943, when the Grand Council of Fascism, led by figures like Dino Grandi, voted to remove Mussolini, effectively ending his dictatorship. This internal coup preceded the armistice with the Allies on September 8, 1943, which fractured the Italian state, leading to the German occupation of northern Italy and the establishment of the RSI.

In the post-war period, the MSI emerged as a political force, initially seeking to adapt Fascism into a tool for nationalist revival but ultimately diluting its core tenets in favor of political survival. This shift mirrored a broader trend among Italy’s wartime elite, who had benefited from Fascism but abandoned it when its fortunes declined. Key MSI figures like Arturo Michelini and Augusto De Marsanich followed in the footsteps of earlier opportunists such as Grandi, Giuseppe Bottai, Luigi Federzoni, and Galeazzo Ciano — men instrumental in the July 25 coup. These individuals, having reaped Fascism’s rewards, turned against it when its collapse became imminent, embodying a profound betrayal of the ideology they once championed.

This narrative of betrayal remains largely unchallenged, partly because the specter of “active Fascists” serves political purposes. Various factions, including some Jewish communities, leverage the threat of a Fascist resurgence — and its historical anti-Semitism — to maintain influence or justify policies. The MSI, positioning itself as the heir to republican Fascism, included figures like Giovanni De Lorenzo, a former SIFAR (military intelligence) director and Resistance hero decorated with a silver medal for valor, and Alfredo Covelli, who served as chief of staff under liberal minister Taddeo De Caro in the first Badoglio government after Mussolini’s fall. These affiliations highlight the ideological ambiguity of post-war Fascist successors.

The Avanguardia Nazionale, a Nazi-Fascist group, further complicates this picture. In 1976, they enlisted Alfredo De Marsico, a lawyer who had served as Minister of Grace and Justice under Mussolini but also supported Grandi’s agenda on July 25, 1943. For this, the RSI’s Extraordinary Special Court in Verona sentenced him to death in absentia in January 1944, though he evaded execution. Such examples underscore a persistent historical distortion: the notion that Fascism endured as a coherent political force beyond April 25, 1945, when Mussolini was executed by communist partisans in Giulino di Mezzegra, and the RSI collapsed.

A Fractured Fascist Legacy

Evola’s complexity is evident in his 1971 challenge to Giorgio Pini, president of the National Federation of RSI Combatants (FNCRSI). Comparing Evola and Pini, however, reveals stark differences. Evola, an esoteric thinker with no direct political involvement, maintained an intellectual distance from Fascism’s practical realities:

“With Fascism’s cataclysmic collapse in 1943, and the German effort at politically reestablishing Mussolini in the north of Italy under National Socialist auspices, Evola refused to commit himself to either Fascism or Mussolini. The reasons were not far to seek. They were the same that had made him reticent to join the Fascist Party for two decades. Instead, he remained in Rome, as he recounted later, to prepare the foundations for a future movement that would represent the “authentic right” as he conceived it.”

— A. James Gregor, The Search for Neofascism

Pini, by contrast, was deeply embedded in Fascism’s history: a decorated World War I veteran, editor-in-chief of Il Popolo d’Italia (Mussolini’s newspaper), and RSI Undersecretary of the Interior. His commitment was both ideological and personal — his son was murdered by partisans, his body never recovered. Pini’s break with the MSI in 1952 stemmed from his disgust at its drift toward a tepid imitation of Christian Democracy, which he saw as devoid of Fascism’s revolutionary spirit. Evola, a self-styled radical traditionalist, lacked such grounding. In his 1971 article in Il Conciliatore, titled A Myth and a Force For The Right, Evola criticized Pini’s statements in the FNCRSI bulletin, where Pini rejected extreme right-wing Westernism, denouncing American imperialism, the Vietnam War bombings, and authoritarian regimes in Greece, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, and Rhodesia:

“We condemn all identification with the military and liberticidal regimes of the Greek colonels, of Franco, executioner of the noble Falange of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, of the crudely conservative, classist and colonialist regime of Lisbon, of the racists of South Africa and Rhodesia. Sympathy for the mercenaries of the Foreign Legion, failed tools against Indochinese and Algerian independence, is absurd and uncivil.”

— Giorgio Pini quoted in Biographical Dictionary of The Extreme Right Since 1890 by Philip Rees

Pini’s stance was clear: post-war Fascists should reject alignment with regimes he viewed as distortions of Fascist ideals. Evola’s retort — dismissing Pini’s statements as “disheveled and mystifying communist prose, lacking originality and substance” — revealed his own intellectual shallowness. This exchange highlighted a deeper rift between Fascism’s wartime adherents and the neo-fascist currents of the post-war era. Pini and his cohort waged an ideological war against capitalism and American imperialism, which they saw as the true threats to European civilization, while others, including Evola, acquiesced to the post-1945 order, focusing on international communism as the sole adversary while ignoring their own ideological contradictions.

“The threat of the dangerous red one hangs over today's West. It threatens not only our political and economic systems but also our way of life and our spiritual heritage. Therefore, it is imperative that we resist this threat with all the means at our disposal.”

— Julius Evola, The Bow and The Club

“The conflict between the West and the East is a conflict between two forms of the modern world. The West represents the liberal and democratic form, while the East represents the communist and totalitarian form. Both are based on the same principles of modern civilization: rationalism, egalitarianism, and secularism. However, in the West, there are still some remnants of the traditional world, such as the idea of freedom and the individual, which, although distorted, are better than the complete negation of the individual in the East.”

— Julius Evola, Interview in Ordine Nuovo 1964

For authentic Fascists, the United States, not Soviet communism, posed the greatest threat to European civilization — a conviction rooted in Fascism’s anti-capitalist origins. Figures like Berto Ricci, Niccolò Giani, and Mussolini himself never viewed America as a savior against “Bolshevik hordes.” In his final months, Mussolini proposed an alliance with the Italian Socialist party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP) to oppose the bourgeois plutocrats he blamed for Italy’s collapse, a stance reflected in RSI rhetoric in 1944–1945. This vision clashed with Evola’s alignment with a post-war Italian state born of military defeat and sustained by foreign powers, lacking the legitimacy of Fascism’s revolutionary ethos.

Ricci and Giani died in combat — Ricci in Libya in 1941, Giani in Albania in 1941 — while Mussolini was executed on April 28, 1945, in Giulino di Mezzegra. Their deaths symbolized the ultimate sacrifice of Fascism’s faithful. Evola, however, survived unscathed, quickly aligning with the new regime propped up by the Allies. This survival raises questions about the motives of right-wing figures who contributed to Italy’s defeat yet sought legitimacy in its aftermath. Junio Valerio Borghese, for instance, escaped Turin’s partisan siege in April 1945 under American protection, later seeking rehabilitation in the 1950s despite his RSI command role, highlighting a stark contrast with those who fought to the end.

Evola’s defense of the NATO as a “necessity” reflected a profound misjudgment of post-war geopolitics. NATO entrenched American dominance over Europe, a cornerstone of U.S. national security strategy after 1945, rather than serving as a bulwark against communism. Similarly, his admiration for Francisco Franco was misguided: Franco, a conservative militarist, suppressed José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s Falange, imprisoning its founder until his execution in 1936 and sidelining its radical elements. Evola’s reverence for Franco reflected his fixation on reactionary order over Fascism’s revolutionary dynamism.

In attacking Pini, Evola resorted to defamation, branding him an opportunist despite Pini’s unwavering commitment to a Fascism rooted in the struggle of “blood against gold” — a metaphor for resisting capitalist materialism. Pini and his peers in the FNCRSI consistently opposed American hegemony and capitalism, viewing them as the primary threats to European culture. They attributed the erosion of traditions and values to Western powers intent on reshaping Europe, rejecting media-driven narratives about external threats like Islam or China. The FNCRSI’s public denunciation of the “Borghese coup” — a failed 1970 plot led by Borghese to overthrow the Italian government, rumored to align with U.S. and Israeli interests — marked a pivotal stance. In January 1971, they broke the silence surrounding this CIA-backed scheme, underscoring their refusal to compromise with foreign agendas. Evola, meanwhile, epitomized contradiction: a theorist urging neo-fascists to integrate into an anti-fascist state, a position that clashed with the FNCRSI’s earlier warnings against a reactionary coup in late 1969.

This schism distilled the divide: Pini and the FNCRSI clung to a Fascism defiant of American imperialism, while Evola embraced a pragmatic, reactionary path that sacrificed core principles for relevance, illuminating the tangled legacy of Fascism in post-war Italy.

The Counterpoint to Evola: Fascism

Giovanni Gentile, Fascism’s philosophical architect, provides a stark contrast to Julius Evola’s traditionalist critique. In The Doctrine of Fascism, co-authored with Mussolini, Gentile articulates a modern, dynamic conception of the state:

“The Fascist negation of socialism, democracy, liberalism, should not, however, be interpreted as implying a desire to drive the world backwards to positions occupied prior to 1789, a year commonly referred to as that which opened the demo-liberal century. History does not travel backwards. The Fascist doctrine has not taken De Maistre as its prophet. Monarchical absolutism is of the past, and so is ecclesiolatry. Dead and done for are feudal privileges and the division of society into closed, uncommunicating castes. Neither has the Fascist conception of authority anything in common with that of a police ridden State. A party governing a nation ‘totalitarianly’ is a new departure in history. There are no points of reference nor of comparison. From beneath the ruins of liberal, socialist, and democratic doctrines, Fascism extracts those elements which are still vital. It preserves what may be described as ‘the acquired facts’ of history; it rejects all else.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism

Gentile’s vision explicitly rejects traditionalism, positioning Fascism as a distinctly modern doctrine that synthesizes viable elements of Marxism, liberal republicanism, and anarcho-syndicalism — ideas that Evola, with his fixation on a pre-modern, hierarchical order, fundamentally misunderstands. Evola, in his traditionalist critique, laments Fascism’s modernist tendencies:

“Fascism appears to us as a reconstructive experiment that, despite its audacity, remains within the orbit of the modern world and does not truly transcend it.”

— Julius Evola, A Traditionalist Confronts Fascism

Gentile directly counters this critique by emphasizing Fascism’s role as a progressive force that builds on historical development, rather than retreating to an imagined past:

“Fascism is not a reaction, but a new synthesis, a new creation, which takes up the positive elements of the past and present to form a higher unity.”

— Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism

This quote refutes Evola’s claim that Fascism fails to transcend modernity, showing instead that Gentile sees Fascism as a forward-looking synthesis, not a regression to pre-modern ideals. This perspective is reinforced in The Philosophical Basis of Fascism, where Gentile casts the Fascist state as “the democratic State par excellence,” fusing individual and collective will through the state’s unifying structure:

“Nationalism identified the State with the Nation and made of the State an entity preexisting, which needed not to be created but to be recognized or known. The recognized nationalists, therefore, required a ruling class of an intellectual character, which was merely a product of the nation. Rather, the people depended on the State and on the State’s authority as the source of the life which they lived and apart from which they could not live. The nationalistic State was, therefore, an aristocratic State, enforcing itself upon the masses through the power conferred upon it by its origins.

The relationship between the nation and the State is accordingly so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far as, the nation consciously understands and appreciates it. The State could not depend on the people; on the contrary, the State is a presupposition. The Fascist State, as such, is the democratic State par excellence. The relationship between State and citizen (not this or that citizen, but all citizens) causes it to exist. Its formation, therefore, is the formation of a consciousness of it in individuals, in the masses.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophical Basis of Fascism

Evola’s claim that Fascism embraces the modern bourgeois state as the true embodiment of community, redirecting capital for the people’s benefit, is a misrepresentation. Gentile’s doctrine of Actual Idealism posits a dialectical relationship between individual and state, where the community exists within the individual, not as an abstract isolation but as a dynamic interplay of personal agency and collective existence. Gentile argued that a truly realized direct democracy — unhindered by traditional liberalism — emerges from this synthesis, where the state ensures formal equality, tying democracy’s viability to its existence. In this framework, the worker’s labor humanism becomes the most genuine expression of democratic governance:

“The State does not just swallow the individual as liberal critics would have it, but the opposite is also true, for in this conception the State is the will of the individual himself in its universal and absolute aspect, and thus the individual swallows the State.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophic Basis of Fascism

“Inseparably linked to each other so that their actual reality results from their relationship to the organism in which and through which they find their necessary fulfillment, and outside of which they are nothing but abstractions.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

Gentile’s vision of the Fascist state as a realization of ethical life — where the state synthesizes individual and communal aspirations within a historical and cultural context — stands in sharp contrast to Evola’s critique, which accuses Fascism of neglecting the tangible dimensions of social organization. Evola instead advocates for a state rooted in metaphysical hierarchy:

“The true State must have a hierarchical and organic character, reflecting the superior order of being, rather than being a mere product of human convention or mass consensus.”

— Julius Evola, Fascism Viewed From The Right

Gentile directly refutes Evola’s rigid hierarchical vision by emphasizing the active, participatory role of the masses in the Fascist state, which evolves through collective action rather than static tradition:

“The State is not an abstract entity imposed from above, but the concrete expression of the will of the people, realized through their active participation in the life of the nation.”

— Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Society

This quote undermines Evola’s call for a state based on a “superior order of being,” highlighting instead Gentile’s belief in the state as a living, dynamic entity shaped by the people’s collective will — a core principle of Fascism that Evola fails to grasp. Mussolini’s policies, rooted in Gentile’s philosophy, sought to bridge this disconnect through the corporatist model, fostering a unified national identity by harmonizing individual and collective interests:

“The man of fascism is an individual who is nation and homeland, a moral law which binds individuals and generations together in a tradition and a mission, which suppresses the instinct of life enclosed in the brief circle of pleasure to establish a superior life in duty free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through self-abnegation, the sacrifice of his particular interests, death itself, realizes that wholly spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism

Gentile’s philosophy also provides a foundation for understanding the operational dynamics of Fascism, which can be visualized through the “Fascist Schema.” This diagram illustrates the interconnected forces that define Fascist ideology, emphasizing the interplay between individual, collective, and state-driven impulses. It is best integrated here, as it complements the discussion of Gentile’s vision of the Ethical State and its emphasis on labor and unity.

Fascist Schema

The “Fascist Schema” delineates five key dimensions — Consciousness, Activity, Will (Ethical Impulse), Economic Impulses, and Physical Impulse — across three entities: the Individual, the People/Nation, and the State/Party. Arrows indicate the bidirectional influence between these entities, reflecting Gentile’s dialectical approach. For instance, consciousness flows between the individual and the state, shaping and being shaped by collective awareness. Activity and economic impulses highlight the role of labor, aligning with Gentile’s labor humanism, where workers are central to the nation’s ethical and cultural foundation. The ethical impulse underscores the moral unity that binds individuals to the state, while the physical impulse represents the tangible actions that sustain this unity. This schema encapsulates Fascism’s totalitarian vision, where the state integrates all aspects of human experience into a cohesive whole — a concept Evola fundamentally misunderstood in his rejection of Fascism’s modern, dynamic nature.

Evola, in his critique, dismisses this interconnected, labor-driven framework as a betrayal of true hierarchy:

“Fascism did not have the courage to fully reject the democratic and egalitarian mythos, nor to affirm a doctrine of authority and hierarchy rooted in transcendent principles.”

— Julius Evola, A Traditionalist Confronts Fascism

Gentile directly refutes Evola’s accusation of “egalitarianism” by clarifying that Fascism’s unity does not erase hierarchy but redefines it through active participation in the state’s ethical mission:

“The Fascist State does not level down; it elevates all to the same moral plane, where each individual, through his labor and duty, contributes to the higher unity of the nation.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act

This quote counters Evola’s claim by showing that Gentile’s Fascism maintains a form of hierarchy — one based on moral and labor contributions, not static, pre-modern traditions — while ensuring unity, as depicted in the Fascist Schema. Gentile’s framework ensures that the state, nation, and individual are not isolated but interlinked, a practical necessity for a modern state in motion that Evola’s static traditionalism fails to address.

My Defense of Gentile’s Philosophy

Gentile’s philosophy robustly defends corporatism as an organic entity, further challenging Evola’s critique of totalitarianism. He views the state as embodying the General Will and Spirit of the people, promoting ethical life and spiritual unity:

“The dialectical concept of mind, then, not only does not exclude, it requires spiritual multiplicity as the essential mark of the infinite unity of mind. Infinite unity is therefore infinite unification of the multiple as it is infinite multiplication of the one.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act

Hegel and Gentile, rooted in idealist philosophy, defend a totalitarian state that privileges unity over individualism. Hegel envisions the state as the embodiment of organic unity, a rational totality that transcends individual wills, ensuring stability and ethical life. Gentile extends this by emphasizing the interplay between individual consciousness and collective experience, arguing that a totalitarian state erases the artificial divide between individual and community, channeling human potential towards the higher purpose of the nation.

As humanism transforms into a humanism of labor, Gentile positions the proletarian nation as the core of the Ethical State, where totalitarian principles are bound to labor:

“The State can no longer be thought of as the State of the citizen (or of the man and the citizen) as in the days of the French Revolution; it is and it should be the State of the workers. The real man, the man who counts, is the man who works, and whose worth is measured by his work. For it is indeed true that value is labor; and a man’s worth is to be measured according to the quantity and quality of his work.”

— Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Society

Under Mussolini’s regime, Fascism sought to distinguish Italy from the industrial alienation of capitalist societies, elevating workers as vital contributors to a unified national purpose. This vision, termed labor humanism, aimed to overcome liberalism’s isolating individualism, fostering a cohesive order where labor served both personal fulfillment and collective destiny. Corporatism organized society into state-supervised “corporations,” mediating between workers, employers, and the state to align economic production with national goals:

“The Fascist State, having organized and juridically recognized workers’ syndicates and employer organizations, intends to adapt its structure to those united syndicates, to draw them into national corporations, on the way to a system of political representation compatible with the structure of workers’ organizations.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism

Sergio Panunzio, a key Fascist theorist and Gentile’s protégé, proposed a corporatist, centralized “empire of labor” as an alternative to Anglo-American capitalism, contrasting it with the “empire of gold” of finance and exploitation. However, Fascism reshaped syndicalist ideas into a top-down structure, with unions becoming state-controlled institutions integrated into the national hierarchy, reflecting the regime’s emphasis on centralized authority.

Mussolini saw corporatism as a practical mechanism within the broader Fascist Revolution, aiming to reshape society into a disciplined, hierarchical order under the state’s command:

“Whoever sees in corporatism only an economic conception or solely political economy, fails to understand it. This economic revolution completes the spiritual development of the individual and society.”

— Benito Mussolini quoted in The Birth of Fascist Ideology by Zeev Sternhell

Evola’s Misguided Critique

Evola’s interpretation of corporatism, particularly in the context of Nazi Germany, reveals his profound misunderstanding of Fascism’s modern dynamics:

“Germany proceeded to reorganize labour and the economy by means of the ‘corporatist’ reconstruction of businesses. We shall not dwell on this aspect of the Third Reich’s legislation, because we have already spoken of it in faulting the defects of Fascist state corporatism. Let us therefore recall only that the reform had for its virtual model the Medieval organic and corporatist structures, which various exponents of the ‘national revolution’ reappraised and adopted as a precursor and as the foundation of a ‘third way’ beyond degenerate capitalism and Marxism.”

— Julius Evola, Notes on The Third Reich

Evola’s fixation on “Medieval organic and corporatist structures” as a model for the Third Reich’s economic reorganization — and by extension, a “third way” — is historically inaccurate and intellectually flawed. He doubles down on this critique in his analysis of Italian Fascism:

“The corporative idea, as it was realized in Fascism, remained a hybrid: it did not succeed in overcoming the economic and materialistic plane, nor did it achieve a true organic and spiritual integration of the forces involved.”

— Julius Evola, Fascism Viewed From The Right

Gentile had already directly refuted this dismissal of Fascist corporatism as a “hybrid” by emphasizing its role as a dynamic, unifying mechanism that integrates economic and spiritual dimensions:

“Corporatism in Fascism is not merely an economic system but a spiritual act, a synthesis of material and ideal forces, through which the individual and the collective find their true realization in the State.”

— Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism

This quote counters Evola’s claim by showing that Gentile’s corporatism, as reflected in the Fascist Schema’s economic and ethical impulses, achieves the spiritual integration Evola claims is lacking, by uniting labor and national purpose in a modern context. Gentile’s corporatism was a dynamic, dialectical method, fusing labor and state into a forward-moving totality, not a relic of feudal guilds. Evola’s medieval model — static, agrarian, and pre-industrial — ignores the Enlightenment’s emphasis on adaptability and growth, which Fascism, under Gentile’s influence, embraced to meet the demands of a modern state. The Third Reich’s actual corporatism was a wartime machine, ruthlessly efficient and industrialized, owing more to modern totalitarianism than to any knightly estate. Evola’s “organic” vision sidesteps the reality of Nazi labor fronts and state-directed production, projecting his aristocratic fantasy onto a regime that would have dismissed his ideas as impractical.

This degrowth fetish undermines his “third way” as a viable alternative to Fascism’s modern framework. A medieval economy — low-output, localized, and resistant to scale — could not sustain a national revolution, let alone compete with capitalism’s expansion or Marxism’s industrial focus. Evola’s corporatism is not a transcendence of these systems but a retreat, a regression to an imagined golden age where progress was stifled. Gentile’s framework, as illustrated in the Fascist Schema, embraced the modern worker as a creative force, dynamically linked to the state and nation, while Evola’s vision is a sterile dead-end, anti-modern to the point of self-sabotage. Fascism, as Gentile envisioned it, offers a practical, unified system that harnesses labor and collective will for national greatness — a vision far superior to Evola’s regressive traditionalism.

Conclusions

Julius Evola’s intellectual legacy is a hollow masquerade of pseudo-traditionalism, a fraudulent edifice that crumbles under scrutiny. Far from being a bulwark against modernity, his thought is a direct descendant of the French Revolution’s ideological upheaval — a cataclysm that birthed modernism by shattering traditional authority through the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. Evola’s reliance on “perennial wisdom,” a concept shared with radical traditionalists like René Guénon, is little more than a repackaged stew of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Deism — doctrines deeply embedded in Freemasonry, a cornerstone of modernist revolutions. Freemasonry, with its Jacobin ties and Deist core, fueled liberal uprisings across Europe, promoting a relativistic pantheism that clashes with the anti-Enlightenment, morally absolute framework of orthodox Christian theology. This trajectory mirrors the neo-Gnostic distortions of thinkers like Alexander Dugin, whose Kabbalistic, anti-materialist spin on Orthodox Christianity rejects Platonic realism for a rootless, esoteric worldview.

Evola’s writings, such as Introduction to Magic, exemplify this intellectual rot, peddling a quasi-satanic mysticism that erodes any claim to authentic traditionalism. His refusal to root himself in a concrete religious tradition — whether Christian, Vedic, or otherwise — lays bare the emptiness of his philosophy. Even more damning is his engagement with modern art, which starkly contradicts his anti-modern rhetoric. His abstract works, such as the painting below, tie him to Futurism and Dada — movements that, despite their avant-garde veneer, were co-opted by fascists, communists, and liberals alike, revealing Evola’s complicity in the very modernity he claimed to oppose.

Evola’s “Five O’Clock Tea” Painting

Evola’s ties to degenerate art circles likely contributed to his fraught relationship with the Nazis, fueling his later anti-fascist posturing — more a product of personal resentment than principled conviction. His contradictions didn’t go unnoticed by the Fascist regime either. A confidential report from the OVRA (Organizzazione di Vigilanza e Repressione dell’Antifascismo), the Fascist Secret Police under the Italian Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate of Public Security and Political Police Division, dated February 24, 1930, in Rome, paints a damning picture of Evola’s activities and affiliations.

A 1930 OVRA report accusing Julius Evola of ties to the Third International and the International of Zionism

The OVRA report accuses Evola of being an agent of the Third International and the International of Zionism, describing him as a former “artist-indianist” (anarchic mystic) who recently attended a conference in Trieste. It notes his directorship of La Torre, a periodical with limited circulation that he delivered during a visit, and his frequenting of notorious dens of debauchery, surrounded by a group of dancers — including a certain “E,” allegedly a pederast. Despite Evola’s vast philosophical culture and visits to the Circolo Filologico and religious sites in the Bigona region, the OVRA viewed his recent introduction to Fascism through the International of the Third Order with suspicion, labeling his artistic, philosophical, and political ideas as false. The report also mentions his involvement in the Progress Exhibition of the Royalist and Fascist party and his connections to Fascist circles in Piazza Risorgimento, yet it underscores the irony of Evola’s anti-Americanism stance, given his associations with pro-Americanists and anti-fascists on July 11.

Ultimately, Evola’s philosophy aligns more with the rootless, globalist ethos of American hegemony than with any genuine tradition — a bitter irony for a self-proclaimed anti-modernist, who hated American Civilization. His ideas, a chaotic amalgam of esotericism and modernist debris, collapse under their own contradictions, serving not as a defense against modernity but as a testament to its triumph. Evola’s legacy is a cautionary tale: a hollow ideology masquerading as tradition, unworthy of serious consideration. Better traditionalists exist anyway, such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Johann Georg Hamann. Read them instead.