--- savitar_devi <savitar_devi@...> wrote:
> The portrayal of Evola is this book is quite rancid
> to say the least…
> this is a quote from the preface, and follows in the
> actual book is
> considerably worse. To say that the author holds
> Evola in low esteem
> would be a massive understatement.
I have not read "Mussolini's Intellectuals" yet, but
its author, A. James Gregor (who has been writing
studies of Fascism for about forty years now), has
discussed Evola before, such as in his book "Phoenix"
which was published in 1999. In that book, it's not
that he holds Evola in low esteem, but rather that he
takes other historians to task for thinking that
anything useful can be gleaned from studying Evola in
terms of understanding Fascism as a historical
phenomenon, as has become the trend in recent
scholarship on Fascism (such as in the writings of
Roger Griffin). Some historians, including Griffin,
Stanley Payne and George Mosse, have been looking to
define what they term "generic fascism" or the
"fascist minimum," which they believe to be the
universal characteristics which all fascist movements
- whether it is German National Socialism, Italian
Fascism, Spanish Falangism, the Hungarian Arrow Cross,
Oswald Mosley's BUF, GRECE, the American Nazi Party,
etc. - share. Gregor is of the opinion that such
classifications are reductive and do not shed any
light on understanding any of these phenomena, each of
which he believes can better be understood within
their specific historical and sociological contexts.
His problem with Evola in this context is that some
historians have begun using him (among other names) in
an effort to show a link between the original fascist
movements and their many post-war offshoots, and have
begun implying that Evola was influential in
establishing a continuity between historical fascism
and the present-day manifestations of the Right. I
don't think that Gregor is necessarily wrong. While it
has been documented that Evola had links to both
Italian Fascism and the SS, I've never seen it
demonstrated that he had any significant impact on
either movement. The one claim that I've seen somewhat
substantiated is that his ideas on race as a spiritual
rather than solely a biological category were
influential on Mussolini when he was seeking an
alternative to Nazi race theory, but even here, from
what I've read Evola was only one of several thinkers
to apply himself to this task. So, from a historians'
point of view, I can see why Gregor would think that
it is wrongheaded to try to understand historical
Fascism as an Evolian phenomenon. And I don't think
that most readers of Evola today would find fault with
this view, since, clearly, Fascism and National
Socialism would have been much more successful in the
long run had they adhered to a more Traditional
world-view.
At any rate, I am curious to read this book and see
what Gregor has to say. I don't think it is so much a
matter of Evola-bashing as much as an attempt to
reframe the historians' debate about Evola's role in
events.
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