5,326 words
With the likes of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline he translated for an Italian readership, and Jose Ortega y Gasset, Julius Evola (1898–1974) stands as one of the notably incisive mid-Twentieth Century critics of modernity. Like Spengler and Ortega, Evola understood himself to owe a formative debt to Friedrich Nietzsche, but more forcefully than Spengler or Ortega, Evola saw the limitations – the contradictions and inconsistencies–in Nietzsche’s thinking.
René Guénon, 1886–1951
5,312 words
The Conservative critique of modernity is by no means a recent phenomenon; it begins rather with the responders to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Jacobin followers in the late Eighteenth Century. It is sufficient in this regard to mention the names of Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) and of their successors, S. T. Coleridge (1772–1834) and François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), to suggest the range and richness of immediately post-revolutionary conservative discourse. (more…)