René Guénon and Henry Corbin

A recent publication, New Perspectives on Henry Corbin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), edited by Hadi Fakhoury, available here, has prompted me to reflect on the relationship between Corbin (pictured left) and Guénon.

At first sight, Corbin and Guénon were very different types of people. Corbin was a scholar who spent his life within French academia, occupying several prestigious posts. Guénon was rejected by French academia, and spent his life outside it, often criticizing it. On the other hand, their paths did somehow cross, given the close relationship between Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and the Italian scholar Francesco Piraino has recently drawn our attention to their very similar contemporary impact: reading Corbin, like reading Guénon, is often important for the trajectories of French converts to Sufi Islam. The Traditionalist author Patrick Laude has written about Corbin together with Guénon and Schuon (see here).

Fakhoury’s volume helps make clear where Corbin and Guénon agreed and where they differed. Firstly, Corbin was not a self-distancing academic scholar. He was never just a historian of ideas, or even a philosopher in the normal sense. He engaged actively in the exploration of the human relationship with the transcendent, and was as interested in actual spiritual experience as in written attempts to explain it. Secondly, he was in many ways a perennialist, believing in an “Oriental” or “Iranian” “Hellenism” that included Zoroastrianism, Plato, Proclus, Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi—not as a succession of historical figures, but as ways of accessing truth. Thirdly, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric was central to his thought, as was—to a lesser extent—initiation. Fourthly, he had a low opinion of the modern West, preferring Oriental Hellenism to “Latinism,” and seeing modernity as lamentably desacralized. Finally, at least towards the end of his life, he sought for surviving transmissions of what Guénon would have called the primordial tradition in ancient orders (the Order of St Jean of Jerusalem) and Freemasonry. Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s chapter on “Henry Corbin as Knight of the Temple” in Fakhoury’s volume sheds much light on this quest.

And yet Corbin’s perennialism was not Guénon’s. Even if Corbin was never just a scholar, he worked on original texts in their original languages with considerable scholarly rigor. When it came to perennialism, Corbin was interested in Christianity and Iranian Hellenism, while Guénon was interested in Hinduism and Arab Islam. Corbin was a Protestant, and Guénon abhorred Protestantism. Corbin valued Plato, and Guénon did not. Guénon’s perennialism derived from Theosophy, while Corbin’s (perennial) Hellenism derived from the Russian Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). The esoteric/exoteric pair is hard to avoid if one looks in certain areas of Islam, and while Corbin’s esoteric was located primarily in what he famously termed the mundus imaginalis, the “imaginary” between the realm of the forms and the experiential world, Guénon’s esoteric was mostly in the teachings of the primordial tradition. For Guénon, anti-modernism was primary, but for Corbin it was secondary.

In the end, the two men were also of different generations. Most of Corbin’s (1903-1978) work was published after Guénon’s death in 1951. Corbin's crucial Sohravardi d’Alep, fondateur de la doctrine illuminative was published in 1939, but—presumably because of the disruption caused by the Second World War—was not reviewed in Études traditionnelles until 1947. And even then it received only one (rather dismissive) paragraph, which can be read here.

More research on Evola

2025 is a great year for those interested in Julius Evola. First, an exhaustive biography (actually published in 2024) has become available: Andrea Scarabelli’s Vita avventurosa di Julius Evola. Una biografia (The Adventurous Life of Julius Evola: A Biography), 816 pages, in Italian. Secondly, the journal Aries has published a special edition on Evola with four excellent articles.

I have not yet read Scarabelli’s book, but hope to, and to review it in this blog. I expect it to be well-informed, as Scarabelli is deputy secretary of the J. Evola Foundation, which houses Evola’s archive, and I also expect it not to be entirely objective, for the same reason—Scarabelli’s role in the Evola Foundation. This was established by Evola himself “to reaffirm the traditional values of culture… [and] enhance and disseminate the thought and work of Julius Evola.” It is not a neutral body.

Now to the Aries special issue, available here. It is edited by Julian Strube and entitled “Far-Right Politics and the Study of Esotericism,” but it is mostly about Evola, though it includes one article (on “The German Jewish Occult: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Philosophy of the ‘Irrational’” by Ansgar Martins) that does not mention Evola, and which this post will ignore. The articles that deal with Evola are discussed in turn. It is therefore a very long post, but it makes sense to discuss these articles together.

✸ The first article is by Peter Staudenmaier, “Evola’s Afterlives: Esotericism and Politics in the Posthumous Reception of Julius Evola,” Aries 25 (2025): 163–193. It shows that Evola was closer to the Italian Fascist Party and to the German National Socialists than he later admitted.

After the end of the Second World War, Evola airbrushed his record. Distancing himself from the Fascist Party, he emphasized that he had never been a member. What he did not mention was that this was because his application to join the party was rejected, twice. The Fascists found him too abrasive, and were nervous about his strange connections. This did not stop him playing a larger role in Fascist racism and antisemitism than he later admitted, however.

The story is much the same when it comes to the Nazis. Not everyone in the SS approved of him, as has often been emphasized. Overall, however, the SS worked happily enough with him, and he was at one point on the payroll of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service, by then a branch of the SS).

This certainly modifies the general view of Evola's life, but does not require any major reassessment of his work. There was already evidence pointing in this direction, and Evola never claimed to have been an active anti-fascist or anti-Nazi, nor could anyone sensible take him as such.

Staudenmaier notes that “The persistence of profoundly distorted images of Evola for decades, including scholarly venues, should be occasion for reflection.” One explanation, he suggests, is partly that the evola Foundation has never allowed much access to its archive. Another is that many people have followed Evola’s own later accounts too uncritically. And then “difficult questions arise with Hans Thomas Hakl, whose work has molded so much of Evola’s international reputation.” Hakl (born 1947) is discussed in more detail below.

✸ Then comes Davide Marino and Milan Reith, “Pagan Imperialisms: Julius Evola’s ‘Esoteric Collaborationism,’” Aries 25 (2025): 194–225. It shows that Evola’s reading of esotericism sometimes followed political imperatives. The “collaborationism” of the title is political, demonstrated through a comparison of two different versions of Evola’s Pagan Imperialism, the Italian original of 1928 and the German version of 1933. Each is placed in its political context, and differences between them are highlighted.

The conclusion is that “Evola seamlessly shifted from one political position to another, continually finding new ‘esoteric’ justifications for his ideological stances,” and this is argued convincingly. As the authors say, “The cult of Mithra could be the herald of the ‘Mediterranean tradition’ in 1928 yet become ‘the avatâra of the ancient Aryan god of the luminous sky’ in 1933. Italians could alternatively be ‘Mediterranean and thus essentially Western,’ distinct from ‘the race of blond Germanic barbarians,’ or ‘Aryans, heirs of the sacred Caesars and the royal sons of Thor and Odin.’” Certainly, on these occasions, political logic was guiding the esotericism, not the other way round. In future, we will need to look more carefully for the political logic, and take the esotericism less at face value.

✸ Next comes Moritz Maurer, “Reading Evola in Germany,” Aries 25 (2025): 226–257. This shows that Evola’s works in German served as occasion for internal Nazi discussions. As Maurer puts it, Evola “could serve as an inspiring intellectual but more often acted as a defining foil against which differing concepts and notions of National Socialism and Germanness were negotiated.” This article is especially interesting since so little is known of the reception of any variety of Traditionalism in Germany. It is based on reviews of Evola’s works in the German press from 1933 to 1943, sources used by neither Scarabelli or Hakl

Maurer explains that “that National Socialism lacked a unified ideological doctrine” and that its success was in part due to its ability to be inclusive—within certain very clear limits. The most important of these were the rejection of anything Jewish, democratic, or Bolshevik. Evola transgressed none of these limits. His criticism of modernity could be read as criticism of the Weimar Republic and all that it had stood for. Reviews of his work could therefore, as Maurer argues, allow debates internal to National Socialist thought, notably over the relationship with the Catholic Church and with Neopaganism. This was one reason for the initial Nazi interest in Evola. Another was that his status within Italian Fascism seems to have been generally overestimated. Although sometimes welcome, his ideas were more often rejected as un-German. Despite the alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, there was little desire to incorporate Italian Fascism into Nazism. The Italians were Italians, not Germans.

The two works that led to most discussion were Heidnischer Imperialismus (Pagan Imperialism) and Erhebung wider die moderne Welt (Revolt against the Modern World), both published in the relatively peaceful years before 1940. The situation after 1940 was different, as Maurer explains, with stricter censorship and, beyond that, paper shortages and economic challenges for publishers. Given this, the 1943 publication of Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre (Fundamentals of Fascist Racial Science) indicates very definite approval within the Nazi state, and also the Italian state—Mussolini himself approved the translation, according to Scarabelli, who gives no source for this information. On this occasion, Evola’s status as a representative of Italian Fascism was perhaps not over-estimated. The book, however, did not give rise to much discussion, presumably given the circumstances of the times.

The Nazi reception of Evola tells us more about Nazism than it does about Evola, even though Evola did manage his reception in Germany, adjusting his views to the German market in his German translations, as Marino and Reith showed. Criticism of Evola’s conception of aristocracy by Bernhard Kummer, a prominent Nazi theorist and Nordicist, is particularly interesting. Kummer “counter[ed] Evola’s aristocratic-pagan ideas,” writes Maurer, “with a völkisch-Protestant conception of Germanness, contrasting aristocracy with the idea of Volksgemeinschaft.” The same position was taken in a journal controlled by a more senior Nazi ideologist, Walther Darré. Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the nationally and racially defined people irrespective of class, was not exactly a Nazi dogma, but was very close to one, and in this respect Evola’s views contradicted Nazism, being more individualist and thus, in some sense, more liberal. More on this below.

As Maurer notes, the picture of Evola in the Third Reich that emerges from his work differs from the postwar attempt by Evola to distance himself from Nazism, and from the pictures painted by his more partisan chroniclers (Hakl, Scarabelli).

✸ Finally comes Julian Strube, “Esotericism, the New Right, and Academic Scholarship,” Aries 25 (2025): 304–353. This long article (50 pages) falls into two parts, one of which complements Maurer by dealing with reading Evola in postwar Germany, and one of which looks mostly at the reception not of Evola, but of Hakl. I will deal with these two parts separately.

✩ In the first part of his article, Strube covers the relatively well-known topic of the international reception of Evola by the New Right. More importantly, he covers the postwar German-language reception of Evola, about which far less is known.

Strube clearly demonstrates the importance of Hakl in the German-language reception of Evola, both as translator and as commentator. Armin Mohler (1920–2003), the secretary of Ernst Jünger, popularized (from 1949) the idea of an interwar “Conservative Revolution” group that was distinct from Nazism and so, by implication, innocent of Nazism’s crimes. The association between Evola’s activities and the Conservative Revolution was later encouraged by Evola himself, and followed by others, including Hakl, who systematically presented Evola is the most favorable possible light. 

Strube does not inquire into Hakl’s motivations, but notes how a sanitized Evola serves the objectives of the New Right, and the number of New Right journals in which Hakl published: Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Junge Freiheit, Sezession, Neue Ordnung, Deutsche Stimme, and Criticón. Strube does not mention Hakl's explanation, that he chose these journals because they were interested in Evola when nobody else was (see interview here), nor does he mention the alternative explanation of Hakl’s favorable presentation of Evola: that he wanted to save the good esoteric content from being drowned out by the bad political elements (see Francesco Baroni, here). But whatever Hakl’s motivations, his role in the popularization of Evola in German New Right circles is clear.

Strube also covers the later reception of Evola by Martin Sellner (born 1989), the Austrian leader of the Identitarian movement and one of the leading figures in today’s German as well as the Austrian Radical Right, and by Martin Lichtmesz (born 1976, legally Martin Semlitsch), another Identitarian, and at the Institut für Staatspolitik and in its journal Sezession.

Interestingly, Strube notes in passing that the concept of ethnopluralism, central to today’s Identitarians and thus to the Radical Right as a whole, was developed not by GRECE in France as is generally thought (and as I thought myself), but by Henning Eichberg (1942–2017), a German-Danish sociologist, in 1973. Ethnopluralism, as Strube writes, “calls for separated ‘ethnic communities’ (Volksgemeinschaften).” It is unclear whether Eichberg used the term Volksgemeinschaft or whether this is Strube’s own gloss, but in either case it raises the interesting question of the relationship between today’s Identitarianism and the Nazi quasi-dogma that Evola rejected.An obvious difference is what was and is seen as the opposite to the Volksgemeinschaft: class struggle for the Nazis, and bland cosmopolitanism for the New Right.

✩ In the second part of his article, Strube turns to the reception of Evola in European academia, notably that part associated with the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). Here I must declare an interest: I was one of the founder members of ESSWE, and served on its board for many years, and I am also friends with several of the scholars who will be mentioned below. Despite this, I write as neutrally as possible.

Strube demonstrates—though he would not put it this way—that many scholars took Hakl too much at face value as a reliable source on Evola. He does not mention my own work, but he might well have done so: I drew on Hakl’s work in my Against the Modern World (2004), and asked him to write the chapter on Evola in my collection on Key Thinkers of the Radical Right (2019). In retrospect, having read the first part of Strube’s article, I was perhaps at times too uncritical, though I followed normal scholarly practice in using other, mostly primary, sources, and as a result I think that the overall picture I have painted of Evola over the years has not been too far wrong—though I admit that I was surprised, and also amused, to learn that the reason he never joined the Fascist Party was that they would not accept his multiple applications. One of the reasons that I relied on Hakl’s work twenty years ago was that there was then almost nothing else available, and even today it would be hard to identify an expert other than Paul Furlong, author of Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola (2011), who has now retired and whose former colleagues have all lost contact with him. Scarabelli of the Evola Foundation, whose book was mentioned at the start of this post, is too obviously partisan. Hakl was never that obviously partisan. This was another reason that I relied on his work: it is not actually that bad. The presentation of Evola is certainly favorable, but Hakl’s scholarship is otherwise generally good.

Strube, however, takes a different view of the academic reception of Hakl’s work. He looks at the work of Joscelyn Godwin (b. 1945), Marco Pasi (b. 1968), and Wouter Hanegraaff (b. 1961), and identifies “a hermeneutic... that actively prevents the rigorous research and possibly uncomfortable self-reflection needed. The motivations for these tendencies are most likely diverse and not necessarily ideologically driven, but they constitute a failure, if not active resistance, to reflect on the history of the field of ‘Western esotericism’ that continues to shape its scholarly debates.” He also writes of “collaborations with far-right milieus.” “It is particularly problematic” he concludes, “when such collaboration leads to the adoption of narratives and polemical rhetoric... Even when the reasons for such reactions are not ideologically motivated, they at least distort an understanding of not only the historical but also the contemporary dynamics between far-right politics and esotericism.”

This, I think, is going too far, even if he concedes that “motivations… are… not necessarily ideologically driven.” The only real collaboration with far-right milieus was Hakl’s, although Godwin did indeed collaborate with Hakl who organized the second of a series of meetings known as the Palladian Academy that had been started by Godwin, and Pasi and Hanegraaff have defended Hakl (see Pasi in Religiographies, here). Strube notes that “there is nothing to suggest that these Palladian Academy meetings were political in nature or guided by any particular ideology,” so does that collaboration really matter? 

So far as I know, the reason that Pasi and Hanegraaff defended Hakl was that they respected his pioneering work on esotericism as a whole, including his fine study of Eranos (Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Routledge 2013), and that they did not see him as an activist for the Radical Right. In which they may well have been right, despite his choice of journals for his articles on Evola. 

The only “adoption of narratives” that Strube seems to demonstrate is that Hanegraaff adopted Hakl’s narrative that “The chief source of attacks against esotericism and New Age movements was and still remains the Frankfurt School” (Hakl, quoted approvingly by Hanegraaff, quoted by Strube). This might indeed slightly “distort [the] understanding of… the contemporary dynamics between far-right politics and esotericism,” but Hanegraaff himself insists that he arrived at this conclusion independently and quoted Hakl not because he was his source, but simply because he agreed with his assessment (personal communication). Strube, then, really demonstrates no collaboration, impact, or lack of scholarly rigor.

✸ The special issue opens with an introduction jointly written by Egil Asprem, editor-in-chief of Aries, and Strube. This takes some of the positions from the second part of Strube’s article even further, suggesting that “the field of ‘Western esotericism’ has proved a hospitable environment for various misconceptions and tendentious narratives about Evola, his politics, and its relation to esotericism. This is all the more problematic because some of the esotericism scholarship on Evola that emerged in the 1990s resulted from collaboration with leading far-right stakeholders.” Certainly, Hakl collaborated with leading far-right stakeholders, and promoted some tendentious narratives. That is not, in my view, enough to condemn an entire field. The introduction also states that Evola’s status as a key thinker of the radical right is “the result of concerted efforts by far-right actors.” This is true. And the actors concerned are not part of the field of Western esotericism, a field that produced the four, or perhaps three and a half, excellent articles contained in this special edition.

New English translation of book by Tage Lindbom

Another book by the Swedish Traditionalist Tage Lindbom (discussed here and here) is now available in English. It is The Windmills of Sancho Panza, first published in Swedish in 1962.

To quote from the recent article on Lindbom by Gulnaz Sibgatullina and Benjamin R. Teitelbaum (here), the book

critiques the liberal notion of freedom, which he saw as individualistic liberation from history, hierarchy, spirituality, and community. He argued that modern liberalism creates an imbalance between freedom and equality, with the latter advancing through the growing power of the modern state, which becomes increasingly managerial and oppressive; he described this dynamic as spreading “like a grass fire.” Drawing on thinkers like Tocqueville while rejecting Rousseau, Lindbom framed his arguments in terms accessible to Western intellectuals.

Professionally and personally, [The Windmills of Sancho Panza] was many things for Lindbom: it catalyzed his intellectual departure from socialism and liberalism, it outed him in public as an ideological Other, and—while it ruined his connections with the mainstream—it helped introduce him to Sweden’s religious and political underground…

The book’s reception was polarizing. Gunnar Fredriksson’s review in Sweden’s leading evening paper Aftonbladet dismissed it with the blunt “Yuck, Lindbom” (1962). And it was while struggling to find a publisher for the book that an editor—perhaps recognizing the text’s intellectual tendencies better than Lindbom himself did—recommended that Lindbom explore the literature on Traditionalism. Indeed, without knowing of Guénon or citing Islam or Hinduism, Lindbom’s text presents a universe of criticism where globalization, centralization, secularization, progressivism, and social leveling co-occur and intermingle.

Traditionalism in Turkish cultural life: for further investigation

A new open-access article points to a possible new direction in the study of the impact of Traditionalism on twentieth-century Turkish cultural life. It is Büşra Çakmaktaş, “From Cinema to Sufism: The Artistic and Mystical Life of Turkish Screenwriter Ayşe Şasa (1941–2014),” Religions 2025, 16, 787, available here. 

Çakmaktaş writes that the Turkish film-maker Ayşe Şasa (1941–2014) read Guénon and Lings, and “frequently referred to the works of these intellectuals… and adopted their metaphysical and spiritual perspectives on Islam as a guiding framework for her artistic works.” The article does not give any examples of this, however, and instead points to general “Sufi” influences on Şasa and her work, deriving from Ibn Arabi and Rumi. Şasa was a Jerrahi, attending the Istanbul tekke led by Safer Dal (1926–1999), the successor of Muzaffer Ozak (1916-1985), who made a big impact in the West through his visits to New York in the 1980s.

The writings of Şasa cited by Çakmaktaş are Yeşilçam Günlüğü (Yeşilçam Diaries, 1993) and Delilik Ülkesinden Notlar (Notes from the Land of Madness, 2006). In Yeşilçam Günlüğü, a long passage is quoted from Lings' What is Sufism  on “the correspondence between inner and outer vision, and between signs in the material world and divine meanings.” “This field offers untouched treasures for cinematic interpretations based on a metaphysical understanding,” wrote Şasa. In Notlar, Guénon is cited four times, mostly as saying that knowledge of the infinite is the only true knowledge, but also as ascribing the crisis of the modern world to the loss of traditional civilization, a proposition with which Şasa explicitly agrees.

These two books certainly indicate familiarity with the Traditionalists, but not exactly their use “as a guiding framework.” More research is needed.

More on André Scrima

The Romanian historian of religions Bogdan Tătaru-Cazaban has recently contributed to the discussion of the status of Traditionalism for the Romanian monk and theologian André Scrima (1925-2000), discussed in previous posts here and here, with an excellent article, “The Inner Dimension of the Orthodox Tradition and Traditionalism According to André Scrima’s Hermeneutics,” Review of Ecumenical Studies 12:3 (2020): 485-496, available here. 

Tătaru-Cazaban takes us further into the original sources (1958, 1994, and 1996) and maintains the position taken by others that Scrima was not really a Traditionalist, given the various points on which he criticized Traditionalist positions. “His detachment from Traditionalism appears evident,” writes Tătaru-Cazaban.

The article is well argued, but I am not entirely convinced that the detachment is realty that evident. Scrima wrote a preface to a Romanian translation of Schuon’s De l’unité transcendante des religions in 1994, when he was 69 and approaching the end of his life, which suggests that he still valued Schuon’s work, even if he disagreed with it in certain ways. It all depends, perhaps, on what one means by “Traditionalist.” If one means “absolutely faithful to the positions taken by Guénon and Schuon,” there are very few real Traditionalists, especially since Guénon and Schuon themselves disagreed on various points. If one means “someone whose starting point was in Traditionalist thought and who then developed and modified that thought,” Scrima was perhaps a Traditionalist.

Tătaru-Cazaban finds “two invariable aspects” in Scrima’s hermeneutics. One is that “tradition is a transmission of living knowledge and of the access to an experience of the Living God through his Holy Spirit; it is not only a ‘repository’ of the experience of faith.” The other is that “Hesychasm is not an ‘universalizable’ spiritual tradition without Christ.” Hesychasm, the ritual pursuit of stillness (Greek hēsychia), is a collection of spiritual practices that developed in the Orthodox church in the fourteenth century, and was revived in Romania in the 1940s by a group of monks including Scrima who were inspired by Traditionalist understandings of the esoteric

To see tradition as a transmission of living knowledge rather than as a historical repository is not necessarily a detachment from the Traditionalist position. Although the way that some Traditionalists find the tradition in ancient texts might seem to turn it into a sort of repository, any Traditionalist who follows a Sufi shaykh also sees the tradition as a transmission of living knowledge. The one position does not exclude the other. One can read ancient texts and following a living master. Similarly, although some perennialists might universalize a practice such as Hesychasm stripped of its context, most would not: Guénon ended by stressing the importance of the exoteric context for any esoteric practice, following the Sufi approach that emphasizes the sharia as the contained of the haqiqa.

When it comes to the relationship between the esoteric and exoteric, Scrima did perhaps detach himself from the Traditionalist position, to judge from passages quoted by Tătaru-Cazaban, here translated by me from French to English:

Spiritual life has always been conceived in the Eastern Church as a living transmission, a parádosis, conveying the Spirit incarnate… There is no room here for any conflict of importance with the Tradition of the Church as such, nor for any distinction of nature from it… The distinction, itself external, between esoteric and exoteric, is meaningless here, for it is no longer a hidden continuation that denies time, a sacred passage, but a continuation of Presence.

Scrima, then, rejected the absolute distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric that is central to Traditionalism, especially in Guénon’s early work, though he later softened this position, and Schuon further eroded the distinction. Scrima, however, emphasized throughout his life the Hesychast practice that he and others saw as corresponding to Guénon’s understanding of the esoteric.His position here, then, is best seen as a modification, not a rejection.

More on Tage Lindbom and Traditionalism in Sweden

A new open-access article investigates Sweden’s leading Traditionalist and his impact on the following generation. It is Gulnaz Sibgatullina and Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, “Sufi Traditionalism, The Radical Right, and Swedish Islam: The Work and Legacy of Tage Lindbom,” Journal of Religion in Europe 2025, available here.

For Tage Lindbom (1909–2001), see earlier posts here and here. Sibgatullina and Teitelbaum by providing a detailed biography of his life, and reviewing some of his most important books. Then—and this is what makes their article so interesting—they discuss the small group that gathered around him towards the end of his life, and its three most prominent members: the Rightist Jonas De Geer, the engaged Muslim Pierre Durrani, and the Muslim poet Mohamed Omar. All three had in common their roots in Lindbom and the fact that their subsequent views and careers took surprising twists. Well worth reading.

Was Gandhi a Traditionalist?

Michael Allen, a philosopher at East Tennessee State University, has worked on protest movements for many years, and has just published a book about Gandhi in which he asks the unexpected question of whether Gandhi has a Traditionalist. The answer, he argues, is no, but the question still gives rise to an interesting discussion, in chapter 7 of Allen's Gandhi’s Popular Sovereignty of Truth: Devotional Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), available here.

Gandhi was, like Guénon, a fierce critic of modernity, and also a perennialist. So far, so similar. The difference, according to Allen, is that while the Traditionalist route to personal or political realization is esoteric, Gandhi’s route was exoteric: his “devotional democracy” depended on “the whole sovereign people together speaking God’s voice,” not just on an elite.

Allen also compares Gandhi to the contemporary Identitarians, who draw on Traditionalism. Here the difference is about “pluralism of ethno-cultural traditions.” While the Identitarians suppose that “each discrete culture may flourish only in its own territory of origin,” which Allen sees as “an impossible global ethno-cultural apartheid,” Gandhi rejects this idea and looks towards "a wide pluralism" instead.

I am not sure that Allen has got the Identitarians quite right, but I am certainly convinced that Gandhi was not a Guénonian. He was closer to Guénon than I had thought, though, perhaps because I have not previously thought about him enough.

Update on Passages

The first number of a new Traditionalist journal, Passages, edited by the American Traditionalist Jafe Arnold, was released in 2023 (and reviewed here). The second number was released earlier in 2025. It is much the same size as the first number (382 pages, fifteen articles) but has grown more Russian, with six Russian contributors (including Alexander Dugin), as against two in 2023. There are about the same number of Italians (five as against six) and Hungarians (three, unchanged). Unlike 2023, there are no American, English or French contributors, perhaps because of the Ukraine war.

A note on Guénon’s sources for Dante

A new article on the esotericism of Dante focuses on the way in which the Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste (1854) of Eugène Aroux, a major source for Guénon’s L’Ésotérisme de Dante, is plagiarized from La Beatrice di Dante (1842) by Gabriele Rossetti. It is Piero Latino, “The Forgotten History of an Indirect Influence: From Gabriele Rossetti to Eugène Aroux, «L'eminente Plagiario», and the Spread of a Silent Idea in European Literature,” Studi Medievali e Moderni 29 (2025), pp. 135-156. 

Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854) was an Italian poet, nationalist revolutionary activist (and consequently later exile in London), and an enthusiast of Dante. One of his sons, Dante Gabriele Rossetti (1828-1882), was among the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London. Eugène Aroux (1793-1859) was a less distinguished French politician and writer, and in his Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste, révélations d'un catholique sur le Moyen Âge (Dante: heretic, revolutionary, and socialist: Revelations of a Catholic about the Middle Ages) reversed the central message of Rossetti, still basing that new version largely on Rossetti’s work. 

On Philip Sherrard

Christopher W. Howell has just published an article on Philip Sherrard (1922-1995, photo here), the English, Traditionalist, Greek Orthodox writer and translator who helped the English poet and Neoplatonist Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) to found the Temenos Academy. It is Christopher W. Howell, “The Holiness of Creation: Philip Sherrard and the Climate Apocalypse,” in Orthodox Christianity and the Study of Nature: Histories of Interaction, ed. Kostas Tampakis and Ronald L. Numbers (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2025), pp. 213-240.

Howell knows Sherrard well, and had access to his unpublished as well as published writings when researching this article. It starts with a biography and an account of Sherrard’s postwar “search for tradition” and his 1956 conversion to Greek Orthodoxy, and then moves on to his Traditionalism, asking whether Sherrard was actually a Traditionalist. Sherrard mentioned René Guénon in a letter in 1953, before his conversion, and the answer would be yes, argues Howell, were it not for Sherrard’s rejection of Frithjof Schuon’s syncretism and his disagreement with René Guénon’s view of Christianity. He also disagreed with Guénon’s conviction that in the modern world the tradition was lost save, perhaps, for an elite: Sherrard had previously found the tradition in the peasants of Greece. Finally, he preferred the Orthodox understanding of creation to that of Guénon.

Rejection of Schuon’s syncretism means one is not a Schuonian, but one can still be a Traditionalist. The disagreements with Guénon that Howell identifies are important, but may be seen as a development of aspects of Guénon’s thought; they are certainly not a rejection of the whole of it.

Howell goes on to discuss Sherrard’s view on modernity, evolution, and finally “climate change,” perhaps not the best phrase. The title of Sherrard’s 1987 book, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science, gives a better view of how he saw the problem, even though wildfires later became a special problem for Greece. Sherrard, then, sits with Seyyed Hossein Nasr as a Traditionalist environmentalist.

This is a well-informed and well-written article that fills one gap in our knowledge of later twentieth-century Traditionalism beyond the Maryamiyya.

Online lecture series by Schuonians

A new lecture series entitled the “Schuon Lectures” is available online.

In 2025 they will be delivered by Harry Oldmeadow, formerly of La Trobe University Bendigo, Australia, author of Traditionalism: Religion in the light of the Perennial Philosophy (2000) and Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions (2004). Other Schuonian speakers are planned for later years: M. Ali Lakhani (2026), Michael Oren Fitzgerald (2027), and Patrick D. Laude (2028).

Oldmeadow’s lectures will be on:

• The Rhythms of Time and Traces of Primordiality (Primordial Worlds) 
• Revealed Tradition as Mediator between Time and Eternity (Traditional Worlds) 
• Signs of the Times: The Reign of Scientism, Evolutionism and ‘Progress’ (The Modern World) 
• Metaphysics and the Spiritual Life (The Eternal Present) 

As well as the lectures, the website offers networking: “Expand your professional network and connect with leading scholars and thinkers in philosophy and theology. Schuon Lecture series provides a platform for networking and collaboration, allowing you to engage with experts from different backgrounds and disciplines.”

For more details, see schuonlectures.respectgs.us/

Conference in Paris: René Guénon et l’Orient

René Guénon et l’Orient:

Perspectives critiques 100 ans après La métaphysique orientale (1925-2025) 

11 avril 2025 (9h-18h30) 

École Pratique des Hautes Études-PSL

Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Salle 1 54, Bd Raspail, 75006, Paris 

Événement partenaire du FRÉSO (Association Francophone pour l’Étude Universitaire des Courants Ésotériques) et de l’ESSWE (European Association for the Study of Western Esotericism) 

Conférence organisée par : Roberto Corso (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”/École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) Comité scientifique : Jean-Pierre Brach (EPHE-LEM) ; Vincent Eltschinger (EPHE-GREI) ; Margherita Serena Saccone (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”) ; Thierry Zarcone (CNRS-GSRL) 

Nombre de places limité. Réservation requise en envoyant un e-mail à l’adresse suivante : roberto.corso@unina.it 

Programme 

Accueil (9h-9h15)

• Mot de bienvenue de Jean-Pierre Brach (École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) et de l'organisateur (9h15-9h30) 

Session 1 (9h30-11h) 

• Modératrice : Mayssa Coutard-Evangelista 
• Davide Marino (CAS-E, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg/University of Vienna) : Chinese Whispers. René Guénon and La métaphysique (extrême-)orientale 
• Alessandra Marchi (Università degli Studi di Cagliari) : Parcours soufis du traditionalisme guénonien en Italie 

Pause 11-11h30

 

Session 2 (11h30-13h) Modérateur : Roberto Corso 

• Hugo David (École Française d’Extrême-Orient) : René Guénon et le Vedānta : retour à la tradition ou nouveau syncrétisme ? 
• Dominique Wohlschlag (Chercheur indépendant) : Guénon et les cycles cosmiques 

Déjeuner libre 13h-15h

 

Session 3 (15h-16h30)

• Modérateur : Nathan Fraikin 
• Marco Giardini (Chercheur indépendant) : L’« Orient merveilleux » médiéval et ses relectures ésotériques au XXe siècle : la légende du Prêtre Jean entre les « études traditionnelles » et la théorie du « monde imaginal » 
• Youna Eskandari (École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) : René Guénon : orientaliste ou oriental? 

Pause 16h30-17h 

Session 4 (17h-18h30)

• Modérateur : Tom Fisher 
• Roberto Corso (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”/École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) : « La part de l’inexprimable ». Perspectives critiques sur les idées de métaphysique et d’Orient dans l’œuvre de René Guénon 
• Jean-Pierre Laurant (École Pratique des Hautes Études) : Apprendre à vivre au hasard d’une rencontre : René Guénon

Traditionalism available in paperback

Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Pelican Books) is now available in paperback, at £10.99 in the UK, also available in Europe, but not in the US, where it's still $29.99 for the hardback from OUP.

Henry Corbin's critique of Traditionalism

A new article looks at a dispute in 1963 between Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919–1978), the most important Traditionalist in Pakistan, discussed in an earlier post here, and Henry Corbin (1903–1978), a leading French scholar of Islamic mysticism and in his youth an enthusiast of the work of René Guénon. It is Hadi Fakhoury, “Ibn ʿArabi between East and West: Henry Corbin and Guénonian Traditionalism.” Religiographies, vol. 3, no. 2 (2024): 25–45 available here (open source).

The dispute took place in the pages of a major French philosophical journal, Revue de métaphysique et de morale (Journal of metaphysics and ethics), and started with an article by Askari (available here) which compared Ibn ‘Arabi and Kierkegaard, the former understood in Traditionalist terms as an exponent of orthodox esotericism, and the later understood as representative of modernity. This article contained a passing criticism of Corbin which ensured that Corbin read it and, unusually, responded (here). Fakhoury suggests that one reason that Corbin responded may have been that he wanted to make clear his mature position on Traditionalism. Probably referring to his own early encounter with Traditionalism, he wrote that “reading the works of René Guenon can, at some point in one’s life, provoke a salutary shock.” An interesting perspective: perhaps that is, indeed, one of the main functions of Guénon’s work.

Corbin’s basic argument was that Askari seemed better acquainted with the writings of Guénon than with those of Ibn ‘Arabi, and that Ibn ‘Arabi was more complex than the Traditionalists suspected. “Anyone,” wrote Corbin, “who has devoted his life to seeing the texts for himself will find it impossible to accept that the last word has been said in René Guénon’s work.” That is, I think, true.

Beyond this, Corbin also accuses Traditionalism of a “bias towards systematic rationalism” without really explaining why, and also of “denouncing and devaluing everything that has to do with personal individuality. Fleeing into the impersonal and the spirit of ‘orthodoxy.’” This, said Corbin, was “strangely in tune with the intellectual fashion of the day,” by which he probably meant the varieties of totalitarianism that he saw smothering the personal. As Fakhoury writes, “for both Guénonian Traditionalism and Corbin, the interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabi has implications far beyond mere historical accuracy. Indeed, their respective retrieval of Ibn ‘Arabi is intrinsically connected to, and motivated by, a series of wider, interrelated questions.”

Fakhoury contrasts the approaches of Corbin and the Traditionalists nicely:

Rather than a “return to tradition,” Corbin seeks to go one step before tradition, as it were, that is, to recover the spiritual source that gave rise to it in the first place. This implies a continuous “re-activation” and “re-creation” of tradition in the present, literally, its “modernization” – a word that derives from the Latin modo, meaning “now existing” or “just now.”

 An important and interesting article.

Ivan Aguéli and Ibn ʿArabi

In a new article, Gregory Vandamme revisits the relationship between Ivan Aguéli and the thought of Ibn ʿArabi. It is Gregory Vandamme, “Akbarian Anarchism: Ivan Aguéli (d. 1917) on Islam, Freedom and Shariʿa,” Religiographies 3, no. 1 (2024): 6–24. Available open access here.

To quote from Vandamme’s conclusion,

The various elements of Islamic tradition [Aguéli] engages with are deeply intertwined with his ideal of freedom… The case of Aguéli reveals the hermeneutical potential and adaptability of Ibn ʿArabi’s ideas... The defining characteristic of Ibn ʿArabi’s thought that Aguéli cultivates and develops lies in its capacity to structure itself around paradoxes that balance the informal with the formal, the universal with the particular, and the collective with the individual… While Aguéli’s philosophy ultimately operates within a metaphysical perspective, it also incorporates practical considerations and social and political reflections... The formal and normative framework of the Islamic religion is neither relativised nor undermined…

Aguéli’s philosophy also reveals the paradoxical dimension of the question of universality. Islam… is capable of preserving cultural diversity and particularities… arguing that only the union of East and West can bring about the advent of an authentic “kingdom of God.” While Aguéli can, in many respects, be considered one of the progenitors of the Traditionalist movement, his conception of Islam’s universal dimension stands apart from the views of figures with a far more pronounced influence.

Faouzi Skali, Corbin, and C.G.Jung

A new article looks carefully at one aspect of the thought and teachings of Faouzi Skali, the Moroccan Sufi active in both Morocco and France whose point of departure was Guénon and Traditionalism. It is Ricarda Stegmann,  “Re-Spiritualising the World: Ibn ʿArabi in the Thought of Faouzi Skali,” Religiographies 3, no. 2 (2024): 88–102, available here.

Stegmann shows that Skali follows other Traditionalist in leaning heavily on Ibn ʿArabi, as did Guénon, who was introduced to Ibn ʿArabi as the prime example of Sufi thought by Ivan Aguéli. So far, no great surprise. What is a surprise is that, as Stegmann shows through a painstaking comparison of understandings of the two crucial concepts of ʿālam al-mithāl and futuwwa, Skali’s reading of Ibn ʿArabi draws not just on the Traditionalist Titus Burckhardt, as one might expect, but also on Henry Corbin, in some ways a Traditionalist fellow-traveler, who himself reads Ibn ʿArabi through lenses borrowed from C. G. Jung. So a certain amount of Jung is visible in Skali. Why? Because, suggests Stegmann, “Skali uses this recent reception of Ibn ʿArabi through Corbin because Corbin’s work has a similar objective to re-sacralise history as well as current life worlds.” This makes sense. 

An interesting article based on high-quality scholarly detective work that shows how different strands of modern “spiritually relevant” scholarship intertwine. “Spiritually relevant,” incidentally, is Stegmann’s apt term for the work of people like Corbin who live up to mainstream scholarly standards but also go a long way beyond the standard objectives of modern scholarship. 

New article on the continuing relevance of Traditionalism for Alexander Dugin

Just published: an article on the continuing relevance of Traditionalism for Alexander Dugin. It is Mark Sedgwick, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Traditionalist roots,” Studies in East European Thought, available here (open access). The abstract for that article is:

By the time of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Russian political activist Aleksandr Dugin was known as an ultra-nationalist, a fascist, a geopolitician, a Eurasianist, a Heideggerian, and sometimes also as a Traditionalist in the school established by René Guénon. Some, however, hold that Dugin had left Traditionalism far behind, or perhaps had never really been a Traditionalist in the first place. This article examines the extent to which Dugin’s engagement with Traditionalism has persisted throughout his intellectual and political career. It begins with Dugin’s formative years in the late-Soviet Iuzhinskii Circle, where he first encountered Traditionalism, and explores his adaptations of Guénon’s views. The article argues that Dugin’s works, including his best-seller The Fundamentals of Geopolitics (1997), reflect his continued commitment to Traditionalist principles, despite significant modifications. The article thus challenges views that dismiss Dugin’s Traditionalism as superficial or abandoned. It concludes that Dugin’s enduring adherence to Traditionalism is essential to understanding his influence on Russian political thought and his broad appeal.

Traditionalist takes over at the Biennale

The (slightly ironic) appointment of the Italian Traditionalist Muslim Pietrangelo Buttafuoco (pictured) as president of the distinctly avant-garde Venice Biennale draws attention to the career of a major figure on the Italian Traditionalist scene and a prolific writer.

Buttafuoco was born in Sicily in 1963 into a family that supported the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), in which he himself became active as a young man. It is not clear when he became a Traditionalist, but in 2001 he published a collection of his articles as Fogli consanguinei (Kin Pages) with the Edizioni di Ar, which was run by Franco Freda, an Evolian who had created a Gruppo di Ar named in honor of the Gruppo di Ur to which Julius Evola had once belonged. Buttafuoco also contributed to a volume on Evola and Spengler published by the Edizioni di Ar in 2004. He became known as a Muslim in 2015, but had probably converted earlier, to judge from his literary output, discussed below. He is a Shi’i, and so, presumably, a member of one of the groups studied by Minoo Mirshahvalad in her Crises and Conversions: The Unlikely Avenues of "Italian Shiism”, discussed in an earlier post here. He stresses the Muslim history of Sicily, and took the name Giafar al Siqilli (the Sicilian) in honor of Jafar ibn Muhammad, the conqueror of Syracuse in 878.

Buttafuoco has published at least one novel or book of essays most years since 2002. Many of these focus on Sicily. The novels are usually historical and quite dramatic and/or romantic, and several feature Islam. One of his non-fiction books is pure Traditionalism, and some others deal with Islam.

From our perspective, Buttafuoco’s most interesting period was 2005-2011. In 2005, his first novel, Le uova del drago. Una storia vera al teatro dei pupi (The Dragon's Eggs: A True Story at the Puppet Theater) was set in wartime Sicily, where the “dragon’s eggs” were eleven Muslim militiamen of various nationalities, under the authority of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who fought bravely against the Allied invasion together with Italian Fascists and a glamorous female German spy. Two years later came L'ultima del Diavolo (The Devil’s last woman, 2008), which Buttafuoco described as “the first Muslim novel in the Italian language.” It switches between the time of the Prophet Muhammad, based on the sira, and the present day, in which the Devil is trying to organize the seizure of documents about the monk Bahira in order to prevent the Christian legitimization of Muhammad, against some Russians who want to bring Orthodox Christians and Muslims closer. The Americans are allied with the Devil. L'ultima del Diavolo is a sort of Islamic Dan Brown with a definite ideological message. I wonder whether Alexander Dugin has read it.

Buttafuoco’s Traditionist book, Cabaret Voltaire. L'Islam, il sacro, l'Occidente (Cabaret Voltaire: Islam, the Sacred, the West) was published in 2008. It attacks modernity and the false worship of rationality and science and the illusions of freedom and democracy in true Guénonian fashion. It further argues that Islam is misunderstood as a result of what is written in the “false liberal” and American-dominated press, and is in fact where one can still find “the sacred, the primordial forces of nature, the original bond.”

Following this came a somewhat different type of book on woman and how to seduce them, Fìmmini. Ammirarle, decifrarle, sedurle (Women: Admire them, decipher them, seduce them), before Buttafuoco returned to Sicily in 2011 with Il lupo e la luna (The Wolf and the Moon), in which a young Sicilian is captured by the Turks and brought up by the Sultan as a military commander. He later returns to Sicily and comes into conflict with his faithfully Catholic brother.This novel is evidently inspired by the life of Giovanni Dionigi Galeni (d. 1587), a not a Sicilian but a Calbrian who was captured, converted to Islam, and ended up as Grand Admiral of the Ottoman navy.

2011 marks the end of Buttafuoco’s most Islamic period. Only two of his later novels and essays in 2012-2023 mention Islam. Il feroce Saracino. La guerra dell'Islam. Il califfo alle porte di Roma (The ferocious Saracen: The War of Islam, The Caliph at the Gates of Rome, 2015), argues against terrorism, seen as an aspect of a struggle within Islam between good and bad Muslims. This is a view with which most experts would mostly agree, but that is not so obvious for the general public. Sotto il suo passo nascono i fiori. Goethe e l'Islam (Flowers bloom under his footfall: Goethe and Islam, 2019) was written together with an Italian Muslim theologian, Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre (b. 1987), and covers Goethe’s encounter with Islam, ending with his (alleged) conversion. The title is taken from a line in his “Mahomets Gesang” (The Song of Muhammad, 1817/21). Goethe is a favorite of those who want to strengthen Islam's roots in Europe.

It is not clear that Buttafuoco has succeeded in making the Italian right more sympathetic towards Islam. It is clear, though, that his Islam has sometimes been a problem for his own political career. After the MSI in which he started his political career had become the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) in 1995 and the AN had merged into Silvio Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL), Buttafuoco joined the Lega Nord, previously allied to the AN. Giorgia Meloni, later Italian Prime Minister, who had also been a prominent member of AN and PdL, is said to have vetoed Buttafuoco’s attempt to stand as the Lega Nord candidate for the post of Governor of Sicily in 2015, given that having a Muslim stand for that post would send all the wrong signals. Keeping a little quieter about Islam may have improved Meloni’s view of Buttafuoco when it came to the Bienale.

My thanks to TR for bringing Buttafuoco to my attention.

Evola’s two translations of the Dàodéjīng

In a new article, Davide Marino has traced the development of Julius Evola’s thought by comparing his two translations of the Dàodéjīng, one published in 1923 and the other in 1959. It is “The Tao of Julius Evola,” Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies (2024), available here (open access).

According to the abstract,

Evola had no knowledge of the Chinese language, and his works were retranslations of materials available at his time to which he added his own personal ideas…. [He moved] from an interpretation of the Dàodéjīng characterised by a mix of Dadaism, Hegelian Idealism, and occultism to a version in line with Traditionalism… [but] despite changing his vocabulary and sources, Evola continued to seek confirmation of his solipsistic theory of the ‘Absolute Individual’ in the ancient Chinese text.

Evola and José Ortega y Gasset

A new article looks at the influence of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) on Julius Evola, Ayn Rand, and Pierre Bourdieu. It is Björn Boman, “Left, right or something else? José Ortega y Gasset’s intellectual influence in the ideological realm,” SN Social Sciences 4, 204 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-024-01008-2 (open access). 

Conclusion with regard to Evola: Ortega’s influence was not great, but it is there. Wider significance: the article is one more step in tying the Traditionalists into the wider tapestry of the intellectual history of the Twentieth century.

Dugin and Queer Theory

A new article looks at an aspect of Alexander Dugin’s thought that has not received much attention before: Queer Theory. The article is Trevor Wilson, “Normative anti-normativity: when Dugin reads queer theory.” Studies in East European Thought (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-024-09695-6 (open access). 

 The abstract runs: 

In line with a recent rise in anti-LGBTQ discourse within conservative Russian politics, Aleksandr Dugin has increasingly critiqued “postmodern” theories that allegedly underpin social diversity (sexual, gender, racial, etc.) within the West: queer theory, post-structuralism, and other theoretical accounts of identity and alterity. In Dugin’s argument for a political philosophy of Eurasianism, the Western endorsement of multiculturalism and pluralism is indicative of individualism and “Atlanticist” liberalism, therefore at odds with the traditional, nationalist collectivism of Eurasia. In this light, queer theory is a Western imposition whose philosophical premises directly contradict native, Russian traditions. Dugin’s attack on queer theory, however, mark a departure from the philosopher’s earlier career within the National Bolshevik movement. Throughout the nineties, Dugin was relatively sympathetic with the nascent LGBT movement in Russia: specifically within the political and philosophical circles of National Bolshevism, in which such figures as Eduard Limonov and Slava Mogutin coalesced with fascists and communists around a broad critique of Western capitalism and openly embraced homoeroticism and countercultural, queer dissidence. Dugin’s links to the LGBT movement are even relatively mainstream: his first wife, Evgeniia Debrianskaia, was a prominent gay activist, and both Debrianskaia and Dugin for a time viewed the Eurasianism’s goals as aligned with that of LGBT activism in Russia. This article examines the development of Dugin’s political philosophy in the context of his reading of queer theory. It first discusses the link in historical terms, in the connections between Dugin’s early post-Soviet career and post-Soviet Russian gay activism. The article then focuses on Dugin’s philosophy of “multipolarity,” as a form of resistance to universalist, American hegemony, in order to illustrate how Dugin’s Eurasianist account of political “anti-normativity” both aligns and contradicts with his reading of queer theory. The article concludes with comments on the globalization of queer theory, cultural imperialism, and its relationship to Dugin’s geopolitics.

Against the Modern World in Persian

 

Against the Modern World is now available in Persian, as ستیز با جهان مدرن (سنت‌گرایی و تاریخ فکری پنهان سدۀ بیستم), published by نشرنو in Tehran. Many thanks to Alireza Bashardoost and Sina Bastani, who pursued this project despite many obstacles. The translation includes a short preface written for the Iranian edition.

Copies available from https://nashrenow.com/product/against-the-modern-world/.