Julius Evola

Julius Evola (1898-1974) has been one of the most misunderstood and controversial authors of the Twentieth century. Born in Rome, Evola began his pursuit of Truth as a Dadaist painter and an Idealist philosopher, but quickly lost his taste for modernism and moved on to metaphysics, religion, and the occult. Encountering the work of René Guénon, who became a lifelong friend, Evola embraced his concept of the Tradition and his critique of the modern world, and spent the remainder of his long career elaborating his own, more individualised variation of the principles first explicated by Guénon, offering his own view of how one can put into practice the doctrines of a genuine spiritual path. Believing that Tradition was an idea which should encompass the social as well as the spiritual world, Evola saw some hope for a remedy to the ills of modernity in Fascism, although he never joined the Party, and his writings on the subject were more critical than complimentary of the movement. Nevertheless, his interest in Fascism branded him as a Fascist in the eyes of his opponents, and this reputation continues to follow his name to this day. After 1945, Evola remained aloof from politics, and attempted to define the most effective stance for an inhabitant of this Kali-yuga to adopt and still retain something of traditional wisdom. He remained almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world until the 1990s, when Inner Traditions began publishing its translations of Evola’s works. Since then, Evola’s ideas have given rise to a new breed of spiritual seekers and anti-modernists in the English-speaking world. To date, Integral Tradition has published the sole English translations of Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory and Death in the World of Tradition (2007), a collection of essays originally written in the 1930s and ‘40s soon to go into its third edition, and The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography (2009).

Pentti Linkola

Pentti Linkola (b. 1932) is a Finnish radical environmentalist who is the author of Can Life Prevail?: A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis. (2009). He has lived his entire life as a fisherman. Linkola’s disgust with the fate of the natural world at the hands of modern civilisation, which he has witnessed first-hand through his work, has led him to write a series of essays deploring the course of ‘progress’ in Finland and advocating deep ecology as the only means to reverse these trends throughout the world. Unlike most environmental authors, however, Linkola believes that the solutions often proposed in the West to solve these problems, such as recycling and electric cars, are fatal half-measures not equal to the challenge at hand. Linkola believes that the situation is so dire that it calls for a complete transformation of society, suggesting the forceful reduction of the existing human population and the birth rate, the elimination of democracy and humanism, the abolition of the stock market, putting an end to the manufacture of all wares not needed to sustain life, the replacement of privately owned vehicles by public transportation exclusively, a ban on the use of fossil fuels, and the reintroduction of a subsistence economy. Linkola’s perspectives will provide a refreshing departure from the usual rhetoric on this topic for those who believe that there should be no compromise with the modern world when the survival of the entire ecosystem is at stake.

Troy Southgate

Troy Southgate (b. 1965), the author of Tradition and Revolution: Collected Writings of Troy Southgate, has had a long and varied career in the area of radical politics, having pursued his social and spiritual visions as an organiser, as an author and as a musician. Born in London, Troy developed an early interest in politics and worked for the National Front as a teenager. He broke with the NF in 1989 and has been involved with a successive series of political organisations ever since, all of which are of a National Anarchist, Green and a traditionalist orientation. His most recent effort has been to found a British branch of the European New Right and an associated journal, New Imperium (available from Integral Tradition). In addition to his revolutionary activism, Troy has written many articles and essays, and he often performs with European musical ensembles such as the Dutch Neoclassical group H.E.R.R., the German band Seelenlicht, and Poland’s Horologium. Troy is widely considered to be one of the most original and prominent voices in British radical politics today. Tradition and Revolution’s first edition was first published in 2007 and quickly sold out. A second edition will be published in 2009.