24 6 / ta n k ta n k / 247

The ideology of
the new paradigm:
as political parties
collapse, Traditionalist
philosophy is on the
rise. Mark Sedgwick
assesses the political
topography of our
strange new days Illustrations by Stathis Tsemberlidis
24 8 / ta n k
Western politics has changed. Sometimes it still
seems to fit into a familiar framework, as at least
at some points the last British election did, but
even then, nothing is quite the same. Despite occa-
sional patronising talk of “the white-van man” and
disadvantaged regions, it is becoming clear that
something fundamental is shifting. The classic left-
right shape of the political contest no longer holds.
The broad liberalism that for so long seemed the
natural background to Western politics is beginning
to look like only one option among many.
There have been changes in what people hope for
and what people fear. Underlying these are changes
in the way many people live. There have also been
changes in the ideologies that inform political life.
As well as the familiar trio of liberalism, socialism
and conservatism, previously unfamiliar thinkers
are now important.
One of them is an Italian, Julius Evola. I
have a pamphlet containing one of his essays,
“Orientamenti”, that was produced in the 1970s
using a manual typewriter and a photocopying
machine – Italian samizdat. His books were first
widely translated into English in the 1990s, brought
out by an alternative publisher in the picturesque
New England village of Rochester, Vermont.
In 2014, when Steve Bannon referred to Evola
in approving terms during a workshop in Rome,
nobody noticed. When Bannon became White
House chief strategist in January 2017, journalists
started going back over his past, found a recording
of the workshop, and, a month later, Evola made it
into the New York Times.
René Guénon, a French writer on whom Evola drew
extensively, is even more important to the new poli-
tics. Bannon recently told Bloomberg’s Josh Green
how reading Guénon had changed his life, and
when I met Aleksandr Dugin, who some now see as
Bannon’s Russian counterpart, in Moscow in 1999,
he proposed Guénon to me as the new Marx.
Guénon and Dugin were then almost equally
obscure, but Dugin has become better known in the
West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was
identified in the Western media as “Putin’s brain” or,
more poetically, “Putin’s Rasputin”. This was going
a bit far. Putin clearly has a brain of his own, and,
while Dugin is on good terms with the Kremlin,
he is not part of Putin’s core entourage. If there is
a Rasputin around today, it may actually be Bannon.
In 1999, I thought that Dugin was exaggerating, but
now it looks increasingly as if he was right. Guénon,
like Marx, was more interested in meta-analysis than
in day-to-day politics. Marx surveyed human history
in the long run, looking at it in terms of economics,
and focusing on the ownership of the means of
production. He saw the struggle between labour
and capital as the key dynamic of his own time.
Guénon also surveyed human history in the long
run, not in terms of economics but of metaphysics,
of understandings of the human place in the
universe. These metaphysical understandings were,
for him, the real tradition of humanity. He came to
see the current period in terms of the clash between
tradition and modernity, as a final stage in a long
process of decline. Marx hoped for the triumph of
labour over capital, but Guénon feared the triumph
of modernity over tradition, and with it the final
collapse of human civilisation. He held out the hope
that something of tradition might be saved, however.
A small elite – the spiritual counterpart of Lenin’s
revolutionary vanguard – might rediscover tradi-
tional doctrines in oriental metaphysics, notably
the Hindu Vedanta.
Guénon tried to form such an elite through his writ-
ings and through the group that gathered around
a journal that he edited called Études Traditionnelles.
Although he drew mostly on the Vedanta in his
writings, when he left Paris in 1930 he moved not
to India but to Egypt, where he became Muslim
and joined a Sufi order. He died in Cairo in 1951,
leaving behind him 17 major books and countless
articles. These discuss Hinduism and other reli-
gions, including Islam, which Guénon stresses as
the proper orthodox context for the esoteric practice
of Sufism. They also discuss modernity, its nature
and its problems, and see the current age as one
of ultimate decline at the end of a temporal cycle,
characterised by the inversion of the traditional
order of society, so that the lower castes exercise
power over the higher castes. These books and
articles form the basis of the “Traditionalist” move-
ment, so called because of its emphasis on perennial
metaphysical tradition, the idea that certain ancient
religions are repositories of shared spiritual truths,
and because of the way in which it values tradition
and condemns modernity.
Just as Marx’s thought was developed after his death
in two directions, the Soviet model and the liberal
social-democratic model, so Guénon’s thought
was also developed in two directions. One was
primarily spiritual, and one was primarily political.
The primarily spiritual heirs of Guénon focused on
preserving metaphysical tradition in small groups,
often drawing on Sufi mysticism, and had no ambi-
tions for human society as a whole. The primarily
political heirs of Guénon, in contrast, were inter-
ested in society, though their thought has never
lost its metaphysical basis.
Three names stand out among Guénon’s political
heirs. Evola represents the Fascist period. Alain
de Benoist, a Frenchman, represents the post-1968
period, and Dugin the post-Soviet period. Evola
was the first to incorporate Guénon’s Traditionalism
into a political philosophy. His most famous book,
Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Revolt Against
the Modern World), takes Guénon’s diagnosis of
modernity from books such as his La crise du monde
moderne (The Crisis of the Modern World) and
proposes a remedy that owes more to Nietzsche
than to Guénon: revolt. Benoist then incorporated
Evola into his own thought, and was the centre
of a group of intellectuals and activists that the
French media called the New Right, echoing the
self-identification of the New Left. The New Right,
in turn, inspired Dugin in Russia, and helped inspire
the alt-right in the United States. All these remain
faithful to a long view of human history that sees
tradition as central and economics as marginal,
that sees the political as inextricably linked to the
metaphysical, and that sees liberal modernity as
a fatal aberration.
Evola is not easy to classify. He was read with appre-
ciation by the Austrian psychoanalyst Carl Jung,
Sigmund Freud’s appointed heir before the two men
split, and by the University of Chicago historian of
religion Mircea Eliade, who did more than anyone
else to establish modern religious studies. The
extent to which Evola influenced Martin Heidegger
is disputed. He advised Mussolini on race, an issue
he also discussed with Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi
theorist who was later sentenced to death at the
Nuremberg trials. Yet Evola criticised Nazi racial
theories as simple-minded, and quarrelled with
Mussolini, whom he found too bourgeois. Evola
does not much resemble the mainstream American
right, which stresses family values and Christian
faith. He often attacked not just the Catholic
Church, but also the Christian religion, and he
was interested in sex magic, in which the force
of orgasm is channelled to transcendent ends.
ta n k / 249
Mircea Eliade
A philosopher and professor at the University
of Chicago, Eliade was a pioneering academic of
religion. His hugely influential theory of “eternal
return” held that myth and ritual are not merely
a form of commemoration but that “In imitating
the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythical hero,
or simply by recounting their adventures, the
man of an archaic society detaches himself from
profane time and magically re-enters the Great
Time, the sacred time.” Eliade remains a contro-
versial figure for his involvement in far-right
politics during the interwar period in his
native Romania.
Evola had a long and varied career. He fought in the
Italian army during the First World War, and then
became a painter, passing from Futurism to Dadaism.
Like many other artists of the time, he looked for
the hidden reality that underlay appearances. This
led him to experimenting with hallucinogenic
drugs, and also with magic. Magic led him to the
esoteric, and to the works of Guénon, many of whose
perspectives he adopted.
While Guénon had spent the Second World War
away from Europe in Egypt, Evola stayed in Italy,
and wrote for newspapers such as Il Regime Fascista,
where he edited a regular column on “Spiritual
problems in Fascist ethics”. He became known
especially for his writings on race. He argued that
the biological racism of the Nazis was adequate for
breeding cats or thoroughbred horses, but entirely
inadequate for grasping human behaviour. Attention
also needed to be paid to the soul and the spirit.
These were the ideas that interested Mussolini.
Unlike Rosenberg, the Nazi theorist, Evola was not
put on trial after the war. He had never even joined
the Fascist Party, and was not directly implicated in
any crimes. In fact, he did not even seem to be seri-
ously implicated in what Italians had come to see
as the fiasco of Fascism, which is why, unusually
among political writers who had been active in the
Fascist period, he continued to write and be read
until his death in Rome in 1974. His work was
a particular favourite of the right-wing terrorists
who fought left-wing terrorists, the Italian state,
and sometimes each other, during the 1970s. I some-
times wonder quite who produced my home-made
copy of “Orientamenti”.
250 / ta n k
Evola’s post-war works took new directions, inevi-
tably so in the aftermath of the collapse of the
Fascist and Nazi projects. The post-war Evola was
a pessimist. The lowest castes had taken power from
the higher castes, and there was no immediate pros-
pect of this changing. The cycle was coming to its
inevitable end. The appropriate response is apoliteia,
detachment from the political. Apoliteia, however,
does not mean inaction. Evola’s first interest had
been not in politics, but in ways in which the “abso-
lute self” might experience the transcendent. Among
these was human action, and that remained true.
Apoliteia need not exclude action with a political
goal, though the action mattered more than the
goal, and the fight mattered more than the victory.
The rest of the Traditionalist movement is even
further from everyday politics. Guénon never
became even briefly involved in actual politics in the
way that Evola did, not just because he was never a
fan of Nietzsche, but because he felt it was pointless.
In his view, the social and the political follow from
the spiritual. Changes to the spiritual would change
the social and the political, but the reverse was not
true, and for this reason all attempts to directly
change the social and the political will inevitably fail.
Traditionalists who refer to Guénon rather than
Evola, therefore, do not generally engage in political
work. They may prefer some political outcomes
to others, but they do not aim at them directly.
They work instead for the formation and devel-
opment of Guénon’s elite, through small groups,
normally religious but sometimes also cultural. The
most frequently found religious group is the Sufi
order, and many of the most important followers of
Guénon are thus converts to Islam. There are also
Guénonian Masonic lodges. Cultural groups include
the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, a London-
based organisation that provides training in such
arts as calligraphy, geometric design and mosaic,
often but not exclusively of Islamic origin. The
school operates under the active and enthusiastic
patronage of Prince Charles, whose engagement
with Traditionalism mirrors that of Bannon,
but focuses on Guénon rather than Evola.
Evola remained obscure outside Italy and France
until the 1990s, when more of his books began
to appear in English translation. In 1994, Telos,
an American journal founded in 1968 as a forum
for the intellectual New Left, published a special
issue on the New Right, subtitled “New Right –
New Left – New Paradigm?” At the time, this ques-
tion was provocative and interesting. More than
20 years later, the answer to the question is clear.
Yes, there is now a new paradigm – and Telos helped
to launch it. The Telos special issue focused above
all on Benoist, a French intellectual and journalist
who continued to appear in later issues of what
was becoming a New Paradigm journal more than
a New Left one. In a key article in Telos in 1999,
Benoist summarised the views of the New Right.
After analysing modernity in terms that owed
much to Guénon and Evola, Benoist argued
that humanity cannot be understood in purely
biological terms, in purely economic terms or in
purely mechanical terms. People, argued Benoist,
live within particular cultures and communities.
Modernity’s attempt to replace the particular with
the universal and the community with the indi-
vidual “has not liberated man from his original ...
belonging or ... attachments. It has only submitted
him to other constraints, which are harsher, because
they are further away, more impersonal, and more
demanding” – that is, the market, the state and
utilitarianism. Accordingly, it is necessary to go
“beyond the marketplace”: the economy should
serve society, not form it. For Benoist, neoliberalism
is inherently and inevitably unjust, and inverts
the proper order of society.
Benoist then returned to his theme of particular
cultures and communities, which he saw as being
under attack from modernity, from universalism
and individualism, and from what he called the
ta n k / 251
“New Class”, the class that dominates the media,
big business and international organisations, “cold-
blooded specialists, rationality detached from day to
day realities”. “The public feels,” he wrote, “indif-
ferent towards or angry at a managerial elite which
does not even speak the same language as they do.”
It is necessary to confront “financial capitalism”,
“arrogant wealth”, and its international institutions.
It is necessary to confront the media, which stifle
debate by endlessly repeating outdated views, and by
denouncing new views rather than discussing them.
Since Benoist wrote these words in 1999, Trump and
Le Pen have been remarkably successful in channel-
ling hostility towards the universalist New Class,
financial capitalism and the mainstream media.
This is just what Benoist hoped would happen.
Similar views are expressed by Dugin in Russia.
Though never a painter, Dugin’s past is almost
as colourful as Evola’s. As a young man he joined
a circle of Soviet dissidents that met in an apart-
ment on Iuzhinskii Lane in Moscow. This circle
had been founded by Yuri Mamleev, a novelist in
the Irrationalist tradition, and included the poet
Yevgeny Golovin. The Iuzhinskii Circle, as it came
to be known, read as much forbidden literature as it
could lay its hands on, including the mystic George
Gurdjieff, Evola and Guénon. Some of their books
252 / ta n k
were available on the open shelves of the Lenin
Library, at least for those who could read French
or German.
Getting Ready for the Party
by Ottessa Moshfegh
“Come and tell me if I’m putting this
hinge on straight,” he said.
She put her pen down and followed
him down the hall, past the framed
photographs from vacations to Morocco
and Tibet and Denmark and Hawaii,
into the bathroom, which still stunk
of sulphur from a lit match.
“Oh, that cabinet,” she said.
He crouched down and swung
the cabinet door open and shut.
“See? See how it’s hanging?”
She stood and looked down at his
head, the pink scalp showing through
his thinning brown hair.
“I can’t see it,” she said. “I don’t see
anything wrong.”
She bent and kissed his neck, then
went back to her desk to finish doctoring
the invitations.
Flash fiction n.7
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
Iuzhinskii Circle’s members explored possibilities
that had previously been closed to them. Dugin’s
wife, Evgenia Debryanskaya, who was also a member
of the circle, founded the Association of Sexual
Minorities, an organisation that campaigned for
LGBT rights. Dugin joined a novelist and a rock
musician in founding the National Bolshevik
Party, not a real political party but a countercultural
organisation that claimed to combine the best
parts of Nazism with the best parts of Stalinism.
Dugin then visited Paris, met Benoist, and on his
return to Moscow launched a magazine called
Elementy, inspired by one of Benoist’s many
publications, Éléments.
In the liberal but chaotic Russia of Boris Yeltsin,
Dugin was countercultural and marginal. As Russia
became less liberal and less chaotic under Putin,
ta n k / 253
“Guénon’s works
the general political culture moved in Dugin’s direc-
tion, and Dugin became progressively less marginal.
The National Bolsheviks were replaced by the more
serious Eurasia Movement, which revived a 1920s
vision of Russia at the heart of a Euro-Asian bloc that
discuss modernity,
stood against an Atlantic bloc. Eurasia incarnated
tradition and hierarchy, while the Atlantic bloc incar-
nated modernity, financial capitalism and decline.
its nature and its
Dugin’s Eurasianism fits well with Putin’s policies,
one of which promoted the Eurasian Economic
Union as an alternative to the EU. It also fits well
with the Russian policy of supporting movements
abroad that question or threaten a status quo more
problems, and see
congenial to the United States than to Russia. To
this end, Russia has indirectly contributed €9 million
to Le Pen’s party, and may also have supported
Trump, and UKIP in the UK. As Bannon explained
in 2014, Putin may be a kleptocrat, but “the under-
the current age
pinnings of some of his beliefs ... come from ...
Eurasianism.” That, in Bannon’s view, is why many
of those who value tradition incline towards him.
as one of ultimate
Dugin’s Eurasianism also facilitates relations
between Russia and those European political parties
whose leaders read Evola with approval, notably
Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary.
It also facilitates relations with Turkey and Iran,
decline at the end
where an Iranian-American professor and Sufi who
is among the spiritual heirs of Guénon, Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, is widely read, and where there
is definite interest in Evola and Guénon. Dugin
played a major part in improving relations between
of a temporal cycle”
Turkey and Russia after their historic low when
Turkish forces shot down a Russian attack aircraft
in late 2015, a process that culminated in discussions
between Dugin and the Turkish prime minister.
Not all Traditionalists favour Russia, however.
Enthusiasts of Evola in Ukraine have formed the
Azov Regiment, which fights pro-Russian forces
in eastern Ukraine, some of whom are followers of
Dugin. This places Evola’s apoliteia in a new light.
Benoist’s emphasis on communities is partly a
response to an aspect of modernity that has intensi-
fied since Guénon and Evola – globalisation. It is also
a response to two issues that have become ever more
pressing in Europe, the EU and immigration. On
the first, Benoist argues for a “Europe of Nations”,
as opposed to a European nation. Traditional ethnic,
linguistic and political identities should be reas-
serted, against homogenisation. Brexiteers would
not disagree. On the second issue, which is always
254 / ta n k
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
A professor of Islamic Studies at George
Washington University, Seyyed Hossein Nasr
is one of the most influential Traditionalist
thinkers alive today. Before the 1979 revolution,
Nasr was a confidant of former Empress Farah
Diba, and established the Imperial Iranian
Academy of Philosophy, which was strongly
influenced by Traditionalist precepts. His son,
the academic and policy adviser Vali Nasr is
a well-known Atlanticist thinker and author
of The Shia Revival, How Conflicts within Islam
Will Shape the Future which the academic
Hamid Dabashi termed “a piece of military
psyop meant to prepare the public at large
for an even more prolonged state of war
against ‘Islamic terrorism’”.
a difficult one for those who value tradition against
modernity, Benoist argues for a “right to difference”
that includes the right of communities of immigrant
origin to be themselves. This is the opposite of the
“integration” policies that are now the norm across
Europe, but is not so different from the policies
pursued by some other states outside Europe, notably
in the Gulf, which remain glad to be multicultural.
The issue of immigration and, especially, Islam
is always a difficult one because Islam is not like
universalism, liberalism, financial capitalism or the
media. All of these can be identified with modernity,
and so condemned. Islam, in contrast, is easier to
identify with tradition than with modernity. This
is how Guénon saw it, and this is how his readers
in Turkey and Iran see it. Guénon was a Sufi, and
as a Sufi in Egypt he lived as a devout Muslim.
Many of his followers today are also Sufis, some-
times born Muslims and sometimes converts to
Islam. While some Westerners condemn Islam
as pre-modern, many Traditionalists prefer
to celebrate it as a bulwark against modernity.
That Islam is the ally of tradition is the position
taken by Dugin in Russia, which has had a signifi-
cant Muslim population since Ivan the Terrible
captured Kazan in 1552. Islam is viewed rather
differently in Russia than in northwestern Europe,
if only because of its longstanding presence there.
Dugin has often supported the alignment of
Russia with the Muslim world, notably Iran and
Turkey, against Western modernity. America as
Chasing human interaction in an internet age, from 2012 to tank / 255
2014 the photographer Alec Soth travelled across the United
States, photographing communities and their gatherings.
quintessentially modern, is the problem for many Songbook (2015) published by MACK, comprises Soth’s work
Traditionalists, not Islam. The European New from these trips, stringing together moments of connection
Right, however, is not a philosophy club. It aims in a world that is arguably becoming ever more insular. In
this photograph from the book, Crazy Legs Saloon, Watertown,
to lay a new ideological basis for a new politics, N.Y. Soth, captures a foam party for military personnel.
and pro-Muslim positions would not, in the current
climate in Europe and America, go down well. The
alternative view, therefore, is that the problem with
Islam is the particular nature of the Islamic tradi-
tion: that it is a tradition of conquest. This is not the
view of Benoist, but it is the view of others associated
with him in Europe, and it is the view of Bannon.
Hence the (attempted) Muslim ban in the United
States. This makes sense for Bannon, but differs
from the Traditionalist norm.
So the new political paradigm is not just about
changes in how people live, in what they fear and
hope for. It is also driven by a new ideology. Those
who voted for Le Pen and Trump were not readers
of Evola or Guénon, do not believe in perennial
metaphysical tradition and do not see themselves
at the end of a temporal cycle that makes apoliteia
an appropriate response. But their votes are still
votes against the liberal consensus that had become
almost synonymous with modernity in the West.
A new paradigm is opening up new political spaces
that can be occupied by people like Bannon and
Dugin, people who, on the one hand, can speak
to the concerns of those who vote for Le Pen
and Trump, and on the other, whose thinking is
informed by their reading of Evola and Guénon,
and by their sense of crisis at the end of a temporal
cycle. Their ideology is already shaping the thinking
of certain politicians, and will increasingly shape
both politics and the future. §
Courtesy the artist and MACK