By Julius Evola

Synthesis of a Doctrine of Race

Racialism as Anti-Universalism

Excerpt from part one of Synthesis of a Doctrine of Race (1941). Translator anonymous.

Racialism presents itself as greater than nationalism, because to feel of the same race, even when this expression is meant to be more of a myth than a reality, is greater than to feel as being of the same nation. As a political myth, race is the living nation, which is not enclosed in abstract, judicial or territorial limits, or exhausting itself within a simple unity of civilization, language or history. The concept of race goes deeper than this, reaches the origins, inseparable from a sentiment of continuity, and touches the deepest chords of the human being.

The doctrine of race revives a sentiment which finds its origins in pre-national forms of community, the community which is proper to the stock, of the same family where it originated in a common unity of blood.

In its modern conception, the nation is presented as a unity of a different type, defined by elements other than a direct or indirect consanguinity. This consideration alone should suffice to illustrate that, in order to legitimately pass from a sentiment of nationality to the more energetic sentiment of race, one must reach a conception of race which is quite different from the elementary one defined by the purely biological element. One must take into account a series of other factors.

Following the doctrine of race, humanity is an abstract fiction, i.e. the final phase (only imaginable as a limit, but never to be entirely achieved) of a process of involution, of disintegration, of collapse. Instead, human nature is differentiated through the diversity of races. This differentiation is the primary element.

This relation between the value of race and those of personality is confirmed by the fact that racialism, as it is politically opposed to the democratic myth, opposes in the cultural sphere the constructions and superstitions of the bourgeois societies by stating the principle of a type of virtue, nobility and dignity which cannot be learned, but which one either possesses or does not possess, which are irreplaceable, which are actual qualities of a stock, a race, connected to a tradition and to forces much more profound than those of the individual man and his abstract intellect.

Those irreplaceable values which cannot be built, compared or destroyed are precisely the virtues that can really propitiate the development of personality, not only on the natural plane, but especially on the supernatural.

Aspects of Racial Doctrine