Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century

A useful addition to the intellectual history bookshelf. Sedgwick explores the highways and by-ways of that mode of thinking which brings perennialism, initiation into a tradition and anti-modernism together to make a potent brew that has had effects on areas as diverse as the academic study of religion (Eliade), Western engagement with Islam (Guenon), Italian right wing terrorism (Evola) , Iranian Islamic thought (Nasr) and Russian politics (Dugin and the National Bolsheviks) amongst many other zones of intellectual endeavour.

This is, in fact, fairly marginal stuff - traditionalism has no real role in Political Islam, which largely derives from indigenous rather than Western sources, and most of the political and intellectual show more directions it took ended up in dead ends or manipulated by third parties for more material ends. The dabblings of some with the SS, the Iron Guard and Italian Fascism also indicate an inherent naivete about the ways of the world.

Too many of the movement's gurus end up behaving like sad old gits looking to justify a tormented sexuality or living in poverty for their ideas, half saint, half mad, all holy fool. Perhaps only the French thinker Henri Hartung was able to use it as constructive critique intended to bring balance to the modern world without the intrinsic hysteria of most, though not all, other such thinkers.

But this is a valuable monograph that adds important detail (though not quite the analysis of its importance or lack of it that I would have liked) to little known aspects of Western, Orthodox and Islamic cultural and religious history. Nevertheless, the book does require that you are already moderately well educated in both esoteric and mainstream intellectual history. show less