All Non-Fiction

Beyond Human Rights is the second in an ongoing series of English translations of Alain de Benoist's works to be published by Arktos. Alain de Benoist begins Beyond Human Rights with an examination of the origins of the concept of 'human rights' in European Antiquity, in which rights were defined in terms of the individual's relationship to his community, and were understood as being exclusive to that community alone. This changed with the coming of Christianity to Europe, after which rights were redefined as a universal concept derived from the idea of each individual as the possessor of a soul that is transcendent and independent of any social identity. This culminated in the Enlightenment belief in 'natural rights', which found its practical expression in the doctrines emerging from the American and French revolutions, in which all individuals were said to possess rights simply by virtue of the fact of their being human. In turn, laws issued by the State came to be viewed as negative impositions upon the naturally independent individual. De Benoist deconstructs this idea and shows how the myth of a 'natural man' who possesses rights independent of his community is indefensible, and how this conception of rights has, in modern times, led to their use as a weapon by stronger nations to bludgeon those weaker states which do not conform to the Western liberal-democratic form of rights, as we have recently seen in action in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya. As such, he presents us with a crucial critique of one of the major issues of our time.

Neo-paganism is the attempt to revive the polytheistic religions of old Europe. But how? Can one just invent or reinvent an authentic, living faith? Or are modern neo-pagans just engaged in elaborate role-playing games?

In Summoning the Gods, Collin Cleary argues that the gods have not died or forsaken us so much as we have died to or forsaken them. Modern civilization—including much of modern neo-paganism—springs from a mindset that closes man off to the divine and traps us in a world of our own creations. Drawing upon sources from Taoism to Heidegger, Collin Cleary describes how we can attain an attitude of openness that may allow the gods to return.

In these nine wide-ranging essays, Collin Cleary also explores the Nordic pagan tradition, Tantrism, the writings of Alain de Benoist, Karl Maria Wiligut, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Patrick McGoohan’s classic television series The Prisoner. Cleary’s essays are models of how to combine clarity and wit with spiritual depth and intellectual sophistication.

Summoning the Gods establishes Collin Cleary as one of the leading intellectual lights of contemporary neo-paganism.

Third, revised edition of Julius Evola's Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory and Death in the World of Tradition. In this book Evola considers the spiritual aspects of war in different spiritual traditions, including the Vedic, Iranian, Islamic and Catholic. In so doing he concludes that war can, in certain circumstances, have a ‘sacred character’ through which man may achieve self-realisation.

Written without notes in Ireland, and first published pseudonymously in 1948, Imperium is Francis Parker Yockey’s masterpiece. It is a critique of 19th-century rationalism and materialism, synthesising Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, and Klaus Haushofer’s geopolitics. In particular, it rethinks the themes of Spengler’s The Decline of the West in an effort to account for the United States’ then recent involvement in World War II and for the task bequeathed to Europe’s political soldiers in the struggle to unite the Continent—heroically, rather than economically—in the realisation of the destiny implied in European High Culture. Yockey’s radical attack on liberal thought, especially that embodied by Americanism (distinct from America or Americans), condemned his work to obscurity, its appeal limited to the post-war fascist underground. Yet, Imperium transcents both the immediate post-war situation and its initial readership: it opened pathways to a deconstruction of liberalism, and introduced the concept of cultural vitalism— the organic conceptualisation of culture, with all that attends to it. These contributions are even more relevant now than in their day, and provide us with a deeper understanding of, as well as tools to deal with, the situation in the West in current century. It is with this in mind that the present, 900-page, fully-annotated edition is offered, complete with a major foreword by Dr. Kerry Bolton, Julius Evola’s review as an afterword (in a fresh new translation), a comprehensive index, a chronology of Yockey's life, and an appendix, revealing, for the first time, much previously unknown information about the author's genealogical background.