One of the most illuminating and provocative sections of the essay is the author’s meditation on La famiglia, peso o baluardo? (The Family: Burden or Bulwark?) and the legacy of Julius Evola, offered as a kind of anti-Gramsci—the closest figure the Right has had to a revolutionary thinker with a coherent meta-political project. Evola, ever the radical aristocrat, saw clearly the need for a new type of man—free from bourgeois sentimentality, unattached to domestic comforts, and trained for the spiritual combat of tradition in an age of decline. De Antonellis explores the Sicilian Baron’s uncompromising stance on celibacy and sexual freedom for militant traditionalists, which, while sure to scandalize mainstream conservatives, is consistent with Evola’s ruthless logic: one cannot wage metaphysical war while clinging to hearth and family life.
This reading of Evola—as someone who, like Gramsci, understood the gravity of the cultural battlefield—is perhaps the most compelling and sobering contribution of the essay. Evola’s failure, as De Antonellis points out, was not intellectual but practical: the Right never produced an “army” of Evolian men who could live sine impedimenta—unbound by work, marriage, or social conformity. The “chimera” of revolutionary struggle almost always gave way to the “siren” of love, comfort, and family—a tragic inversion of priorities for a movement that claims to uphold heroic virtue and transcendent order.
De Antonellis is not dismissive of the family—far from it. He presents it as a natural and deeply rooted good, a bastion of civilizational continuity. But he does not allow this to become an excuse for passivity or withdrawal. Rather, the essay challenges the Right to reconsider the cost of its values when confronted with revolutionary zeal. The Left was willing to send its sons into seminaries, into newspapers, into cultural warfare. The Right, by contrast, hesitated to sacrifice—not because it lacked conviction, but because it lacked coordination, imagination, and above all, a counter-cultural elite capable of forming a long-term resistance.
La famiglia, peso o baluardo? is not just a lamentation of missed opportunities—it is a call for the Right to reorient itself around strategy and sacrifice. It reminds us that culture is not an idle pastime, but the foundation of power. And in highlighting Evola’s challenge—the demand for a militant, metaphysical manhood (società di uomini, or Männerbund)—De Antonellis invites his readers to reconsider what kind of men must rise if the tide is ever to turn.
This is an essential read for any counter-revolutionary thinker who is done making excuses and ready to confront the hard truths of civilizational decline.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, July 8th, Feast of San Procopio di Cesarea
