Nae Ionescu’s 1938 Legionary Phenomenon: A “Missing Link” between Evola and Dugin

Abstract

Little has been written about the recently translated Legionary Phenomenon (Italian, 1998; English, 2022) by Romanian Legionary ideologue Nae Ionescu. Almost nothing exists in English. The present article demonstrates that the text is consciously patterned after Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) and thus constitutes an as yet unrecognized part of the corpus of fascist Integral Traditionalism. When the text was published in 1940 and republished in 1963, it was proposed as the basis for a “Legionary doctrine.” Yet its late appearance relative to important Legionary texts like Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Nest Leader’s Manual and For My Legionaries makes it uncertain how much influence the text might have had on the Legionary movement during the interwar period. Ultimately, the text may be most significant for its impact not on the interwar Legionary movement, but on subsequent and contemporary fascist ideologies, such as Aleksandr Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism. This article places Legionary Phenomenon in an intellectual history between Evola and Dugin, disrupting many analyses of Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism with evidence that certain ideological innovations attributed to him in fact belong to Ionescu and revealing the similarities of Dugin’s ideological output to Legionary Romanian fascism. Although these topics are not explored here, it likewise impacts the study of Ionescu’s philosophical and theological corpus, and has implications for the theory of religion of Ionescu’s student and friend, Mircea Eliade.