In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • A Conversation with John Morgan
  • Arthur Versluis
Arthur Versluis (AV):

I'm sitting here with John Morgan, and we're drinking cups of hot apple cider in late fall in Michigan, and talking about his publishing efforts with a company and website called Arktos. Arktos includes works from a range of authors, but many of them are associated with the European or French New Right. They also include other works that sometimes could be classified as critical of modernity, Traditionalist—a range of works along those lines. I thought it would be a good idea for us to sit down and talk about, first of all, how you came to be affiliated with the perspectives represented by Arktos and by its predecessor, Integral Tradition Publishing. So perhaps you could start by talking a little bit about how you arrived at Arktos and what you're trying to achieve.

John Morgan (JM):

Integral Tradition, and later Arktos, was the culmination of many years of development for me. I actually feel very fortunate to be a part of all this, because if I could go back in time 10 or 15 years to when I was first getting interested in these kinds of ideas and authors, imagining what I would like to be doing, it would probably be something like this. I always had a sense very early on that there was something wrong with society and culture in general, but I could never really put my finger on it. I briefly flirted with the far Left when I was an undergraduate at the [End Page 107] University of Michigan, but I didn't hang around that very long, because I didn't find it very satisfactory. Then I really tried to take advantage of University of Michigan's library and the resources that were available there. That's where I did my undergraduate work, as you know. I just started reading, and even before I heard about the New Right and the Traditionalists, the first thing that I came across was the Conservative Revolution in Germany, and to a certain extent in other Western European countries in the 1920s and early 1930s, and that introduced me to a whole new type of thinking that wasn't easily classifiable as what we think of in America as Left or Right. These were theorists such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Jünger, Ernst Niekisch, and others who tried to take elements of socialism, and even of the Soviet Union, and combine it with more traditional counter-revolutionary thinking (meaning counter to the ideals of the French Revolution), and combining those ideas into a higher synthesis. That was probably my first exposure, and for a while I wasn't aware of any modern form of that that was still active in the 1990s. So, after some initial interest, I explored some of my other interests for a while, and then I came across the book by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the well-known English scholar of esotericism, on Savitri Devi called Hitler's Priestess. That would have been in 1998. Savitri Devi herself was an interesting, if problematic figure, but what really interested me in that book is that he also mentions in passing the Traditionalists, Evola, Guénon, and all these figures who I had never heard of before that time, or maybe had just heard referenced, but didn't know anything about them. Another crucial book, which came out the following year, was Kevin Coogan's Dreamer of the Day, about Francis Parker Yockey. Although Coogan engages in some baseless accusations and petty name-calling in that book, it is impressive for its breadth and detail, and he references and discusses the European New Right and other important figures of the European postwar "dissident Right" that I was only encountering for the first time.

It was really kind of revelatory for me that there were people still actively pursuing those same kinds of ideas that were visible in the Conservative Revolution. So I went back to the library and started hunting down texts. Of course, there really wasn't much to be had at that time. No books by Alain de...

pdf