The crisis of the modern world

There is no longer news that the Western world is in crisis, a crisis that spread beyond its point of origin and became global by nature. In 1927, René Guénon responded to this crisis with the closest thing he wrote to a statement and "call to action." The crisis of the modern world was his most direct and comprehensive application of traditional metaphysical principles — especially those of the "Dark Age" preceding the end of the current world — to social criticism, and only the Age of Quantities and the Times signs surpassed it, his greatest works. In his current work, Guénon mercilessly reveals the "Western deviation": its loss of tradition, its glorification of action over knowledge, and the spread of individualism and general social chaos. His response to these conditions was not "activist."