The Reign of Quantity gives a concise but comprehensive view of the present state of affairs in the world, as it appears from the point of view of the ‘ancient wisdom’, formerly common both to the East and to the West, but now almost entirely lost sight of. The author indicates with his fabled clarity and directness the precise nature of the modern deviation, and devotes special attention to the development of modern philosophy and science, and to the part played by them, with their accompanying notions of progress and evolution, in the formation of the industrial and democratic society which we now regard as ‘normal’. Guénon sees history as a descent from Form (or Quality) toward Matter (or Quantity); but after the Reign of Quantity-modern materialism and the ‘rise of the masses’-Guénon predicts a reign of ‘inverted quality’ just before the end of the age: the triumph of the ‘counter-initiation’, the kingdom of Antichrist. This text is considered the magnum opus among Guénon’s texts of civilizational criticism, as is Symbols of Sacred Science among his studies on symbols and cosmology, and Man and His Becoming according to the Vedanta among his more purely metaphysical works.

Table of Contents

Editorial Note
Introduction
Chapter 1 Quality and Quantity
Chapter 2 Materia Signata Quantitate
Chapter 3 Measure and Manifestation
Chapter 4 Spatial Quantity and Qualified Space
Chapter 5 The Qualitative Determinations of Time
Chapter 6 The Principle of Individuation
Chapter 7 Uniformity against Unity
Chapter 8 Ancient Crafts and Modern Industry
Chapter 9 The Twofold Significance of Anonymity
Chapter 10 The Illusion of Statistics
Chapter 11 Unity and ‘Simplicity’
Chapter 12 The Hatred of Secrecy
Chapter 13 The Postulates of Rationalism
Chapter 14 Mechanism and Materialism
Chapter 15 The Illusion of ‘Ordinary Life’
Chapter 16 The Degeneration of Coinage
Chapter 17 The Solidification of the World
Chapter 18 Scientific Mythology and Popularization
Chapter 19 The Limits of History and Geography
Chapter 20 From Sphere to Cube
Chapter 21 Cain and Abel
Chapter 22 The Significance of Metallurgy
Chapter 23 Time changed into Space
Chapter 24 Toward Dissolution
Chapter 25 The Fissures in the Great Wall
Chapter 26 Shamanism and Sorcery
Chapter 27 Psychic Residues
Chapter 28 The Successive Stages in Anti-Traditional Action
Chapter 29 Deviation and Subversion
Chapter 30 The Inversion of Symbols
Chapter 31 Tradition and Traditionalism
Chapter 32 Neo-Spiritualism
Chapter 33 Contemporary Intuitionism
Chapter 34 The Misdeeds of Psychoanalysis
Chapter 35 The Confusion of the Psychic and the Spiritual
Chapter 36 Pseudo-Initiation
Chapter 37 The Deceptiveness of ‘Prophecies’
Chapter 38 From Anti-Tradition to Counter-Tradition
Chapter 39 The Great Parody: or Spirituality Inverted
Chapter 40 The End of a World

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