The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

This is also where some of his most useful observations are found—his discussion of potlatch, for example, the ethnic destruction of property to demonstrate power, can be very useful in understanding the tendency of certain demographics to riot as a means of demonstrating or celebrating power. Civilized societies, of course, consider such riots as counter-productive because when a fully realised narod riots, it is usually an expression of frustrated powerlessness, not a demonstration of social power. Dugin enables us to draw qualitative distinctions having nothing to do with environment or circumstance between the bread riots preceding the French Revolution and the Ferguson and Baltimore riots following the death of Black criminals in the United States or the more recent riots in places like Johannesburg. Another interesting observation is his understanding of slavery as a function that only higher civilization, the narod, is truly capable, since slavery creates irreconcilable contradictions within the structure of the ethnos. The primitive ethnos has no category for a slave, since the balance of the ethnos requires the “other” to be an absolute evil to be destroyed, while a slave is allowed to exist and remain “other” to the ethnos (he observes that the Egyptians referred to slaves as “living dead” for this reason – those who by all right should have been deprived of life but instead were kept alive to become tools for ethnic labour). The necessary connexion of slavery with complex societies and higher thought is rich fodder for Reactionary thought in particular.

Cold war was the confrontation between two ideological camps. Now there is no more clear distinction in the field of ideology, rather between two versions of the same liberal-democracy – advanced in the case of USA and EU and delayed in the case of Russia. So we would presume that should reduce considerably the tension. But it is not the case. So we have to search the reason of growing tensions in other field than ideology. The most likely the reasons of the “new cold war” are this time geopolitical. But it is legitimate to ask the question: That it was not in reality an ideological cold war between capitalism and socialism the moment of much more broader historically context the moment of Great War of Continents.

This GWoC is the very basis of geopolitical understanding of history – Sea Power against Land Power, Eurasia against Atlantica. If we can agree on that everything becomes logical and clear. There is the everlasting battle between two types of civilizations – dynamic (progressive, merchant)  Sea civilization and static (conservative, heroic) Land civilization: Carthage against Rome, Athens against Sparta.

The US, UK, and France’s first missile airstrikes were rather improvisational and symbolic in nature.

Iranian, Russian, and Hezbollah forces were not attacked. Assad did not suffer strategically. The Syrian opposition, which expected much more, did not gain any serious advantages. Mass demonstrations in support of Assad are being held in Damascus.

Russian commentators have pointed out that France itself did not launch any missiles - all those launched were by British and American military forces.

Judging by the fact that all the missiles were launched at targets at a careful distance from the location of Russian soldiers, it seems that Mattis’ line won out in the US, as opposed to that of Bolton, who has insisted on directly attacking Iranians and Russians.

Man, as the cosmic mediator, is situated on the border between both worlds, between Tradition (above) and modernity (below). He is always straddling this border, eternally, in both the era of Tradition’s predominance, and in the periods in which modernity temporarily wins. In his eidetic, eternal dimension, man himself is this border, and the movement of his spirit, his thought, his ways and methods of philosophizing, outline the content of that which lies on either side. Through his choice of orientation, spiritual or corporeal, man constitutes the time, the epoch, the age in which he lives.

Thus, residing in the “dark age”, the Kali-Yuga, is neither a fatality, a punishment, nor something arbitrary, but the Night’s testing of the grain of eternity, of the divine center that comprises the essence of man. In other words, no matter how far away the Golden Age might be, a kernel of it remains within man as hope, as opportunity, as a fulcrum, which can always be found in refusing to unconditionally and fatalistically (or unconsciously) accept the conditions of the Iron Age. Time is an illusion. The historial is no more than a sign, a metaphor that can be deciphered in different ways and appealed to freely. We ourselves choose the time in which we live. And if man is born in the modern world and in the West’s zone of influence, this means that he is included in the profound plans of eternity, and this reflects his mission and fate. Modernity is in Tradition, and Tradition is in modernity. But in different sections of the vertical world, their proportions adjust to being polar: in Heaven (Tradition) there is only a drop of hell (the Biblical serpent that first appeared in paradise), and in hell there is a drop of Heaven. But this is enough to stretch a semantic thread of sacred history, or hiérohistoire (in Henry Corbin’s formulation) between these drops.

Moscow is not just a great city, not just a great capital, not just the symbol of a gigantic Empire. Moscow is a basic concept of theology and geopolitics.

Moscow has been called the “Third Rome” not merely as a metaphor or self-indulgent manifestation of purely national pride. Everything goes much, much deeper. Orthodoxy knows the special teaching of the “three Romes.” The first was imperial Rome before Christ, the same state on whose territory the Son of God set foot on earth. This Rome was a universal reality that united enormous spaces and manifold peoples and cultures in civilizational unity.

The Second Rome, the New Rome, was Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, which had accepted the blessing of holy christening. From that point forward, the Roman Empire acquired a strictly ecclesiastical, deeply Christian meaning. The Orthodox Emperor (Basileus), as head of the Empire, was identified with the mysterious person from the Apostle Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians: the “withholder”, “katechon”, who in the end times is fated to prevent the “coming of the son of perdition.”

The coming of Christ is a central event in world history. Everything that preceded it was a presage. What followed it was the universalization of the Gospel. And, in the Orthodox conception of the world, the center of history in the Christian era was Rome, the New Rome, Constantinople and its ruler, the Orthodox Basileus.

To overcome the Modernity is not easy. Any alternative will be impregnated by the some modern prejudices. We need be afraid of nothing – including regress, authoritarianism and so on. We are ashamed of all such phenomena because we are still Modern. I like communitarianism. It has in itself something premodern as organic community of people living in the personalized relations to the nature and each other. But we shouldn’t exclude the imagination of Empires, hierarchies and most of all sacredness, We need to restore all three traditional types – Priest, Warrior and Peasant. The economy is the field of peasant. So the peasant community and small manufacturers are the base of the material aspect of society. But outside of Modernity the materiality is the last concern. So the real basis of the society should be the Heaven – spiritual life, sacred values. The Earth should be once more conquered by the Heaven. So the Priests and Warriors should regain its essential position. So we need reverse the Modernity that began with quite opposite with the putting the material over spiritual, the Earth over the Heaven.

In this monograph, Dugin provides an overview of the primary foreign and Russian sources and schools that influenced the establishment of ethnosociology as an independent and original scientific discipline. Dugin offers a profoundly philosophical approach to the categories of the “ethnos,” “narod,” “nation” and “society,” providing clear definitions of these concepts, and expounding a broader ethnosociological taxonomy. For the first time in the field, this work brings a consistent approach to a broad spectrum of knowledge, as well as elucidating various methodologies of ethnosociological analysis, bringing everything together into a single, easily applicable system.

This volume is an invaluable manual for those specializing in sociology, philosophy, political science, cultural studies, ethnology, international relations, state, and law, as well as being of interest to those who follow the current developments in the humanities.

This volume is an invaluable manual for those specializing in sociology, philosophy, political science, cultural studies, ethnology, international relations, state, and law, as well as being of interest to those who follow the current developments in the humanities.

The Fourth Political Theory treats the concept “narod” as an independent legal and philosophical category, beyond its interpretations in the context of the three political theories of Modernity. But the “narod” is understood existentially, as Dasein. Heidegger’s formula “Dasein existiert völkisch” is key. The Fourth Political Theory understands the narod, the populus, as Dasein, Volk als Dasein. That makes the phenomenon of populism not indistinct, chaotic, and spontaneous, but deeply grounded, philosophical, and avant-garde. In this case, the Fourth Political Theory can be regarded as a “metaphysics of populism,” explaining its appearance and supplying the blind protest of humanity against the satanic elite that has seized power over it with a strategy, consciousness, thought, a system, and a plan of struggle.

To conclude this preface to the Italian edition, I want to emphasize: the Fourth Political Theory appeals to everyone – to traditionalists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, persons with convictions and persons without convictions. It is an invitation to think, and not the imposition of ready-made judgments or models. Our goal is to awaken in Italian society an interest towards political philosophy, towards ideas and towards an acute – truly Italian – perception of reality.

Modern European civilization is the historical continuation of Mediterranean civilization. The Indo-European element is predominant in this continuity, as the Indo-European tradition makes up Europe’s main linguistic and cultural matrix. If we recall Dumézil’s reconstruction of the trifunctional system here, then we immediately obtain a sociological map of Europe, the social structure of which is dominated by a constantly reproduced principle of three prevailing castes: priests, warriors, and producers. Indeed, we encounter none other than this stratification of European societies at the most different historical stages and under different names and titles.

The classic expression of this order was the ancient epoch of Mediterranean societies beginning with the Achaean conquests and Homeric Greece. Such a system was characteristic of Ancient Greece and Rome with the exception of periods of decline distinguished by a strengthening of the political positions of “urban dwellers”, who represented a mixture of higher castes with uprooted peasants that gave birth to a new type of merchant hitherto alien to classical Indo-European societies. This type of merchant could have taken shape through the degradation and materialization of the warrior caste (which Plato describes in his Republic as the phenomenon of timocracy), or from below through a specific deviation from social type on the part of former peasants or urban artisans. It cannot be ruled out that this was the result of influences that were altogether foreign to the Indo-European cultural circle, such as Phoenician or, more broadly, Semitic cultures, for whom trade was a widespread social occupation. In the city-states of Greece, “urban dwellers” and “citizens”, i.e., “townspeople”, formed a specific social milieu in which the three classical functions of Indo-European society found parodical manifestation. In the very least, this is what Aristotle presented in his Politics. The authority of king-priests (the sacred monarchy) transformed into tyranny. The domination of the warrior aristocracy gave way to domination by a financial oligarchy. The organic self-government of ethnically homogeneous and solidary communities (polity) became “democracy”, or the power of the sporadic and disparate crowd unified only by territory of urban residence.

e are talking about ideologies such as Chavismo in Venezuela, undoubtedly patriotic socialist doctrine, based on the political creativity of Hugo Chavez, who managed to forge a Fourth Way in relation to liberal-capitalism, communism and chauvinistic nationalism, reconciling its Peronist and Velasquist influences with perspective of a Communal State based on the productive autonomy of the workers. Your purpose? As outlined in his Plan de la Patria, establishing a multipolar and pluricentric world order and effectively building a socialism based on patriotic values ​​in Venezuela.

The pure individual must be a carrier of physical immortality, as there will be nothing in him that could die. There should be no hint of structure or filiation in him. He should be fully liberated of all forms of collective identity and also of existence. This is the ‘end of economics’, the ‘death of the person’, while at the same time being the flowering of chrematistics and the immortality of the (post-human) individual.

The seed of the human rots, but in its place there is no resurrected life, but a simulacrum, an electronic Antichrist. Capital is etymologically related to head (the Latin caput), i.e. capital has historically been a preparation for the coming of artificial intelligence.

So what does the economic aspect of the Fourth Political Theory, which challenges liberalism in its final (terminal) stage, consist of?
We must theoretically affirm a radical return to the integral worker, to the economic person against the disintegrated capitalist ‘order’ (organized chaos to be more precise) and the chrematistic individual. This means radical de-urbanisation and a return to agricultural practice, to the creation of sovereign farmer’s communities. This is the 4PT economic program: the resurrection of economics after the dark night of chrematistics, the rebirth of the economic person from the abyss of individualism.

The sequel to the bestseller The Fourth Political Theory, expanding further on the fourth political theory. All the political systems of the modern age have been the products of three distinct ideologies: the first, and oldest, is liberal democracy; the second is Marxism; and the third is fascism. The latter two have long since failed and passed out of the pages of history, and the first no longer operates as an ideology, but rather as something taken for granted. The world today finds itself on the brink of a post-political reality — one in which the values of liberalism are so deeply embedded that the average person is not aware that there is an ideology at work around him. As a result, liberalism is threatening to monopolise political discourse and drown the world in a universal sameness, destroying everything that makes the various cultures and peoples unique. According to Alexander Dugin, what is needed to break through this morass is a fourth ideology — one that will sift through the debris of the first three to look for elements that might be useful, but that remains innovative and unique in itself.

The Ways of the Absolute was written in 1989. Its main task was presenting the foundations of Traditionalism, exhibiting how Tradition understands the most important metaphysical problems, and on what philosophical principles the sacred worldview is built. We considered the present work to be a kind of introduction to Traditionalism, as transmitting into the Russian context the main lines of such eminent modern Traditionalists as René Guénon (the founding father of this tendency), Julius Evola, etc. We pursued an altogether definite purpose, and it predetermined the topics selected, the methods of presentation, and the emphases. It was extremely important for us to at once put Traditionalist through in its proper context, and show its radical non-conformism, its rigid alternity to academic, “humanitarian” and profane philosophical trends in modern culture. Traditionalism is not a history of religions, not a philosophy, not a structural sociological analysis. It is more of an ideology or meta-ideology that is totalitarian to a considerable extent and places rather harsh demands before those who accept and profess it. Either man breaks with the totality of the worldview cliches of modernity diffused throughout his environment, completely revises his views and positions, investigates the profane genesis and then rejects them all at once in order to accept the norms of Tradition with perfect confidence and strict conviction, or he will remain essentially outside of it, outside the sacred fence, in the Eleusinian swamps of the modern world in which there is no fundamental difference between highbrow professors, philosophers, and the obedient, absolutely unreflective mass of laymen, including even those intellectuals who for “academic” reasons are interested in various “extravagant” subjects, such as theology, rituals, symbolism, traditional societies, etc.

In Wirth’s view, the main key to understanding this language, and all existing languages and traditions, is the year. The year and man, the year and God, the year and nature, the year and time, the year and space are, in Wirth’s view, synonymous concepts. Man is the embodiment of condensed time. Time in and of itself is a divine manifestation.

The northern, polar cycle is the highest knowledge and, as follows, everything else is to be explained through the calendar. Special attention should be paid to the natural features of the North Pole. We know that a day there lasts not 24 hours, but six months, as does a night. For example, such a notion as the “midnight sun”, which is addressed in many of the Dionysian mysteries and is a generally important element in multiple sacred theories, acquires an entirely natural sense in Arctida – natural-magical meaning. This is the sun that shines at midnight at the North Pole during the summer solstice. Indeed, there is sun, and there is midnight. The memory of this midnight sun, like the memory of the primordial homeland of our ancestors, has been preserved in traditional models and been passed down from generation to generation in the form of legends and stories.

It will be a huge Empire. The richness of the landscape and the diversity of the polities will be intrinsic to the state. The Empire principle must be rehabilitated. Besides the trifunctional system (philosophers, warriors, and farmers), the Empire can include enclaves of a variety of creatures from Amazons to two-headed, bird-legged, and headless beings, gypsies, Evenki, etc. There could even be a mermaid republic or Veche forest gatherings governed by an assembly of Domoviye and Leshie. We can also imagine a congress of Angels or Tatar Kurultai.

A plurality of types of political and anthropological creativity should be encouraged.

TV and the press will be cancelled, as they are always spouting some kind of meaningless nonsense.

Clothing will have its own meaning. The body is the wrapper of the eidos, and the clothes are the wrapping of the body. Everyone will have different clothes, but all colorful and astonishingly beautiful, so that people pay attention to them. People will notice clothes and judge by clothes. There will be an absolute cult of clothing. People will spend most of their time getting dressed and changing.

Food will be the most ecologically pure, and distributed freely, as a gift. There will be an exceptional lot of sausage, cheese, and hazelnuts in the Empire.

Characteristic of “servants of Magical Matter” is pure agnosticism, i.e., a third way between Gnosis and Faith. The agnosticism of mystical materialism is conditioned by the inadmissibility of the subject questioning knowledge, since the subject, as part and parcel of the cosmos, is merely one of the facts of this cosmos and nothing more, thus the subject’s reflective capacity (its mind) cannot add or subtract anything from the flow of the cosmos. In this view, knowledge is identical with cosmic fact, but insofar as the cosmos is in motion, knowledge is identified with practice, i.e., it is simply discarded. In other words, agnosticism is the result of the absence of the pair of “knower” and “known” which is necessary for knowledge itself. For the proponents of Magical Matter, the absolute surface of the world coincides with its absolute depth. Here it would be interesting to recall Nietzsche’s aphorism regarding how “a woman needs to find depth in her superficiality.” Such an analogy is no accident, since the ideology of Magical Matter bears an openly gyneocratic, matriarchal character, in some sense being a projection of the female subconscious closed to itself.

Heidegger is universally recognized as a great philosopher of world history.  No one seriously contests this, but someone calmly passes by, relying on other trends in philosophy, while someone responds keenly to his message, using his terms ("Dasein", "existential", "Angst", etc.) and allowing himself to be carried away by his thoughts.

            A different, special, exclusive place in the history of philosophy that can be set aside for Heidegger should be recognized in the case that we fully trust Heidegger, immerse ourselves in his thinking, and make him our highest authority.  In other words, Heidegger in the space of Heideggerianism will differ essentially from Heidegger in the average and conventional history of philosophy.  In this case, Heidegger will be revealed not only as a great philosopher, on par with the other greats, but as the greatest of them all, occupying the place of the last prophet, concluding the development of the first stage of philosophy (from Anaximander to Nietzsche) and serving as the transition, the bridge to a new philosophy, which he only anticipates in his works.  In that case, Heidegger is revealed as an eschatological figure, as the final interpreter and clarifier of the deepest and most enigmatic themes of world philosophy and the creator of a radically new thinking.  In this case he can be viewed as a figure of the religious pantheon, as an "envoy of being itself", a prophesier and preparer of the greatest event, in which the old history of the European world will end and a new one, which has never been hitherto, will begin.

            It seems to me that the second approach is more productive for a true understanding of Heidegger (even if at some time, in the distant future, it will be revised).  It allows for full and complete immersion into Heidegger's thinking, without hurried attempts at interpreting him through appeals to other authorities (and to their separate traces in our consciousness) and allows Heidegger to communicate to us without hindrance what he intended to communicate.  And only after accepting this message in its main features and believing in its significance and inevitability can one, if need be, take a certain distance in regards to it.