The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

Speech by N.V. Melentieva at the presentation of the book "Eschatological Optimism" by Daria Dugina at the "Eurasian Congress of Philosophers" 17.02.2024

A few words should be said about the socio-cultural situation in Russian society that developed in the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, and in our time at the beginning of the 20th century.

Contemporary social science in Russia needs to catch up in understanding the changes occurring in the country and in forming a sovereign worldview, and it needs to be accelerated, philosopher Alexander Dugin told journalists at the 5th Congress of the Russian Society of Political Scientists in Svetlogorsk (Kaliningrad region).

Alexander Dugin discusses Vladimir Putin’s Munich speech in 2010 as a historic turning point, asserting Russia’s rejection of a unipolar world and advocating a multipolar global framework that acknowledges Russia’s sovereignty and geopolitical interests.

Let us start with the simpler part: Russia. Here, Tucker Carlson has become a focal point for two polar opposites within Russian society: ideological patriots and elite Westernisers who nonetheless remain loyal to Putin and the Special Military Operation. For patriots, Tucker Carlson is simply ‘one of us’. He is a traditionalist, a right-wing conservative, and a staunch opponent of liberalism. This is what twenty-first-century emissaries to the Russian tsar look like.

In 1924, the leaders of the Soviet state, including Stalin himself, were still fully convinced that the success of the USSR was only the first step of a pan-European revolutionary process. Already in May 1924, Stalin wrote in the pamphlet “The Foundations of Leninism”:

In Russia, the year 2024 has been proclaimed the Year of the Family. Clearly, in this area, things are quite dire for us. The alarming rates of divorce, abortion, and declining birth rates represent a national catastrophe. If we take the Year of the Family seriously, relying on the classics (but not the liberal or communist ones, as they are likely to advise something that will only hasten the disintegration of the family), we should simultaneously return to our roots and take a step forward.

Chaadaev’s philosophical, spiritual emigration was developed and embodied in the poetry and personal fate of an even more extreme Westernizer, the ideal archetype for this movement, Vladimir Sergeevich Pecherin (1807–1885). Pecherin was a Westernizer from his earliest youth. Here is how he wrote about this himself in correspondence with Fedor Vasilyevich Chizhov:

The main issue in 2024 remains the same fundamental problem as before: the confrontation between two waves — the waning wave of a unipolar world order with US hegemony and the collective West, and the rising wave of a multipolar world, embodied in BRICS-10.

The Fourth Political Theory, upon recognising its preliminarily outlined structures, could become more systematic and detailed by examining some fundamentally important doctrines, schools, and figures for political philosophy. For instance, let us consider Hegel.

Another key point of Solovyov’s reflections is the thesis of “all-unity.” It also represents an echo of the deep archaic intuition about the “cohesiveness”5 of all oppositions and differences.

PRAV's Editor-in-Chief speaks out on the "message" of Daria Platonova Dugina's life and death and on her book *Eschatological Optimism*.

The appearance in the first quarter of the 19th century of Russian conservatives (the so-called “Russian party”: Shishkov, Rastopchin, Glinka, etc.) and Slavophiles especially can be represented in this diagram as an achievement of the “haughty” Eurocentric ellipse expanding its reach to the points of Focus A (Figure 2) and the first intelligible and conscious intuitions of the Russian intellectual and political elite regarding the fact that Russia is a distinctive and original culture and civilization, not just a “European country.”

On the eve of 2024, it is worth taking a look at the overall picture of the world and the main geopolitical trends. Overall, we are in a moment of transition from unipolarity to multipolarity. This year, multipolarity received additional structuring in BRICS-10 (Argentina, having just joined this organisation, was hastily removed from there by another globalist clown — Javier Milei).

The adoption of Orthodoxy by the Grand Duke of Kiev Vladimir was the starting point of Christian historicity, which covers almost the entire history of Russia - with the exception of the Soviet period and the era of liberal reforms. This historicity itself was a complex and multidimensional process, which it would be wrong to describe as a gradual and unidirectional penetration of Byzantine Orthodox culture into the popular environment, in parallel with the displacement of pre-Christian ('pagan') ideas. Rather, we are talking about different phases of the temporal synthesis between Byzantinism and East Slavic demetriac civilisation, phases determined by the different correlation of the main structures - Byzantine ideology at the elite level and the reception of Christianity by the people as such.

On the threshold of the jubilee congress of the World Russian People’s Council in the Kremlin, which is dedicated to the Russian World, it is necessary to address the very concept of “Russian World” in a little more detail.

Nevertheless, from time to time we use the combination of words, “Russian philosophy,” and we list the names of “Russian philosophers”: Skovoroda, Solovyov, Fedorov, Leontiev, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Trubetskoy, Frank, Florensky, Shestov, Kojève, Losev. Who are they, then, and what were they up to?

'Magical Reflections on Russia's Defeat', which the West has begun to talk about explicitly, advising them to stop, is another name for military-political propaganda with a neat and quite appropriate appeal to anthropology. Propaganda is the magic of war. 

Russia, as a pole of a multipolar world, is fighting the West in Ukraine. Many Islamic countries, influenced by Western propaganda, did not clearly understand the reasons, goals, and the very nature of this war, assuming it was a regional conflict (and there are many such in the Islamic world itself).