The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

Historical events we cannot explain only by conscious intention of their protagonists. Also, not even solely with their personal characteristics and traits, although, of course, is not insignificant psychological structure of important historical actors, and their ideological or philosophical disposition.
Apart from factors which are purely quantitative and quantifiable (economic, social, etc..), the events of history have always been influenced by far more subtle, delicate modes of reality, which are no less real in regard to quality, not a quantity, regardless they are out of physical observation. (All this, by the way, fully applies to the many other spheres of human activity, which are more ordinary than is sphere of politics.) Not once, some “abstract” idea, a concept or a myth sealed the fate of entire nations or civilizations (eg the Incas, which in the Spanish conquistadors “recognized” White gods). And the political ideology, after all, belong to quite distinctive reality, which is largely independent of any individual. (Indeed, ideology is often able to fully subjugate in themselves person, able to “absorb” any concrete individual.)

The new millennium dawning on the horizon of History suggests us a major paradigmatic upheaval, a reversal of the categories of thought that, at a time of extreme political and ideological confusion, requires a rethink. At the threshold of a new era, a new global disorder stands out: mankind must face the approaching of several cultural universes, pushed towards a collision and a mutual annihilation by the new world-wide perspective. Economy, designed according to bourgeois criteria, demonstrates its finiteness, projecting the future of humanity towards a peak of exploitation and alienation. Peoples, despoiled of any decision-making power and sovereignty, render any authority to minorities who direct world affairs according to their own interest. Cultures and religions die on the altars of postmodern simulacra. The new law is chaos.

Prof. Dugin, the Western mainstream media and established politicians describe the recent situation in Ukraine as a conflict between pro-European, democratic and liberal oppositional alliance on the one side and an authoritarian regime with a dictator as president on the other side. Do you agree?

Dugin: I know those stories and I consider this type of analysis totally wrong. We cannot divide the world today in the Cold War style. There is no “democratic world” which stands against an “antidemocratic world”, as many Western media report.

Your country, Russia, is one of the cores of this so called “antidemocratic world” when we believe our mainstream media. And Russia with president Vladimir Putin tries to intervene in Ukrainian domestic politics, we read...

Dugin: That´s completely wrong. Russia is a liberal democracy. Take a look at the Russian constitution: We have a democratic electoral system, a functioning parliament, a free market system. The constitution is based on Western pattern. Our president Vladimir Putin rules the country in a democratic way. We are a not a monarchy, we are not a dictatorship, we are not a soviet communist regime.

The Eurasian movement, which seeks to restore Russian power and prestige, is a form of National Bolshevism based on the geopolitical theory that Moscow, Berlin, and Paris form a natural political axis and potential power center. Alexander Dugin, the founder of the Eurasian Party, writes: The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the basic principle of opposition to the common enemy: Atlanticism and the American New World Order. A multipolar world must replace the current unipolar world currently dominated by the United States.

Much has been written over the past several years about the Russian university professor, Alexander Dugin, who has become a prominent Putin advisor although he has no official government position, nor in fact does he have the academic credentials to head the Sociology Department at Moscow State University. His advisory role as resident intellectual without portfolio appears to be based on his expertise in matters dealing with political philosophies and forms of government. Although the Russian Federation has a Constitution, the Government is quite new and untested in many regards. An intellect like Alexander Dugin could certainly be helpful in advising the President on the fundamental laws and principles that prescribe the nature, function, and limits of both the Russian and foreign governments.

Europeans have frequently criticized the United States as a materialist society, but is not every society materialist? Is it not part of human nature to always to want more?

You are right. In that sense I would say that today we are all Americans. And it is true that the desire to have more is part of human nature. The difference is that much of European religion and philosophy are based on values that are more important, on the belief that for moral or religious or philosophical reasons, we must not submit to greed and to the appetite for wealth. This was different in America because of the protestant Calvinist idea of the elect—God shows his approval by giving wealth. You know Max Weber’s theory of the link between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. I think these things make a big difference.

In Catholic countries money is always suspect—even though everyone wants more of it rather than less. You can see that in the fact that in France it would be impossible for a wealthy man to be elected head of state. No one would vote for a millionaire. The idea would be repulsive. But in America if a candidate is a millionaire it shows he is a success and has ability.

So in Europe people hide what they have. They don’t say how much they earn. In America there is a passion for numbers, and everything is a calculable quantity. Americans know how much they paid for everything. When American tourists go to the Eiffel Tower they ask, “How many steps to the top?” They do not understand the difference between quantity and quality.

Why, then, democratic?  Marchart provides the best answer to this question.  In Democracy and Minimal Politics: The Political Difference and Its Consequences (2011), Marchart argues that democracy, understood as “the meeting point between a political and an ethical logic”, is the regime that relates to the “irresolvable contingency of social affairs” such that “the absence of an ultimate ground of the social…is institutionally accepted, even promoted".  Democratic politics or the politics of democratization is involved in the differential-political-ontological process of founding and instituting itself, on one hand, and constantly subverting itself, “deliberately undermining the very foundation it seeks to institute”.  For Marchart, democratic ethics is as such unpolitical, inasmuch as it recognizes its own groundlessness.  However, the necessity of ongoing re-founding renders it an “antinomy”.  This positive account of democracy’s inherent self-criticism resembles somewhat Derrida’s arguments in favour of “democracy to come”. 

            Of course, we might fairly ask whether the isomorphism of the democratic antinomy to the “play” of differential political ontology is a good enough reason to be democratically oriented; but our own thoughts aside, this reasoning does underlie the HL’s democratic politics, at least in some cases. 

Although it is common for New Right thinkers to extend the search for examples of anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian thoughts and practices to the Greeks, those still confined to the corridors of State academia tend to begin their search for such odious refutations of truth and justice with reactions to the Enlightenment and French Revolution. It is this latter tendency that has given us an intellectual tradition called the Counter-Enlightenment. While there are serious consequences for choosing to begin with the Enlightenment itself – the most obvious of which are the normalization of the Enlightenment principles of reason, humanity, and equality; and subsequent denial of the ontological power and legitimacy of anti-democratic thought – one may still use Counter-Enlightenment as a valid designation of the vast current in Western thought that overruns the ramparts of the “city upon a hill.”

This current is comprised of an array of concepts – among them aristocracy, warrior-caste, tradition, particularity, reverence, and honor – and thinkers – such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Joseph de Maistre, Johann Herder, Georges Sorel, and Julius Evola.

According to Professor Dugin, there have been three distinct ideologies since the dawn of the modern age – Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism – and we are now moving into the era of the Fourth Ideology. Dugin clearly hopes that he can influence how this turns out, but this is a paradoxical belief because underlying Dugin’s ideas is the notion of a kind of natural progression of ideologies.

This deterministic pattern is apparent if we consider the subjects of the three ideologies, which are, in ascending order, the individual, the class, and the nation. Dugin’s hope is that the subject of the Fourth Ideology will be Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, which, in its essence, is almost a kind of animism in that it is a rejection of the hyper-connectivity and hyper-standardization of modernity.

Egalitarians, be it modern liberals or the Left, would like everyone to think that the colonisation of White homelands by settlers of colour is irreversible, and that this (according them) now permanent situation is a sign of ‘progress’, resulting from the technological overcoming of geographical barriers, the deprecation of ‘antiquated’ notions of identity, the destruction of traditional hierarchies, and the increasing move towards a fluid world. Yet this is vision is purely ideological: there is nothing intrinsically progressive inegalitarianism or globalisation,the latter of which is an expression of the former; they are merely the expression of an ethics that subjectively declares equality to be an absolute moral good. And herein lies the principal difficulty in the effort to instigate a change of government policy: in our age, the dominant morality in our society is an egalitarian morality, and it is this, rather than any of the contrived pseudo-economic arguments we often hear repeated in the mainstream media and liberal and Left-leaning think tanks, that serves as the ultimate basis for justification—either for continuing the policy or for not reversing it. Most ordinary citizens in the West agree that there are too many ‘immigrants’ (settlers of colour) and would rather their governments stopped them coming and sent most of them back. They dare not say or call for this publicly, however, because they fear that desiring this makes them ‘bad people’ and would cause others to think them so too. This is why no amount of economic data, crime statistics, or racial science has any effect on policy. To see it change we will need to be able to articulate the case for change in moral terms, and I believe this cannot be achieved without attacking egalitarianism in moral terms, because it is its enshrinement of equality as a moral good that lies at the base ofthe modern liberal project.Once the moral standing of egalitarianism is destabilised, and once an ethics of inequality (the moral goodness of difference, or the moral goodness of quality) issuccessfully articulated, then it will become a lot easier to justify a change inimmigration policy throughout the West.Of course, reversing the effects of decades of colonisation is more difficult whereit has been more intensive and where the indigenous have intermarried with thesettlers, but, from the perspective of physically relocating, those who immigratedcan just as easily emigrate: after all, did they not emigrate from their countries oforigin in the first place? It is not the migration that is difficult, even if large numbers are involved—it’s everything else.

The Present World is not something given. The world is something that is created in the process of human existence. We don't exist in the World as something taken for granted. Existing, we constitute the world by the very fact of existing. Modernity insists on the objectivity of the world. But the objective world can really be present – because in order to be present it needs to have being, it to has to be, to participate in the Being Essence. But the question of being demands a witness who must be a thinking, judging entity. Only the intellectual moment defines whether or not the world is present and by judging the presence it automatically constitutes the world as something present. So the world in order to be should be present and has to be installed as such.

I will allow myself to express my opinion about the future, the strategies and values - the value's framework of the development of our country, the affects of global processes over our nation, our identity and how we would like to see the world in the twenty-first centur, and what can our country,Russia, bring to this world together with our partners.

Today, almost all the countries of the world - the Russian and European nations, the Chinese and American societies - are virtually faced, in one form or another, with the need to find new strategies and preserve their identity in the radically changing world, a world that has become more open, transparent and interdependent. The question «who we are?», «what we want to be?» - are heard in our society, getting louder and louder. We separated from Soviet ideology and it is not possible to return to it. Proponents of fundamental conservatism, idealizing Russia until 1917, are now as far from reality as supporters of the Western ultraliberalizm. It is evident that our movement forward is not possible without the spiritual, cultural, and national self-determination, in other case we will not be able to withstand internal and external challenges and will not succeed in global competition. And today we see a new round of competition.

For the second part of my review of Alexander Dugin’s "The Fourth Political Theory," I will focus on the more esoteric and abstract aspects, and attempt to relate it to real political concerns and issues. Although such ideas may seem irrelevant to a lot of people, they do have significance in the sense that they allow us to trace the trajectory of Dugin’s ideas, as well as their implications on the political sphere. In other words, they can tell us where Dugin is “coming from.”

Dugin: We have to see the struggle for geopolitical power as the old conflict of land power represented by Russia and sea power represented by the USA and its NATO partners. This is not a new phenomenon; it is the continuation of the old geopolitical and geostrategic struggle. The 1990s was the time of the great defeat of the land power represented by the USSR. Michail Gorbatchev refused the continuation of this struggle. This was a kind of treason and resignation in front of the unipolar world. But with President Vladimir Putin in the early years of 2000, came a reactivation of the geopolitical identity of Russia as a land power. This was the beginning of a new kind of competition between sea power and land power.

How did this reactivation start?

Dugin: It started with the second Chechen war (1999-2009). Russia by that time was under pressure by Chechen terrorist attacks and the possible separatism of the northern Caucasus. Putin had to realize all the west, the USA and the European Union took side for the Chechen separatists and Islamic terrorists fighting against the Russian army. This is the same plot we witness today in Syria or yesterday in Libya. The West gave the Chechen guerrilla support, and this was the moment of revelation of the new conflict between land power and sea power. With Putin, land power reaffirmed itself. The second moment of revelation was in August 2008, when the Georgian pro-western Sakashwili regime attacked Zchinwali in South Ossetia. The war between the Russia and Georgia was the second moment of revelation.

Alexander Dugin’s book is a very timely work; by which I mean it is almost exclusively a response to the twentieth century—“the century of ideology” (p. 15) — from the twenty-first. It is a right-wing critique of modernity that has learned its lessons from left-wing post-modernity. It joins a flurry of works in a similar genre of post-war “alternative politics,” spanning from Julius Evola’sFascism Viewed from the Right of 1964 to Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism of 2010. Authors can be Christian, neo-pagan, or atheist; they can be reformed fascists, “paleo”-conservatives, or Traditionalists. They all, however, seem to send the same message and understand the same thing about the present state of the Western world: everything that is wrong with the way we act is rooted in something desperately wrong with the way we think. It is, in many ways, set apart from the radical right-wing not only in conclusions but the quality of the authors. While some are certainly pamphleteers in spirit, there is a distinctly intellectual strain running through it all—exemplified by the Nouvelle Droitphenomenon in France. It should come as no surprise, then, that Dugin is Professor of Sociology at Moscow State University (as well as Chair of that department’s Centre for Conservative Studies).

Counter-hegemony is the major aspect of the Theory of Multi-polar World. It originally appeared in the context of the critical theory of International Relations (IR). This concept undergoes certain semantic transformations in the transition from the critical theory of International Relations to the Theory of Multi-polar World (TMW). Those transformations should be considered in more details. In this case, we need to recall the basic principles of the hegemony theory in the framework of the critical theory.

The arrival in Paris of Mr. Ferdinand Ossendowski, who has been called the Robinson Crusoe of the twentieth century, could not go unnoticed; all critics are unanimous in considering Beasts, Men and Gods, his first book translated into French, as a prodigious book, the most exciting travelogue they ever read,. We had the good fortune to talk with Ossendowski, the man who saw the living Buddha, and we had the no less valued opportunity to meet with the three French personalities who seem best designated to compare their doctrines and science to his experiences, and to judge, in the light of Western concepts, the incredible number of observations he reported about his dramatic trip through Asia. I selected the historian of Asia, Rene Grousset, whom we presented to our readers a few weeks ago, Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher, to whom the Thomistic revival in this country is largely due, and Rene Guenon, the Hinduist, whose meditations have earned us this remarkable book,Introduction to Hindu Doctrines, a nice summary, full of substance, both East and West, and who publishes these days on the questions which trouble the European consciousness.

Alexander Dugin, a youngish, stylish, slim, neat, hip and bearded don at the Moscow U, is a cult figure at his homeland; people throng to his lectures; his plentiful books cover a vast spectre of subjects from pop culture to metaphysics, from philosophy to theology, from international affairs to domestic politics. He is fluent in many languages, a voracious reader, and he made the Russians aware of many less known Western thinkers. He is ready to wade deepest waters of mystical and heterodox thought with mind-boggling courage. He thrives on controversies; adored and hated, but never boring.

He is a scholar and a practitioner of Mysticism, akin to Mirchea Eliade and Guenon; a church-going adherent of traditionalist Orthodoxy; an ardent student of conspiracy theories from Templers and the Holy Grail to Herman Wirth’s Arctogaia; he is a master of tools sharpened by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord; but first and foremost, he is a dedicated fighter for liberation of mankind from the vise of liberal tyranny in American-dominated New World Order, or even from Maya, the post-modernist post-liberal virtuality - by political means.

Beneath liberalism’s appeals to individualism and social contracts, nationhood remained synonymous with tribe and community. This is not surprising because modern nation-states did not arise out of thin air or at the end of the nose of some 17th-century philosopher. They are are built upon the base of organic societies that have preceded them. 

China, for example, had existed as a nation, civilization, and empire long before the PRC was even established; just as Europe as a civilization and as a historical subject had existed long before the birth of the EU and its member states. So in addressing the issue of Nationalism, it is important to separate the Nation-State from the organic communities upon which it is based. These are H.G. Well’s “natural borders.” They are “the necessary political map of the world which transcends artificial states.”

Almost a century has passed since Guénon began to write his criticism of modernism and modern Western civilization. Since then the epidemic of modernism has spread much more globally and affected much more deeply than then the great non-Western civilizations such as the Islamic, Hindu and Far Eastern. Your question, therefore, can be asked about all civilizations and not only the West. Nevertheless, tradition has been better preserved in those civilizations than in the West where modernism was born and grew before it spread elsewhere. This is especially true of the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of these non-Western traditions with the help of which Guénon hoped a new traditional intellectual elite could be created in the West, something which in fact has taken place to some extent. As to whether Western civilization can avoid decay and destruction by returning to its traditional roots, such an event seems ever more unlikely on a civilizational scale, but return to tradition remains an accessible path for individuals in the West and many have chosen to pursue this path.

Guénon also spoke of the possibility of a “redressement” and who is to say that such an event is no longer possible no matter how unlikely it seems. As the Bible states, “With God all things are possible.” My own understanding is that a golden kernel is now forming while the petals of the “flower of civilization” are falling apart and that this kernel will serve as the seed for the next historical and cosmic cycle.