The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

Heidegger himself later called Sein und Zeit the most old-fashioned book ever written. We believe that in the way our economically driven political speech develops, we experience that in Dutch ‘ de wal het schip keert’ , meaning literally that the shore is the only thing that can stop the ship. We are caught up in a form of management. The thought of an Eurasian continent as a mediator between the Atlantic and the Asian might for a Dutch metaphysician be felt as the relieve of a burden. Heidegger saw his own mission in preparing European thinking for a confrontation with the East.

Bringing the geopolitical question back in the philosophical and political agendas means also the necessity of posing the question of the relation between the two. After all the question of politics is again the Schmittian question of friend or foe. When we would be so bold to identify the foe with the antichrist, Heideggers remark in the black notebooks spring to mind: ‘In relation to liberalism the antichrist is a small boy’ .

To work on a new political theory is a matter of great importance, but also a thing that requires great care. Perhaps this care, Sorge, for Heidegger in Sein und Zeit the unity of Dasein, is the driving force itself.

The title of Noomakhia, which literally means “war of the mind” (Noomachy) [4] – and which can also be conceived of as “war within the mind”, “war of minds”, or even “war against the mind” – is intended to emphasize the conflictual nature of logoi structures as well as the multiplicity of noetic fields in each of which surprises, conflicts, aporias, struggles, contradictions, and opposition lie in wait for us. The field of thinking is the field of warfare [5]: thoughts wage ceaseless wars not only against phenomenality, matter, and their own reorganization into elements (whether existing or not is an open question), natural law, dispersion, non-structurality escaping the “control” of multiplicity, etc., but also against other types of thoughts, other thoughts, and the complex diversity of vertical and horizontal, noetic and noeric chains which permeate the reality of the world on different planes and different geometries. Wars between people, including even the most cruel and bloody, are but pale comparisons to the wars of the gods, titans, giants, elements, demons, and angels. And these, in turn, are but figures illustrating even more formidable and profound wars unfolding in the Mind, in the sphere of the Nous and its limits in which the Mind itself borders the zone of Madness. Thus, everything is Noomachy, even that which is bigger and came first of all – ϋπερπαντα. War, according to Heraclitus, is the father of all (πολεμος πατηρ παντων). Indeed, it is about this, the “father of all”, that Noomakhia is written.

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.

The Romanov period saw a continuous process of Russian Orthodoxy’s silent return to pre-Petrine times; this was not a conservative-revolutionary path (as with the Old Believers), but a conservative-evolutionary one whose existence was due mainly to the archaic nature of the provincial clerics and the multitude of simple parishioners. In a certain sense, the enthronement of the antichrist in the Church did not fully succeed, despite the fact that during the individual intervals of Peter the Great’s rule the impression formed that this was taking place. Still, because of some higher reasons, the final chord was delayed, even though the forces of the antichrist multiplied tenfold.

Although it was at the price of compromise and adaptability, Russian Orthodoxy maintained its unity, the legality of its hierarchy, eucharistic succession, and loyalty to the fundamental norms of patristic tradition. The Saint-Petersburg stage was characterised by a certain split in the official Church. At the lower levels it moved towards the Old Faith, i.e. towards Orthodoxy in its purest form. At the top, it was oriented towards Western adjustments and norms, as official theology repeated the model of Catholic-Protestant teachings, and the general spirit was fully apostate. Nikon’s reforms significantly damaged both rites and liturgical books. The synod became an administrative agency in a bureaucratic, profane government.

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.

I admire Italy, or more precisely the many societies, cultures, peoples, and states comprising the history of Italy from the Etruscans and Roman Empire to the Vatican and Risorgimento. I dedicated a separate book to the “Latin Logos,” where I expressed my love for the Italian spirit and for the beauty of dramatic and elevated Italian thought.

Peruvian social scientists are reducing their work to the strict academic terrain, this relationated with the fear of social rejection and labor ostracism, which would imply their participation in political projects and social reforms, this situation is generating that, today, political parties are in a lack of doctrine, strategies and coherent programs. The decline of the Peruvian political parties, we endorse, is also determinate by the flight of thinkers and social scientists from them.

Due to this situations, and in order to amend them, investigations are being carried out in Peru, in such areas as political philosophy, metapolitics and geopolitics. For the sake of identifying the real obstacles that interfere with our progress as a nation, and to give with this the necessary tools for the institutionalization of a political project. It is the return of social scientists to the political arena, since today, far from the humanities, the Peruvian political parties are only political companies, prey to corruption, improvisation and clientelism.

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.

If one takes the third position on religion and modern science, life will become difficult (perhaps even unbearable). In this case, we must not only distrust the ideology of the modern (definitely non-Christian, often directly anti-Christian) society, but also the world itself, which, if we think about it, is pushed onto so heavily onto us by the entire structure of upbringing, education, study, and culture that we are convinced that it is reality, nature, existence, truth. Once can debate an ideology (although this is difficult, if it is a totalitarian one like all Modern ideologies: communism, fascism, and the most totalitarian one of all, liberalism!), but to distrust one’s own sensory organs, to see that which ‘isn’t’ behind ‘natural’ phenomena (as was said to us by our parents and teachers), i.e. the cosmological power of angels and demons is a direct road to insanity.

I do not know the answer to this question, as it can neither be easy nor understood. I can only express certain assumptions without being confident in neither their effectivity nor their ability to change anything.

First, we must give ourselves the task of fundamentally researching the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. This demands effort, but it is the foundation of Christian thought. Without Plato, the fundamental theological theses of the Cappadocian school, or even the most fundamental teachings about the Trinity, creation, etc., to say nothing of the Aeropagites, asceticism, or hesychasm would have no foundation at all. The fundamentals of Christian theology were developed by the Platonists. And it is Platonic cosmology (with Christian corrections) that was patched into this philosophy. In the Christian context, this corpus is most clearly represented by the Aeropagites, in the West by Scotus Eriugena.

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.

According to Ultra-modernity, everything that is said now will be claimed wrong within, say, twenty years. Remember, though, that you will be a grandparent yourself. So, are you ready to be thrown in the trash can in your days of old? Or will you simply refuse to grow old, considering aging a disease and trying to stop it? Because these are the days we are living: we will have to work hard for the right of being both right and old.

There is a very simple test that you can make, even if you do not know much about Geopolitics or Political Philosophy, to see on what side you are. It goes like this: if your people/territory/identity accepts most tenets of the Western culture, will the best ways of your grandparents fade or will they blossom?

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.

Unlike Dugin, for Freedland there is only one truth in the world, which cannot be questioned at all. The British journalist completely ignores the so-called autonomy of the political, such as the fact that politics is not based on rationality, but on irrationality. As we learn from the German jurist Carl Schmitt, politics means acting to defend or impose a particular type of collective existence, beyond what is morally right or wrong and what is objectively true or false. Freedland is very surprised by the actual trend towards a «deeper and more bitter partisanship», but this fact only means that what is happening in countries like his own it’s simply the return of politics in contexts from which it was almost gone. Politics divides people into different groups, which are aggregated around a particular “speech”, or a particular “narration”, or, as Dugin teaches us, around a particular “truth”. To Trump’s supporters (like those of any other political leader) doesn’t matter if what their leader says is true or false; they only identify themselves in him and in his political view. So politicians like Trump are neither “engaging in post-truth politics” nor lying, but they are only making politics. Furthermore, Freedland should understand that in  politics there are indeed no  referees, but only players.  In fact, there are referees only when there is someone who commands on all the others and who has the monopoly of the truth.

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.

Christianity is that tradition whose metaphysical dimension has been studied least of all. This is quite a paradox since one would think that such a deep study of Christianity, the religion of the West, would attract all those interested in metaphysics and who, following Guénon, are trying to make sense of the most profound aspects of Tradition. Nevertheless, the disputes surrounding Christianity in Traditionalist circles are, as a rule, limited to fairly secondary, practical issues regarding the virtual initiation of the sacraments, the absence of an idea of cyclical time, etc. In all of this, one can see a tacit consensus among Traditionalists that Christianity is nothing more than a reduced, incomplete tradition whose esotericism has been practically lost, and whose metaphysical content cannot be detached from the dense veil of exoteric scholastic theology and the hazy subjective intuitions of mystics. All attempts to identify any consistency between the basic principles of Christianity and the conceptual categories of other, more metaphysically developed traditions (primarily Hinduism) have yielded rather poor results and have been based on strained interpretations and biased urges to arrive at any cost at conclusions which match Guénon’s own ideas.

Orthodoxy, for its part, despite having preserved ontological and metaphysical wholeness, from a certain time onward could no longer assert its metaphysical content (i.e., actual Christian metaphysics) in clear categories. Shortly after the “Palamite disputes” when Orthodox esotericism experienced its last dazzling rise in history, this line was somewhat marginalized and “frozen”, as priority was given to the exoteric sides of the Church. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Russian theologians and even secular philosophers, intuitively surmising the special metaphysical nature of Orthodoxy, attempted to formulate certain principles for reviving the forgotten dimension of this tradition. However, most of these attempts did not yield serious results since none of them were familiar with the works of Guénon. Hence why only now, in our opinion, is it possible to acquire adequate knowledge of the most important proportions of the structure of fully-fledged metaphysics.