Living with Our Tradition – Venner

Living in Accordance with Our Tradition

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Giuliano Adriano Malvicini

 

Every great people own a primordial tradition that is different from all the others. It is the past and the future, the world of the depths, the bedrock that supports, the source from which one may draw as one sees fit. It is the stable axis at the center of the turning wheel of change. As Hannah Arendt put it, it is the “authority that chooses and names, transmits and conserves, indicates where the treasures are to be found and what their value is.”

This dynamic conception of tradition is different from the Guénonian notion of a single, universal and hermetic tradition, which is supposedly common to all peoples and all times, and which originates in a revelation from an unidentified “beyond”. That such an idea is decidedly a-historical has not bothered its theoreticians. In their view, the world and history, for three or for thousand years, is no more than a regression, a fatal involution, the negation of of the world of what they call “tradition”, that of a golden age inspired by the Vedic and Hesiodic cosmologies. One must admit that the anti-materialism of this school is stimulating. On the other hand, its syncretism is ambiguous, to the point of leading some of its adepts, and not the least of them, to convert to Islam. Moreover, its critique of modernity has only lead to an admission of impotence. Unable to go beyond an often legitimate critique and propose an alternative way of life, the traditionalist school has taken refuge in an eschatological waiting for catastrophe. (1) That which is thinking of a high standard in Guénon or Evola, sometimes turns into sterile rhetoric among their disciples. (2) Whatever reservations we may have with regard to the Evola’s claims, we will always be indebted to him for having forcefully shown, in his work, that beyond all specific religious references, there is a spiritual path of tradition that is opposed to the materialism of which the Enlightenment was an expression. Evola was not only a creative thinker, he also proved, in his own life, the heroic values that he had developed in his work.

In order to avoid all confusion with the ordinary meaning of the old traditionalisms, however respectable they might be, we suggest a neologism, that of “traditionism”.

For Europeans, as for other peoples, the authentic tradition can only be their own. That is the tradition that opposes nihilism through the return to the sources specific to the European ancestral soul. Contrary to materialism, tradition does not explain the higher through the lower, ethics through heredity, politics through interests, love through sexuality. However, heredity has its part in ethics and culture, interest has its part in politics, and sexuality has its part in love. However, tradition orders them in a hierarchy. It constructs personal and collective existence from above to below. As in the allegory in Plato’s “Timaeus”, the sovereign spirit, relying on the courage of the heart, commands the appetites. But that does not mean that the spirit and the body can be separated. In the same way, authentic love is at once a communion of souls and a carnal harmony.

Tradition is not an idea. It is a way of being and of living, in accordance with the Timaeus’ precept that “the goal of human life is to establish order and harmony in one’s body and one’s soul, in the image of the order of the cosmos.” Which means that life is a path towards this goal.

In the future, the desire to live in accordance with our tradition will be felt more and more strongly, as the chaos of nihilism is exacerbated. In order to find itself again, the European soul, so often straining towards conquests and the infinite, is destined to return to itself through an effort of introspection and knowledge. Its Greek and Apollonian side, which are so rich, offers a model of wisdom in finitude, the lack of which will become more and more painful. But this pain is necessary. One must pass through the night to reach the dawn.

For Europeans, living according to their tradition first of all presupposes an awakening of consciousness, a thirst for true spirituality, practiced through personal reflection while in contact with a superior thought. One’s level of education does not constitute a barrier. “The learning of many things”, said Heraclitus, “does not teach understanding”. And he added: “To all men is granted the ability to know themselves and to think rightly.” One must also practice meditation, but austerity is not necessary. Xenophanes of Colophon even provided the following pleasant instructions: “One should hold such converse by the fire-side in the winter season, lying on a soft couch, well-fed, drinking sweet wine, nibbling peas: ‘Who are you among men, and where from?” Epicurius, who was more demanding, recommended two exercises: keeping a journal and imposing upon oneself a daily examination of conscience. That was what the stoics practiced. With the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, they handed down to us the model for all spirtual exercises.

Taking notes, reading, re-reading, learning, repeating daily a few aphorisms from an author associated with the tradition, that is what provides one with a point of support. Homer or Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, Montaigne or Nietzsche, Evola or Jünger, poets who elevate and memorialists who incite to distance. The only rule is to choose that which elevates, while enjoying one’s reading.

To live in accordance with tradition is to conform to the ideal that it embodies, to cultivate excellence in relation to one’s nature, to find one’s roots again, to transmit the heritage, to stand united with one’s own kind. It also means driving out nihilism from oneself, even if one must pretend to pay tribute to a society that remains subjugated by nihilism through the bonds of desire. This implies a certain frugality, imposing limits upon oneself in order to liberate oneself from the chains of consumerism. It also means finding one’s way back to the poetic perception of the sacred in nature, in love, in family, in pleasure and in action. To live in accordance with tradition also means giving a form to one’s existence, by being one’s own demanding judge, one’s gaze turned towards the awakened beauty of one’s heart, rather than towards the ugliness of a decomposing world.

Notes

(1) Generally speaking, the pessimism intrinsic to counter-revolutionary thought – from which Evola distinguishes himself – comes from a fixation with form (political and social institutions), to the detriment of the essence of things (which persist behind change).

(2) The academic Marco Tarchi, who has for a long time been interested in Evola, has criticized in him a sterile discourse peopled by dreams of “warriors” and “aristocrats” (cf. the journal “Vouloir”, Bruxelles, january-february 1991. This journal is edited by the philologist Robert Steuckers).

Excerpt from the book Histoire et traditions des Européens: 30,000 ans d’identité (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2002).

 

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Venner, Dominique. “Living in Accordance with Our Tradition.” Eurocontinentalism Journal, 5 Octoboer 2013. <http://eurocontinentalism.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/living-in-accordance-with-our-tradition-dominique-venner/ >.

 

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Guenon’s Critique of Modernity – Bertonneau

The Kali Yuga: René Guenon’s Critique of Modernity

By Thomas T. Bertonneau

 

 

The Conservative critique of modernity is by no means a recent phenomenon; it begins rather with the responders to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Jacobin followers in the late Eighteenth Century. It is sufficient in this regard to mention the names of Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) and Joseph de Maistre (1753 – 1821) and of their successors, S. T. Coleridge (1772 – 1834) and François-René de Chateaubriand (1768 – 1848), to suggest the range and richness of immediately post-revolutionary conservative discourse. In the Twentieth Century, José Ortega y Gassett (1883 – 1955), Oswald Spengler (1886 – 1936), and T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965), among others, continued in the line established by French réactionisme. In Ortega’s case and in Spengler’s this continuation entailed incorporating the iconoclastic skepticism of Friedrich Nietzsche into the discourse qualifiedly. In Eliot’s case, it meant rejecting Nietzsche’s atheism and taking up from Chateaubriand and Coleridge the apology for Christian revelation and for a theological, as opposed to a secular, view of existence. René Guénon (1886 – 1951) belongs by his dates with the generation of Ortega, Spengler, and Eliot; like Eliot, Guénon is a theist, but despite his favorable treatment of Catholicism he is less identifiably Christian than Eliot. Guénon sees Catholicism as the vessel of tradition in the West, but elsewhere tradition has other forms that are valid in their own contexts.[i]

Spengler’s Decline of the West undoubtedly made an impression on Guénon, much as it did on Guenon’s younger contemporary Julius Evola (1898 – 1974). Guénon and Evola knew each other and mutually influenced one other.[ii] Both Guénon and Evola together exemplify a branch of modern critical anti-modernism affiliated much more than casually with the Twentieth Century occult revival. Guénon at one time, in the 1920s, edited the chief French-language occult periodical, La Gnose or “Gnosis.” Yet Guénon, a fierce un-masker of religious mountebanks, can hardly be accused of employing mystic obscurantism to push a doctrinaire agenda. Guénon’s interest in occult topics, even more than Evola’s, strikes one as rigorous and objective. As for Guénon’s awareness of ideological deformations of reality, it ran to the acute. The driving force of deformation, in Guénon’s analysis as in Evola’s, is the stultifying massiveness of modern society, with its conformism on an unprecedented scale, and its receptivity to oratorical manipulation.

I. Guénon’s study Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion (1921) offers a useful entry into the man’s view. This comprehensive account of Helena Blavatsky (1831 – 1891) and her idiosyncratic cult also serves valuably as a study of modern ersatz-religion in general, delving as it does beyond Blavatsky and Theosophy into related sectarian developments, some of which exhibit a distinctly political character. Guénon never uses the term Gnosticism pejoratively in Theosophy, where it designates only a species of ancient theological speculation. Anyone familiar with Eric Voegelin’s usage of the same term will, however, recognize that Guénon frequently addresses the identical phenomenon of antinomian rebellion, motivated by libido dominandi and expressing itself in apocalyptic language, as addressed by Voegelin. Such self-aggrandizing rebellion, which would impose itself on the whole world, attempts to disguise its libidinousness under the banner of sweeping moral imperatives. Crusading slogans of this type make an appeal to the compensatory self-righteousness of the frustrated and resentful. According to Guénon, Blavatsky’s movement belongs generically to the revolt of distorted moral righteousness against nature; specifically it belongs to the type of destructive petulance that he denominates under the term mystic socialism, a peculiar development of Western civilization in the early Nineteenth Century.

The Blavatsky phenomenon thus serves for Guénon as a case study with broad implications beyond its peculiarities. In the chapter in Theosophy on “The Principle Points of Theosophical Teaching,” in a discussion of reincarnation in Blavatsky’s thought, Guénon writes that, “most revolutionaries [of the 1830s and 40s] were ‘mystics’ in the worst sense of the word, and everyone knows of the extravagances occasioned among them by the theories of Fourrier, Saint-Simon, and others of this kind.” Guénon echoes numerous others in his insight. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Anatole France, all note-worthily perceived the same overlap between radical leftwing politics and what Guénon calls “pseudo-mystical aspirations.” Hawthorne writes about political religiosity in The Blithedale Romance (1852); Conrad in Under Western Eyes (1911); James in The Princess Casamassima (1886); and France, using sacrificial terminology and borrowing not a little from de Maistre, in The Gods Will Have Blood (1912). The convergence of judgment bolsters the plausibility of the observation.[iii]

Where Voegelin, for his part, commented on a pronounced mystic strain in the writings of Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, and others Guénon commented on a pronounced political strain in modern mysticism, taking Theosophy as his main instance. Voegelin would have agreed with Guénon’s observation that a “restless and misguided religiosity,” coupled with evangelical “eagerness” to propagate doctrine, animates much of what is characteristically modern in both religion and politics, Voegelin having made similar observations in his own work. Guénon even anticipates Voegelin in his assertion that radical preaching, whether for the advancement of socialism or for the disestablishment of authority, invariably employs “a sentimental and ‘consoling’ moralism,” just as in modern liberal oratory, with its parade of alleged victims of iniquity. Such “moralism” finds fertile ground in the varieties of Protestantism, especially in its Puritan offshoots, like Unitarianism. “The modernist mentality and the Protestant mentality,” Guénon writes, “differ only in nuance,” both being directed at an ancien régime, or religious establishment, denounced as intolerable; both being moralistic; and both being politically messianic.

Theosophy, in Guénon’s analysis, exhibits in its organization the telltale features of a political cabal. Not only did Blavatsky and her collaborators conduct their activities in clandestine and conspiratorial ways, but also Theosophy articulated itself as the inner party/outer party configuration noticeable in Communist organizations. In this way, by recruiting a large exoteric enrollment, the actual ruling minority provides itself with an instrument of willing drones and propagandists. Idealism finds its locus in the movement in the large following. The inner circle, by contrast, aware of its own manipulative character and jealous of its privileges, quickly becomes cynical if it were not so from the beginning; it extracts money from the membership and delegates to volunteers the workaday and unsavory tasks that it prefers not to undertake directly on its own. In a chapter on “The Oath in Theosophy,” Guénon writes, “a secret society is not necessarily a society that conceals its existence or that of its members, but is above all a society that has secrets, whatever their nature.” The secrets might be absurdities, as was the case with many Theosophical secrets; but by pledging the inner-circle to keeping the secrets, on pain of denunciation, the organization inculcates obedience – the real objective of what otherwise might appear so much pointless flummery.

The heart of Guénon’s History of a Pseudo-Religion consists of its twenty-seventh through twenty-ninth chapters – “Theosophical Moralism,” “Theosophy and Protestantism,” “The Political Role of the Theosophical Society” – and its “Conclusion.” In these sections of the book, Guénon begins to abstract from the mass of details concerning the peccadilloes of Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott, Annie Besant, and the other capital mountebanks of the cult. Under the topic of “moralism,” Guénon remarks that while a vaguely Christian “universal brotherhood” had been a stated goal of Theosophical activity, Blavatsky steadily described her many social enterprises as incompatible with “confessional differences.” Blavatsky’s enterprises were nevertheless, as Guénon writes, “in direct competition with charitable institutions having a confessional character.” Theosophy resembles in its practical activity the socialism contemporary with it, not least in seeing itself as the opposition to constituted religion, from which it wishes to recruit away the membership; and after that in its aggressive and imperious character, expressed in crusades of shaming and prohibition.[iv]

According to Guénon, “Humanitarianism, pacifism, anti-alcoholism, and vegetarianism [are] ideas that are at root sentimental.” In appropriating these themes Theosophy shows itself to be thoroughly informed by “the essentially ‘moralistic’ mentality of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism,” just as Fabian socialism was. The modern moralization of politics undoubtedly runs in train with the modern politicization of religion. Theosophy reveals much about the generics of modern agitation and complaint: Modern sentiment-driven prohibition-crusades, Guénon writes, organize themselves for “puerile ends.” Yet the crusaders also expect, when they have succeeded in imposing their prohibitions universally, that the event will transform the world. One recalls Fourier’s belief that on the accomplishment of the global Phalanstery the seas would turn to lemonade. Such “pietism” reacts to principled resistance by amplifying its wont as an authoritarian stance.

Because Christianity is an ethos of freedom, all “moralist” – that is to say, “immanentist” – programs “must logically become anti-Christian,” hence also despotic. There is a syllogistic connection, Guénon argues, between a movement “which does not even admit the divinity of Christ,” and the “messianic and millenarist” themes that predominate among “contemporary pragmatists and intuitionists.” The first is the premise and the others are variants of the conclusion.

II. In the term pragmatist Guénon implicates the psychologist William James and in the term intuitionist, the philosopher Henri Bergson. That Guénon yokes James and Bergson with Blavatsky and Besant will outrage many a sensibility. Yet Bergson in fact yoked himself to James, whom he first met in London in 1908 and whom he had quoted approvingly as early as 1889 in Time and Free Will; James repaid that compliment twenty years later in A Pluralistic Universe. James’ best-known book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), might seem somewhat anti-modern, validating as it does visionary events and a type of non-empirical knowledge. In Guénon’s view, however, as he expresses it in his keynote Crisis of the Modern World (1927) Jamesian pragmatism merely exemplifies the modern tendency to emphasize action over contemplation and instrumentality over knowledge. Guenon remarks how under the Protestant dispensation religion descends towards two privative states, “moralism” and “sentimentality,” until it dwindles down to jejune “religiosity.” Guénon writes: “To this final stage [of dispirited religion] correspond theories such as that of the ‘religious experience’ of William James, which goes to the point of finding in the ‘subconscious’ man’s means of entering into communication with the divine”; thus “a limited God [of subjective rather than transcendental experience] is stipulated as being more ‘advantageous’ than an infinite God.”[v]

As for Bergson, he too according to Guénon is “anti-metaphysical,” his “reality” corresponding blandly “to a vaguely defined sensory order… conceived as something essentially changing and unstable.” But if everything were “change” no possibility of knowledge would exist; nor could intuition have an object, not even itself.[vi]

Guénon wrote The Crisis of the Modern World to summarize his encyclopedic assessment, shared by such illustrious contemporaries as Ortega and Spengler, and canvassing every aspect of life, that Western civilization had entered a phase of terminal deliquescence. Guénon saw in the modern era not merely the age of the vulgate flouting itself en masse, as did Ortega, or of Culture fossilizing into Civilization, as did Spengler: He discerned the “Kali Yuga,” the “Dark Age” of willful havoc, borrowing the label from Hindu scriptures. Thus: “The human cycle [Sanskrit: Manvantara] is divided into four periods marking so many stages during which the primordial spirituality becomes gradually more obscured; these are the same periods that the ancient traditions of the West called the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages. We are now in the fourth age… and have been so already… for more than six thousand years.” (“The Dark Age” is the title of the book’s first chapter.)

The sequence of metallic ages comes from Hesiod’s Works and Days (Eighth Century BC). Hesiod laments having been born into the Iron Age, saying, “Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards”; Hesiod’s catalogue of prevailing evils encompasses the triumph of “envy” and the dissolution of justice in selfish claims.

Describing modernity in terms similar to those in Hesiod’s complaint, Guénon refers to such phenomena as “occlusion,” “dispersion in pure multiplicity,” and “progressive materialization” as traits of the times. Guénon traces the remote origin of the specifically modern crisis to the Greek world of two centuries later than Hesiod, particularly to the differentiation of philosophy (self-denominated and as such) from traditional wisdom. In its Pythagorean etymology, as the “love of wisdom,” philosophy connoted modestly “the initial disposition required for the attainment of wisdom,” a “preliminary and preparatory stage.” Soon, however, “the perversion… ensued that consisted in taking this transitional stage for an end in itself and in seeking to substitute ‘philosophy’ for wisdom.” Such arrogance generated “a pretended wisdom that was purely human and therefore entirely of the rational order, and that took the place of true, traditional, supra-rational, and ‘non-human’ wisdom.” These events reflect, in small, and likewise forecast the larger crisis, which Guénon characterizes as inevitable. “The reason [for their inevitability] is that the development of any manifestation implies a gradually increasing distance from the principle from which it proceeds.”[vii]

Tendencies like sophism (egocentric) and skepticism (epistemologically nihilistic) gradually undermined the foundations of Greco-Roman civilization, Guénon opines. Modern consensus-scholarship takes the dominance of Stoicism and Epicureanism over the views of the imperial upper classes as signifying progress in rationality. Guénon assesses the same transformation contrarily as showing “to what point intellectuality had declined.” He writes: “The ancient, sacred doctrines… had degenerated through… lack of understanding into [actual] ‘superstitions’ [that is to say] things which, having lost their meaning, survived for their own sake merely as manifestations.” When the Gothic tribes belatedly dismantled the western Imperium, they did little more in Guénon’s view than put the period to a sentence long completed. The ensuing Gothic Christianity represents for Guénon a temporary positive “readjustment” to tradition. The so-called Renaissance, which follows the Middle Ages “was in reality not a rebirth but the death of many things,” so much so that in respect of the medieval mind modernity is “unable to understand its intellectuality.” Together the Renaissance and the Reformation correspond with “the disruption of Christendom” and they therefore together mark “the starting-point of the modern crisis” in a “definitive rupture with the traditional spirit.”[viii]

Modernity invariably caricatures the Middle Ages as socially and technically stagnant, in contrast to itself, which it conceives as meritoriously active. The modern mentality chiefly demands “change,” which, in a mood of self-congratulation, modern people call dynamism or progress. But, as Guénon writes in the chapter on “Knowledge and Action,” “change, in the widest sense of the word, is unintelligible and contradictory”; thus no society can actually predicate meaningful order purely on “change.” Quite the opposite, constant “change” is indistinguishable from anarchy, toward which all agitating trends like “humanism,” “individualism” and “materialism” lead or so Guénon believes. In the chapter on “Individualism,” Guénon defines that sacrosanct term as, in fact, “the negation of any principle higher than individuality, and the consequent reduction of civilization, in all its branches, to purely human elements.” Individualism existed in ancient society without ever becoming the dominant ethos, but with humanism and Protestantism it broke its fetters and became the defining omniprevalent motif.

For Guénon, Florentine humanism corresponds to Luther’s schismatic rebellion with a Latinate accent – an insight, one might add, that a calm re-reading of Pico’s famous Oration will support. Both movements position themselves resentfully as anti-Catholic and anti-traditional. Florentine neo-Platonism is of the very late, magical variety. As for Protestantism as such, The Crisis classifies it under the formula of “individualism as applied to religion.” Guénon puts it this way: “Protestantism, like the modern world, is built upon mere negation, the same negation of principles that is the essence of individualism.”

III. Much of the refraichement in Guénon’s work comes from its author’s forthright judgment, his judgment of Protestantism furnishing a signal specimen. In The Crisis, Guénon goes on to say that, once it had undergone the Protestant transformation, “The modern outlook was bound to reject all spiritual authority in the true sense of the word, namely authority that is based on the supra-human order, as well as any traditional organization.” One can easily imagine the faculty of a contemporary philosophy department squirming in response to Guénon’s words or bursting into demonstration of outrage. The ire would be unanimous. But that is precisely the paradox that Guénon’s analysis of modernity reveals: In the vaunted individualism noticeable individuality swiftly ceases to exist; a welter of contending subjects replace it, who, in their egocentric contentiousness, soon resemble one another indistinguishably. Guénon has the temerity to write: “Protestantism denied the authority of the organization qualified to interpret legitimately the religious tradition of the West and in its place claimed to set up ‘free criticism,’ that is to say any interpretations resulting from private judgment, even that of the ignorant and incompetent, and based exclusively on the exercise of human reason.” Having validated the subjective, the Protestant or modern mind has no criterion by which it might reject any opinion; so it embraces the opposite and declares a regime of mandatory relativism in ideas and moeurs. From this turn-around arises the social, cultural, and epistemological chaos of the modern age.

Readers of The Crisis, especially of the chapter on “Social Chaos,” must remind themselves every few paragraphs that the writing dates from over eighty years ago, so aptly does it depict existing circumstances in 2010. Guénon denounces “the pseudo-principle of… ‘equality,’” which as he says, “almost all of our contemporaries blindly accept.” Along with pseudo-principles there are “pseudo-ideas” such as “progress” and “democracy,” which have “nothing in common with the intellectual order.” These “false ideas” are, properly speaking, “suggestions,” rooted in sentiment, whose “contagious” character endows them with propagandistic effectiveness; these “verbalisms” are the “idols” of the contemporary masses. As for democracy, “The higher cannot proceed from the lower, because the greater cannot proceed from the lesser.” Guénon’s analysis of mob-behavior (“a sort of general psychosis”) owes something to Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd (1895). Guénon would return to the basic plan of The Crisis in 1945, enlarging the scale of the presentation, with The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, reading whose pages is, if possible, an even more powerful experience than reading those of The Crisis.

The great “signs of the times” in 1945 offered themselves in the wrecked cities of Europe and Japan, the “liberated” concentration camps and POW camps, the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe all the way to Vienna, and the new omen of the mushroom cloud. The world’s victorious governments and their eager servants, the agencies of the free press, hastened to call the concatenation of these things “peace” – a “verbalism” which when seen starkly against its background becomes suggestive of actual dementia. Guénon had written The Reign of Quantity during the conflict yet tellingly and deliberately the book barely mentions the war. Eschewing the topical, Guénon returns to his patient diagnosis of modern intellectual and cultural degradation, always keen to reveal the origin of modern perversity. Vital – which is to say, traditional – civilizations acknowledge quality as superior to quantity; such civilizations eschew quantity for its own sake and thus often appear to modern people to have lived in material poverty. The modern idea of the Middle Ages corresponds to this prejudice, which in its turn indicates the impoverishment of modern thinking.[ix]

For Guénon the idea of “democracy” belongs ineradicably to the mentality that values quantity over quality, so much so that it despises the latter – in the social, moral, and esthetic senses – for being incompatible with the so-called equality. It is this, equality, which supplies that mentality’s overriding desideratum. Guénon steadfastly refuses to allow any dignity to the word “democracy,” which he takes as synonymous with modernity’s mad insistence on equalizing all human achievement at the lowest level, the only level at which such a project could come near to completing itself. Thus in the chapter on “The Hatred of Secrecy,” Guénon addresses the pedagogical folly that tries to bring the totality of knowledge and every associated practice “within the reach of all.” Nowadays conservative commentary refers to such programs under the names of “dumbing down” and “affirmative action,” which it would locate as recent developments. Guénon sees the process as co-incipient with Protestant and Revolutionary spitefulness against constituted authority in any domain. Guénon writes: “The modern mentality… cannot bear any secret or even any reserve,” but “such things appear [to it] only as ‘privileges.’” The modern mentality again despises “any kind of superiority” of intellect or mastery because the fact that these things require preparation, capacity, and attunement “is just what ‘egalitarianism’ so obstinately denies.”

Guénon’s Reign makes a telling comparison with another apocalyptic book, H. G. Wells’ Mind at the End of its Tether, like The Reign written during the war and published in 1945. Wells (1866 – 1946), the great prophet of material civilization and “progress,” suddenly knows what Guénon has long known: “The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that, within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life, not simply human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning.” Wells writes of “the abrupt revelation of a hitherto unsuspected upward limit to quantitative material adjustability.” But Wells, militantly secular in his lifelong orientation, cannot grasp that his own sudden disorientation stems from the very attitude that his career successfully promoted. What dawns belatedly on Wells as a mysterious and abrupt alteration presents itself to Guénon only as the inevitable outcome of a long trend. An earlier book by Wells, The Work Health and Happiness of Mankind (1931), is an extravagant instance of what Guénon means by “The Reign of Quantity.”

In the chapter in The Reign on “The Illusion of ‘Ordinary Life,’” Guénon writes, “Materialists, with all their boasted ‘good sense’ and all the ‘progress’ of which they proudly consider themselves to be the most finished products… are really only [people] in whom certain faculties have become atrophied to the extent of being completely abolished.” What materialists like Wells call “normal” is, from a traditional perspective, quite paltry and abnormal. A world organized purely on material lines – as Wells and those of his convictions first prescribed and then realized – exists “as it were in an eminently unstable state of equilibrium.” Hence those mushroom clouds. Unsurprisingly then “the world has even now reached a point where the security of ‘ordinary life,’ on which the whole outward organization of the modern world has rested up till now, runs serious risks of being troubled by unanticipated ‘interferences.’” Those last phrases resemble the opening sentence from The Mind at the End of its Tether previously quoted, but the shock of an unexpected discovery is entirely absent from Guénon’s prose.

IV. Wells, about whom much in a positive way could be said, nevertheless serves as an exemplar of the modern, anti-traditional mentality and thus also as a useful counter-figure to Guénon; indeed, at the end of his life, Wells might be said to have encountered himself uncannily, with The Mind at the End of its Tether and the less pessimistic but equally quirky Happy Turning testifying to the event. Knowledge of Wells helps in understanding Guénon’s diagnosis of modernity in another way, for, having been raised by a Methodist mother, a good deal of righteous evangelism remained in Wells’ makeup even after he rejected any notion of God and adopted as one of his hobbies the making of nasty attacks on organized religion. Guénon argues that modernity is a deviation from but also a deviation of religion or at any rate from and of the “sacred” – the realm of the “profane” being the same as the realm of matter and of quantity. Several French contemporaries of Guénon saw socialism as a Christian heresy, not least Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931) and Henri de Lubac (1896 – 1991). Much more recently the American Paul Gottfried (born 1941) has argued that political correctness is a continuation of Protestant Nineteenth-Century social crusades. The distance between Gottfried’s view as expressed in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (2002) and Guénon’s view either in The Crisis or The Reign is hardly great; both men remark the intolerant, dogmatic character of “liberal” crusades and the appeal of those crusades to base emotions rather than to intellect.

The liberal professoriate, from which Gottfried is maximally distant, creates theories aplenty that have a superficially intellectual appearance and that deploy arcane terminology, but in the very thickness of the verbalism one can discern Guénon’s themes of “materialization” or “solidification” as keynote characteristics of the prevailing situation.

Wells’ bulking Work Health and Happiness again offers itself as emblematic: It is a two-volume bludgeon of statistics of its day with audacious quantitative prescriptions for realizing global socialism. In The Reign, in the chapter on “Cain and Abel,” Guénon lists, as figuring among the consequences that “materialization” and “solidification” have devolved on the social order, that regime “in which everything is counted, recorded and regulated,” as he writes. This “mania for census-taking,” which Guenon associates with the centrality of statistics in modern thinking, belongs to “the endless multiplication of administrative interventions in all the circumstances of life.” The sixty-five years since The Reign’s appearance have only strengthened the legitimacy of Guénon’s lexical choice of the term mania.” Thus whatever else they might be (articulating that would entail a long list of invidious motives), both “diversity,” on the one hand, and “climate change policy,” on the other, to name but two Twenty-First Century political programs, are maniacally quantitative and anti-traditional.

In describing bureaucratic number-fixation Guénon writes clairvoyantly that: “These interventions [in tradition] must naturally have the effect of insuring the most complete possible uniformity between individuals, all the more so because it is… a ‘principle’ of all administration to treat individuals as mere numerical units all exactly alike… thus constraining all men to adjust themselves… to the same ‘average’ level.”

The tyranny of quantity, it will be seen, overlaps in the Venn diagram of Guénon’s commentary almost entirely with the tyranny of equality; any manifestation of quality, as such, then looms as the enemy of both. Because an egalitarian dispensation can only be achieved at the price of quality in itself, all modern intellectual activity will be constrained by mandatory simplification toward numerical dumbness. This engrossment of thinking – indeed of the perception and experience from which thinking derives its material – is also a topic in The Reign. Traditional society, Guenon argues, being hierarchical is also initiatory. Entrance into the guilds and brotherhoods of traditional society occurs by rigorous selection and arduous training, thus assuring that those who fill the established offices are those best suited to discharge the work that their appointed stations entail. Guénon writes: “Initiation, in whatever form it may appear, is that which really incarnates the ‘spirit’ of ‘supra-human’ states.” For the rebellious mentality that spurns hierarchy, “initiation is the thing that must be opposed.” Modern society, in Guénon’s vocabulary, realizes its program through “counter-initiation,” which strives to effect “a change in the general mentality” and the concomitant “destruction of all traditional institutions.”

Protestantism (once again), rationalism, and humanism re-enter the discussion. Guénon sees them all as agitating, corrosive forms of “counter-initiation,” most obviously in the cases of Calvin and Luther, but no less perniciously in other later non-religious and anti-religious discourse. According to Guénon, “the most astonishing thing is the speed with which it has been possible to induce Westerners to forget everything connected with the existence of a traditional civilization in their countries.” The modern self-congratulatory enlightenment of the European and North American nations therefore corresponds, as Guenon observes, with “total incomprehension of the Middle Ages and everything connected with them.” This forgetfulness is not a spontaneous or natural development, but the result rather of deliberate hostility against the traditional past – of the propaganda, in the exercise of which modern movements, whether political, cultural, sectarian, or scientific excel.

The “Reign of Quantity” requires that its constituency live unconnected with any past in a kind of perpetual present, on the multiplying distractions of which the untutored mind remains stupidly fixed. Guénon remarks how industry fills life with things, objects and devices, which monopolize attention, and which assimilate individuals to the pattern of the consumer. In our own time the variety and fascination – and the idiocy – of these things have only increased. The trend toward “materialization” thus converges with the trend toward mental stultification and, in the stultifying vocabulary of modern politics, “democracy.” Having abolished the normal and the traditional, modernity offers counterfeits in the form of “pseudo-religion,” “pseudo-nature,” and even “pseudo-comfort.” Thus the modern regimes organize “civic or lay ‘pseudo-rites’ that… provide the ‘masses’ with a purely human substitute for real religious rites.” Such counterfeits include the reintroduction of “nature,” or what is supposed to be nature, as an object of worship. Guénon’s analysis of the counterfeit anticipates Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the Simulacrum although as far as I know no one has ever called attention to Guénon’s priority in this respect.

Many literate people nowadays have the gnawing sense that a crackup of the world is at hand. This sense too belongs to The Reign, in whose pages Guénon predicts repeatedly that the “descent” into the nullity of pure quantity is about to hit its lowest depth, its stopping point, at which moment the Kali Yuga will have completed its cycle and a new, opposite motion will begin. Reading Guénon, many literate people will very likely experience some nervousness about the mystic-mythic vocabulary with which he articulates his philosophy of tradition. It is significant, however, that someone as temperamentally opposite to Guénon as was Wells had, at the end of his life, a vision of modern fraudulence as stark as Guénon’s. Given then the total jejuneness of everything modern, including the scrubbed-clean, anti-transcendent vocabulary of positivism; given the vapidity and imposture of Foucault-speak and Derrida-speak, both designed to destroy thinking; given, I say, the rampant perniciousness of the socialistic-egalitarian experiment in all its guises – Guénon’s insistence on the archaic, the traditional language of symbol and myth begins to appear in a new light as both useful and urgent. Guénon displays a kinship in this regard with another explorer of tradition, Richard Wagner.

Notes

[i] Guénon was sympathetic with Islam, especially with the Sufi movement of Islam; he underwent initiation in Islamic mysteries and took an Arabic name.

[ii] Evola wrote a book about Guénon, René Guénon: a Teacher for Modern Times (1933). Other writers who have addressed Guénon are: Frithjof Schuon, Paul Chacornac, Robin Waterfield, and Jean Borella.

[iii] I am, of course, aware that France later became a Communist, an event proving only the vast capacity of human beings for self-delusion and oblivious self-contradiction. France’s novel La Revolte des Anges (1914) is explicitly Gnostic, using actual Gnostic nomenclature; but it is also Marxian and revolutionary, making it a complete turn-around from The Gods will have Blood.

[iv] In the United States, “Spiritism,” Feminism, and the Temperance Movement were all related; their chief personae were the same.

[v] I assess James more positively than Guénon does although I prefer the James of The Varieties of Religious Experience to the James of Pragmatism.

[vi] Hence in Heraclitus, the symbol of the river, ever-changing, on the one hand, and the symbol of the Logos, or eternal idea on the other, with the latter making it possible for the investigating subject to recognize that the river is one and the same even though it is always changing.

[vii] By “manifestation,” Guénon means revelation – of metaphysical truth, vouchsafed by the equivalent of deity, to truth’s original human codifiers. Spengler too wrote that every “Great Culture” begins in a mystic vision, but in Spengler’s scheme revelation is immanent, effective but subjective; for Guénon the source of revelation is living, an entity, and the basis of existence. It is quite real.

[viii] Spengler refers to the Renaissance as an “imbroglio.”

[ix] For Guénon, the Middle Ages represented the last normal phase of Western Civilization.

 

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Bertonneau, Thomas T. “The Kali Yuga: René Guenon’s Critique of Modernity.” The Brussels Journal, 13 December 2010. <http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4603 >.

 

Democracy: Representative & Participatory – Benoist

Democracy: Representative & Participatory

By Alain de Benoist

 

Representative democracy — essentially liberal and bourgeois — is the most widespread political regime in the Western world today. Representatives are authorized by election to transform the popular will into acts of government. Thus we tend to think of “democracy” and “representation” almost as synonyms. The history of ideas, however, does not at all support this.

The great theorists of representation are Hobbes and Locke. For both, the people, in effect, contractually delegates its sovereignty to governments. For Hobbes, this delegation is total. But it by no means leads to democracy: on the contrary, it invests the monarch with absolute power (the “Leviathan”). For Locke delegation is conditional: the people agrees to give up its sovereignty only in exchange for guarantees concerning fundamental rights and individual freedoms. Popular sovereignty is not so much lost between elections as suspended, so long as the government respects the terms of the contract.

Rousseau, for his part, holds that democracy is incompatible with any representative regime. The people, for him, does not contract with the sovereign. The prince is only the executive of the people, which remains the sole holder of legislative power. He is not even invested with the power belonging to the general will; indeed, it is rather the people that governs through him. Rousseau’s argument is very simple: if the people is represented, then its representatives hold power, in which case it is no longer sovereign. The sovereign people is a “collective being” that can only be represented by itself. To renounce its sovereignty would be like renouncing its freedom, i.e., destroying itself. As soon as the people elect its representatives, “it is a slave, it is nothing” (On the Social Contract, III, 15). Freedom, as an inalienable right, implies its full exercise, otherwise there cannot be true political citizenship. Under these conditions, popular sovereignty can only be undivided and inalienable. Any representation thus constitutes an abdication.

If it is granted that democracy is the regime based on the sovereignty of the people, then one must accept Rousseau’s argument.

Democracy is the form of government that corresponds to the principle of the identity of the ruled and the ruler, i.e., the popular will and the law. This identity derives from the nominal equality of the citizens, i.e., from the fact that they are all equally members of the same political unity. To say that the people is sovereign, not essentially but by vocation, means that it is from the people that the public power and the laws proceed. The rulers can thus be only agents of execution, who must conform to the ends determined by the general will. The role of the representative must be reduced as much as possible, the representative mandate losing all legitimacy as soon as it relates to ends or projects not corresponding to the general will.

Exactly the opposite is the case today. In liberal democracies, primacy is given to representation, and more precisely to whomever incarnates representation, i.e., the representative. The representative, far from being merely an “agent” expressing the will of his voters, is the very incarnation of this will by the mere fact of being elected. Election justifies him acting no longer according to the will of those who elected him, but according to his own will—in other words, he regards himself as authorized by election to do whatever he judges best.

This system is the object of those criticisms that have always been raised against parliamentarism, criticisms that assume new urgency in current debates on the “democracy deficit” and the “crisis of representation.”

In the representative system, once the voter has delegated his political will to his representative by voting, power’s center of gravity inevitably resides in the representatives and the political parties that subsume them, and no longer in the people. The political class soon forms an oligarchy of professionals who defend their own interests (the “New Class”), in a general climate of confusion and unaccountability. Today, when decision-making power is increasingly allotted by nomination or co-optation rather than election, this oligarchy is further augmented by “experts,” senior officials, and technicians.

The rule of law, whose virtues liberal theorists regularly celebrate—despite all the ambiguities attached to this expression—seems unlikely to correct the situation. Consisting of an ensemble of procedures and formal legal rules, it is actually indifferent to the specific aims of politics. Values are excluded from its concern, thus leaving an open field for the confrontation of interests. Laws have authority solely because they are legal, i.e., in conformity with the constitution and the procedures provided for their adoption. Thus legitimacy is reduced to legality. This legalist-positivist conception of legitimacy encourages respect for institutions as such, as if they constituted ends in themselves, without the popular will being able to amend them and control their operation.

However, in democracy, the legitimacy of power does not depend solely on conformity to the law, or even conformity to the Constitution, but above all on conformity of governmental practices to the aims assigned by the general will. Thus the justice and the validity of the laws cannot lie entirely in the activity of the state or the legislation of the party in power. Likewise, the law’s legitimacy cannot be guaranteed by the mere existence of jurisdictional control: it is also necessary that the law be legitimate, that it answer to the citizens’ expectations, and that it serve the common good. Finally, one can speak of constitutional legitimacy only when the authority of the constituent power is recognized as always having the right to amend the laws’ form or contents. That is to say that the constituting power cannot be completely delegated or alienated, that it continues to exist and that its authority is higher than the Constitution and constitutional laws, even if these are based on it.

Obviously we can never completely escape representation, since the idea of a controlling majority encounters insurmountable difficulties in modern societies. Representation, which is never more than a makeshift, does not, however, exhaust the democratic principle. It can to a large extent be corrected by the implementation of participatory democracy, also called organic democracy or embodied democracy. Such a reorientation appears even more necessary today given the general evolution of society.

The crisis of institutional structures, the disappearance of the founding “grand narratives,” the growing disaffection of the electorate for conventional political parties, the revival of community life, the emergence of new social or political movements (ecological, regionalist, identitarian) whose common characteristic is less to defend negotiable interests than existential values—all these allow us to envision the possibility of recreating a fundamentally active citizenship.

The crisis of the nation state — due in particular to the globalization of economic life and the deployment of phenomena of planetary influence — causes for its part two modes of transcendence: at the top, through various attempts to recreate at the supranational level a coherence and efficiency in decision-making that would allow at least partial regulation of the globalization process; at the bottom, through the renewed importance of small political unities and local autonomies. These two tendencies — which not only do not oppose but actually complement and imply one another — offer a remedy for today’s democracy deficit.

But the political scene is still changing. On the right we are seeing the rupture of the old “hegemonic block” because capitalism can no longer maintain its alliance with the middle classes—due to its belated modernization, the evolution of production costs, and the transnationalization of capital accelerated by the crisis. At the same time that the middle classes feel disorientated if not threatened, the lower classes are increasingly disappointed by the governmental policies of a left that, after disavowing practically all its principles, tends to identify more and more with the interests of the upper middle class. In other words, the middle classes no longer feel represented by the parties of the right, while the popular elements feel abandoned and betrayed by the parties of the left.

Moreover, the effacement of old points of reference, the collapse of models, the disintegration of the great ideologies of modernity, the absolute power of a commercial system that (may) ensure the means of existence but not the meaning of life, raise finally the crucial question of the significance of man’s earthly existence, of the meaning of individual and collective life, in an age when the economy produces more and more goods and services with less and less labor, multiplying exclusions in a context already heavily marked by unemployment, precarious employment, fear of the future, insecurity, reactive aggressiveness, and tensions of all kinds.

All these factors call for an in-depth recasting of democratic practices that can take place only in terms of true participatory democracy. Indeed, in an increasingly “illegible” society, participatory democracy has the main advantage of eliminating or correcting the distortions caused by representation, ensuring greater conformity of the law to the general will, and founding a legitimacy without which institutional legality is mere show.

It is not possible to recreate such an active citizenship at the level of the great collective institutions (parties, trade unions, churches, armies, schools, etc.) for today they are all more or less in crisis and thus no longer able to perform their traditional functions of social integration and mediation. Nor can the control of power be the sole prerogative of political parties whose activity is too often reduced to clientelism. Today, participatory democracy can be only a grassroots democracy.

The purpose of grassroots democracy is not to generalize discussion to all realms of life, but rather — with the input of as many people as possible — to arrive at new decision-making procedures in conformity with the requirements of grassroots democracy and the aspirations of the citizens. This is not merely a matter of opposing “civil society” to the public sphere, which would amount to increasing private influence and giving up political initiative for obsolete forms of power. Rather, grassroots democracy works to make it possible for individuals to prove themselves as citizens, and not as members of the private sphere, while supporting as much as possible the multiplication and flourishing of new public spheres of initiative and responsibility.

The referendum procedure (which results either from government decision or popular initiative and which is either optional or obligatory) is only one form of direct democracy among others — one whose importance is perhaps overestimated. Let us stress once again that the real political principle of democracy is not that the majority decides, but that the people is sovereign. Voting per se is only a simple technical means of consulting and revealing opinion. This means that democracy is a political principle that should not be confused with the means it uses, any more than it is to be reduced to a purely arithmetic or quantitative idea. Citizenship is not exhausted by voting, but is present in all methods allowing one to give or refuse consent, to express refusal or approval. It is thus advisable to explore systematically all possible forms of active participation in public life, which are also forms of responsibility and personal autonomy, since public life conditions the daily existence of us all.

But participatory democracy is more than just political. It also has social import. By supporting relations of reciprocity, by allowing the re-creation of social bonds, it can help reconstitute today’s weakened organic solidarity, repairing a social fabric frayed by the rise of individualism, competition, and self-interest. Insofar as it produces elementary sociality, participatory democracy goes hand in hand with the rebirth of vibrant communities, the re-creation of solidarity in neighborhoods, districts, workplaces, etc.

This participatory conception of democracy is entirely opposed to the liberal legitimation of political apathy, which indirectly encourages abstention and leads to the reign of managers, experts, and technicians. Democracy, in the final analysis, rests less on the form of government per se than on people’s participation in public life, such that the maximum of democracy merges with the maximum of participation. To participate is to take part, to prove oneself as part of a unit or a whole, and to assume the active role that results from this membership. “Participation,” René Capitant says, “is the individual act of the citizen acting as a member of the popular collectivity.” One sees by this how much the concepts of membership, citizenship, and democracy are interdependent. Participation sanctions citizenship, which results from membership. Membership justifies citizenship, which allows participation.

Everyone knows the motto of the French republic: “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” If the liberal democracies have exploited the word “liberty,” if the former people’s democracies seized upon “equality,” then organic or participatory democracy, based on active citizenship and popular sovereignty, could well be the best way to respond to the imperative of fraternity.

Note

Alain de Benoist, “Démocratie représentative et démocratie participative,” in Critiques—Théoriques (Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme, 2002), 426–30. The translator wishes to thank Alain de Benoist for permission to translate and publish this essay, and Michael O’Meara for checking and editing the translation.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Democracy: Representative & Participatory.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 19-24. Text retrieved from: <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/democracy-representative-and-participatory/ >.

 

Dostoyevsky and Russia – Dugin

Dostoyevsky and the Metaphysics of St. Petersburg

By Alexander Dugin

Translated by Vladislav Ivanov

 

The Author Who Wrote Russia

Russia’s principal writer is the novelist Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky. Russian culture and its outlook accumulate in him, as if to some magic source. All the previous anticipates Dostoyevskiy, all the following results from him. No doubt he is Russia’s greatest national genius.

Dostoyevsky’s heritage is immense and almost all researchers agree upon the importance of his main novel, “Crime and Punishment”. If Dostoyevsky is the main author of Russia, “Crime and Punishment” is the main work of Russian literature and fundamental text of the Russian history.*

Consequently, there is nothing accidental or arbitrary about it, and there cannot be. Certainly this book must contain some mysterious hieroglyph, in which the whole Russian fate is concentrated. Deciphering that hieroglyph is the equivalent of attaining knowledge of the unfathomable Russian Mystery.

The Third Capital – The Third Rus

The novel is set in St. Petersburg. This fact, in itself, has a symbolic meaning. What is the sacred function of Petersburg in Russian history? By understanding this, we come near to Dostoyevskiy’s position.

St. Petersburg takes on sacred significance only in comparison with Moscow. Both capitals are bound up with each other by a ial cyclic logic, by a symbolic thread. Russia has had three capitals. The first one – Kiev – was the capital of a national, ethnically uniform state, situated on the periphery of the Byzantine Empire. That northern frontier formation did not play a very important civilizational or sacred role. A usual state for Aryan barbarians. Kiev is the capital of the ethnic Russ.

The second capital – Moscow – is something much more important. It took on a special significance at the moment of Constantinople’s fall, when Russ turned out to be the last Orthodox Christian Kingdom, the last Orthodox Christian Empire left.

Hence it follows: “Moscow is the Third Rome”. The idea of the Kingdom in the Orthodox Christian tradition has a special eschatological role: the State, by recognizing the completeness of the Church’s truth is, according to Tradition, the obstacle in the way of “Ruin’s son”, the hindrance to the advent of the “Antichrist”.

The Orthodox Christian State, constitutionally recognizing Orthodox Christianity’s truth and the Patriarch’s spiritual sway, is the “cathechon”, or “deterrent” (from Saint Paul the Apostle’s second Letter to the Thessalonians). The introduction of Patriarchate in Russ became possible only at the moment when the Byzantine Empire had fallen as a kingdom and, consequently, the Constantinopolitan Patriarch had lost his eschatological significance. For this significance is concentrated not just in the Orthodox Christian Church hierarchy, but in the Empire which recognizes the authority of that hierarchy. Hence follows the theological and eschatological significance of Moscow, of Moscow Russ. The Byzantine Empire’s fall signified, in the apocalyptic view of Orthodox Christianity, the approach of the “apostasy” period, of general recreancy. Only for a short time does Moscow turn out to be the Third Rome so as to postpone the Antichrist’s advent, to put off the moment when his arrival becomes a general, universal phenomenon. Moscow since then is the capital of an essentially new State. Not a national State, but a soteriological, eschatological, apocalyptic one. Moscow Russ, with its Patriarch and Orthodox Christian King (or Czar), is a Russ which is absolutely different from the Kievan one. It is no longer on the Empire’s periphery, but is the last stronghold of salvation, the Ark, the ground cleared for New Jerusalem to descend. “There will not be the Fourth one”.

St. Petersburg is the capital of the Russ which comes after the Third Rome. In some sense there is no such capital, there can’t be. “There won’t be a Fourth Rome”. St. Petersburg establishes the Third Russia. Third by quality, structure and sense. It is neither a national state, nor a soteriological ark. It is a strange titanic chimera, the ‘postmortem’ country, the nation that lives and develops in a space that is beyond history. Petersburg is a city of “Nav” (“Death’s incarnation”, Old Russian), a city of the reverse side. Hence follows the assonance of the Neva River (on which Petersburg is situated) and the Nav. The city of moonlight, water, strange buildings, alien to history’s rhythm, to national or religious aesthetics. The Petersburg period of Russian history was the third sense of its fate. That was a time of special Russians, of ones beyond the ark. The old believers were the last to embark the ark of the Third Rome by the christening fire which committed their huts together with them to flames.

Dostoyevsky is the writer of Petersburg. He is not intelligible without Petersburg. But Petersburg itself would remain in the virtual, illusive state without Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky revived it, made this enigmatic city actual, having had revealed its sense (only then does anything exist, when its sense shows through itself).

Only in Petersburg does Russian literature appear. The Kievan period is the period of epic legends. Moscow period is the time of soteriology and national theology.

Petersburg brings literature to Russia, the unholy rudiment of what used to be a valuable national thinking, the extolled trace of what has gone. Literature is a covering, a surface speck of sidereal waves, a vacuum, which is moaning with despair. Dostoyevsky heeded this call of emptiness so much that everything gone, erased, forgotten was, as it were, resurrected in his heroic spiritual doing.

Dostoyevsky is more than literature. He is theology, epic legend. Therefore his Petersburg seeks the idea, the sense. It constantly turns to the Third Rome. It agonizingly scrutinizes the sources of the nation.

The main character of “Crime and Punishment” is named Raskolnikov, being a direct reference to the Schism (or “Raskol”). Raskolnikov is a man of the Third Rome, “geworfen” (or “thrown”) into navi Petersburg. The suffering soul, which by a strange logic suddenly found himself after self-immolation in the damp labyrinth of the Petersburg streets, yellow walls, wet roadways and morose gray skies.

The Capital

The plot of “Crime and Punishment” is a structural analogue to Marx’s “Capital”: the prophecy of the coming Russian Revolution. It was simultaneously a draft to a new theology, a theology of being forsaken by God, what would become the main philosophical problem of the Twentieth Century. That theology could be called the “theology of Petersburg”, navi thoughts, the intellectualism of ghosts.

The story is extremely simple. The student Raskolnikov sharply senses the social reality as a revelation of evil, a special sensation that is so characteristic in some Gnostic, eschatological teachings.

The potassium cyanide of civilization. The degeneracy and the vice flourishes where the organic connections, spiritual meanings and anagogic spirals of hierarchies that ascend unimpeded to heaven, are lost. The perception of unholy reality. The insufferable loss of the “Third Rome”. The horror before the encounter with the universal Antichrist element, with Petersburg. Raskolnikov guesses absolutely correctly that the symbolic pole of evil is a perverted womanhood (Kali). That is that damned by religion loan capital, which equalizes the living with the lifeless and creates monsters. That is the decaying, degradation of the world. All this is the crone-usurer, the Baba-Yaga of the modern world, the Winter-Woman, Death, murderer. Out of her dirty place she spins Petersburg’s web, sending through its black streets Luzhins, Svidrigaylovs, dvorniks and Marmeladovs, the “black brothers”, secret agents of the capitalist sin.

The toils of the Underworld entangle taverns and brothels, dens of misery and ignorance, and stairwells and gateways plunged in semi-darkness. Because of her senile sorcery, the Sophia, God’s wisdom, turns to pitiful Sonechka with the yellow ticket. The hub of the wheel of Petersburg’s evil is found. Rodion Raskolnikov completes the ontological reconnoitering. Certainly, Raskolnikov is a communist. Though he is closer to the socialist-revolutionaries, to the narodniks. Certainly, he is familiar with the contemporary social teachings. He knows foreign languages and could have familiarized himself with Marx’s “Manifesto” or even with “Capital”. What is important is at the beginning of the “Manifesto”: “…a specter is wandering Europe…”. This is not a metaphor, it is a precise definition of that special mode of being that comes about after a society becomes unholy, after “God’s death”. From that time on we are in the world of wraiths, in the world of visions, chimeras, hallucinations, of navi plots.** For Russia this means “journeying from Moscow to Petersburg”, the incarnation into the city on the Neva, into the ghost-city. This incarnation could never be complete.

The communist specter makes all reality ghostly. Having settled in the consciousness of the student, who searches for the lost Logos, it plunges him into a current of distorted visions: there an old libertine drags a drunk teenage girl somewhere; there Marmeladov cries in a heart-rending way, after he has sold the last shawl of his lady-love to get money for alcohol; there demonic Svidrigaylov, the envoy of the web eternity, which is under the wardship of the usurer-crone, sidles toward Rodion’s pure sister. But is this a delusion? The ghost, having possessed the consciousness, in fact rids the unconsciousness. The reality unveiled is frightful, intolerable, but true. Is it evil to understand evil? Is it an illusion to reveal the illusory character of the world? Is it insanity to realize that the humankind lives according to the laws of ill logic? The ghost of Marxism, the narcotic of disclosure, the Gnostic call to uprising against the evil Demiurge… The bloody pain of these wounds is more acute than the image of a brightly lit hall, full of well-dressed couples, whirling in the dance.

Raskolnikov, killing the old crone, commits a paradigmatic gesture, carries out a Deed to which, in an archetypal way, the Praxis as Marxism perceives it, is reduced. Rodion Raskolnikov’s Deed is the act of the Russian Revolution, the summary of all Social Democratic, Narodnik and Bolshevik literature. This is a fundamental gesture of Russian history which just came about after Dostoyevsky, having been prepared long before him in enigmatic initial points of the national fate. All our history is divided into two parts – before the murder of the usurer-crone by Raskolnikov and after the murder. But being a phantasmal, supertemporal moment, it cast flashes forward and backward into time. It shows itself in peasant uprisings, in heresies, in Pugachov’s and Razin’s rebellions, in the split of the Orthodox Christian Church (Schism, Raskol), in the advent of the dark time (the events at the beginning of 17th Century Russia), in all the complicated, multi-stage, insatiable metaphysics of Russian Murder, which spread from the profundity of the initial Slavic birth to the Red Terror and Gulag. Any hand raised over a victim’s skull was impelled by a passionate, vague, profound outburst. It was participation in the Common Deed and its philosophy. Killing and Death brings near the Resurrection of the Dead.

We Russians are a blessed nation. Therefore all our manifestations – lofty and shabby, comely and terrifying – are sanctified by otherworldly senses, by rays of the otherworldly city, are washed by transcendent moisture. In the abundance of the national Grace the good and the evil are mixed, pour from one to another, and suddenly the dark lightens, whereas something white becomes a mere hell. We are as unknowable as the Absolute. We are a divine nation. Even our Crime is incomparably superior to some other’s virtue.

Dichotomy of the two

Between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Russian consciousness was in a strange way possessed with comprehending one of the ten commandments – “kill not”. They discussed it as if it were the Christianity essence. Theologians, revolutionaries, and terrorists constantly repeated it (Savinkov was mad for that commandment) as well as humanitarians, progressives, and conservatives. Both the theme and the argumentation around it were so important that it affected, to a considerable extent, all modern Russian consciousness. Although the significance of that formula faded with the advent of Bolsheviks, it reemerged at the end of the Soviet period and began to haunt intellectuals’ brains with the renewed force. “Kill not” is not an exactly Christian and New Testament commandment, but is the Judaic and Old Testament one. This is a part of the Law, the Torah, that regulates, as a whole, the exoteric, outer, social and ethical norms of Israeli popular life. That commandment doesn’t have any special significance. You can find something analogous in most traditions, in their social codes. In Hinduism the equivalent is called “ahimsa”, “non-violence”. This “kill not”, as well as the rest of the paragraphs of the Law, regulate human freedom, directing it to the stream which, according to the spirit of Tradition, belongs to the better part, to its “right-hand side”. In addition, it is significant that “kill not” does not have any absolute metaphysical sense. As well as all exoteric statues this commandment just serves with the others in keeping the collective existence in order and for preserving the community from falling into chaos (“The Law has committed nothing”, according to Saint Paul the Apostle). In principle, if one compares the Old Testament reality with the modern one, the formula to “kill not” approximately corresponds to the inscription “smoking is forbidden”, put up in the theater’s foyer. Smoking in a theater is not allowed, it is not good. When some strained spectators begin to smoke, it’s a state of emergency for the usherettes. Such people are condemned by public opinion and subjected to repression by the servants of justice.

It is very significant that the Old Testament is full of defiant non-observance of that commandment. Murder is all around. It is committed by not only sinners, but also by righteous men, kings, anointed sovereigns, even prophets. Elijah’s favorite pupil, the prophet Elisha, was especially stern: he had no mercy even for innocent little ones. They killed during wars, killed natives and aliens, killed criminals and those who have killed, killed women. They had no mercy for infants, the aged ones, goyim, prophets, idolaters, sorcerers, sectarians, relatives. A lot of things were destroyed. In the Book of Job, Yahweh – without any special reason except a fairly superficial controversy with Lucifer – treats in a sadistic way his own chosen and virtuous man.

When the latter, covered with leprosy, gets indignant at this, Jahwe cows him with two geo-political*** monsters: the land called Behemoth and the sea called Leviathan, i.e. Jahweh mortifies him in the moral sense too. Modern Biblical investigation proves convincingly that the original text of the Book of Job comes to its end at the peak of the tragedy, and the naively moralistic end was added by Levites long after, who were terrified by the primordial, rigid nature of that most archaic of “Old Testament” fragments.

In other words, in the Judaic context where the commandment to “kill not” was directly taken from, it has neither any absolute character nor any special significance.

There was no controversy on that theme and apparently no reflection was given it with any express purpose. That is not to say that the commandment was never taken into account. It was: they tried not to shed blood for no purpose. They also bewared the rabbinical court. If someone was finished off in vain, a punishment followed. The usual law. The ordinary commandment. Nothing special. The standard of human conduct. In Christianity everything is different. Christ is the fulfillment of the Law. The Law ends with him. The Law’s mission is carried out. In some sense, it is removed from the agenda. Exactly “removed”, but not repealed. The spiritual problems pass on to a radically different plane. From now on the Post-Law, the era of Grace, begins. “The protection of Law is overcome”. Strictly speaking, the advent of such an era signifies the unimportant character of commandments.

Even the very first commandment of worshipping One Lord is overcome by the New Testament, by the Precept of Love for Him. Through the Incarnation, the Logos-God brings about absolutely new relations between the Maker and all creation, and among the creatures themselves. From then on everything happens under the sign of Emmanuel, by the beneficial formula, “God is with us”. God is not somewhere far away, He performs not just the role of Judge and Law-giver, but also the role of the Beloved and Loving One. The New Commandment does not reject the ten previous ones, but makes them unnecessary.

New Testament humanity is in a cardinal way different from the old, Judaic (or heathen) one. It bears the sign of transcendent Love. That is why the dichotomy of Law- “worship – worship not”, “singular – plural”, “steal – steal not”, “seduce – seduce not” and, finally, “kill – kill not”- doesn’t make sense anymore.

In Christian holiness, all means are expressed positively. The new man needs no rules here, he lives for one thing – the sober, everlasting, undiluted Love, staying in prayer and contemplation. Here, there’s not just “kill not”. The Christian saints would laugh at such caution for in them the duality is already abolished, the barrier between self and non-self is crushed. Moreover, they want to be killed, they aspire to suffer, they long for martyrdom. However, valuable Christian life doesn’t have any relation to the old Ten Commandments. They are once and forever overcome in the sacred christening. Further, there is only the realization of Grace.

But let’s consider a Christian not in holiness, not in monkshood, not in asceticism and the hermitic life. Will the idea set by the Old Testament order be valid for him? No. He is christened, which means born from above, and consequently God is with him too. Inside, but not outside. Therefore, even being a sinner, the unworthy one too lives beyond the old man, in the new being, in the stream of the undeserved light of Grace. Observing or not observing Old Testament legislation has nothing to do with the intimate essence of the Christian existence.

Of course, it is more convenient for a society to have dealings with those who are obedient and observe rules. For a Christian society too. But all this doesn’t have any common measure with the Church sacrament, with the mystical life of a believer. Here the most interesting element begins. A Christian, by overstepping some Old Testament commandment, in fact demonstrates that he did not complete in himself the mysterious nature of the New Man, the potential personality cast by the Holy Spirit in the font of christening.

But who can boast that he has reached full deification? The more one is holy, the more mean, sinful, terrible he seems to himself before the face of the Shining Trinity. Consequently, as in the case of the yurodivy (“God’s fools”) who disparaged the human aspect, falling can be, in a paradoxical Christian way, a sacrament.

Observing the Ten Commandments isn’t a decisive factor for an Orthodox Christian. Only one thing is important for him: Love, the New – absolutely New – Testament, the Love Testament. The Ten Commandments without Love is the way to hell. And if Love is, then they have no significance anymore. This was all clear to radical Russian intellectuals. In Boris Savinkov’s book, “The Pale Horse”, a terrorist named “Vanya” (a literary character, inspired by Ivan Kalyayev) says before committing a murder: “And the other way – Christ’s way to Christ… Listen, if you love a lot, really love, you can then kill, can you not?”

And further –

“…one must undergo a cross torment, one must determine on doing all this out of love and for love. But absolutely out of love and for love… So I live, and what for? Maybe I live for my death-hour. I pray: Lord, give me death in the name of love. You cannot pray for murder, can you?”.

Savinkov lived, thought, wrote, and murdered after Dostoyevsky. But nothing is added to Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov murders not just for humankind’s sake (though for it too), he murders for the sake of Love. In order to go through suffering, he has to die, to kill death in himself and others. Ivan Kalyayev, as well as Savinkov himself, are profoundly Russian, profoundly Orthodox Christian, profoundly “dostoyevskian-type” people: having an evidently divine character, along with the entire nation, and filled with such lofty, paradoxical and Orthodox Christian Thought, a comparison which makes the most refined and profound Western philosophical schemes turn insipid. Russians don’t formulate a theology, they endure it, live it throughout all their lives. This is the theology, coming through pores, through breath, through tears, through sleep and grimaces of wrath. Through torment and torture. Through the wet and bloody, carnal and spiritualized element of the New Life.

With Love and for Love’s sake one may do everything. This doesn’t mean that one must do everything and that all commandments should be countermanded, rejected. On no account. One should just demonstrate with one’s life and gestures that there is – and this is the chief thing – another measure of being, the new light, the light of Love.

The place of the usurer-crone’s murder is St. Petersburg. So this is the place of Love in Russia, locus amoris.

Rodion raises two hands, two angular signs, two sinew plexus, two runes over the wintry shriveled skull of the Capital. In his hand there is a coarse, gross, crudely made item. With this item, the central ritual of Russian history, and of Russian mystery, is committed. The wraith materializes, the moment falls out of the system of earthly time (Goethe would have gone immediately crazy, having seen which moment in fact stopped…). Two theologies, two testaments, two revelations meet in the magic point. This point is absolute.

Axe is its name.

Labris

The short genealogy of the axe.

The most brilliant hypotheses concerning this item – its origin and its Symbolism – was advanced by Herman Wirth, a German scientific genius and a specialist in the sphere of human prehistory and ancient letters. Wirth showed that the twofold axe was the primordial symbol of the Year, of the circle, of its two halves, one is following the winter solstice, the other is foregoing it. The standard (not twofold) axe correspondingly symbolizes one half of the Year, as a rule the springtime, the ascending half.

Moreover, the utilitarian use of an axe for chopping trees, also according to Wirth, bears a relation to yearly symbolism, for the Tree in Tradition means Year. Its roots are the wintry months, its crown are the summer ones. Therefore chopping trees is correlated, in the primordial symbolical context of the sacred societies, with the advent of the New Year and the old one’s end.

The Axe is simultaneously the New Year and the instrument with which the old is destroyed. Simultaneously it is a cutting instrument, splitting Time, snipping the umbilical cord of its span off in the Winter Solstice’s magic point, when the Sun’s greatest Mystery of death and resurrection comes about.

The rune in the ancient runic calendar depicting the axe was called “thurs” and was dedicated to God Thor. It fell on the first months of the New Year. Thor was the Axe-God or its symbolic equivalent, the Hammer-God or Miollnir. With this Hammer-Axe, Thor smashed the skull of the World Serpent, Irmunganthr, who floated in the lower waters of darkness. Again the obvious solstice myth, connected with the point of the New Year. The Serpent is the Winter, the cold, the lower waters of the Sacred year, where the polar sun descends to. Thor, here he is both the Sun and the spirit of the Sun, overcomes the cold’s grasp and sets the Light free. On the later stages of the myth, the Sun-Light figure is divided into two – the savior and the saved – and then into three with the addition of salvation’s instrument, the axe. In the primordial form, all those personalities were something united – god-sun-axe (hammer).

The earliest inscription of the axe sign in the ancient Paleolithic caverns and rock carvings were analyzed by Herman Wirth in the light of the entire ritual and calendar structure. He traced the amazing constancy of the axe proto-sense through the most different by both age and geographic location cultures and languages. He showed the etymological and semantic relation of words which mean ‘axe’ with other symbolic notions and mythological subjects, which are also associated with the mystery of New Year, the middle of Winter, the Winter Solstice.

Especially interesting are the indications that the symbolic meaning of “axe” is strictly identical with two other ancient hieroglyph-word-items: “labyrinth” and “beard”.

The “Labyrinth” is a development of the idea of a year spiral, twisting to the New Year and then right away starting to untwist. “Beard” is merely the masculine sun’s light in the autumn-winter half of the year circle (the hair as a whole are the sun’s rays). Therefore in the runic circle another rune – “peorp” – looks like the axe, but means the beard. In the middle of the Labyrinth lives Minotaurus, the monster, the human-bull, the equivalent of Jormungandr, the World Serpent and… the usurer crone. Dostoyevsky described the ancient mythological subject, the secret paradigm of a symbolic succession, the primordial ritual, which our ancestors practiced for many millennia. But this is not just an anachronism or uncoordinated fragments of the collective unconscious. In fact the matter is about a much more important eschatological picture, about the sense and gesture of the End of Times, about the sacred apocalyptic moment, when time collides with Eternity, when the fire of Doomsday blazes.

The Russians are the blessed nation, and Russian history is the resume of world history. To us, like to a temporal, spatial and ethnic magnet, the destiny sense of centuries gravitates with increasing progression. The First and the Second Rome were just for the Third one to appear. The Byzantine Empire was the prophecy of the Holy Russ. The Holy Russ in the apocalyptic way drew itself to the wraith-city named St. Petersburg, where Russia’s greatest prophet Fyodor Dostoyevsky appeared. The scene of his main novel, “Crime and Punishment”, is set in the labyrinth of Petersburg’s streets and the novel’s main characters are Russia’s main characters. Among them, the most important are Raskolnikov, the usurer-crone and the axe. In addition, the axe is the beam that connects Raskolnikov with the usurer-crone. Consequently, world history – through the history of Rome, through the history of the Byzantine Empire, through the history of Russia, through the history of Moscow, through the history of St. Petersburg, through the history of Dostoyevsky, through the history of “Crime and Punishment”, through the history of the novel’s main characters – is reduced to the AXE.

Raskolnikov splits the capitalist crone’s head. The name “Raskolnikov” (“Raskol” means literally a “split”) itself indicates the axe and the operation it makes. Raskolnikov performs the New Year ritual, the Doomsday mystery, the celebration of the Sun’s resurrection.

Capitalism, creeping to Russia from the West, from the sunset side, carnally represents the world serpent. Its agent is the spider-crone, spinning a web of usurious slavery. She is also part of it.

Raskolnikov brings the axe of the East.

The axe of the rising sun, the axe of Freedom and the New Dawn.

The novel should have ended in a triumphal way with the full justification of Rodion. Raskolnikov’s crime is the punishment for the usurer. The era of the Axe and proletarian Revolution is proclaimed. But… additional forces entered the affair. The investigator Porfiriy turns out to be especially insidious. That representative of Kafkian jurisprudence and Pharisaical pseudo-humanitarianism begins a complicated intrigue to defame the main character and his actions in Raskolnikov’s own eyes. Porfiriy, in the mean way he juggles the facts, leads Raskolnikov up a blind labyrinth of doubt, nervousness, and mental derangement. He doesn’t just try to put Rodion in jail, but seeks to suppress him in a spiritual way. The main character should have treated that scum the same way he did the crone: “Smash the serpent’s skull”. But our personage turns out to be unable to gather himself up… Then the rest of the tissue of the myth also turns out to be unraveled. Raskolnikov, according to the primordial scenario, should have gotten Wisdom-Sophia out of the brothel, like Gnostic-Simon did with Helena. Even the scene of reciting the gospel narration about Lazarus’s resurrection remained from the original version: Sophia, rescued by Love and upon being released from usurious slavery propagates the universal resurrection. But here for some reason she joins in a conspiracy with the “humanitarian serpent-worshipper”, Porfiriy. She begins to suggest to Raskolnikov an idea: that the old woman, she said, should have been spared, that she was “not a shaking louse”. The society of love of animals, including the world serpent from pitch-darkness. A care for a capitalist’s tear.

How can this all be explained?

Dostoyevsky was a prophet and had the gift of a clairvoyant. He foresaw, not only the revolution (the stroke on the skull with the axe), but also its degeneration, its betrayal, its being put on the market. The Sophia of socialism gradually degraded to humanitarian Pharisaic dithering. Porfiriys penetrated the party and undermined the basics of the Soviet country’s eschatological reign.

First they gave up the permanent revolution, then the purges, and then Sonya, under the guise of the late-Soviet intellectuals, again started whining about the silliest – to “kill not”… And blood gushed as a river. This wasn’t the blood of usurer-crones, but that of really innocent children.

There exists a virtual version of “Crime and Punishment”, which has an absolutely different ending. It has to do with the new, coming period of Russian history. Till now we lived through the first version. But now that’s all over. The new myth is incarnating, the scarlet sword of Boris Savinkov is scorching the hands of a new youthful Russia, the Russia of the End Times.

Axe is the name of that Russia.

Notes

* Let’s take notice right away of the fact that quite a few of the concepts in this article are suggested by reading the very interesting work of V. Kushev, “730 steps”, in which the author analyzes the paradigm of “Crime and Punishment”.

** Stirner wrote in “German Ideology”: “Mensch, es spukt in deinem Kopfe!”, what could be approximately translated as, “Man, it is your head what is haunted by ghosts”. Regarding the exact translation of the German verb “spuken”, it is derived from “der Spuk” (a wraith) and is analogous to the French “hanter” and the English “to haunt”. Father Seraphim indicated to us an interesting analogy, having remembered that in Old Russian there existed the verb “stuzhati”, meaning the same as the German “spuken” – to be overcome by the evil ones, be possessed by the invisible beings. Jacques Derrida in his text “Hamlet and Hecuba” (1956) pointed out the similarity between Shakespeare’s drama and Marx’s “Manifesto”. In both cases everything begins with the ghost, from expecting its appearance. Derrida points out precisely that “the moment of the ghosts doesn’t belong to usual time”. In other words, time in the world of ghosts doesn’t have any common measure with the time of the human world. It is very closely connected with the very essence of Petersburg, the ghost-city, living beyond the sacred time of Russian history in some subtle sleep, sidereal dizziness. This is the ghost-like eternity of Svidrigaylov. This “flying Dutchman-like” city, its lights, its chandeliers, its candles and bulbs, and its Enlightenment are nothing more than St. Elm’s lights, the fictitious luminescence of a marsh-like quasi-existence. Stuzhalyy gorod, the haunted city, la ville hantee… The place of insanity, illness, fever, perversions, vice and…dawning consciousness.

*** In modern geopolitics, Leviathan and Behemoth means sea power and land power correspondingly. The Leviathan is Atlantism, the West, America, the Anglo-Saxon world, and market ideology. The Behemoth is the Eurasian, continental structure, and is associated with Russia, hierarchy and tradition.

 

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Dugin, Alexander. “Dostoyevsky and the metaphysics of St. Petersburg.” Eurocontinentalism Journal, 13 Friday 2013. <http://eurocontinentalism.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/dostoyevsky-and-the-metaphysics-of-st-petersburg-prof-dr-alexandr-dugin/ >.

 

Establish Multipolar World Order – Savin

Establish a Multipolar World Order

Interview with Mr. Leonid SAVIN of the International Eurasian Movement – by Euro-Synergies

 

Could you describe in a few key words the essence and goals of your movement? Does it place itself in an existing sociopolitical-historical trend of Russian politics? Does it lobby in Russian government circles to achieve its goals?

The main idea and goal of the International Eurasian Movement is to establish a multipolar world order, where there will be no dictatorship of the U.S. anymore or of any other country or actor of world politics. In the sector of ideology we strongly reject (neo)liberalism and the globalization process as its derivative. We agree that we (as well as other nations) need a constructive platform for our alternative future. In the search of it, our work is directed to dialogue with other cultures and peoples who understand the meaning and necessity of conservative values in contemporary societies. Speaking about Russian reality, we are heirs and assigns to the former Eurasianists (this ideology was born in the 1920s): Piotr Savitsky, Nikolay Trubetskoy, Nikolay Alekseev as well as Lev Gumilev — the famous Soviet scholar. They all studied historical processes and proposed a unique vision of our history, separate from the eurocentric science approach. The understanding that Russia is not part of Europe or Asia, but forms a very own unique world, named Eurasia, is also implemented in our political activity. In cooperation with members of parliament or the Council of the Federation or other governmental bodies, with our advices and recommendations, we always provide a strong basis linked to our history, culture, diversity and so on. And I must tell you that many people understand and support our ideas and efforts (in governmental structures, local and regional authorities, science and education, religious institutions and in society at large).

What is your vision on a multipolar world? Which role do you see for Western European nations? Do they have any future at all on the world stage of the 21st century? Will they surmount the actual crises on a demographic, metaphysical and mental level?

In my opinion, a multipolar world is the order with 5 or more centers of power in the world and this reality will keep our planet more safe and balanced with shared responsibility between the regions. But it is not just interdependence by the logic of liberalism: some regions might well exist in relative political and economic autarky. Beside that, there might exist a double core in one center (for example Arabs and Turks in a large Muslim zone or Russia and Central Asian states for Eurasia) and shifted and inter-imposed zones, because, historically, centers of power can be moved. Of course at the moment the most significant centers of power are described in terms of nuclear arms, GDP, economic weight/growth and diplomatic influence. First of all we already have more poles than during the Soviet-US opposition. Secondly, everybody understands the role of China as a ‘Bretton Woods-2’, as well as emerging countries under acronyms as BRICS or VISTA, “anchor countries” and so on. And, thirdly, we see the rise of popular and unconventional diplomacy and the desire of many countries (many of them are strong regional actors such as Iran, Indonesia and Brazil) to not follow the U.S. as satellites or minor partners.

Of course, Washington does not like this scenario and tries to make coalitions based on states with a neocolonial background or on dutiful marionettes. But even in the U.S., politicians and analysts understand that the time of unipolar hegemony has gone. They are trying to build a more flexible approach to international relations, called ‘multilateralism’ (H. Clinton) or ‘non-polarity’ (R. Haas), but the problem is that the U.S. do not have enough confidence in foreign actors united as joint, but who still have no strong alternative to the contemporary world order. So, they use another option for destabilization of rising regions, known as controlled chaos. Because of its military presence over most parts of the globe and its status of promoter of democracy and the protection of human rights, the White House can justify its own interests in these places. And cyberspace is also the object of manipulation, where the whole world is divided in two camps that remind us of the times of the Cold War (I call it ‘Cold Cyber War’).

We think that the contemporary West European nations are one of the poles (centers of power) in a forthcoming multipolar world order). But the problem for now is their engagement in U.S. pro-atlanticist politics, as manifested in the Euro-Atlantic chart of cooperation (common market, legislation and regulation mechanisms, including items of domestic politics), as well as NATO activity. The same we see on the other side of Eurasia – attempts of Washington to start trans-Atlantic cooperation with Asian countries. The contemporary crisis is neither good nor bad. It’s a fact. And the European nations must think about the way they’ll choose, because it will form the future (at least in Europe). It is not the first time in history: during the middle ages there was decline of population because of pestilence and wars. Religious schisms also occurred, so Europeans have some experience in metaphysics and ethics dealing with system failure too. The point is that now we have more interconnected reality and the speed of information sharing is fantastic, that was not possible, imagine, a century ago. And European society becomes more consumerist! But even in Europe, there are a lot of voices in respect of nature (organic greens), anti-grow movements (in economics) and traditionalists who try to keep and preserve ethnic and historical values and manners. Even the Soviet experience could be useful: after the Great Social Revolution there was a strong anti-church attitude promoted by the government, but after 70 years we’re back at our roots (of course during all this time not all people were atheists and the return to church happened during Stalin’s period when the institute of the Patriarchy was restored).

How do you see the dialogue of civilizations in the light of more than 10 years of wars between the West and the Muslim world? Where does Russia stand in this opposition? Are there fears of an islamization process within the Russian Federation, or are Russian authorities setting on long-time accommodation with Muslim minorities and actors?

At first we must bear in mind that the idea of Huntington (the ‘clash of civilizations’) was developed out of necessity of justifying the U.S.’s military and economic expansion. His book was issued when the first wave of globalization as the highest principle of Westcentrism just began its tide in the Third World. By the logic of neo-liberal capitalism it must be re-ordered and re-programmed in the search for new markets. All non-western societies must consume western products, services and technologies by this logic. And let’s remember that war against the Muslim countries originated from the neocons from Washington. So, these 10 years of wars that you to mention is nothing more than a provoked conflict by a small group that was very powerful in American politics at the beginning of the 2000s. By the way, all kinds of radical Islam (Wahhabism) were promoted by the United Kingdom. This version of Islam was founded in Saudi Arabia only with London’s special support. The Great Game in Eurasia was started many years ago and Britain has played here a most significant role. The U.S. took this role only after WW2, but many destructive processes were already unleashed. Of course, Russia is suspicious of radical Islam, because emissaries of the Wahhabis and al-Qaeda were already in the Northern Caucasus. And still now, there are different terrorist groups with the idea of the so-called “Emirate of the Caucasus.” There were also attempts to spread another sectarian belief promoted by Fetullah Gullen (Nurjular), but for now this sect is prohibited here. Actually Islam is not a threat to Russia, because, traditionally, a lot of people living here are Muslim. Regions like Tatarstan, the North Caucasus republics, Bashkortostan have an Islamic population. And our government supports traditional Islam here.

What do you think about the American/Western strategy of strategic encirclement of Russia? Can we see this as well in the process of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’? Is an open, Western-waged war against Syria and Iran possible and would it be the onset to a major world conflict, a ‘Third World War’? Where would Russia stand?

It works. Not only because of the reset of the Anaconda strategy for Eurasia by means of military presence. Sometimes it doesn’t manifest in classical bases. Logistics is the main element of contemporary warfare, as well as C4ISR – Command, Control, Computer, Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance – works in the vein of smart engagement. Other tools are: economics, promotion of democracy and human rights, cyber politics. The Arab Spring is a very complex phenomenon – there are a couple of components, but you can see that the U.S. has a bonus anyway: Egypt has asked for a huge loan from the World Bank; Western companies go to Libya; Muslim extremists are being manipulated against moderate Muslims, because they are a threat to western interests and so on. Organized chaos is just another view on the socio-political reality in turbulence. As Steve Mann (famous theorist of the chaos principle in diplomacy) wrote: the state is just hardware and ideology is its soft version. It were better to use ‘virus’ (in other words ‘promoting democracy’) and not to break PC. Syria and Iran are interesting for many nations now. The hysteria of Israel is not good, because this country has nuclear weapons. What will come of Israel using it? The Palestinian question is also on the table. I think that Israel is a more serious problem than Syria and Iran. Russia firmly supports Syria and takes a moderate position on Iran. During the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia declined to provide the “S-300” rocket complex to Iran (we had already signed the contract) and the deal was canceled. You bear in mind that during the same time Russia supported resolution 1973 of UN Security Council and the West started operation “Odyssey Dawn” against Libya. So, even VIP politicians in Russia sometimes do wrong things! But Mr. Putin is actively pro-Syrian and I think that the position of Russia about Iran and about Western pressure will be more adequate than before. As foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told: “we got experience with Libya and don’t believe the West anymore”.

What do you think about the Western Europeans: should they remain loyal to their historical-political heritage of individualism and atlanticism, or should they rethink themselves and orient themselves towards Russia and continentalism? What about pro-Russian elements in European society? Can they be partners or are they, politically and socially spoken, too marginal for that?

John M. Hobson, in his brilliant work The eurocentric conception of world politics, made very clear that the West is rooted in the logic of immanence instead of the logic of co-development that is characteristic of non-western societies. He continues that the formula “the West and the Rest” is wrong, because without the rest there is no place for the West. Now we see one United Europe, but in real life we have two levels. The first one is presented by the bureaucratic establishment with its symbols, history, power projections and procedures. The second one is active publicity with movements, political parties and personal activists who are not interested in an Orwellian future with “Big Brother,” universal values and so on. Actually, in geography we have more than one substance. And where is the border between Southern, Western and Eastern Europe? It’s mostly in the minds. From history we remember the Celtic space, the Roman Empire, the Germanic and nomad invasions (Huns, Avars, etc.), that shows that the face of Europe permanently changed throughout the centuries. Now the European population includes people from Africa and Asia and soon the demographic balance will change. Political culture will change too. Without Russia, Europe is impossible. Not only because of geography (just look at the map and you will see that the EU is just the small, overpopulated western peninsula of Eurasia), but also because of the role of Russia in European history. Napoleon and Hitler – the two most significant unifiers of Europe – were stopped and defeated in Russia and, after that, new political orders were established. And for now in Europe we have so many Russian “prints”: in culture, history, the role of some persons and diasporas. I think that pro-Russian elements just now have a very good choice, because the window of opportunity is open. All these elements could form an avant-garde of a new kind of cooperation: in trade relations, science, art and education and public diplomacy. The last one is the tie for all activities. Actually Minister Lavrov just today (i.e. 26.02.2013) announced that, because of the Russia year in the Netherlands and vice versa, there will be more than 350 actions on state level. It is a good sign of mutual respect and it may be deeper.

What about key power Germany? Do you believe in, let’s say, an ‘Indo-European bloc’, an axis Berlin-Moscow-New Delhi, as a formidable counterweight to the atlanticist bloc of the axis Washington-London-Paris? Do the horrors of the Second World War still affect Russians’ views of Germany and the Germans, or is it possible to turn the page on both sides and look forward? What about the French: do they belong in the atlanticist bloc, or can they be won for the continentalist bloc without giving in to their chauvinism? And what about China: will it turn out to be an even more dangerous enemy than the USA, or will both Russia and China remain strategic partners, e.g. within the SCO?

Because the EU has two levels, the same is true for Germany. One Germany, represented by the political establishment, is pro-U.S. and cannot do anything without Washington. Another one (latent or potential) is looking for closer cooperation with Russia. At the time of the Russian Empire a lot of German people came to our country at the invitation of Empress Catherine the Great. Even before that, many foreigners were in Russia as military officers, teachers, technical specialists, etc. People’s potential can do a lot of things. We must keep in mind that, besides Sea Power and Land Power in geopolitics, we have Man Power, which is the unique and main axis of any politics. The problem is that, after WWII, there was in most European countries a strong influence of Britain and the U.S.. They used very black propaganda and the peoples of Europe were afraid of a communist invasion. The U.S. even started more horrible projects in Western Europe (for example Propaganda-Due and operation “Gladio” in Italy, as well as “Stay Behind” NATO secret armies, formed from right-wing extremist elements). Still now in the EU, we see anti-Russian propaganda, but our borders are open and any European can go to Russia and see what happens here. The case of Gérard Depardieu is just one example.

If we look at what happens in China we’ll understand that it is a very strong actor and that its power grows from year to year. In the UN Security Council China is an important partner of Russia (for the Syria voting too). Russia is a supplier of oil and gas to China and we have new agreements for the future. Besides that we provide military equipment to China, though they have good weapon systems of their own as well. In the SCO we had good results and I think that cooperation in this organization must be enlarged through strategic military elements with the entry at least of Iran, Belarus, India and Pakistan (they have an observer or dialogue partner status). Turkey is interested as well, but because of its NATO membership it will be difficult to join.

I know that some Russians and Europeans describe China as a possible enemy, a “yellow threat” (the Polish writer Ignacy Witkiewicz even wrote about it in his novel in 1929!!!) and so on, but in reality China has no intents of border pretence to Russia. We have had some incidents in Siberia with contraband, but these are criminal cases which do not deal with state politics. China will focus on Taiwan and on the disputed islands in the Pacific and it will take all geopolitical attention and may be some loyalty from Russia and SCO members.

Also China has the same view on the future world order – multipolarity. Actually this idea (duojihua) was born in China in 1986. And with the strategic cooperation with many other countries in Africa and South America, joint efforts against western hegemony will be fruitful.

So, I think China and Russia can do a lot for a reform of the forthcoming world order.

A lot of people now want to forget their own origins and the origins of other peoples. Bavaria, for example, was populated centuries ago by Avars from Asia (part of them still live in the Caucasus) during the Migration Period. Groups of Turkish origin also went to lands of contemporary Austria. So in contemporary Europe we have a lot of Asian elements. And vice-versa in Asia we have people of Aryan origin. Not only in the North of India, but also in Tajikistan, Pakistan, Iran (arya is the self-name of the people of Iran and India). And hybridization is continuing as we speak in Europe and in other regions. Just before Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union we had a pact with Germany and had been cooperating extensively in technologies and in the economy. And France was attacked first by Germany, but now relations between both countries are normal. I think that historical harms between Germany and Russia have been mostly forgotten. And I think that many Germans still remember that the most destructive attacks did not come from the Soviet army but from U.S. and British air forces (Dresden, Leipzig…). It was not a war, but a deliberate destruction of cities and non-armed refugees. Actually now Germans is mostly good businessmen for Russians, compared to representatives of other European nations (these facts have been confirmed by many friends who do business with Europeans).

I can not to speak with enough certainty of what happens with Russian-French relations, because I’m not very interested in this sector. During the XXth century we had many deals with France, and after WWII it was the idea of Stalin to give the winner status to France. Charles de Gaulle also was pro-Soviet in a geopolitical sense. But after the legalization of gay marriage in France, many Russians feel suspicious about this country. But every people and every country has its own specifics. We have had many interesting philosophers from France who have had influence on Russian thinkers too.

Turning to domestic Russian problems: Russia under President Putin has been able to make enormous progress in the social field, mainly due to energy sales during the 2000s. Has this changed the face of Russia? Has this period come to an end or is there stagnation? How will Russia cope with its domestic problems, such as the demographic crisis, which it shares with Western Europe? Should the Siberian land mass be ‘re-colonized’ by Russians and other Europeans, in order to make it an impregnable ‘green lung fortress’ for the white peoples?

The grand contribution of Mr. Putin is that he stopped liberal privatization and the process of separatism in Russia. Persons such as Chodorkovsky were representatives of the Western oligarchy, especially of powerful financial clans (for example, he is a personal friend of Rothschild) and he had plans to usurp power in Russia through the corruption of parliament. We still have the rudiments of predatory liberalism such as misbalances, corruption, fifth column, degradation of traditional values, etc. For now we see in Russia efforts to build a smarter kind of economics, but it must be done very carefully. The questions that must be at the center are: how to deal with the Federal Reserve System? What about a new currency order that may be represented by BRICS? How to start mobilization? What to do with the neoliberal lobby within the government? The demographic crisis is also linked with neoliberalism and consumerism. A century ago, there was a rise of population in Russia, but two world wars have cut it. Even during Soviet times we had a good demography index. Now the government has started supporting young families and the process of human reproduction. In addition to birth programs we have an initiative dealing with the return of compatriots to Russia and all people who were born in the USSR can come to Russia very easily and get certain funding from the state. But I think that, because the Russians were the state-forming people, there must be a preference for Slavonic origin, because migrants from Asian countries (who do not speak Russian and have other traditions) will flow to Russia for economic reasons. Many Russian activists who take a critical stance on Asian people are already disappointed by this program. I think that the attraction of Byelorussians and Ukrainians can equalize this disproportion. But, strategically, the state must support a system of child-bearing with all necessary needs (fosterage, education, working place, social environmental, etc.). In some regions governors personally start up that kind of programs dealing with local and regional solidarity. First of all, Siberia is still Russian. The Siberian type of Russian is different from citizens from the central or southern regions, but till now it’s still mainly Russian, not only institutionally, but also ethnically. Actually, according to our statistics, most labor migrants to Russia come from Ukraine! So, in spite of strange relations between both countries and with strong anti-Russian stances on the part of Ukrainian nationalists and pro-western “democrats,” people just make their own choice. Rationally speaking, Siberia is not only interesting, because of its virgin forests and natural resources, but also because of its neighbors — and China is one of them with an emerging economy. So Siberia could serve as a hub in the future. I think that Europeans would also go to Russia (not only to Siberia), but this migration must be done meticulously, because of the language barrier, with a period of adaptation to different social conditions and so on. Maybe it could be useful to organize towns of compact residence and also city-hubs for foreign people who come to live in Russia, where they can live and work in new conditions. New Berlin, New Brussels, New Paris (of course translated into the Russian language) will then appear on a new Russian map.

What is your opinion about the future of Putinist Russia? Will the government be able to enduringly counter Western propaganda and destabilization campaigns, and come to a ‘generation pact’ between the older generation, born during Soviet times, and the younger generation, born after 1991? What will be President Putin’s fundamental heritage for Russian history?

The key problem for Russia is a neoliberal group inside the Kremlin. Putin has the support of people who want more radical actions against corruption, western agents and so on. But a “colored revolution” in Russia is impossible, because the masses do not believe in the pro-western opposition. Ideas of democracy and human rights promoted by West have been discredited worldwide and our people understand well what liberalization, privatization and such kind of activities in the interest of global oligarchy mean. And because of the announcement of the Eurasian Customs Union Russia must work hard the coming years with partners from Kazakhstan and Belarus. As for counterpropaganda, the new official doctrine of Russian foreign policy is about softpower. So Russia has all the instruments officially legalized to model its own image abroad. In some sense we do this kind of work, just as other non-governmental organizations and public initiatives.You mention a “generation pact,” referring to different ideals of young and older people, especially in the context of the Soviet era. Now, you would be surprised that a figure as Stalin is very popular among young people and thinking part of the youth understands well that Soviet times were more enjoyable than contemporary semi-capitalism. As I told in my previous answer, Putin is important because he stopped the disintegration of Russia. He already is a historical figure.

Is there a common ‘metaphysical future’ for the whole of Europe after the downfall of Western Christianity (catholicism, protestantism)? Can Russian Orthodoxism be a guide? What do you hold of the modest revival of pre-Christian religious traditions across the continent? What about countering the influence of Islam on the European continent? Is there a different view concerning that discussion between Russia and Western Europe?

Russian Christian Orthodoxy is not panacea, because there are also some problems. Christianity in XIIth century, XVIth century and nowadays is very different. Now many formal orthodox Christians go to church two times a year, at Easter and at Christmas. But Orthodox Christianity is also a thesaurus of wisdom where you can find ideas from ancient Greek philosophy, metaphysics, cultural heritage, transformed paganism and psychology. In this sense, Russian Christian Orthodox old believers keep this heritage alive and may be interested as well in forms (ceremonies) as in the spiritual essence with its complex ideas. Speaking about paganism, Russia is the only country in Europe that still has authentic pagan societies (Republics of Mari-El, Mordovia, Komi) with very interesting rites and traditions. Actually Finno-Ugric peoples historically were very close to Slavonic people and assimilated together, so there is a good chance to research these traditions for those who are interested in Slavonic pre-Christian culture. But the postmodern version of a restored paganism in Europe or any other region to my opinion is just a fake and there is not so much from true paganism. As for Islam, as I told before, in Russia there exist a couple of versions of traditional Islam, which are presented by several law schools (mazhabs). In the Northern Caucasus, the regional government has tried to copy the idea of multiculturalism and to implement Euro-Islam as an antithesis to spreading Wahhabism. But it has not worked and now more attention is paid to traditional religious culture linked with education and the social sector. But the project of multiculturalism has failed in Europe as well, so all common Euro-Russian outlooks on Islam are finished. But, to be honest, I think that Europe must learn from the Russian experience of coexistence of different religions (not forgetting paganism and shamanism – this belief is widely found in Siberia). In Europe, they use the term tolerance but we, Eurasianists, prefer the term complimentarity, proposed by Lev Gumilev, meaning a subconscious sympathy between different ethnic groups. As Gumilev explained, Russia became so large because Russians, during the expansion, looked on other people as on their own and understood them. This differs from the point of view (more specifically in ethnosociology) that all ethnic groups have the idea of “We are” against “The Other,” represented by another group. The imperial principle works with the idea of mosaics where every ethnos is a “We are.” And our famous writer and philosopher Fjodor Dostoevsky told about all-human (all-mankind) nature (not common to all mankind) that is represented by the Russians, because inside, you can find all radical oppositions. I think it is a good reason to turn to Russia and its people.

Thank you, Mr. Savin, for this very interesting and open-hearted interview.

 

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Savin, Leonid. “Establish a Multipolar World Order: Interview with Mr. Leonid Savin of the International Eurasian Movement.” Interview by Synergies Européennes. Euro-Synergies, 25 March 2013. <http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2013/03/22/interview-with-mr-leonid-savin.html >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Establish a Multipolar World Order).

Notes: For another discussion of the theory of the multi-polar world, see Natella Speranskaya’s interview with Alexander Dugin: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/civilization-as-political-concept-dugin/ >. See also Dugin’s essays: “The Multipolar World and the Postmodern” and “Multipolarism as an Open Project”. The full exposition of the theory of the Multipolar World was made in Russian in Dugin’s book теория многополярного мира (Москва: Евразийское движение, 2012), which was translated into French as Pour une théorie du monde multipolaire (Nantes: Éditions Ars Magna, 2013). For the Eurasianist perspective on Japan in particular, we recommend reading Dugin’s essay “In the Country of Rising ‘Do’”.

 

Fourth Dimension – Benoist

The Fourth Dimension

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from the French by Tomislav Sunic

 

Modernity successfully gave birth to three major competing political doctrines; liberalism in the eighteenth century, socialism in the nineteenth century and fascism in the twentieth century. Being the last in line, fascism was also the one that disappeared most rapidly. However, the breakdown of the Soviet system has not brought to a halt socialist aspirations and even less so the ideas of communism. Liberalism, for its part, seems to be the biggest winner in this competition. In any case the principles of liberalism, spearheaded by the ideology of human rights, and thriving now within the New Class all over the globe, are today the most widespread within the framework of the process of globalization.

None of these doctrines are totally wrong. Each one of them contains some elements of truth. Let us have a rapid look at this panorama. What needs to be retained from liberalism is the following; the idea of freedom accompanied by the sense of responsibility; the rejection of rigid determinism; the importance of the notion of autonomy; the critique of statism; a certain tendency towards republicanism, anti-Jacobinism and anti-centralism. What needs to be rejected is: possessive individualism; the focus on the anthropological concept of the producer vs. consumer in which everybody searches for his best interest; the principles based on what Adam Smith called “the gift for peddling,” that is, the inclination for tradeoffs; the ideology of progress, the bourgeois spirit, the primacy of utilitarian and mercantile values; the paradigm of the market — in short, capitalism.

What needs to be retained from socialism are the following points: its critique of the logic of the capital in so far as socialism was the first to analyze each of its economic and supra-economic dimensions; the idea that society must be defined as a whole (holism, the original key-concept of sociology); the desire for enfranchisement; the notion of solidarity and the idea of social justice. What needs to be rejected is: historicism; statism; the drive toward egalitarianism and doleful hypermoralism.

From fascism what needs to be retained is the following: the affirmation of the uniqueness of identity of each people and its national culture; the sense of heroic values; the bondage between ethics and aesthetics. What needs to be rejected is: the metaphysics of subjectivity, nationalism, Social Darwinism, racism, primitive anti-feminism and the cult of the leader, and of course, again, statism.

The Interregnum

Will the fourth political theory, the one the twenty-first century so badly needs, be a radically new doctrine, or will it provide a synthesis of what was best in the preceding ones? In any case this project has been a major focus of interest of (what one calls) the “European New Right” for well over 40 years.

The twenty-first century will also be the century of the 4^th Nomos of the Earth (general power configuration at the global level). The First Nomos, the one where nations lived relatively isolated from each other, came to an end with the discovery of America. The Second Nomos, embodied by the Eurocentric order of modern states (the Westphalian order), ended with the First World War. The Third Nomos was the one in place since 1945 and it shaped the Yalta regime and the Soviet-American condominium.

What will be the Fourth Nomos? That one may take on the form of a unipolar America-centric world, i.e. a vast global market, that is to say, an immense free trade space, or possibly a multi-polar world where major continental blocks, being both autonomous power actors and hubs of civilizations, play a regulatory role vis-à-vis globalization, preserving thus the diversity of lifestyles and cultures that make up the wealth of mankind.

But it may just as well be said that we have entered now World War IV. World War One (1914–18), which ended for the benefit of the City of London, had brought about the dismantlement of the Austro- Hungarian and the Ottoman empires. The two big winners of the Second World War (1939–45) were the United States and Stalinist Russia. World War III corresponded to the Cold War (1945–89). It ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet system, mainly to the advantage of Washington. World War IV began in 1991. It means a war led by the United States against the rest of the world; a multifaceted type of war, both militarily and economically; both at the financial, technological and cultural level and inseparable from the world-wide “enframing” and rationalization of everything (‘Gestell’) by boundless capital.

The evolution of warfare depends not only on technological advances in armaments, but also on the succession of political forms and institutions to which they are related. One can say that the well-defined military forms of conflict have gone through four stages in modern times: first came the war of sovereign states — as a fall-out of the birth of modern politics, so well described by Hobbes and Machiavelli. In other words back then we were witnessing the dispossession of the theological in favor of a pure political conception of the sovereign. Henceforth, wars were solely conducted for the interests of each state. These were limited wars — wars against justus hostis (“just enemy”), in which only a specific political order was defended.

In the 18^th century surfaced the “democratic war” of nations, who in their turn became sovereign actors. This was also the war that included irregulars while giving birth to guerillas within the context of rising nationalism, and in which what needed to be defended was a given territory as the first priority. In the nineteenth century one could witness the rise of wars conducted in the name of humanity, i.e., wars of a moralizing and criminalizing nature, wars based on an ideology in which abstract principles were defended. This type of war signaled the return of “just war” (its first apparition could be observed during the American Civil War). The fourth form of warfare is now the war against “terror” (or “Star Wars”) — a war of asymmetric and total character.

In many aspects we have already entered the fourth dimension of warfare. Entering this fourth dimension brings us closer to the moment of truth. The question remains as to what will be the general configuration of issues in this century, the major lines of demarcation and the decisive cleavages? For the time being we still live in a kind of interregnum. Yet from now on, the essential issue needs to be addressed: the enigma of the subject in the historical process in a world dominated by Capitalism, in which Capitalism is itself subject to terrible internal contradictions, while at the same time becoming stronger and stronger day after day. Who will be the historical subject to shake things up in life now?

Being a historical subject and not an object of the history of others requires full self-awareness and awareness of how to unfold oneself towards one’s own potential. Heidegger spoke of Being (Dasein), a Being shaped by his time, waiting to unfold. But there is also a Being (Dasein) of peoples in the political sense of this term. All peoples are waiting to see the end of their alienation — as peoples. Facing the objectified forms of their work — which is represented by capital — they need to affirm themselves as historical subjects in the present age — in order to become again the subjects of their own social endeavors.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “The Fourth Dimension.” The Occidental Observer, 30 January 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/01/the-fourth-dimension/ >.

Note: This article was originally published in French in Elements, Nr. 136, June 2011.

 

The “West” Should be Forgotten – Benoist

The “West” Should Be Forgotten

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from the French by Tomislav Sunic

 

The “West”? Raymond Abellio observed that “Europe is fixed in space, that is to say, in geography, as opposed to the West which is “portable.” In fact, the “West” has continued travelling and changing directions. In the beginning that term meant the land where the sun sets (Abendland), as opposed to the land of the rising sun (Morgenland). Starting with the reign of Diocletian in the late third century AD, the opposition between East and West came down to the distinction between the Western Roman Empire (whose capital was Milan and then Ravenna) and the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople. The first one disappeared in 476 AD, with the abdication of Romulus Augustulus. After that the West and Europe merged for good. However, starting with the eighteenth century the adjective “Western” came to light on nautical charts referring to the New World, also called the “American system,” as opposed to the “European system,” or the “Eastern Hemisphere” (which then included Europe, Africa and Asia).

In the interwar period the West, having always been associated with Europe, as for example in Spengler’s works, was contrasted to the Orient, which turned into an object of fascination (René Guenon) and a scarecrow (Henri Massis). During the Cold War, the West included Western Europe and its Anglo-Saxon allies such as England and the United States, both being at that time opposed to the “Eastern bloc,” dominated by the Soviet Russia. This view, which allowed the U.S. to legitimize its hegemony, survived the collapse of the Soviet system (also for example with Huntington).

Today, the West has again acquired new meanings. At times it can have a purely economic one: “Western” are all developed, modernized, industrialized countries, such as Japan, South Korea and Australia, including the countries of the former “Eastern Europe,” North America or Latin America. “Ex Oriente lux, luxus ex Occidente,” (Light comes from the East; luxuriousness comes from the West) quipped jokingly the Polish writer Stanislaw Jerzy Lec. The West is losing its spatial content only to become merged with the notion of modernity. On the global level and as the last incarnation of furor orientalis in the eyes of Westerners, the West is opposed to Islamism. Accordingly, a fundamental divide separates the “Judeo-Christian” West from the “Arab-Muslim East,” and some people do not hesitate to predict that the final struggle of “Rome” and “Ismaël” — the war of Gog and Magog — will culminate in the messianic era.

In reality, there is no more such thing as the unitary “West,” just as there is no homogenous “East.” As for the notion of the “Christian West,” it has lost all meaning ever since Europe sank into indifference and “practical materialism” and in view of the fact that religion has become a private matter. Europe and the West have become completely disjointed from each other — to the point that defending Europe often means fighting against the West. No longer related to any geographical domain, let alone cultural, the word ‘West’ should be forgotten for good.

Let us rather talk about Europe. By thinking objectively, that is to say, by acquiring the gift for distancing itself from its self, and in order to be able to objectively rule on the true, the just and the good, Europe, all of a sudden, wished to access the universal — a desire that is not to be found in other cultures. Jean-François Mattei rightly speaks about the “theoretical view of the universal.” This idea of the universal has later on degenerated into universalism, which originally had a religious nature and then a secular nature (there is just as much distance between the universal and universalism as there is between liberty and liberalism). In its quest for Sameness, universalism boils down to the ideology of the Same, at the expense of Difference, i.e. in affirming the primacy of Oneness over Multiplicity. But it also reflects hidden ethnocentrism to the point that any idea of universal inevitably reflects a specific conception of the universal. Initially, there was a need to grasp the Other from the point of view of the Others and not from one’s own Self — which was both commendable and necessary. Afterwards, one gave up on being his Self — which turned out to be catastrophic.

Europe seems to be now in decline at all levels. The very construction of Europe is melting away before our eyes. Not only is Europe the “sick man on the economic planet” (Marcel Gauchet); it is also facing an unprecedented crisis of intelligence and political will. It wishes to bail out of history, driven by the idea that the present state of things — the boundless capital and techno-science — are expected to continue their course forever and that there is nothing else possible, and especially that there is nothing better. Ceding to an impetus that has become a part and an object of the history of others, Europe has exempted itself from its very self. Between the destitution of its past and the fear of its future, it believes in nothing else other than abstract moralism and disembodied principles that would save her from thriving in its being — even if the price is its metamorphosis. Forgetting that history is tragic, assuming that its can reject any consideration of power, searching for consensus at any cost, floating weightless, as if in a form of lethargy, not only does it consent to its own disappearance, but it interprets its disappearance as a proof of its moral superiority. One can obviously think of the “last man” that Nietzsche talked about.

So the only thing that is not declining is the subject of the decline itself — which is the subject of the permanent “declination.” This issue is not an offshoot of the old tradition of cultural pessimism. We need to know whether history obeys intrinsic laws that go beyond human action. If there is a decline of the West, then this decline comes from far away and must not be reduced to the present state of affairs such as globalization. The fate of a culture is contained in its origin. Its very history is determined by its origin because its origin determines its historical itinerary, its narrative skill, and the content of its narration. Historically, the Western idea first expressed itself in a metaphysical form, after that in an ideological form, and then in a “scientific” form. Evidently, it is running out of steam today. The West has said everything it had to say; it conjugated all its myths in every possible manner. It is coming to an end in a chaotic dissolution, as a depletion of energy and all-out nihilism.

The real issue is whether there is another culture which, having already embraced modernity, could offer the world a new form of mastering the universal, both in theory and practice, or for that matter, whether Western culture, having reached its terminal phase, could give birth to another one. Indeed, when a culture comes to a close, another one can replace it. Europe has already been the site of many cultures and therefore, there is no reason why it can’t be again the homeland of a new culture, of which we need to detect warning signs. This new culture will follow on the preceding one, but it will not be its extension. Rather than lapsing into unnecessary lamentation, what is needed is an eye sharp enough to look at the margins where something can grow that enables hope.

We are back at Spengler’s, but with one correction; what comes to an end heralds a new beginning.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “The “West” Should Be Forgotten.” The Occidental Observer, 21 April 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/04/the-%e2%80%9cwest%e2%80%9d-should-be-forgotten/ >.

Note: This article was originally published in French in Elements, #139 (April–June, 2011).

 

European Son – Interview with Benoist

“European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist” (PDF – 191 KB):

European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist

Additional document with portions of the original interview containing critical commentaries on Christianity and the Human Sciences which were cut out from the official interview in The Occidental Quarterly (PDF – 314 KB):

Interview with Alain de Benoist on the Human Sciences and Christianity by Bryan Sylvain

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Citation for the official The Occidental Quarterly interview: De Benoist, Alain. “European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist.” Interview by Brian Sylvian. The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 7-27. <https://www.toqonline.com/archives/v5n3/53-bs-debenoist.pdf >.

Citations for the original sources of the “Interview with Alain de Benoist on the Human Sciences and Christianity by Bryan Sylvain”: De Benoist, Alain. “Interview on Christianity, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 28 January 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/interview-on-christianity-part-1/ >; “Interview on Christianity, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 January 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/interview-on-christianity-part-2/ >; “Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 9 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-1/ >; “Benoist on Eugenics & Intelligence: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 11 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/benoist-on-eugenics-and-intelligence-interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-2/ >; “Benoist on J. Philippe Rushton: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 3.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-3/ >; “Benoist on Feminism, IQ, & the Wealth of Nations: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 4.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/benoist-on-feminism-iq-the-wealth-of-nations-interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-4/ >.

 

Re-Reading Rousseau – Benoist

Re-Reading Rousseau*

By Alain de Benoist

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) is a rather curious case in the history of ideas. After two centuries, he is still the object of truly passionate opinions (you either love him or you hate him), and few authors have given rise to as many contradictory interpretations. He is commonly seen as an inspiration for the French Revolution, but also as an influence on German nationalism. He is seen as a convinced individualist, a social misfit, a gentle dreamer seeking self-dissolution—and as a fanatical logician devoted to Spartan discipline. He is seen as a rationalist, but also as the prophet of a morality and religion based solely on sentiment. He has been represented as the father of romanticism and one of the precursors of state socialism. Hippolyte Taine accused him of collectivism, Benjamin Constant of despotism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who blamed him for the “great deviation of 1793,”[1] saw him as a theorist and apologist of tyranny.

Rousseau is the bête noire of the French right, though they seldom read him. The liberals, for their part, blame him for the excesses of the Revolution of 1789 and claim he is the source of a “totalitarian” current leading straight to Karl Marx.[2] Indeed, for Rousseau, the social contract remains in large part still to be written: the limits of the possible have not yet been attained and the better society is still to come. The traditional right is more radical in its criticism, reproaching Rousseau for the very idea of the social contract and using the term “Rousseauism” to designate a “utopian” anthropology of undeniable malefi-cence. Rousseau is then presented as nothing more than the father of egalitarianism and the author of absurd theories of the “noble savage” and the “naturally good man.”

Typical of this mentality is Charles Maurras’ portrait of “poor Rousseau”:

Neither the spirit of the family, nor of the party, nor the political interests that would have moderated every other Genevan, was capable of tempering the mystic rage of this tub thumper, born in misfortune, scourged silly by an elderly spinster, and spoiled rotten by his first friends. Jack of all the trades, including the most disgusting, in turn lackey and minion, music master, parasite, kept man, he knew only one thing: his intellectual and moral bankruptcy. . . . Born sensitive and versatile, completely incapable of holding fast to the truth, his divergent arguments never harmonize with his whining. He is a criminal, a savage, and a madman, in about equal parts.[3]

Rousseau’s thought nevertheless exerted a considerable influence, which extends far beyond the intellectual or political context to which it is often restricted.[4] But this influence, even in Rousseau’s own time, seems to be located much more on the level of sensibility than of doctrine. Besides, his influence was based less on his texts than on often hostile interpretations and simplifications. Rousseau is an author who is often quoted but almost never read. Moreover, only his early works are commonly cited; his constitutional projects for Corsica and Poland are too often ignored, especially by his adversaries. Finally, it was only in the twentieth century that serious study of his work began and the unity of his thought was recognized.[5] In any case, all these controversies show that Rousseau’s thought does not lend itself to easy summation in neat formulas. Thus I propose that we re-read Rousseau, not to “rehabilitate” him—for he does not need it—but to go beyond the received view and discover an author who undoubtedly deserves better than the image often offered by his admirers as well as his enemies.

Rousseau on Nature

Rousseau writes that “man is naturally good.” However, one reads at the beginning of Emile: “Everything that comes from the hands of the Author of things is good; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” What are we to think of a being who is alleged to be naturally good, but who causes everything he touches to “degenerate”? Moreover, in the formula “naturally good,” which word matters most? Does Rousseau want to say simply that man is good, and on top of that this kindness is natural for him, or does he want to say that it is as a natural being that man is good? The importance that Rousseau gives “nature” evidently suggests the second interpretation. But this term is also equivocal for him. The “back to nature” theme was all the rage in the eighteenth century. For Diderot, Guillaume Raynal, and so many others, it nourished all kinds of speculations about the “golden age,” the “primitive virtues,” etc.[6] Is this really the case with Rousseau? Moreover, such a watchword has very different meanings depending on one’s idea of “nature.” The Church, for example, always preached an “ethics according to nature,” whereas Nietzsche denounced “morality as anti-nature” (the title of the one of the chapters of Twilight of the Idols). In fact, one need only read Rousseau to realize that “natural” is used with two very different meanings. Sometimes “natural” refers to what is original, sometimes to what is authentic or essential. Very quickly, the second meaning took precedence.

When he evokes the “state of nature,” Rousseau proves to be much less utopian than many Enlightenment philosophers. At the beginning of his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men,[7] he says explicitly that he never intended to depict an original state of humanity, because one can never know what it was, or even if the “state of nature” ever existed. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Rousseau does not turn towards a far distant past, which he reconstructed in his own fashion, any more than he believed it possible to learn something of human “nature” from so-called “savage” tribes. The state of nature for him is less a historical concept than a speculative and regulative idea allowing one to organize facts. It is a fiction he uses to explain the appearance of the phenomena he wishes to critique. The same applies to the idea of the “social contract” which he says belongs among “the hypothetical and conditional truths.” Today, one would say: a working hypothesis.

Rousseau opposes “natural man” and “civilized man.” But both of these categories are immediately subdivided: just as civilized man includes the bourgeois as well as the citizen (more on this below), the natural man includes the savage natural man and the natural man living in society. However, one wonders whether the first of these two “natural men” is truly a man. Rousseau describes him as a “stupid and limited being,” “bound by nature to instinct alone”: “limited to physical instinct alone, he is null, he is stupid” (Discourse on Inequality). This savage, guided only by “self-love,” is a recluse who lives in autarky. He is self-sufficient in the sense that he does not maintain individualized relations with anybody. He has neither morality, nor beliefs, nor reason, nor language. Such a being is thus in no way distinguishable from an animal. The savage natural man, subject to strict natural selection, is initially one living thing among others. By this, Rousseau thinks he is affirming the animal origin of man. It is a point of view rather different from that of his contemporaries.

Rousseau does not see the “state of nature” as the starting point of an ineluctable linear development. The state of nature described in the first part of the Discourse on Inequality is essentially static; in theory, man could have remained there eternally, perpetually enjoying the “happiness” connected to his animal embodiment. This savage man is by all evidence an imaginary being, a kind of ideal type that Rousseau needs in order to set up his other categories. For if the savage is not an actual man, he is nevertheless potentially one. He is solitary, but not asocial. He has the “social virtues potentially.”[8] For Rousseau, although sociality does not strictly speaking arise from nature, neither does it go against it. Man is social as soon as he is man, in the full sense of the term. It is thus no exaggeration to say, with Louis Dumont, that Rousseau, contrary to most interpretations of his thought, fully recognizes the social character of man, i.e., his membership in a concrete society as a condition of his humanity.

Natural Goodness and the Problem of Evil

It is, in short, necessary to place Rousseau in the context of his time. Rousseau’s theory of the “naturally good man” initially aimed at answering the classical question of theodicy, i.e., the problem raised by the existence of evil in a world supposedly freely created by a God who is both all-powerful and infinitely good. Apparently this problem can be solved in only two ways: either we exonerate God by explaining evil by the original sin, i.e., by man’s misuse of his freedom before his entry into history; or we exonerate man, and one is then obliged to doubt the goodness or the absolute power of God.

Rousseau’s position is more original. Against the Encyclopedists, Rousseau advocates the “justification of God.” Against the Church, he disputes the idea of original sin, which represents man as naturally bad. By affirming that evil comes neither from man nor from God, but from a third source, i.e., society, Rousseau by no means intends to plead in favor of an irresponsible individual who blames “society” for all his acts, which is the common meaning of “Rousseauist.” He intends, rather, to answer a fundamental theological problem, which immediately confronts any speculative reflection.

His critical conception of the social is equally original compared to the philosophy of his time. The idea of a distinction between civil society and the state was certainly common in the eighteenth century, when all philosophical reflection rested on the assumption that modern man first lives in a private social sphere, in opposition to the public sphere dominated by the state. The early liberal theorists articulated their criticism of institutions starting from the idea that there is a civil society that must be continuously defended against the encroachments of power. For Encyclopedists, civil society is thus a priori good in itself. What is bad is the political system, absolute monarchy, power which always tends to expand itself.

But Rousseau concludes the exact opposite. Absolutism, in his eyes, is only an epiphenomenon. For the Encyclopedists, it is the cause of social and political evil; for Rousseau it is only a consequence. These are two very different perspectives. The Encyclopedists, who reason in a purely mechanist manner, believe that it would suffice to limit power so that civil society could function “freely” in a more or less optimal way. Rousseau himself realized quite well that social reality is much more complex, and that one does not solve all problems by curbing the authority of the state or changing institutions.

Above all, it was the Church which, having recognized Rousseau as an adversary of the idea of original sin, worked to blame every excess on the “natural goodness” of man. In fact, for Rousseau, man in the state of nature is neither good nor bad, for the simple reason that there is no morality in him. In the state of nature, there is, “neither goodness in our hearts, nor morality in our actions.”[9] In addition, man is fully man only when he is “denatured,” i.e., when he ceases being a solitary and perfect whole to become part of the social whole. Rousseau, who often returns to this idea, writes that “good institutions are those that best denature man . . . so that each individual no longer believes he is one, but part of the whole.” His thought on this point is very clear. Rather than “good,” man is naturally innocent as long as his humanity is just virtual; he is neither good nor bad (or both good and bad) as soon as he fully attains his humanity.

In the second sense, which takes on a greater importance in Rousseau, “natural” means essential. Ultimately, for Rousseau “natural” man is not the original man, man without society, who bears an essence that he himself authenticates. The “nature” of man becomes at the same time what is specifically human in him. Consequently, the problem of human nature becomes an exclusively moral and philosophical problem. To know what is “natural” in man, one must undertake a reflection on his inner being, on the ideal type that corresponds best to the human phenomenon. I agree with Louis Dumont who writes: “The core of Rousseau’s message lies much more in moral and religious consciousness than in feeling for nature, as is sometimes is believed.”

Freedom, Perfectibility, History

What then is the “nature” of man? First and foremost, it is his freedom. Rousseau opens an important inquiry when he wonders whether man really belongs to “nature,” and not rather to freedom. His answer is that the two terms are integral to each other. And from this fundamental freedom, Rousseau immediately derives the concept of “perfectibility.” What distinguishes man from all the other living things is that he is perfectible: he has the capacity to change himself. Here Rousseau is not very far from the idea, presented in particular by Arnold Gehlen, of man as “open to the world,” not strictly determined, free to “denature” himself, i.e., to enculturate himself in his own fashion. Far from preaching the return to any state of nature, Rousseau defines real man as a being who never sticks to his state of origin, but unceasingly seeks to exceed himself and create new forms of existence. “The nature of man is to have no nature, but to be free” (Pierre Manent). That, of course, can be understood in various ways. But the fundamental idea remains: freedom initially consists in constructing oneself, which applies to individuals as well as to peoples.

In addition, for Rousseau freedom is neither a gift nor a passive state. From a dynamic point of view, it exists only insofar as one is ready to conquer it. Contrary to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau does not intend to base the social bond on “sympathy” or self-interest. He does not expect society to guarantee well-being or “happiness,” but rather to provide man the conditions in which he can conquer his freedom. This is far from the presuppositions of the economists and utilitarians of his time and ours.

It is important to grasp fully that it is perfectibility that inserts man into history and makes him a historical being in the full sense of the word. Through this conception of man, Rousseau poses a philosophy of history far removed from modern historicism. Rousseau does not, like Hegel, see continuous progress in human development, an ever-intensifying rise of reason in history. The concept of perfectibility, for him, does not immediately answer the question of progress. On the contrary, Rousseau wonders why the history of human perfectibility is so often a history of evil. Contrary to liberal optimism, he believes neither in the intrinsic virtues of progress nor in a utopia that will necessarily come to pass. In a certain way, in his eyes, to become historical is neutral. Perfectibility is the source of errors and hopes, successes and failures. It is the cause of misfortune and all human “misery.” It is the source of the alienation of everything most authentic in him. But it can also help him get it back. In fact, according to the circumstances, it can lead to servitude or a better society.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, who were avid pastoralists, Rousseau did not believe it possible to return to an original state: “Human nature does not go backwards.” He did not dream of a Golden Age or wish to restore a lost paradise. His social contract is not, like Locke’s, an event of the past, but a part of the future that still remains to be founded. It is not to be reconstituted, but to be realized. Intended to rescue man from the corruptions of a degenerate society, it does not reveal the image of the self-sufficient individual, but calls for collective action. This is equivalent to moving from a history unconsciously suffered to one consciously engaged. Rousseau knew well that society was always much more the result of human action than human design. But his conclusions were the opposite of Hayek’s. Rousseau is resolutely “perspectivist.” Society has gone wrong precisely because hitherto it has developed without man’s knowledge—and this is why man must try to take control of it. Human existence is not inevitably inauthentic and “depraved.” It is not a question of seeking “happiness” or returning to the “state of nature,” but of taking the path of freedom. The idea that man is a good savage who has been corrupted by society seems, in this light, somewhat inadequate. Rather, according to Rousseau, man is a perfectible animal whose perfectibility resulted in self-alienation, but who can recover his authenticity without having to revert to a former state.

To work for the advent of a better society ultimately comes down to knowing how man can conform to his essence, how he can be himself. This preoccupation with “authenticity” explains Rousseau’s influence on the German Romantics and the Sturm und Drang generation, an influence, moreover, that would be expressed in two different forms according to whether one gave primacy to the feeling for nature or the requirements of morality. For Rousseau’s morality was not reduced to the prerogatives of feeling, to the “right of the heart” which likened Goethe’s Werther to Rousseau’s New Eloise. It is a more fundamental ethical imperative that already foreshadows Kant. Moreover, Kant worked out his moral theory in explicit reference to Rousseau, and it was really “between Kant and Rousseau” that the discourse of the young writers of the Sturm und Drang would be worked out.

Equality

Let us now consider the problem of equality. Here too, we tend to stick too closely to a formula: “All men are born equal and free” (On the Social Contract). Rousseau’s conception of equality is actually very complex. It has nothing to do, for example, with the embryonic communism of François-Noël Babeuf. Rousseau reduces the equality of nature to membership in the species—men are equal insofar as they belong to the same species (sub specie naturae)—and also to the metaphysical constitution of human nature: men are subject to a common finitude; we are all equally doomed to death.

Along with this equality of the human condition, there is a natural inequality that Rousseau does not deny for an instant. On the contrary, in the Discourse on Inequality, he explicitly mentions this “natural inequality,” “established by nature,” “which consists in the difference of ages, health, physical strength, and qualities of the mind, of the soul.”

Certainly, the social contract represents one moment when equality between men is perfectly realized. But Rousseau describes this equality as a “reciprocal commitment of all towards each.” This concept of reciprocity is rather close to the Aristotelian definition of justice, and steers the idea of equality towards that of proportion or right measure: to each his own.

In addition, on the social level, Rousseau unambiguously challenges what Montesquieu calls the spirit of “extreme equality.” In his eyes, the despotism of all is no better than the despotism of just one, and he rightly sees that extreme equality leads to the tyranny of all. In his projects for Corsica and Poland, he even recommends instituting a hierarchy of three nonhereditary classes, having distinct functions and privileges.

Thus Rousseau does not recommend the disappearance of social differences. He asks only that social inequalities agree with natural inequalities and do not involve unbearable domination. “With regard to equality,” he writes, “this word does not mean that the degrees of power and wealth are absolutely the same, but that, as for power, it is never comparable to violence and is never exerted but in virtue of rank and laws and, as for wealth, that no citizen is so rich he can buy another, and no one so poor that he has to sell himself” (Discourse on Inequality).

To use Isocrates’ famous distinction: Rousseau in the end tends more toward a “geometrical equality,” i.e., a distributive justice, than toward the arithmetic equality characteristic of modern egalitarianism. As Raymond Polin writes, “Rousseau always defended the other equality, the proportional and moderate form of equality that recognizes the legitimacy of moral and political distinctions and differences, provided that they harmonize with the inequalities established by nature.”[10]

Rousseau, in the same way, does not criticize property rights, but intends to firmly limit their abuse. “Property,” he affirms, “is the most sacred of all civil rights and more important, in certain regards, than even life.” In addition, property is “the true guarantor of the commitments of citizens,” because the law would be inapplicable if the people could not respond to how it applies to their goods. For this reason, Rousseau disputes Locke’s idea that one has a natural right to property based on work. Property, he says, is “a human convention and institution,” which means that the right to property is a social right. The state for Rousseau, unlike Diderot, is not a “dispenser of happiness.” It ought to intervene only when the inequalities of fortune reach such a point that they condemn certain categories of citizens to an economic dependence reducing them to the status of objects. Generally speaking, Rousseau is quite aware that there can be rights only where there are relations: rights are born with society. Human rights in the sense defined by liberal theorists, as eternal rights that man brings from his “state of nature,” leave Rousseau completely indifferent.

The importance Rousseau gives to broader society leads him to recognize that the central power in society resides in opinion. It is what fixes the position of men and the esteem they enjoy. It is what determines the social comparisons from which most inequalities result. (Here one can still see Rousseau’s originality: inequalities do not give rise to social comparisons, but social comparisons give rise to inequalities.) With these observations, Rousseau again expresses his anti-liberalism. Some take self-interest as axiomatic: society “necessarily entails that men hate one another to the extent that their interests conflict.” He perceived quite well that, in modern societies, the assignment of comparative values to men is above all based on the process by which things are priced. The value allotted to each individual aligns with exchange value. However, for Rousseau, the value of men is not reducible to a price. Thus he shows that, personal qualities being at the origin of inequalities and the phenomena of subordination that they involve, “wealth is the last thing they are reduced to in the end, because being most immediately useful for well-being and easiest to pass on, one easily makes use of it to buy everything else” (Discourse on Inequality).

Rousseau observes that this “competitive” inequality is found as much in Paris as in London, Naples, or Geneva. The power of money is integral to modernity, which installs the bourgeois in place of the citizen. Modern man lives neither for others nor for his fatherland, but only for the approval of an opinion that spontaneously models social value on monetary value, i.e., on money. Rousseau calls this attitude vanity (amour-propre) and sees it as a corruption of self-love (amour de soi). As Pierre Manent stresses:

Vanity is not self-love: it is even in some way the opposite. Vanity lives by comparison, it is the desire to be esteemed by others at as high a price as one esteems oneself, and it is condemned to be unsatisfied, since everyone has the same vanity and feels the same desire. Vanity knows that it cannot be satisfied, and it hates others for their vanity. It nourishes in the soul distaste for oneself and impotent hatred of others. The man of such a society lives only by the approval of the others, whom he hates.[11]

Thus envy and frustration seem to form the cursed pair of the modern spirit. One sees here the beginning of an analysis of resentment and mimetic competition that presages Nietzsche, Tocqueville, and René Girard all at once. Furthermore, the transformation of natural man into sociable man, into “man of man,” as described in the second part of On the Social Contract, attests to the importance of the role of vanity and resentment from the angle of preferences and comparisons. Comparison causes preferences, preferences generate individualized personal relations, the latter being mediated by the opinions of others, which is the origin of inequality. Describing this process, Rousseau reveals the connection between man’s domination of nature and his alienation from himself. The more man sets himself up as the master of a world reduced to objects, the more he is withdrawn from a relationship of mutual belonging with the world; the more he changes himself into an object, loses the meaning of his existence, and becomes a stranger to himself. The idea will be found in Heidegger. Rousseau notes finally that in the society produced by this evolution, “freedom” is nothing but illusion: when all members are slaves of opinion, the freedom of each is only the impotence of all. This is what justifies his strikingly formulated critique of the bourgeois spirit.[12]

Rousseau describes the bourgeois as a “double being,” divided, entirely subject to the dictates of opinion, and, for this reason, concerned entirely with appearances. Referring to the birth of the bourgeois, he writes in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality: “To be and appear became two completely different things, and from this distinction came imposing splendor, deceptive trickery, and all the vices that follow in their train. . . . When everything is reduced to appearances, everything becomes false and deceptive.” This passage is important, because it shows what Rousseau really wanted. The bourgeois is defined less by his economic position than his psychic type, his mentality. The bourgeois is the very negation of everything authentic, of everything that connects man to his essential being. He is a false man, without consistency; a decadent who lives only for the opinion of others; a being characterized by lies, prudence, and calculation; by a servile spirit, debased morals, and tepid feelings: “He will be one of these men of today, a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois; he will be nothing.”[13]

Here the opposition to liberal authors is total. Whereas they criticize power but not wealth, Rousseau blames the rich much more than the powerful. Whereas the Encyclopedists sought above all to modify the institutional and political system, Rousseau realizes quite well that the problem raised by the absolute power of a social situation founded on envy, and in the final analysis on the power of money, is infinitely more complex. Rousseau is quite far from contrasting French absolutism to the liberal English regime so much admired by the Enlightenment. He sees that beyond their differences, the two systems are devoted to the rise of the same bourgeois type, i.e., of the type of man who aims always above all at his own self-interest.[14]

Finally, Rousseau does not believe for an instant that private life, left to itself, can make men happy, nor that the pursuit of selfish interest can, thanks to the “invisible hand,” end up benefiting all. In truth, he reviles selfishness: “When one wants to be happy only for himself, then there is no happiness for the fatherland.”[15] This is why he intends to fight against indifference towards the commonweal and wants to keep “in narrow boundaries this personal interest that isolates private individuals to such an extent that the state is weakened by their power and can expect nothing from their good will.”

Rousseau’s Critique of Progress

Nor does one find in Rousseau the optimistic confidence with which the Encyclopedists observed the rise and the progress of the sciences. Rousseau does not share the idea that there is a natural harmony between the requirements of society and those of positive science. Nor does he expect the diffusion of knowledge to roll back “superstitions.” In a famous text addressing the question Whether the progress of the sciences and the arts has contributed to the corruption or the purification of morals (1750),[16] he expresses his doubts about the emancipatory powers of science. Elsewhere, he recalls that “if reason illuminates us,” “passion leads us.”

It is probably in light of this critique of scientism that we should understand the importance he gives to feeling. For him conscience plays the same role that instinct does for the body: “Too often reason misleads us . . . but the conscience is never mistaken,” one reads in Emile (IV). This moral subjectivism, this idea that the personal conscience alone is able to determine good and evil (“all that I feel to be good is good, all that I feel to be bad is bad; the best of all casuists is the conscience”) earned Rousseau justified criticism. It should be seen, however, that if Rousseau gives such a place to the impulses of the conscience, if he defends feeling and passions, if he praises the “heart of nature” and the surging sensations it generates, he does so—against the spirit of the Encyclopedists, who conceive of society only in the form of a social mechanism—to establish the infirmity of reason and oppose to it the prerogatives of the heart—perhaps also to affirm the existence of a bond between man and the world at a time when incipient industrialization was turning the latter into a simple object of which human reason was to take possession.

To the figure of the modern bourgeois, Rousseau significantly opposes that of the citizen, of whom he finds the most perfect examples in antiquity. He writes:

When ancient history is read, one believes oneself transported into another universe and among other beings. What have the French, the English, the Russians, in common with the Romans and the Greeks? Almost nothing but their shapes . . . . They existed, however, and they were human like us. What prevents us from being men like them? Our prejudices, our base philosophy, and the passions of petty interest and selfishness in the hearts of all the foolish institutions that genius has ever dictated.[17]

The enthusiasm and the bitterness that inspire these lines are revealing. Rousseau is a passionate admirer of antiquity. He has an acute sense of heroism and loves great men. Did he not learn how to read with Plutarch’s Lives? It is in antiquity that he sought proof that there is a form of existence other than the bourgeois. It is his study of antiquity that sparked the idea of a society where distinctions rest on real virtues, not on wealth, birth, or even simple skill. It is in Rome and Sparta, in “noble Lacademonia,” that he sought the model citizen. Thus he does not at all share the criticisms Hobbes formulated of the ideal society of the ancients. And contra Montesquieu, who admired the ancient city, but reproached it for imposing an exhausting civic discipline on its members, he pleaded forcefully for a return to the public-spiritedness of free citizens.

He also used the ancient example when he based equality on liberty, and not liberty on equality. His conception of liberty is much nearer to what Benjamin Constant called the “liberty of the ancients” than that of the moderns, who understand liberty exclusively as the liberation of the individual ego and the independence of the subject. Liberty as Rousseau conceives it is inseparable from the idea of participation in the social order.

Rousseau on Democracy

Rousseau believes in direct democracy. Ideally, he says, this is the best regime, because the people always remain in control of the sovereign power. It guarantees every man total liberty and perfect autonomy, while ensuring that government conforms with the general interest. This leads to Rousseau’s fundamental criticism of the concept of representation. Contrary to the social contract of Hobbes or Locke, Rousseau excludes any delegation of sovereignty to rulers and requires that elected officials act according to the will of the voters rather than their own conscience.

In his system, the people do not sign a contract with the sovereign: their relations are governed exclusively by law. The prince is only the executive of the people, who retain sole title to legislative power. The prince does not represent the General Will; he is not its incarnation, but only its instrument; at most he is elected, commissioned, to express it. Indeed, remarks Rousseau, if the people are represented, then it is the representatives who have power, in which case the people are no longer sovereign. For Rousseau, popular sovereignty is inalienable. Any representation is thus equivalent to an abdication.

In this scheme, the sovereign holds executive power, but not legislative power. Rousseau calls “democratic government” the system in which the people would also hold executive power, a possibility that appears entirely utopian to him. This is why he writes: “If there were a people of gods, it would be governed democratically. A government so perfect does not agree with men. . . . True democracy never existed and never will.”[18] This remark, the subject of countless misconceptions,[19] must be interpreted correctly. Rousseau means only that the legislative power cannot merge with the executive power, because “it is against the natural order that the great number governs.”[20] The people cannot govern itself, but it can, on the other hand, legislate and then “appoint” its governors.

The rejection of any representative system entails the rejection of factions and parties. This is why Rousseau harshly critcizes the English constitution which, according to him, does not guarantee liberty so much as the privileges of the representatives: “The English people think themselves free; they are quite mistaken; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament; as soon as their representatives are elected, the people are slaves, they are nothing. In the brief moments of their liberty, the use they make of it merits its loss.”[21]

Whereas the philosophers of the Enlightenment wanted to limit the prerogatives of power and disputed the very notion of popular sovereignty, Rousseau instead made the latter the cornerstone of his entire political system. Calling sovereign the body politic which gave birth to the social contract, he deduced from this that, the General Will being one, the sovereignty resulting from it cannot be fragmented without losing all meaning. Thus Rousseau rejects any separation of powers, any attempt to divide sovereignty.

Rousseau also rejects the distinction between liberalism and despotism, because he thinks that by establishing citizenship, one can ensure political and social unity without falling into despotism. That said, he is rather indifferent to the form of government. He is not hostile, for example, to aristocratic government, which he says quite openly is the “best government.”[22] But that must be understood within his system. What is essential, for Rousseau, is that the people hold legislative power and never relinquish it. Once that is acquired, executive power can just as well have an aristocratic form. The power to govern does not merge with sovereignty.

In principle, the reasoning is completely sound. It is clear that to the degree it is human, democracy is truly realized only in direct form: a citizen who delegates his right to approve or reject a law to a representative, even one elected by him, thereby alienates his autonomy and uses his liberty only to relinquish it. But it is equally obvious, at least in theory, that only the rule of unanimity truly respects autonomy. It follows that true democracy requires, not just the assent of a majority, but the assent of all. On this point, one can of course be skeptical. Unanimity can perhaps be reached in very small cities or communities, with populations having common values and interests. On the other hand, the greater the population, the greater the risk of a diversity of irreconcilable opinions. Unless one falls into despotism, the ideal of unanimity then becomes an inaccessible dream. (Georges Sorel, of course, reproached Rousseau precisely for having imagined a democracy copied from the Genevan model.)

Rousseau does not dodge the problem. He is conscious of the fact that direct democracy requires conditions that are only seldom met. This is why he appears hardly inclined to propose universal solutions: his project for Corsica differs notably from the one he conceived for Poland. His tendency is rather to resort to the principle of authority: he thinks that the more subjects a government has, the stronger it must be.[23] He even thinks that, in a state of emergency, a Roman-style dictatorship (rei publicae servanda, “for the commonweal”) can be justified.

Holism and Individualism

Rousseau appears especially obsessed by the dangers of division. On the political plane, if he admires the ancient city, it is first of all for its unity. On the anthropological plane, he describes the bourgeois as a divided being. Moreover, he draws an interesting parallel between, on the one hand, the distinction between temporal and spiritual power, and, on the other, liberalism’s distinction between the citizen acting in the public sphere and the isolated individual pursuing his self-interest in the private sphere. Like Hobbes, he thinks that the conversion of Europe to Christianity could only entail a disastrous distinction between spiritual and temporal power, creating “a perpetual conflict of jurisdiction that made any good polity impossible in the Christian states.”[24] The conflict between the Christian and the citizen thus presages the conflict between the individual and society.

As a result, Rousseau sees what liberalism and absolutism—which the philosophy of the Enlightenment treats as polar opposites—really have in common: the importance attached to the individual—the difference being that absolutism believes in the rebellious nature of individuals and thus in the need to use force to make them obey, while liberalism professes in this respect a greater optimism. Rousseau criticizes the liberal idea that the social can be based on individualistic impulses and the autonomy of civil society. But at the same time, he reproached the French monarchy, to the extent that it reflected the influence of the bourgeoisie, for having dismantled the traditional corporations and professions, in order to transform them into entities made up only of individuals.[25]

Rousseau returns to the Aristotelian definition of the citizen: the citizen is he who participates in the sovereign authority. Thus citizenship is directly related to political life. The political sphere constitutes the essential medium for relationships between citizens; it is the place where they can find a unity apart from membership dictated by origin alone. In the city, the citizen depends only on the law, not on men. Contrary to the bourgeois, he shows from the beginning that this essential characteristic is not to be divided. It is a unity, and a good society has to preserve this unity. In the final analysis, society must allow each citizen to identify himself with the city of which he forms a part. The individual should be seen only as part of the body politic. One sees from this that Rousseau is completely alien to any scheme inspired by “class struggle.” He characterizes the well-ordered society by the harmonious integration of all its components. Society is first of all a community, a whole where each party is subordinated to all. Plato said: “Nothing is made for you, but you are made for the whole” (Laws, X). Rousseau advocates “the total alienation by each member of the community of all his rights to the whole community” (On the Social Contract).

Unlike Hobbes, who described society only in mechanistic terms, Rousseau sometimes even happens to compare the social body to a living organism. He is not, however, an organicist in the strict sense, because for him the solidarity between parties comes not just from organic cohesion or common origins, but in the political realities of the social contract and General Will. Referring to the social contract, Rousseau wrote: “This act of association produces a moral and collective body made up of as many members as the assembly has votes, deriving from this same act its unity, its common self, its life, and its will.”[26]

Thus in the end, Rousseau’s reasoning departs from individualistic premises to arrive at holist conclusions. Rousseau says that it is because man is free and originally one that he can be autonomous, and this model of individual autonomy must found the autonomy of society as a whole: “He who dares to undertake to institute a people must feel in a position to change, so to speak, human nature; to transform each individual, who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into part of a very great whole from which this individual receives to some extent his life and his being.”[27] Thus he uses a holist model, but a holism “built” on the model of the individual.

This passage from the individual level to the social status raises obvious difficulties. How can the citizen, the ideal figure of real humanity, constantly align his own interest with that of the city without making him fundamentally alienated from it? How can individual autonomy amalgamate with social autonomy without the latter, inevitably, restricting the former? Rousseau answers these questions by turning again to the social contract and the General Will. Implying a discontinuity between natural man and man in society, the social contract marks the true emergence of humanity in the strict sense. However, the social contract implies the General Will, which permits Rousseau to re-establish holism against the individualism that had previously sustained his discourse.

The General Will

What is the General Will? Rousseau sometimes gives the impression that he confuses the General Will with the will of all, i.e., with the simple addition of individual wills. But it is nothing of the kind. The General Will is based on the unanimous preference of those who instituted the body politic. It is the will of this body as an established whole. Its only acts are laws, and these are the acts that make it possible to put the general interest, the common good, above individual opinion and private interests. Rousseau, as we have seen, defines liberty as an autonomous ability to participate in society. From such a perspective, authentic liberty consists in the autonomous movement of the will that adheres to the law, and this is why it is realized to the highest degree in the General Will. Of course, “each individual as a man can have a specific will contrary or dissimilar to the General Will which he has as citizen. His private interest can tell him something completely different than the common interest.” The individual, Rousseau continues, should put nothing before the General Will. It is here that he makes a remark for which he is reproached so often:

When one proposes a law in the assembly of the people, what one asks them is not precisely if they approve or reject the proposal, but if it is in conformity or not with the General Will that is theirs. . . . Thus when a opinion contrary to mine prevails, that proves only that I had been mistaken, and that what I thought was the General Will was not in fact it.[28]

And as individual autonomy is supposed to have fused with social autonomy, Rousseau can affirm that while submitting to the General Will, individuals in the end submit only to themselves!

The question inevitably arises of whether the General Will is infallible. Rousseau answers it in a way that can make one smile: “The General Will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened.” That leads him to imagine the figure of the “Legislator,” a rather ambiguous character who would have the power to control the laws without possessing either “legislative right” or governmental office. Commentators, of course, have not failed to compare this “Legislator” to the providential “guides” of which modern totalitarianisms made great use.[29] It should not be forgotten, however, that in Rousseau the General Will is more a force of resistance than a force of command. Its essential goal is to express right, just as the government incarnates force, both being necessary to the operation of the state. Expressing the law, the General Will literally animates the social body, gives it “movement and will,” becoming thus the principle of its conservation. It is consequently “the sole form appropriate to the will as an ethical will in general, the sole institution that can bring about the passage from mere arbitrariness to law” (Cassirer).

The General Will thus escapes any reductionistic interpretation. Incarnating sovereignty, it transcends individual wills and has particular characteristics that one does not find in any of its components taken separately, exactly in the same way that the common interest transcends private interests. Rousseau, moreover, is emphatic that “what realizes the will is less the number of votes than the shared interest that unites them.” The theory of the General Will thus exceeds the idea of the majority that comes from universal suffrage. Centered around the concept of “common interest,” it implies the existence and maintenance of a collective identity. Whence the importance Rousseau attaches to the “character of a people,” to the “feeling of membership,” “shared habits,” etc. It is known that Rousseau puts the law above all, because in his eyes it alone can realize the justice that is the condition of freedom. And yet, above the law, he still places mores. “By reason alone,” he writes, “one cannot establish any natural law,”[30] while mores are what makes the “true constitution of states.”[31] When the laws grow old and fade away, it is mores that revive them. Customs and traditions thus constitute the natural adjuncts of political authority: “Nothing can replace mores for the maintenance of government.”

Thus the people is identified with the whole citizenry and opposed quite naturally to the masses (“the multitude”): whereas the multitude can always be controlled by a tyrant, the people no longer exists when the Republic is dissolved. Thus the General Will can be likened to Durkheim’s “collective conscience,” or even the “popular soul” (Volks-seele) dear to the Romantics, although the conditions of its formation are exclusively political. Indeed, there is little doubt that the General Will implicitly preexists its expression in a majority vote. It is, as Louis Dumont writes, “the emergence at the political level and in the language of democracy of the unity of a given society as it preexists in its members and is present in their thoughts and projects.”[32] To be legitimate, therefore, power must be exercised by a community that has first become conscious of itself. As Kant saw so well, the General Will is the act by which the people constitutes itself as a state and creates the conditions of an identity of will between the people and the sovereign: the society resulting from this act, says Rousseau, is one where “a unity of interest and will reigns between the people and their leaders.”

Furthermore, against the universalism of the Enlightenment which, with Diderot, advocates the “society of mankind,” Rousseau affirms that the General Will of a nation is specific to it, which leads him to challenge cosmopolitanism. The citizen, according to him, is first of all a patriot. In Emile, he writes:

Forced to fight nature or social institutions, it is necessary to choose between making a man or a citizen: because one cannot do both at the same time. . . . Every patriot is hard on strangers: they are only men; they are nothing in his eyes. This disadvantage is inevitable, but it is small. What is essential is to be good to the people with whom one lives. . . . Beware of those cosmopolitans who search far and wide in their books for duties that they scorn to observe where they are.[33]

In the Discourse on Inequality, he adds: “If I had been forced to choose the place of my birth, I would have chosen . . . a state . . . where this sweet habit of seeing and knowing one another turned love of the fatherland into love of the citizens rather than of the Earth.” Just as individual liberty corrupts itself when it falls under the domination of others or when it is alienated and becomes a stranger to itself, ceasing to belong to itself, the liberty of the nation is essential for him. Rousseau even goes so far as to make autarky one of the conditions of freedom: “The national condition most favorable to the happiness of individuals is not to need the help of any other people in order to live happily.”[34]

Economics versus Freedom

Montesquieu naïvely maintained that the expansion of trade in Europe would oblige states “to cure themselves of Machiavellianism.” Rousseau, who knew that the “state of nature” always persists between nations, did not believe for a moment that trade and economic exchange in general were conducive to peace.[35] Besides, he obviously did not like economics and scarcely wrote anything about it. When Mirabeau tried to make him read the Physiocrats, he balked. On his return from England in 1767, he denounced the idea of an autonomous economic sphere and developed a radical critique of Physiocratic ideas. His economic ideal is nothing at all like free trade: here too, he remains autarkical and even archaic. Rousseau wishes above all to reduce as much as possible the role of money in exchanges, and proposes to support agriculture against industry. A nation with prosperous agriculture, he says, is already on the path of self-sufficiency; in addition, its inhabitants, having kept contact with nature, have healthier mores than townspeople or workmen: “Trade produces wealth, but agriculture ensures freedom.”

This opposition between “wealth” and “liberty” is characteristic of Rousseau’s thought. Just as he defends the primacy of politics over economics, Rousseau—preoccupied with “morals” above all—upholds values contrary to those of the bourgeois or the merchant. He extols virtue, which is to be understood as “political virtue,” i.e., as good citizenship. To adapt his particular will to the General Will, to place the common interest above all else, to put themselves at the service of the fatherland, i.e., at the service of all free individuals who compose the people and of the laws they give themselves, this is what virtue is. An admirer of Sparta, Rousseau loved the frugal life, “simplicity in manner and ornament.” The thesis of Emile is that one should spare no effort, no pain, no suffering if one wants to educate the character and the will. Indeed, for Rousseau, the public authorities ought to be educators. In order to forge and maintain the will of the citizens, they should make money contemptible, discourage useless luxury, maintain “simple manners, healthy tastes, a martial spirit without ambition, form courageous and disinterested souls.” Above all, on all occasions, they must cultivate love of the fatherland, which merges with the love of liberties and laws. In opposition to Christianity which, he says, inspires “humanity rather than patriotism” and tends “to make men rather than citizens,” Rousseau proposes in his book on the government of Poland to educate citizens in the worship of the fatherland alone: “It is education that ought to imbue men’s souls with the force of the nation and direct their opinions and tastes such that they are patriotic by inclination, by passion, by need. A child, when opening his eyes, must see the fatherland and, until his death, should see nothing else.”[36] At the end of his life, he went so far as to envisage the formation of a national and civil religion inspired by antiquity, which was to be the highest degree of patriotic worship and civic education.

* * *

The commentators on Rousseau have stressed his contradictions, real or imagined, a thousand times. He himself says: “System of any kind is above me; I have none of it in my life and actions.”[37] A complex thinker heralding the whole modern agenda through the very critique he made of it, Rousseau never hesitated to correct himself when he thought it necessary. The closer he came to the end of its life, the more he seemed to realize that the objective he had chosen—to find a form of government that puts laws above man, without falling back into divine right monarchy—was the political equivalent of squaring the circle. His letter to Mirabeau of July 26th, 1767 even suggest that the form of government he proposed was to a great extent chimerical.

Many criticisms of Rousseau are superficial and erroneous, but others are sound. Maurras is obviously wrong to attach Rousseau to the liberal school. The model of society proposed in On the Social Contract, and more still in the later texts, is incontestably holist. The whole problem comes, as we already noted, from basing a holist model on individualistic premises. Rousseau remains individualistic in the very idea of the social contract: he believes, mistakenly, in the voluntary origin of politics; he believes that politics is about “commission.” To support the idea that the city is an artifice if man is not naturally a social being, he had to imagine a “natural” man whose existence, however, he was the first to regard as doubtful. The contradiction falls apart when he attempts to posit society as an enlarged projection of the individual. How can one compose a society that is one and independent of individuals who themselves prefer to be and remain one and independent? The social contract makes it impossible to solve this problem. It is necessary for men to be autonomous by nature if society is conceived in their image, but as soon as society exists, it is necessary that they cease being autonomous. Rousseau hopes “to find a form of association . . . by which each, uniting himself with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.”[38] This objective is unrealizable.

Rousseau’s main error is to believe that one can fuse the law and the constitution. He thinks it possible to found a constitution where the law alone is sovereign, so that there is no longer any reason to limit the sovereignty of such a constitution. The General Will would then have all rights: “Alienation being made without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be and no associate has anything more to claim.” Consequently, one could not violate the law, since it would amount to contradicting oneself. And no law could be unjust, since one could not be unjust towards oneself. Disobedience consequently becomes impossible. But there is no more freedom when it is not possible to disobey. The simultaneous search for unanimity and undivided direct democracy is thus quite likely to lead to a new form of tyranny, a tyranny all the more frightening as the system, bathed in an eminently moral atmosphere, does not so much state what politics is as what it should be.

Although idealist and “virtuist” in many respects, Rousseau is nonetheless eminently realistic. He gleefully denounces the majority of “enlightened myths” supported by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and flatly opposes liberal optimism. His conception of man clarifies both his “animal” origins and the “world-openness” that enables him to realize his humanity within a social whole. His “final” holism is undeniable, and his definition of human authenticity deserves to be pondered. The Precursor of a certain modernity, he nevertheless embraces the ancient ideal and pleads for a people’s community against the bourgeois society growing before his eyes. His entire social philosophy is based ultimately on the primacy of politics, which is enough to make him one of the most original minds of his time. Consequently, his thought is much more “Machiavellian” than is generally supposed. His whole treatment of the conservation of a political order founded on sovereign authority and instituted by the General Will, with a sovereign personifying the order and identified with the will of all, inevitably evokes Machiavelli’s repubblica ordinata bene. His theory of political order thus seems quite foreign to the individualistic foundations of his theory of the social contract. This reveals his major contradiction: he borrows from republican political doctrines as well as the philosophy of natural right, which he misappropriates. This contradiction was indeed noted by Maurizio Viroli, who writes:

Whereas republican political doctrines are based on virtue and community, the political doctrines of natural right are based on self-interest and consider the function of the state to be the protection of the private interests. The former posits love for the fatherland and identification with the community as essential conditions for maintaining good political order and freedom. The latter speaks the language of interests and rational calculation. Rousseau uses both. But is it possible to be a republican and a “contractualist” at the same time?[39]

It is a pity that so complex an author is always over-simplified. We need to re-read Rousseau.

 

Notes

* Alain de Benoist, “Relire Rousseau,” in Critiques—Théoriques (Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme, 2002), 313–31. The translator wishes to thank Alain de Benoist for permission to translate and publish this essay, and for checking the translation. Thanks also to Michael O’Meara and F. Roger Devlin for checking the translation.

[1] The Terror—Ed.

[2] Cf. notably J. L. Talmon, Les origines de la démocratie totalitaire [The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy] (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1966), which presents Rousseau as a kind of Montagnard avant la lettre. Undoubtedly Marx would not have contradicted this point of view. Louis Dumont, however, showed that the Marxian reading of Rousseau rests on a remarkable series of misconceptions (cf. Homo æqualis: Genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique [Homo aequalis: The Genesis and Development of Ecnomic Ideology] [Paris: Gallimard, 1977], 151–56). Dumont also thinks that “the totalitarian aspects of democratic movements result not from Rousseau’s theories but from the confrontation of the artificialist project of individualism with experience” (Essais sur l’individualisme. Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne [Paris: Seuil, 1983], 96; in English: Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986]). The accusation that Rousseau paved the way for the excesses of the Revolution is found in Nietzsche (cf. Human, All-Too-Human, I, §463). The thesis that Rousseau is a precursor of totalitarianism is contradicted by Raymond Polin, La politique de la solitude: Essai sur la philosophie politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau [The Politics of Solitude: Essay on the Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau] (Paris: Sirey, 1971) and Eric Weil, “Rousseau et sa politique” [“Rousseau and his Politics”], in Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov, Pensée de Rousseau [Rousseau’s Thought] (Paris: Seuil-Points, 1984).

[3] Charles Maurras, Romantisme et révolution [Romanticism and Revolution] (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922).

[4] In Germany, in particular, Rousseau did not just influence Kant in a decisive fashion (which is well-known). By way of romanticism, his influence was also felt by a whole series of theorists advocating the “return to nature” and some forms of social organicism, beginning with some völkisch authors. Maurras, who accused Rousseau of having imported “Germanic” ideas into France, was undoubtedly aware of it. In any case, the idea that Rousseau is nothing more than an author of “the left” (particularly widespread in France and the United States) can only appear quite summary to one who knows a bit about the complexity of the history of ideas in Europe. His intellectual legacy is undoubtedly more varied than is usually believed.

[5] Cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963).

[6] Cf. André Delaporte, Bergers d’Arcadie: Le mythe de l’Âge d’Or dans la littérature française du XVIIIe siècle [Shepherds of Arcadia: The Myth of the Golden Age in the French Literature of the Eighteenth Century] (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1988).

[7] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 3, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992).

[8] Emile, IV. In English: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

[9] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Geneva Manuscript (the first version of On the Social Contract), I, 2, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4, Social Contract, Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero, Political Fragments, and Geneva Manuscript, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994).

[10] Polin, La politique de la solitude,133. Heinrich Meier writes: “The opinion—still widespread—that had the strongest historical influence, namely the idea that the Discourse on Inequality is above all a moral, not to say moralizing, treatise with the goal of promoting egalitarianism, blocks access to the central core of the enterprise, which is more broached than revealed by Rousseau in his book” (“The Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Men: On the Intention of Rousseau’s Most Philosophical Work,” Interpretation, Winter 1988–89, 212).

[11] Pierre Manent, Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme: Dix leçons (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1987; 2nd ed, Paris: Hachette-Pluriel, 1988), 155; in English: An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Chapter 6 is entitled “Rousseau, Critic of Liberalism.”

[12] Heinrich Meier, in his article on the Discourse on Inequality cited above, claims that Rousseau introduced his politico-anthropological use of the concept of the “bourgeois” in the first book of Emile.

[13] Emile, I.

[14] Rousseau even thought that France was much more bourgeois than England. According to him, the French monarchy had continuously supported the emergence of the bourgeois type, without ever giving rise to the citizen, whereas English history, at least in certain periods, made a place for the latter.

[15] “On Public Happiness,” Political Fragments, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4.

[16] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 2, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (First Discourse) and Polemics, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992).

[17] Considerations on the Government of Poland and its Planned Reformation, ch. 2, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 11, The Plan for Perpetual Peace, On the Government of Poland, and Other Writings on History and Politics, ed. Christopher Kelly, trans. Christopher Kelly and Judith R. Bush (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005).

[18] On the Social Contract, III, 4, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4.

[19] Cf. for example Jean-Jacques Rouvier, Les grandes idées politiques, des origines à Jean-Jacques Rousseau [The Great Political Ideas, from the Origins to Jean-Jacques Rousseau] (Paris: Bordas, 1973), 342.

[20] On the Social Contract, III, 4.

[21] On the Social Contract, III, 15.

[22] On the Social Contract, III, 5.

[23] On the Social Contract, III, 1, 13, and 15.

[24] On the Social Contract, IV, 8.

[25] This process was accelerated by the Revolution.

[26] On the Social Contract, I, 6.

[27] On the Social Contract, II, 7.

[28] On the Social Contract, IV, 2.

[29] Cf. Talmon, Les origines de la démocratie totalitaire.

[30] Emile, IV.

[31] On the Social Contract, II, 12.

[32] Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme, 100.

[33] Emile, I, 2.

[34] “On Public Happiness.”

[35] Rousseau, moreover, did not believe in the supreme value of peace. Citing the ancient ideal once more, he prefers freedom to peace, and states that freedom merits fighting battles to preserve it.

[36] Considerations on the Government of Poland, ch. 4.

[37] Letter to Mirabeau, March 1767.

[38] On the Social Contract, I, 6.

[39] Maurizio Viroli, La théorie de la société bien ordonnée chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 20 ; in English: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the “Well-Ordered Society,” trans. Derek Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

 

——————–

De Benoist, Alain. “Re-Reading Rousseau.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 7 (Fall 2008). Text retrieved from: <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/06/re-reading-rousseau/ >.

 

4th Political Theory & the “Other Europe” – Speranskaya

The Fourth Political Theory and “Other Europe”

By Natella Speranskaya

 

“The Fourth Political Theory is a volitional construction of the tradition based on deconstruction of modernity” – Alexander Dugin

Critique of (Neo)liberalism from “above”

In his book Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and The Concept of the Political Heinrich Meier states that the world that is trying to refrain from identifying the difference between a friend and an enemy Schmitt clearly shows the world the inevitability of “either or” in order to intensify the “awareness of an emergency situation” and re-awaken the ability that is manifested when “the enemy reveals itself with particular clarity”[1]. Indeed, today we can unmistakably identify our enemy. The ideological (as well as ontological) enemy is a liberal – a supporter of the political theory that defeated the two ideologies of the twentieth century – Communism and Fascism (National Socialism). Today we are dealing with the result of the victory. By saying “we” I do not mean some abstract political entity, rather I mean the representatives of the Eurasian geopolitical tradition or the approaches of tellurocratic geopolitics (therefore, the enemies are determined by their involvement in thalassocratic geopolitics). By commenting on the fundamental work The Concept of the Political Leo Strauss notes that despite all radical critique of liberalism incorporated in it Schmitt does not follow it through since his critique develops and remains within the scope of liberalism.

“His anti-Liberal tendency, – claims Strauss, – remains constrained by “systematics of liberal thought” that has not been overcome so far, which – as Schmitt himself admits – “despite all failures is not substituted by any other system in today’s Europe”[2]. Critique of liberalism is impossible within the scope of liberalism; without definite overcoming (or better to say, “collapsing”) the liberal discourse no substitution is possible.

We are well aware of the fact that all three major political ideologies of the past century – Liberalism, Communism and Fascism (the first, second and third political theories, respectively) – are the products of modernity. A paradigmatic shift to postmodernity necessarily implies the birth of a political theory that is beyond the scope of the preceding three theories (besides, given the political metamorphoses of Liberalism that can be reduced to a single definition – “Neoliberalism” – the need for a well-grounded alternative becomes essential). Only after getting liberated from the bondage of Liberal doctrine it is possible to proceed with its total critique. Moving a step beyond modernity does not mean: a) the attempts aimed at formation of another communist doctrine, b) a possibility of establishing a Neo-Fascist ideology capable of substituting an alternative political theory of counter-liberal essence. We are to make a political choice that will determine the future of the world order being already on the verge of transition to multipolarity, constituted by four poles, where the presence of the Eurasian pole is essential. Besides, the very political choice implies the conscious acceptance of the concept of The Fourth Political Theory enabling the critique of (Neo)liberalism from “above”.

“Other Europe”

“Only few people can actually argue against the fact that today, amid the frightening feeling of crisis and unease that has taken over the keenest minds, the whole European community appeals to the supreme ideal of world culture, culture, within which a new principle is expected to unite the powers and bearers of scattered European traditions”, – claims Italian philosopher Julius Evola in an introductory part of his essay United Europe: The Spiritual Prerequisite[3].

We, the representatives of the Eurasian political philosophy are building strategic relations with the last resistant rebels of Europe, those who even among the ruins maintain the courage to defend supreme, heroic and traditional values. When reflecting on preconditions of the new European unity, Evola highlights an imminent threat both from Russia and the USA. This essay deals with the historical period that has been characterized by a bipolar system of world order; the very model incorporated two poles, the two hegemons – the USSR and the USA. Nowadays, we are dealing with a unipolar model and a single hegemon, the United State of America and, therefore, find ourselves within a victorious Liberal discourse that is going through barely noticeable metamorphoses. Despite all the differences between the two historical periods, the European crisis not only remained an unresolved problem but rather increased significantly. However, what kind of Europe do we discuss? In one of his interviews Alexander Dugin noted that today we encounter “two Europes: “ liberal Europe” (or “Europe-1”) incorporating the idea of “open society”, human rights, registration of same-sex marriages, legalization of the Swedish family, and “other Europe” (“Europe-2”) – politically engaged, thinker, intellectual, spiritual, the one that considers the status quo and domination of liberal discourse as a real disaster and a betrayal of the European tradition. “Many years have passed since when the West became aware what the “tradition” stand for, in its highest sense; anti-traditional spirit has become synonymous with the western one as early as in the Renaissance era. “Tradition” in its full sense is a succession of periods called as “The heroic ages” by Vico – where there was the only creative force with metaphysical roots expressed in customs and religion, law, mythology, artistic creations – in all private areas of existence[4],– states Julius Evola. The last resistant rebels of Europe are the representatives of “Other Europe”.

In his work Europe and Globalization Alain de Benoist pays attention to the fact that “Europe possesses all trump cards that would enable it to overthrow the American hegemony and to become a major world power without any hesitation.” However, Europe restrains itself from making a strategic decision and allows to be thrown into an abyss of helplessness and total extinction by the USA; most of the Europeans have lost their identity, and only a few representatives of “Other Europe” are still faithful to the heritage of the European tradition. The fourth Nomos of the Earth that we have closely approached is characterized as “multipolar” or, more precisely, as potentially multipolar since “the only civilization – the United States of America is hegemonic in six major spheres of power – technologies, economics, finances, warfare, media and culture. De Benoist highlights that the US aims to delay inevitable transformation of Western universum into planetary pluriversum. A radical split from the US would lead Europe to become sovereign, to return its true identity (national, cultural, etc.) and, as a result, would contribute to the decline of the USA status of a world leader.

We would like to point out a need for identifying a principle capable of ensuring unity, mentioned by Evola, that we define as a political doctrine that represents a major alternative to the liberal ideology. The very political doctrine, founded by Alexander Dugin, has been titled as The Fourth Political Theory. Today we must reconsider the historical fate of Russia and Europe. Russia, not as a part of Europe, but rather Russia and Europe as two “big spaces” (Grossraum), two civilizations: on the one hand, given the multipolar model of the world order that incorporates the above-mentioned civilizations as actors, and on the other hand, considering comprehensive analysis of the relations between Russia and Europe that is overcoming the liberal paradigm and provides us with a completely different picture. Alain de Benoist also highlights that Russia, located in the center of Heartland, is not Europe, while Europe belongs to the Eurasian entity. It is noteworthy that the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari, ex-governor of Venice and a former Member of the European Parliament (mostly popular in Russia for his work entitled The Geophilosophy of Europe) had a presentiment about the Fourth theory; this is described in Foreword of his geophilosophical work as follows: “…instead of a simplified classical scheme with two poles – left (Marxists) and right (anti-Marxists, conservatives), and the center in the middle, Cacciari discusses approproateness of the political scheme that involves, ar least, four distinctions”.

«Imitation of History»

The Fourth Political Theory is Liberalism’s enemy. However, what the current Liberalism stands for? Our strategic plan aimed at destruction of the hostile ideology depends on the answer to this question. Today we are dealing with “Neo-Liberalism” or “Post-Liberalism”, a non-authentic Liberalism. In his book The Fourth Political Theory A. Dugin establishes the change of status of the Liberal ideology within the transition from modernity to post-modernity, and describes the “scenery (панораму) of post-liberal grotesque”: the “individuum” of classical Liberalism, the former measure of all things, becomes a post- individuum; a man as a possessor of private property – that practically acquired a sacral status –becomes possessed by the latter; the Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle (Guy Debord) occurs; the boundary between real and virtual is blurred – the world becomes a technical supermarket; all forms of supra-individual authority are eliminated; the state is substituted by the “civil society”; the principle – “the economy is our destiny” is replaced by another principle – “the digital code is our destiny”, in other words, everything comes to total virtuality.

“There is nothing more tragic than a failure to understand the historical moment we are currently going through; – notes Alain de Benoist – this is the moment of postmodern globalization”. The French philosopher emphasizes the significance of the issue of a new Nomos of the Earth that is a way of establishing international relations. So, what do you think the fourth Nomos will be like? De Benoist discusses two possibilities: transition to universe (or a unipolar world) which means the USA domination, and transition to pluriversum (a multi-polar world) where cultural diversity will face no threat of total absorption and “melting”. Indeed, the fourth Nomos of the Earth is related to the Fourth Political Theory. Alain de Benoist states that “similar to the three large Nomoi of the Earth within the modernity, there have been three major political theories”. In the era of modernity we have encountered the succession of Liberalism, Socialism and Fascism in the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries, respectively. And these three ideologies disappeared in the reverse order. So, the latest of the ideologies was the one that disappeared first. (…) The fourth Nomos of the Earth requires the emergence of the Fourth Political Theory. The Fourth Theory cannot yet be defined in detail, – adds de Benoist. – Indeed, it will be critical of the preceding theories. However, it will incorporate valuable ideas from the preceding ideologies. This will be a synthesis as well as Aufhebung in its Hegelian sense.

While elaborating an ideological basis for the Fourth Theory it is possible to analyze positive as well as negative aspects of the other three well-known political theories and adopt those aspects that we find acceptable. This is one of the ways. However, it does not mean that there are no other approaches. We can also propose the issue of “political mimesis” having considered it from another angle.

For instance, contemporary French philosophers Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy offer a new concept of “imitation of history”. They focus on the idea that Europe has tended to be imitation-oriented for a long time, “which, first of all, means imitating the ancients. The role of the antique model (Sparta, Athens, Rome) in the establishment of contemporary nation states and in the construction of their culture is well known»[5].

“Imitation of history” played a fundamental role in the concept of German Nazism (as well as Italian Fascism). It is important to reflect whether political mimesis of classical era is feasible today, and whether or not the need for a new shift towards antiquity has to be discussed. Was not it a mistake of the followers of the third political theory in the form of German National-Socialism (resulting in a defeat) that the imitation of the ancients ignored an important feature: existence of «two Greeces» – Apollonian and Dionysian, Greece of the light day and Greece of the mysteries, Greece of the Law and heroic severity and Greece of ecstatic rituals and sacrifices? And the last is the Russian rather than only European soil feasible for the revival of the spirit of antiquity? In other words, should not we borrow “political mimesis” or “Imitation of history” of more ancient ideologemes rather than those ideological aspects that exist within the political theories generated by modernity? This would be a radical solution for the development of political theory beyond the modernity.

As for Russia, establishment of the Russian school of Neoplatonism clearly indicates the seriousness of our intention and our understanding of Plato’s significant role. “The project of New Russia is to be commenced by Plato’s announcement”, – claims A. Dugin. The fact that Platonopolis, Plato’s Republic has never been founded may indicate that any attempt to establish it involved an initial intention of reducing a distance between modernity and antiquity by approximation of the Greek heritage to «us/them». However, the main point is that we/they are to be elevated to the Greeks. The city of the world must become the city of God and not the other way around.

“Nazism (and in many respects, the Italian Fascism) is characterized by defining its own movement, ideology and the state as a manifestation of some myth or as a living myth. This is what Rosenberg claims: “Odin is dead, but in another way, as essence of the German soul, Odin is resuscitating before our very eyes,” claim P. Lacoue-Labarthe, and J.-L.Nancy. National-Socialism was a synthesis of various myths (rather not quite successful): Apollonian and Dionysian Greece clashed rather than had anything in common within the new political doctrine; even at the early stage, this featured a further defeat in a historical collision. However, besides Greek element (Hitler used to say of himself: “I am Greek”), National-Socialism also incorporated the elements of the ancient Germanic paganism, Medieval and Indo-Aryan tradition. Mussolini’s Fascism, in its turn, represented an idealistic myth of Italy as the heiress of Rome. Julius Evola notes that with the doctrine of the state, Fascism “returned to the tradition underlying the great European states. Besides, it has revived or, at least, attempted to revive the Roman idea as the highest and special integration of “myth” about a new political organism that is “strong and organic”. For Mussolini the Roman tradition was not just a figure of speech, it was rather the “idea of power”, the ideal for upbringing of a new type of a human being who had to take power into his hands. “Rome is our myth” (1922). These words witnessed a proper choice and great courage; they incorporate a desire to bridge the gap over the abyss of centuries, to revive continuity of the only valuable heritage of Italian history”[6]. Nevertheless, Mussolini was never able to truly appreciate a spiritual dimension of Roman symbol and ancient Rome.

Racial Doctrine

A fatal mistake of the German National-Socialism was a distorted understanding of the racial doctrine that recognized only “racism of the first degree” (biological racism).

The first step in this succession was the confusion of concepts of “nation” and “race” that, in Evola’s words, equaled to democratization and degradation of the concept of race. Opinions of a small number of followers of different understanding of the racial theory were not taken into account. As for the Italian Fascism, from the very beginning this ideology was free from vulgar interpretation of the racial theory. In 1941 Evola was summoned to appear in the Venetian Palace where his meeting with Mussolini was planned. Mussolini expressed great interest in Evola’s work titled “The Synthesis of Racial Doctrine”, having discovered “a basis for establishing an independent fascist and anti-materialist racism” in it. Mussolini unconditionally accepted the theory of three races such as spiritual, mental and physical (biological). The very theory has had a direct correlation with Plato’s ideas: the race of body in the state corresponded to demos, the mass, while the mental race and the race of spirit correlated with guards/warriors and philosophers, respectively. However, subsequently Mussolini had come under pressure from the representatives of the Catholic Church who realized a major threat in racial issue being discussed on the level of spirit, and the theory of three races did not get an appropriate support.

Julius Evola used to emphasize that the concept of race (that is beyond its usual understanding as being both an anthropological and ethnic entity) confronts an individual (which is indeed a positive feature of racism). According to the Italian philosopher, one of the practical meaning of racial theory is “the need for overcoming liberal, individualistic and rationalistic conceptions according to which an individual is like an atom, the subject in itself, that lives, making sense only for himself”. Thus, the Italian Fascism with its roots was initially focused on the theory of three races that strongly distinguishes it from National-Socialist doctrine which fanatically professed biological racism.

Nowadays, the word “race” and its derivatives are only perceived in a negative sense; therefore, applying them as the elements of foundation for any ideological structure would be extremely incautious. The Fourth Political Theory categorically rejects racism including its latest, postmodern forms such as a dictatorship of glamour, following the trends of modern information, the idea of unipolar globalization (superiority of Western values). Alexander Dugin claims that the Fourth Political Theory rejects “all forms of normative hierarchization of societies on the basis of ethnic, religious, social, technological, economic and cultural origin. A comparison of societies is possible; however, one should not claim superiority of one society over the others”.

Returning to the issue of «Imitation of history» several questions might be posed: which path to follow when forming the Fourth Political Theory? Should we select “robust elements” from the three political ideologies or should we refer to Plato’s Politeia and pre-modern, traditional society (or combine both approaches)?

What could be a hypothetic transition from logos to mythos within the political ideology? And what is the relationship between the Fourth Political Theory and a myth?

What are the myth of Russia and the myth (or myths) of “other Europe” being incorporated in the Fourth Political Theory as a foundation for a multipolar world?

These questions await answers.

Alexander Dugin believes that Plato sacrificed the truth of the myth to the truth of philosophy. Therefore, Plato’s Republic, from the very beginning, was based on Apollonian principle (strictly rejecting the Dionysian one). Is not it appropriate to sacrifice the truth of philosophy for to Philosophy of the other Beginning that will eliminate the problematics of separation of logos and Mythos? Politeia is only possible when there are two of its constituent principles. The Fourth Political Theory is in need of a Myth, a Myth as a universal Myth, a Myth as paradeigma, within the scope of which the dialogue between Russia and “Other Europe” will mark (mean, become) the transition to a new political reality.

According to its founder, The Fourth Political Theory is a volitional construction of tradition based on deconstruction of modernity. It primarily deals with total rejection of subjects of three theories of the 20^th century: rejection of individual, class and race/nation-state in Liberalism, Communism and National-Socialism as well as Fascism, respectively. [Heidegger’s] Dasein (Germ. “being-there/there-being”) becomes the subject of the Fourth Political Theory making it a «fundamental-ontological structure developed in the field of existential anthropology». Besides, The Fourth Political Theory, focused on multi-polarity, goes even further than Heidegger and claims the plurality of Dasein. The Dasein-culture-civilization-big space-a pole of the multi-polar world presents an absolutely different context of political thought. There is no individual as it is abolished by Dasein; instead of individual there is an issue of authentic or non-authentic existence, that is a choice – das Mann or Selbst; that is the foundation of the Fourth Political Theory. A class and a race, as well as a state (at least, a contemporary national bourgeois state) all constitute anthropological and ontological constructs of modernity, versions of Techne, Ge-stell; and we are designing an existential political structure, – says Alexander Dugin.

Thus, all attempts of our liberal opponents aimed at discrediting the Fourth Political Theory as “a new version of National-Socialism” are groundless, and represent just a hostile reaction due to the occurrence of an equal (or a superior) rival and strategic actions aimed at eliminating the risk of the imminent collision with the enemy. Again, we would like to emphasize that the Fourth Political Theory is beyond the scope of the three political ideologies, and a rigid resistance to liberalism can be considered to be the only feature bringing it closer to the second and the third theories.

Notes

[1] Heinrich Meier. “Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and The Concept of the Political.” The Hidden Dialogue. Moscow: SKIMEN, 2012.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Julius Evola. United Europe: The Spiritual Prerequisite. Tradition and Europe. Ex Nord Lux, 2009.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Julius Evola. Men Among the Ruins. Critic of the Fascist Regime: Right-Wing Views. Moscow, ACT, 2007.

 

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Speranskaya, Natella. “The Fourth Political Theory ‘Other Europe’.” Global Revolutionary Alliance News (GRANews), 9 February 2013. <http://www.granews.info/content/natella-speranskaya-fourth-political-theory-and-other-europe >.

Note: See also Natella Speranskaya’s interview with Alexander Dugin: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/civilization-as-political-concept-dugin/ >.