Nationalism – Benoist

Nationalism: Phenomenology & Critique

By Alain de Benoist

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

There are probably as many theories of nationalism as there are nationalist theories. It is obviously impossible to give an account of them here. We will not take part in the false quarrel over whether nationalism is a pathological exacerbation of patriotism, or if it represents, on the contrary, its conscious and rigorous doctrinal elaboration. Let us note only that, beyond the often extremely complex typologies suggested today,[1] nationalism can be defined in two basic ways.

First, nationalism is the more or less voluntary aspiration, founded on objective facts or not, of a people to be constituted (or restored) as a nation, generally in a context perceived as hostile to its collective identity. Thus it presents itself as a movement of historical construction. In the second definition, nationalism is the political doctrine that affirms that a government must be concerned above all with the national interest, even based upon it exclusively.

These two definitions show from the start the ambivalence of nationalism, an ambivalence directly related to its eminently reactive character. Nationalism generally appears in circumstances that are “exceptional,” in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the term. Nationalism aims at reacting against a threat, real or supposed, that would weigh upon the collective identity and prevent it from founding itself as or persisting as a nation. Nationalism, for example, appears just as much in reaction to a foreign occupation as in a situation of colonization, in the framework of an exacerbated regionalism, etc. Its essence, therefore, is related to conflict. It needs an enemy. But this enemy can take the most diverse forms. Hence the plasticity of nationalism which, in history, can just as well be modern or antimodern, intellectual or popular, of the Right or Left. (During the whole nineteenth century, let us recall, nationalism was primarily liberal and republican.)

The definition of nationalism as a political doctrine raises other problems. Once an identity is recovered or the nation emerges, what in nationalism can truly be used as a principle of government? The concept of “national interest” is fuzzy. Maurras writes that a nationalist “subordinates his feelings, his interests, and his systems to the good of the fatherland.” But what faction would not lay claim to this expression? The “good of the fatherland” is a concept for which almost anything can be claimed, the more so as one can have extremely different ideas about it. Given that conflict is of the essence of nationalism, the risk is then great that a nationalist government can exist only while engaging in new arenas of conflict. Any foreigner, for example, will be potentially seen as an enemy. As for the concept of an “inner enemy,” it will lead to civil war, which nationalism seems to prohibit on principle.

The contents of nationalism thus remain rather obscure. One sees nationalist movements appearing in the world, but in general they have few things in common. They are opposed to one another. They claim contradictory values. It all seems as if nationalism were more a form than a substance, a container than a content.

One can understand it better, however, if one relates it to the idea of the nation, from which it cannot be dissociated. Indeed, nationalism initially represents a political instrumentality of the collective identity that gives rise to the nation. However, the nation is only one form of polity among others. And it is a specifically modern form.

Neither the Gallic resistance against Caesar nor that of Arminius against the legions of Varus is relevant to our sense of “nationalism.” The application of the word “nation” to Antiquity or the Old Regime is for the most part an anachronism. In the Middle Ages, the “nation” (from natio, “birth”) had a cultural or ethnic sense, but by no means a political one. At the time of the Hundred Years War, patriotism refers to the “country” (pays), i.e., to both a familiar region and an ensemble of intermediate bodies concretely defining a shared identity. In the political sense, the nation appears only in the eighteenth century, and it is defined in opposition to the king. The “patriots” then were those who thought the nation, not the king, incarnates the unity of the country, i.e., the nation exists independently of the kingdom. The nation joins together those who share the same political and philosophical ideas. It is in this sense that Barrère[2] was able to say to the Convention that “the aristocrats have no fatherland.” The nation is thus initially perceived as the sovereign people, then as the population of a given territory recognizing the authority of the same state and themselves as members of the same political unity, and finally as this political unity itself. One reads, in Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: “The principle of any sovereignty lies primarily in the nation.”

The Old Regime in France had already largely started the process of centralization. The Revolution continued this process in a new form. It aimed at “producing the nation,” creating a new social bond, generating social behaviors giving rise to the nation as a body politic formed of equal individuals. The state, consequently, became the producer of the social. And this production was built on the ruins of the intermediate bodies. Beginning with the Revolution, the nation became for any individual an immediate presence. It is a collective abstraction to which one belongs directly, without the mediation of intermediate bodies or the state. There is thus, paradoxically, an individualistic root of the nation and nationalism. Louis Dumont has written on this subject:

Historically, the nation in the precise, modern sense of the term, and nationalism—distinguished from simple patriotism—have depended upon individualism as a value. The nation is precisely the type of overall society corresponding to the reign of individualism as a value. Not only does the nation accompany individualism historically, but the interdependence of the two is essential, so that one can say that the nation is a society composed of people who regard themselves as individuals.[3]

The “modernity” of the nation and nationalism remained unseen for a long time, initially because nationalism was at times also a reaction (or an answer) to the social and political dysfunctions born of modernity, then, starting in the late nineteenth century, because the political Right took up the national idea in opposition to the “internationalist” socialist movements.

This individualistic and modern sense of the national idea allows us to understand how nationalism falls within the horizon of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Heidegger, who sees subjectivity as the modern form (Gestalt) of being oneself (Selbstsein), writes in this connection:

Any nationalism is, on the metaphysical plane, an anthropologism and as such a subjectivism. Nationalism is not overcome by pure internationalism, but only enlarged and established as a system. Nationalism is as little brought and raised to humanitas by internationalism as individualism is by ahistorical collectivism. Collectivism is the subjectivity of man on the plane of totality.[4]

At the same time this also clarifies the relationship between nationalism and liberal individualism: the “we” that forms the base of the former is only an enlargement of the “I” characteristic of the latter. In liberalism, it is legitimate for the individual always to seek his own best interest; in nationalism, the national interest precedes all. In both cases, justice and truth merge with what is good for me or for us. In both cases, the ultimate decision lies in subjective interest, that is, in utility.

In the quotation above, Heidegger shows just as well that political universalism (“pure internationalism”) does not fundamentally contradict nationalism. Exacerbated ethnocentrism, moreover, is defined quite classically as the private individual enlarged to universal dimensions, and universalism, conversely, as a masked ethnocentrism. The private individual attests only to his truth, but he tends to present it as the truth in itself. Such is the base of the pretense of certain peoples or certain nations to be regarded as “chosen,” i.e., called to fulfill a “universal mission.” France has not escaped this temptation, and even succumbed more often than others. Guizot declared: “France is the heart of civilization.” Lavisse added: “Our fatherland is most human of the fatherlands,” thus giving to understand that there exist degrees of “humanity.” In fact, it is often said that French nationalism cannot be fundamentally intolerant because in France the idea of the nation goes along with that of humanity. But this assertion makes one wonder. Indeed, if the idea of the nation goes with that of humanity, then the idea of humanity also goes with that of the nation. Whoever does not belong to the nation consequently finds himself excluded from humanity.

Any claim of collective identity need not necessarily be formulated in terms of the ideology of nationalism. Such a confusion, given the historical excesses of nationalism, could only call into question the value of the very concept of collective identity. Yet such a concept, regardless of methods and foundations, is essential to any true sociality. In communist societies, it is what made it possible for the people to survive by opposing their own identity to the one the regime tried to impose upon them. In Western society, it is what continues to nourish the symbolic imagination and give meaning to the desire to live together. Nationalism, in what is most tumultuous and questionable in it, is no more the inevitable consequence of the assertion of collective identities than is the nation the only way of politically organizing the citizenry. Indeed, it is the negation of collective identities, such as we encounter throughout the twentieth century in liberalism as well as in Communism, that causes these identities to assume irredentist, convulsive, and destructive forms.

To be more precise, let us say that there are two different ways to pose the affirmation of a collective identity. The first, which could be that of nationalism, restricts the individual to defending his people, while the second, concerned above all with diversity, sees the necessity of defending all peoples against the ideologies that threaten to eradicate them.

Consider the English saying “My country, right or wrong.” This saying is generally misunderstood. It does not state that membership is a mere fact from which one cannot draw an abstraction. It also says that my country can be right or wrong—and not that it is always right.

Yet, in all rigor, a nationalist could not recognize his country is wrong, simply because to judge it wrong, he must have a criterion of justice that goes beyond mere belonging, i.e., ultimately, a clear awareness of the objective truth. A nationalist is spontaneously carried from thinking his country is never wrong to thinking that it is always right. From such a point of view, in the event of conflict, only force can decide. Force then becomes the supreme value. It is identified with truth, which means that history is basically right: the winners are always right, for the sole reason that they won. One paradoxically lapses into social Darwinism, which is only another form of the ideology of progress.

If, on the contrary, I can judge my country wrong, without forgetting it is mine, that is because I know that my membership is not a criterion of objective truth. Then I leave behind the metaphysics of subjectivity, the point where nationalism and liberal individualism converge. The identity of others is no longer in principle a threat to mine. I am ready to defend my identity because this defense is a general principle, whose legitimacy I also recognize for others. In other words, if I defend my “tribe,” it is also because I am ready to defend those of others.

Notes

Alain de Benoist, “Nationalisme : phénoménologie et critique,” in his Critiques—Théoriques (Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme, 2002), 85–88. The translator wishes to thank Alain de Benoist for his permission to translate and publish this essay, Michael O’Meara for checking the translation, and Arjuna for his help with French idioms.

1. Cf. in particular Gil Delannoi et Pierre-André Taguieff, eds., Théories du nationalisme. Nation, nationalité, ethnicité (Paris: Kimé, 1991).

2. Bertrand Barrère de Vieuzac (1755–1841)—TOQ.

3. Louis Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 20–21. English translation: Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

4. Martin Heidegger, Über den Humanismus (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1946), 107. English translation by Frank A. Capuzzi, with J. Glenn Gray and David Farrell Krell: “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, revised and expanded edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 244.

 

——————

De Benoist, Alain. “Nationalism: Phenomenology & Critique.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 16 May 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/nationalism-phenomenology-and-critique/ >.

Note: On the problem of nationalism, see also Kosaku Yoshino’s “From Ethnie to Nation: Theoretical Reflections on Nationalism”.

 

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Multipolarism as Open Project – Dugin

Multipolarism as an Open Project

By Alexander Dugin

 

1. Multipolarism and “Land Power”

Geopolitics of the Land in the Global World

In the previous part we discussed the subject of globalism, globalization, and mondialism in a view considered to be generally accepted and “conventional”. Geopolitical analysis of the phenomenon of the subject of globalism, globalization, and mondialism has showed that in the modern globalism we only deal with one of the two geopolitical powers, namely, with a thalassocracy, a “Sea Power” that from now on claims for uniqueness, totality, and normativeness and strives to pretend to be the only possible civilization, sociological and geopolitical condition of the world.

Therewith, the philosophy of globalism is based upon the internal surety with universalism of exactly the Western-European value system thought to be the summary of all the diverse experience of the human cultures on all stages of their history.

And finally, in its roots, globalization has an active ideology (mondialism) and power structures that spread and bring this ideology into use. If taking into account that the latter are the most authoritative intellectual US centers (such as CFR and neoconservatives), structures of the US Supreme Military Command and their analysts (Owens, Sibrowsky, Barnett, Garstka), international oligarchs (such as George Soros), a number of international organizations (The Bilderberg Club, Trilateral Commission, etc.), and innumerous amount of analysts, politicians, journalists, scientists, economists, people of culture and art, and IT sector employees spread all over the world, we can understand the reason why this ideology seems to be something that goes without saying for us. That we sometimes take globalization as an “objective process” is the result of a huge manipulation with public opinion and the fruit of a total information war.

Therefore, the picture of global processes we described is an affirmation of the real state of affairs just in part. In such a description, there is a significant share of a normative and imperative volitional (ideological) wish that everything should be quite so, which means, it is based upon wrenches and, to some extent, striving to represent our wishful thinking as reality.

In this part, we will describe an absolutely different point of view on globalization and globalism that is impossible from inside the “Sea Power”, i.e. out of the environment of the nominal “Global World”. Such a view is not taken into account either in antiglobalism or in alterglobalism because it refuses from the most fundamental philosophical and ideological grounds of Eurocentrism. Such a view rejects the faith in:

• universalism of the Western values, that Western societies, in their history, have passed the only possible way all the other countries are expected to pass;
• progress as an indisputable forwardness of historical and social development;
• that it is limitless technical, economical, and material development, which is the answer for the most vital needs of all humankind;
• that people of all cultures, religions, civilizations, and ethnoses are principally the same as the people of the West and they are governed by the same anthropological motives;
• absolute superiority of capitalism over other sociopolitical formations;
• absence of any alternative for market economy;
• that liberal democracy is the only acceptable form of political organization of the society;
• individual freedom and individual identity as the superior value of human being;
• liberalism as a historically inevitable, higher-priority, and optimal ideology.

In other words, we proceed to the position of the “Land Power” and consider the present moment of the world history from the point of view of Geopolitics-2, or the thalassocratic geopolitics as an episode of the “Great Continent War”, not as its conclusion.

Of course, it is difficult to refuse that the present moment of historical development demonstrates a number of unique features that, if desired, can be interpreted as the ultimate victory of the Sea over the Land, Carthage over Rome and Leviathan over Behemoth. Indeed, never in history the “Sea Power” was such a serious success and stretched might and influence of its paradigm in such a scale. Of course, Geopolitics-2 acknowledges this fact and the consequences included. But it clearly realizes that globalization can be also interpreted otherwise, namely, as a series of victories in combats and battles, not as the ultimate win in the war.

Here, a historical analogy suggests itself: when German troops were approaching to Moscow in 1941, one could think that everything was lost and the end of the USSR was foredoomed. The Nazi propaganda commented the course of the war quiet so: the “New Order” is created in the occupied territory, the authorities work, economical and political hierarchy is created, and the social life is organized. But the Soviet people kept on violently resisting – at all the fronts as well as in the rear of the enemy, while systematically moving to their goal and their victory.

Now, there is precisely this moment in the geopolitical stand of the Sea and the Land. Information policy inside the “Sea Power” is built so as no-one has any doubt that globalism is an accomplished fact and the global society has come about in its essential features, that all the obstacles from now on are of a technical character. But from certain conceptual, philosophical, sociological, and geopolitical positions, all of it can be challenged by suggesting an absolutely different vision of the situation. All the point is in interpretation. Historical facts make no sense without interpretation. Likewise in geopolitics: any state of affairs in the field of geopolitics only makes sense in one or another interpretation. Globalism is interpreted today almost exclusively in the Atlantist meaning and, thus, the “sea” sense is put into it. A view from the Land’s position doesn’t change the state of affairs but it does change its sense. And this, in many cases, is of fundamental importance.

Further, we will represent the view on globalization and globalism from the Land’s position – geopolitical, sociological, philosophical, and strategical.

Grounds for Existence of Geopolitics-2 in the Global World

How can we substantiate the very possibility of a view on globalization on the part of the Land, assuming that the structure of the global world, as we have shown, presupposes marginalization and fragmentation of the Land?

There are several grounds for this.

1. The human spirit (conscience, will, faith) is always capable to formulate its attitude to any ambient phenomenon and even if this phenomenon is presented as invincible, integral, and “objective”, it is possible to take it in a different way – accept or reject, justify or condemn. This is the superior dignity of man and his difference from animal species. And if man rejects and condemns something, he has the right to build strategies to overcome it in any, most difficult and insuperable, situations and conditions. The advance of the global society can be accepted and approved but it can be rejected and condemned as well. In the former case, we float adrift the history, in the latter one – we seek a “fulcrum” to stop this process. History is made by people and the spirit plays the central part here. Hence, there is a theoretical possibility to create a theory radically opposite to the views that are built on the base of the “Sea Power” and accept basic paradigms of the Western view on the things, course of history, and logic of changing sociopolitical structures.
2. The geopolitical method allows to identify globalization as a subjective process connected with a success of one of the two global powers. Be the Land ever so “marginal and fragmentized», it has serious historical grounds behind itself, traditions, experience, sociological and civilization background. The Land’s geopolitics is not built on a void place; this is a tradition that generalizes some fundamental historical, geographical, and strategical trends. Therefore, even on the theoretical level, estimation of globalization from the position of Geopolitics-2 is absolutely relevant. Just as well as there is the “subject” of globalization in its center (mondialism and its structures), the Land Power can and does have its own subjective embodiment. In spite of a huge scale and massive forms of the historical polemics of civilizations, we, first of all, deal with a stand of minds, ideas, concepts, theories, and only then – with that of material things, devices, technologies, finances, weapons, etc.
3. The process of desovereignization of national states has not yet become nonreversible, and the elements of the Westphalian system are still being partly preserved. That means that a whole range of national states, by virtue of certain consideration, can still bank on realization of the land strategy, i.e. they can completely or partially reject globalization and the “Sea Power’s” paradigm. China is an example of it; it balances between globalization and its own land identity, strictly observing that the general balance is kept and that only what consolidates China as a sovereign geopolitical formation is borrowed from the global strategies. The same can be also said about the states the US have equaled to the “Axis of Evil” — Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, etc. Of course, the threat of a direct intrusion of US troops hangs over these countries like the sword of Damocles (on the model of Iraq or Afghanistan), and they are continuously subject to more politic network attacks from inside. However, at the moment their sovereignty is preserved what makes them privileged areas for development of the Land Power. It is also possible to refer here a number of hesitant countries, such as India, Turkey and others, which, being significantly involved into the globalization orbit, preserve their original sociological features, getting out of accord with the official precepts of their governing regimes. Such situation is characteristic of many Asian. Latin-American and African societies.
4. And, finally, the most general. — The present state of Heartland. The world dominance, as we know, and thus, reality or evanescence of monopolar globalization depends on it. In 1980-90-s, Heartland fundamentally reduced its influence area. Two geopolitical belts – Eastern Europe (whose countries were within the “Socialist Block”, “Warsaw Pact», Comecon, etc.) and the Federative Republics of the USSR consistently withdrew from it. By the mid 1990-s, a bloody testing for a possibility of further breakdown of Russia into “national republics” had started in Chechnya. This fragmentation of Heartland, down to a mosaic of marionette dependent states in place of Russia, had to become the final accord of construction of the global world and the “end of history”, after which it would be much more difficult to speak about the Land and Geopolitics-2. Heartland is of central importance in the possibility of strategical consolidation of all Eurasia and, thus, the “Land Power”. If the processes that took place in Russia in 1990-s had moved in a groove and its disintegration kept on, it would be much more difficult to challenge globalization. But since late 1990-s — early 2000-s, a turning-point has taken place in Russia, disintegration was stopped; moreover, the federal authorities have restored control over the rebellious Chechnya. Then V. Putin implemented a legal reform of the Federation subjects (excision of the article about “sovereignty”, governors’ appointment, etc.) that has consolidated the power vertical all over Russia. The CCI integration processes have started gathering pace. In August 2008, in the course of the five-day conflict of Russia with Georgia, Russia took its direct control over territories beyond the borders of the Russian Federation (Southern Ossetia, Abkhazia), and acknowledged their independence, in spite of a huge support of Georgia on the part of the US and the NATO countries and pressure of the international public opinion. Generally, since early 2000-s Russia as Heartland has ceased the processes of its self-disintegration, has reinforced its energetics, has normalized the issues of energy supply abroad, has refused from the practice of unilateral reduction of armaments, having preserved its nuclear potential. Whereby, influence of the network of geopolitical agents of Atlantism and Mondialism on the political authority and strategical decision making has qualitatively diminished, consolidation of the sovereignty has been understood as the top-priority issue, and integration of Russia into a number of globalist structures menacing its independence has been ceased. In a word, Heartland keeps on remaining the foundation of Eurasia, its “Core” — weakened, suffered very serious losses, but still existing, independent, sovereign, and capable to pursue a policy, if not on a global scale, then on a regional one. In its history, Russia has several times fallen yet lower: the Domain Fragmentation on the turn of the 13^th century, The Time of Troubles, and the events of 1917-1918 show us Heartland in a yet more deplorable and weakened condition. But every time, in some period, Russia revived and returned to the orbit of its geopolitical history again. The present state of Russia is difficult to recognize brilliant or even satisfactory from the geopolitical (Eurasian) point of view. Yet in general — Heartland does exist, it is relatively independent, and therefore, we have both a theoretical and practical base to consolidate and bring to life all the pre-conditions for development of a response to the phenomenon of monopolar globalization on the part of the Land.

Such an answer of the Land to the challenge of globalization (as a triumph of the “Sea Power”) is Multipolarism, as a theory, philosophy, strategy, policy, and practice.

Multipolarism as a Project of the World Order from the Land’s Position

Multipolarism represents a summary of Geopolitics-2 in actual conditions of the global process evolution. This is an extraordinarily capacious concept that demands a through consideration.

Multipolarism is a real antithesis for monopolarity in all its aspects: hard (imperialism, neocons, direct US domination), soft (multilateralism) and critical (alterglobalism, postmodernism, and neo-Marxism) ones.

The hard monopolarity version (radical American imperialism) is based upon the idea that the US represents the last citadel of the world order, prosperity, comfort, safety, and development surrounded by a chaos of underdeveloped societies. Multipolarism states the directly opposite: the US is a national state that exists among many others, its values are doubtful (or, at least, relative), its claims are disproportional, its appetites are excessive, methods of conducting its foreign policy are inacceptable, and its technological messianism is disastrous for the culture and ecology of the whole world. In this regard, the multipolar project is a hard antithesis to the US as an instance that methodically builds a unipolar world, and it is aimed to strongly disallow, break up, and prevent this construction.

The soft monopolarity version does not only act on behalf of the US, but on behalf of “humanity”, exclusively understanding it as the West and the societies that agree with universalism of Western values. Soft monopolarity does not claim to press by force, but persuade, not to compel, but explain profits peoples and countries will obtain from entering into globalization. Here the pole is not a single national state (the US), but Western civilization as a whole, as a quintessence of all the humanity.

Such, as it is sometimes called, “multilateral” monopolarity (multilateralism, multilateralization) is rejected by Multipolarism that considers Western culture and Western values to represent merely one axiological composition among many others, one culture among different other cultures, and cultures and value systems based on some absolutely different principles to have the full right for existence. Consequently, the West in a whole and those sharing its values, have no grounds to insist on universalism of democracy, human rights, market, individualism, individual freedom, secularity, etc. and build a global society on the base of these guidelines.

Against alterglobalism and postmodern antiglobalism, Multipolarism advances a thesis that a capitalist phase of development and construction of worldwide global capitalism is not a necessary phase of society development, that it is despotism and an ambition to dictate different societies some kind of single history scenario. In the meantime, confusion of mankind into the single global proletariat is not a way to a better future, but an incidental and absolutely negative aspect of the global capitalism, which does not open any new prospects and only leads to degradation of cultures, societies, and traditions. If peoples do have a chance to organize effective resistance to the global capitalism, it is only where Socialist ideas are combined with elements of a traditional society (archaic, agricultural, ethnical, etc.), as it was in the history of the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam and takes place today in some Latin-American countries (e. g., in Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.).

Further, Multipolarism is an absolutely different view on the space of land than bipolarity, a bipolar world.

Multipolarism represents a normative and imperative view on the present situation in the world on the part of the Land and it qualitatively differs from the model predominated in the Yalta World in the period of the “Cold War”.

The Bipolar World was constructed under the ideological principle, where two ideologies – Capitalism and Socialism – acted as poles. Socialism as an ideology did not challenge universalism of the West-European culture and represented a sociocultural and political tradition that threw back to the European Enlightenment. In a certain sense, Capitalism and Socialism competed with each other as two versions of Enlightenment, two versions of progress, two versions of universalism, two versions of the West-European sociopolitical idea.

Socialism and Marxism entered into a resonance with certain parameters of the “Land Power”, and therefore they did not win where Marx had supposed, but where he excluded this possibility – in an agricultural country with the predominant way of life of a traditional society and imperial organization of the political field. Another case of an (independent) victory of Socialism – China – also represented an agricultural, traditional society.

Multipolarism does not oppose monopolarity from the position of a single ideology that could claim for the second pole, but it does from the position of many ideologies, a plenty of cultures, world-views and religions that (each for its own reasons) have nothing in common with the Western liberal capitalism.In a situation, when the Sea has a unified ideological aspect (however, ever more going to the sphere of subauditions, not explicit declarations), and the Land itself doesn’t, representing itself as several different world-view and civilization ensembles, Multipolarism suggests creating a united front of the Land against the Sea.

Multipolarism is different from both the conservative project of conservation and reinforcement of national states. On the one hand, national states in both colonial and post-colonial period reflect the West-European understanding of a normative political organization (that ignores any religious, social, ethnical, and cultural features of specific societies) in their structures, i.e. the nations themselves are partially products of globalization. And on the other hand, it is only a minor part of the two hundred fifty-six countries officially itemized in the UN list today that are, if necessary, capable to defend their sovereignty by themselves, without entering into a block or alliance with other countries. It means that not each nominal sovereign state can be considered a pole, as the degree of strategical freedom of the vast majority of the countries acknowledged is negligible. Therefore, reinforcement of the Westphalian system that still mechanically exists today is not an issue of Multipolarism.

Being the opposition of monopolarity, Multipolarism does not call to either return to the bipolar world on the base of ideology or to fasten the order of national states, or to merely preserve the status quo. All these strategies will only play in hands of globalization and monopolarity centers, as they have a project, a plan, a goal, and a rational route of movement to future; and all the scenarios enumerated are at best an appeal to a delay of the globalization process, and at worst (restoration of bipolarity on the base of ideology) look like irresponsible fantasy and nostalgia.

Multipolarism is a vector of the Land’s geopolitics directed to the future. It is based upon a sociological paradigm whose consistency is historically proven in the past and which realistically takes into account the state of affairs existing in the modern world and basic trends and force lines of its probable transformations. But Multipolarism is constructed on this basis as a project, as a plan of the world order we yet only expect to create.

2. Multipolarism and its Theoretical Foundation

The absence of the Multipolarism Theory

In spite of the fact that the term “Multipolarism” is quite often used in political and international discussions recently, its meaning is rather diffuse and inconcrete. Different circles and separate analysts and politicians insert their own sense in it. Well-founded researches and solid scientific monographs devoted to Multipolarism can be counted on fingers[1]. Even serious articles on this topic are quite rare[2]. The reason for this is well understood: as the US and Western countries set the parameters of the normative political and ideological discourse in a global scale today, according to these rules, whatever you want can be discussed but the sharpest and most painful questions. Even those considering unipolarity to have been just a “moment[3]” in the 1990-s and a transfer to some new indefinite model to be taking place now are ready to discuss any versions but the “multipolar” one. Thus, for example, the modern head of CFR Richard Haass tells about “Non-Polarity” meaning such stage of globalization where necessity in presence of a rigid center falls off by itself[4]. Such wiles are explained by the fact that one of the aims of globalization is, as we have seen, marginalization of the “Land Power”. And as far as Multipolarism can only be a form of an active strategy of the “Land Power” in the new conditions, any reference to it is not welcome by the West that sets the trend in the structure of political analysis in the general global context. Still less one should expect that conventional ideologies of the West take up development of the Multipolarism Theory.

It would be logical to assume that the Multipolarism Theory will be developed in the countries that explicitly declare orientation upon a multipolar world as the general vector of their foreign policy. The number of such countries includes Russia, China, India, and some others. Besides, the address to Multipolarism can be encountered in texts and documents of some European political actors (e.g., former French minister of Foreign Affairs Hubert Vidrine[5]). But at the moment, we can as well hardly find something more than materials of several symposiums and conferences with rather vague phrases in this field. One has to state that the topic of Multipolarism is not properly conceptualized also in the countries that proclaim it as their strategical goal, not to mention the absence a distinct and integral theory of Multipolarism.

Nevertheless, on the base of the geopolitical method from the position of the “Land Power” and with due account for the analysis of a phenomenon called globalism, it is quite possible to formulate some absolute principles that must underlie the Multipolarism Theory when the matter comes to its more systemized and expanded development.

Multipolarism: Geopolitics and Meta-Ideology

Let’s blueprint some theoretical sources, on whose base a valuable theory of Multipolarism must be built.

It is only geopolitics that can be the base for this theory in the actual conditions. At the moment, no religious, economical, political, social, cultural or economical ideology is capable to pull together the critical mass of the countries and societies that refer to the “Land Power” in a single planetary front necessary to make a serious and effective antithesis to globalism and the unipolar world. This is the specificity of the historical moment (“The Unipolar Moment”[6]): the dominating ideology (the global liberalism/post-liberalism) has no symmetrical opposition on its own level. Hence, it is necessary to directly appeal to geopolitics by taking the principle of the Land, the Land Power, instead of the opposing ideology. It is only possible in the case if the sociological, philosophical, and civilization dimensions of geopolitics are realized to the full extent.

The “Sea Power” will serve us as a proof for this statement. We have seen that the very matrix of this civilization does not only occur in the Modem Period, but also in thalassocratic empires of the Antiquity (e.g., in Carthage), in the ancient Athens or in the Republic of Venice. And within the Modern World itself atlantism and liberalism do not as well find complete predominance over the other trends at once. And nevertheless, we can trace the conceptual sequence through a series of social formations: the “Sea Power” (as a geopolitical category) moves through history taking various forms till it finds its most complete and absolute aspect in the global world where its internal precepts become predominant in a planetary scale. In other words, ideology of the modern mondialism is only a historical form of a more common geopolitical paradigm. But there is a direct relation between this (probably, most absolute) form and the geopolitical matrix.

There is no such direct symmetry in case of the “Land Power”. The Communism ideology just partly (heroism, collectivism, antiliberalism) resonated with geopolitical percepts of the “ground” society (and this just in the concrete form of the Eurasian USSR and, to a lesser degree, of China), as the other aspects of this ideology (progressism, technology, materialism) fitted badly in the axiological structure of the “Land Power”. And today, even in theory, Communism cannot perform the mobilizing ideological function it used to perform in the 20^th century in a planetary scale. From the ideological point of view the Land is really split into fragments and, in the nearest future, we can hardly expect some new ideology capable to symmetrically withstand the liberal globalism to appear. But the very geopolitical principle of the Land does not lose anything in its paradigmatic structure. It is this principle that must be taken as a foundation for construction of the Multipolarism Theory. This theory must address directly to geopolitics, draw principles, ideas, methods and terms out of it. This will allow to otherwise take both the wide range of existing non-globalist and counter-globalist ideologies, religions, cultures, and social trends. It is absolutely unnecessary to shape them to transform into something unified and systematized. They can well remain local or regional but be integrated into a front of common stand against globalization and “Western Civilization’s” domination on the meta-ideological level, on the paradigmatic level of Geopolitics-2 and this moment – plurality of ideologies – is already laid in the very term “Multi-polarism” (not only within the strategical space, but also in the field of the ideological, cultural, religious, social, and economical one).

Multipolarism is nothing but extension of Geopolitics-2 (geopolitics of the Land) into a new environment characterized with the advance of globalism (as atlantism) on a qualitatively new level and in qualitatively new proportions. Multipolarism has no other sense.

Geopolitics of the Land and its general vectors projected upon the modern conditions are the axis of the Multipolarism Theory, on which all the other aspects of this theory are threaded. These aspects constitute philosophical, sociological, axiological, economical, and ethical parts of this theory. But all of them are anyway conjugated with the acknowledged – in an extendedly sociological way – structure of the “Land Power” and with the direct sense of the very concept of “Multipolarism” that refers us to the principles of plurality, diversity, non-universalism, and variety.

3. Multipolarism and Neo-Eurasianism

Neo-Eurasianism as Weltanschauung

Neo-Eurasianism is positioned nearest to the theory of Multipolarism. This concept roots in geopolitics and operates par excellence with the formula of “Russia-Eurasia” (as Heartland) but at the same time develops a wide range of ideological, philosophical, sociological and politological fields, instead of being only limited with geostrategy and application analysis.

What is in the term of “Neo-Eurasianism” can be illustrated with fragments of the Manifesto of the International “Eurasian Movement” “Eurasian Mission»[7]. Its authors point out five levels in Neo-Eurasianism allowing to interpret it in a different way depending on a concrete context.

The first level: Eurasianism is a Weltanschauung.

According to the authors of the Manifesto, the term “Eurasianism” “is applied to a certain Weltanschauung, a certain political philosophy that combines in itself tradition, modernity and even elements of postmodern in an original manner. The philosophy of Eurasianism proceeds from priority of values of the traditional society, acknowledges the imperative of technical and social modernization (but without breaking off cultural roots), and strives to adapt its ideal program to the situation of a post-industrial, information society called “postmodern”.

The formal opposition between tradition and modernity is removed in postmodern. However, postmodernism in the atlantist aspect levels them from the position of indifference and exhaustiveness of contents. The Eurasian postmodern, on the contrary, considers the possibility for an alliance of tradition with modernity to be a creative, optimistic energetic impulse that induces imagination and development.

In the Eurasianism philosophy, the realities superseded by the period of Enlightenment obtain a legitimate place – these are religion, ethnos, empire, cult, legend, etc. In the same time, a technological breakthrough, economical development, social fairness, labour liberation, etc. are taken from the Modern. The oppositions are overcome by merging into a single harmonious and original theory that arouses fresh ideas and new decisions for eternal problems of humankind. (…)

The philosophy of Eurasianism is an open philosophy, it is free from any forms of dogmatism. It can be appended by diversified areas – history, religion, sociological and ethnological discoveries, geopolitics, economics, regional geography, culturology, various types of strategical and politological researches, etc. Moreover, Eurasianism as a philosophy assumes an original development in each concrete cultural and linguistic context: Eurasianism of the Russians will inevitably differ from Eurasianism of the French or Germans, Eurasianism of the Turks from Eurasianism of the Iranians; Eurasianism of the Arabs from Eurasianism of the Chinese, etc. Whereby, the main force lines of this philosophy will, in a whole, be preserved unalterable.(…)

The following items can be called general reference points of the Eurasianism philosophy:

• differentialism, pluralism of value systems against obligatory domination of a single ideology (in our case and first of all, of the American liberal democracy);
• traditionalism against destruction of cultures, beliefs and rites of the traditional society;
• a world-state, continent-state against both bourgeois national states and “the world government”;
• rights of nations against omnipotence of “the Golden Billion” and neo-colonial hegemony of “the Rich North”;
• an ethnos as a value and subject of history against depersonalization of nations and their alienation in artificial sociopolitical constructions;
• social fairness and solidarity of labour people against exploitation, logic of coarse gain, and humiliation of man by man.»[8]

Neo-Eurasianism as a Planetary Trend

On the second level: Neo-Eurasianism is a planetary trend. The authors of the Manifesto explain:

«Eurasianism on the level of a planetary trend is a global, revolutionary, civilization concept that is, by gradually improving, addressed to become a new ideological platform of mutual understanding and cooperation for a vast conglomerate of different forces, states, nations, cultures, and confessions that refuse from the Atlantic globalization.

It is worth carefully reading the statements of the most diverse powers all over the world: politicians, philosophers, and intellectuals and we will make sure that Eurasianists constitute the vast majority. Mentality of many nations, societies, confession, and states is, though they may not suspect about it themselves, Eurasianist.

If thinking about this multitude of different cultures, religions, confessions, and countries discordant with “the end of history” we are imposed by atlantism, our courage will grow up and the seriousness of risks of realization of the American 21^st century strategical security concept related with a unipolar world establishment will sharply increase.

Eurasianism is an aggregate of all natural and artificial, objective and subjective obstacles on the way of unipolar globalization, whereby it is elevated from a mere negation to a positive project, a creative alternative. While these obstacles exist discretely and chaotically, the globalists deal with them separately. But it is worth just integrating, pulling them together in a single, consistent Weltanschauung of a planetary character and the chances for victory of Eurasianism all over the world will be very serious.»[9]

Neo-Eurasianism as an Integration Project

On the next level, Neo-Eurasianism is treated as a project of strategical integration of the Eurasian Continent:

“The concept “the Old World” usually defining Europe can be considered much wider. This huge multicivilization space populated with nations, states, cultures, ethnoses and confessions connected between each other historically and spatially by the community of dialectical destiny. The Old World is a product of organic development of human history.

The Old World is usually set against the New World, i.e. the American continent that was discovered by the Europeans and has become a platform for construction of an artificial civilization where the European projects of the Modern, the period of Enlightenment have taken shape. (…)

In the 20^th century Europe realized its original essence and had gradually been moving to integration of all the European states into a single Union capable to provide all this space with sovereignty, independence, security, and freedom.

Creation of the European Union was the greatest milestone in the mission of Europe’s return in history. This was the response of “the Old World” to the exorbitant demands of the “New” one. If considering the alliance between the US and Western Europe – with US domination – to be the Atlantist vector of European development, then the integration of European nations themselves with predomination of the continental countries (France-Germany) can be considered Eurasianism in relation to Europe.

It becomes especially illustrative, if taking into account the theories that Europe geopolitically stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals (Ch. de Gaulle) or to Vladivostok. In other words, the interminable spaces of Russia are also valuably included in the field of the Old World subject to integration.

(…) Eurasianism in this context can be defined as a project of strategical, geopolitical, economical integration of the North of the Eurasian Continent realized as the cradle of European history, matrix of nations and cultures closely interlaced between each other.

And since Russia itself (like, by the way, the ancestors of many Europeans as well) is related in a large measure with the Turkish, Mongolian world, with Caucasian nations, through Russia – and in a parallel way through Turkey – does the integrating Europe as the Old World already acquire the Eurasianism dimension to full extent; and in this case, not only in symbolic sense, but also in geographical one. Here Eurasianism can be synonimically identified with Continentalism.[10]»

These three most general definitions of Neo-Eurasianism demonstrate that here we deal with a preparatory basis for construction of the Multipolarism Theory. This is the ground view on the sharpest challenges of modernity and attempt to give an adjust response to them taking into account geopolitical, civilization, sociological, historical and philosophical regularities.

 

Notes

[1] Murray D., Brown D. (eds.)Multipolarity in the 21st Century. A New World Order. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010; Ambrosio Th. Challenging America global Preeminence: Russian Quest for Multipolarity. Chippenheim, Wiltshire: Anthony Rose, 2005;Peral L. (ed.) Global Security in a Multi-polar World.Chaillot Paper. Paris: European Institute for Security Studies, 2009; Hiro D. After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. Yale: Nation Books, 2009.

[2] Turner Susan. “Russia, China and the Multipolar World Order: the danger in the undefined.” Asian Perspective. 2009. Vol. 33, No. 1. C. 159-184;Higgott Richard, “Multi-Polarity and Trans-Atlantic Relations: Normative Aspirations and Practical Limits of EU Foreign Policy.” – www.garnet-eu.org. 2010. [Electronic resource] URL: http://www.garnet-eu.org/fileadmin/documents/working_papers/7610.pdf (дата обращения 28.08.2010); Katz M. Primakov Redux. Putin’s Pursuit of «Multipolarism» in Asia//Demokratizatsya. 2006. vol.14 № 4. C.144-152.

[3] Krauthammer Ch. “The Unipolar Moment.” Foreign Affairs, 1990 / 1991 Winter. Vol. 70, No 1. С. 23-33.

[4] Haass R. “The Age of Non-polarity: What will follow US Dominance?” Foreign Affairs, 2008. 87 (3). С. 44-56.

[5] Déclaration de M. Hubert Védrine, ministre des affaires étrangères sur la reprise d’une dialogue approfondie entre la France et l’Hinde: les enjeux de la resistance a l’uniformisation culturelle et aux exces du monde unipolaire. New Delhi — 1 lesdiscours.vie-publique.fr. 7.02.2000. [Electronic resource] URL: http://lesdiscours.vie-publique.fr/pdf/003000733.pdf

[6] Krauthammer Ch. “The Unipolar Moment.” Op.cit.

[7] Евразийская миссия. Манифест Международного «Евразийского Движения». М.: Международное Евразийское Движение, 2005.

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

 

——————-

Dugin, Alexander. “Multipolarism as an Open Project.” Journal of Eurasian Affairs, vol.1, no.1 (September 2013). <http://www.eurasianaffairs.net/multipolarism-as-an-open-project/ >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Multipolarism as an Open Project).

Notes: The above essay is the English translation of a chapter from Dugin’s major work on the Theory of the Multipolar World, originally published in Russian as теория многополярного мира (Москва: Евразийское движение, 2012). This book is available in a French translation as Pour une théorie du monde multipolaire (Nantes: Éditions Ars Magna, 2013).

For a brief discussion of Dugin’s theories and also a listing of major translated works by him, see Natella Speranskaya’s interview with Dugin: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/civilization-as-political-concept-dugin/ >.

 

Multipolar & Postmodern World – Dugin

The Multipolar World and the Postmodern

By Alexander Dugin

 

1. Multipolarism as a Vision of the Future and Land in the Postmodern Era

Multipolarism as an Innovative Mold-Breaking Concept

The Multipolar Theory represents a unique direction that cannot be qualified simply in terms of “progress/conservatism”, “old/new”, “development/stagnation”, etc. The unipolar and globalist view on history imagines the historical process as a linear motion from the worse to the better, from the underdeveloped to the developed, and so on and so forth. In this case, globalization is seen as the horizon of a universal future, and everything that impedes globalization is simply seen as the inertia of the past, atavism, or a striving to blindly preserve the “status quo” at all costs. In virtue of such a percept, globalism and “The Sea Power” are also trying to interpret Multipolarism as exclusively being a conservative position opposing the “inevitable change”. If globalization is the Postmodern (the global society), Multipolarism appears to be resistance to the Postmodern (containing elements of the Modern and even Pre-Modern).

Alas, it is indeed possible to consider things under a different visual angle and set aside the dogmatics of linear progress[1] or the “monotonous process”[2]. The idea of time as a sociological category of the philosophy of Multipolarism is based on interpreting the general paradigm of Multipolarism through the view of an absolutely different system.

Multipolarism, in comparison with unipolarity and globalism, is not just an appeal to the old or a call for preserving everything as it is. Multipolarism does not insist either on preserving national states (the Westphalian world) or on restoring the bipolar model (the Yalta world), nor on freezing that transitional state where international life is currently positioned. Multipolarism is a look into the future (that which has not yet been), a project of organization of the world order on absolutely new principles and elements, and thus, a serious revision of the ideological, philosophical, and sociological axioms that modernity rests upon.

Multipolarism, as well as unipolarity and globalization, is oriented towards the construction of that which has never been before it, to the creative strain of free spirit, the philosophical search and the striving for building a better, more absolute, fair, harmonious, and happy society. What is different, however, is that the character of this society, its principles and values, and also the methods to construct its foundation, are seen in a radically different way when compared to the globalists’ vision. Multipolarism sees the future to be multiple, full of variety, differentiated, dissimilar, and preserving a wide palette of collective and individual self-identification choices. There are also undertones of frontier societies that experience the influence of different identification matrices. This is a model of the “flourishing complexity” of the world, where a multitude of places combines with a multitude of times, where multiscale collective and individual actors engage in a dialogue, and thus figuring out and sometimes transforming their identity in the course of such a conversation. The West’s culture, philosophy, policy, economy, and technology are seen in this future world to be just one of many local phenomena, in no way excelling the culture, philosophy, policy, economy, and technology of the Asiatic societies and even the archaic tribes. All that we deal with in the form of different ethnoses, peoples, nations, and civilizations are equitable variations of “human societies” (“Menschliche Gesellschaft”[3]). Some of them are “disenchanted” (M. Weber) and materially developed, while others are poor and plain, though still “enchanted” (M. Eliade), sacred, and living in harmony and equilibrium with their ambient existence. Multipolarism accepts whichever choice society makes, but any choice becomes sensible only in the context of space and a historical moment, and hence, it remains local. The most that Western culture, perceived as something local, can do for others is be a source of admiration and arouse delight, but a claim for universalism and separation from the historical context turns it into a simulacrum, into a Quasi-West, into a cartoon and kitsch. To some extent, this has already happened in regards to American culture’s influence over Europe, where it is still easy to recognize Europe, but this Europe is hypertrophic, sterilized, and deprived of internal harmony and proportions, charm, and tradition. It is a Europe of the universalist project and it is no longer organic, taking on the characteristics of a complex, paradoxical, dramatic, tragic, and contradictory historical and spatial phenomenon.

Multipolarism as the Postmodern

If we refer to the past, we will easily find out that the Multipolar World, the international order based upon the principle of Multipolarism, never existed. Multipolarism is therefore a project, plan, and strategy of the future, not a mere inertia or sluggish resistance to globalization. Multipolarism observes the future, but sees it in a radically different way than the proponents of unipolarity, universalism, and globalization do, and it strives to bring its vision into life.

These considerations demonstrate that, in a certain sense, Multipolarism is also the Postmodern (not the Modern or Premodern), but simply different from the Postmodern visions of globalism and unipolarity. In this special sense, the Multipolar Philosophy agrees that the present world order, and also that of the past (national or bipolar), is imperfect and demands a radical alteration. The Multipolar World is not an assertion of K. Schmitt’s Second or Third Nomos of the Earth, but a battle for the Fourth Nomos that must come in place of the present and the past. As well, Multipolarism is not rejection of the Postmodern, but the establishment of a radically different Postmodern than the version suggested by the globalists and proponents of the unipolar world; different in relation to the neo-liberal dominating version, and in relation to the critical antiglobalist and alterglobalist position, it will be based upon the same universalism as neo-liberalism, but only with the reverse sign. The Multipolar Postmodern therefore represents something altogether different from the Modern or Pre-Modern, neo-liberal globalism or unipolar America-centric imperialism, or leftist antiglobalist or alterglobalist ideas. Therefore, in the case of the formalization of Multipolarism into a systemized ideology, the conversation drifts precisely to “The Fourth Political Theory”.

The Multipolar Idea recognizes that national states do not correspond with the challenges of history, and moreover, they are merely a preparatory stage for globalization. Therefore, it supports integration processes in specific regions, insisting so that their borders consider the civilizational peculiarities of the societies historically developed in these territories. This is a positive feature of postmodernism.

The Multipolar Idea posits that the significance of new non-state actors must increase in international politics, but these actors must be, first of all, original historically developed organic societies (such as ethnoses) having an established relationship to their space of activity. This is also a postmodernist feature.

The Multipolar Idea rejects the universal “Great Narratives” (stories), European logocentrism, rigid power hierarchies, and an assumable normative patriarchate. Instead of this, it supports the value of local, multifaceted, and asymmetrical identities reflecting the spirit of each specific culture, whatever it is and however alien and execrable it seems to the rest. This is yet another postmodernist feature.

The Multipolar Idea rejects the mechanistic approach to reality and the Descartes division into the subject and the object. It does this by affirming integrity, holism, and an integral approach to the world, one that is organic and balanced, based rather upon the “geometry of nature” (B. Mandelbrot) than on the “geometry of the machine”. This yields ecologism for the Multipolar World, rejection of the “subjugation of nature” concept (F. Bacon), and transition to “a dialogue with nature”. This is an even better postmodern feature.

The Multipolar Postmodern against the Unipolar (Globalist/Antiglobalist) Postmodern

When the conversation drifts to the measure of things in the future world, serious contradictions begin to arise between the Multipolar Theory and Postmodernism. Liberal and Neo-Marxist Postmodernism operate with the basic concepts of the “individual” and linear “progress”, conceived in the prospect of the “liberation of the individual” and, on the last stage, in the prospect of “liberation from the individual” and a transition to the post-man, be it a cyborg, mutant, rhizome, or clone. Moreover, it is the principle of individuality that they consider universal. Here, the Multipolar Idea sharply diverges with the main line of Postmodernism and posits the society[4], collective personality, collective consciousness (E. Durkheim), and the collective unconscious (K. G. Jung) as the center of things. Society is a matrix of existence; it creates individuals, people, languages, cultures, economies, political systems, time, and space. In the Multipolar Idea, there is not just one society, as societies are many, and they are all incommensurable with one other. An individual has become “the measure of things” in such an absolute and accomplished form only in one type of society (Western European), and in all other societies, he has not and will not become so. This is because they are structured in an absolutely different way. One must acknowledge the inalienable right for each society to be such as it wants to be and to create reality by its own means, be it through assigning an individual and man a superior value or not assigning them any.

The same idea concerns the issue of “progress”. Since time is a social phenomenon[5], it is structured in a different way in each society. In some societies, it bears in itself an increase in the role of the individual in history, while in others it does not. Therefore, there is no determining factor across societies concerning the concepts of individualism and post-humanity. The fate of the West will likely continue to proceed towards these aforementioned directions, as this path is connected with the logic of its history. The West’s embrace of individualism and post-humanity has the potential to inflict collateral damage to other societies and nations, as even if these ideas are already somewhat present in their culture, it is as a rule usually in the form of externally enforced colonial precepts that are align paradigms for the local societies themselves. It is this colonial imperialist universalism of the West that is the main challenge for the Multipolar Idea.

By using the terms of geopolitics, it can be said that Multipolarism is the land, continental, tellurocratic version of the Postmodern, whereas globalism (as well as antiglobalism) is its sea and thalassocratic version.

2. Multipolarism and Globalization Theories

Multipolarism against the Global Policy

From the position of Multipolarism, let us now consider the basic theories of globalization and how they relate to one another.

The World Polity Theory (J. Meyer, J. Boli, etc.) presumes the creation of an integrated global state, and with the support of individual citizens, it is maximally opposite to Multipolarism and represents its formal antithesis. It is similar to the theses of “the end of history” (rapid or gradual) by F. Fukuyama and all the other rigidly globalist unipolar projects that describe a desirable and probable future that completely contradicts the Multipolar one. In this case, between Multipolarism and the theory of globalization, there exists a relation of plus and minus, black and white, etc. As an example, there is a radical antagonism of ultimatums: either “The World Polity” or Multipolarism.

Multipolarism and the Global Culture (in Defense of Localization)

The case study of relations is more difficult to conduct with the World Culture Theory (R. Robertson) and “transformationists” concepts (E. Giddens, etc.). Critical appraisals of globalization in the spirit of S. Huntington can also be referred to here. In these theories, they analyze the balance of two trends – universalization (pure globalism) and localization (R. Robertson) – or the new appearance of civilization contours (S. Huntington). If the attitude of the Multipolar Theory to universalization is unambiguously antagonistic, a number of phenomena that manifest themselves as secondary effects in the course of globalization can, on the contrary, be appraised positively. The weakening of the sociopolitical context of national states in these theories is demonstrated from two sides: partially, their functions are transferred to global entities, and partially, they turn out to be in the hands of some new, local actors. On the other hand, due to the fragility and looseness of national states, civilizational and religious factors assume ever greater importance. It is this set of phenomena that accompany globalization, and they are consequences of the weakening of previous state and ideological world models that deserve positive attention and become elements of the Multipolar Theory.

The secondary effects of globalization return societies to a specific spatial, cultural, and occasionally, religious context. This leads to the reinforcement of the role of ethnic identity, an increase in the importance of the confessional factor, and increased attention to local communities and problems. In summarizing these phenomena, they can be realized as strategic positions of the Multipolar World Order that must be fixed, fastened, and supported. Within the “glocalization” described by Robertson, Multipolarism is interested in “localization”, being in complete solidarity with it. Robertson himself believes that the processes of “glocalization” are not predetermined and can sway to one side or another. Accepting this analysis, the supporters of the Multipolar World must consciously apply their efforts so that the processes sway to the “local” side and overweigh the “global” one.

Multipolar Conclusions from the Analysis of the World-System Theory

The World-System Theory by I. Wallerstein is interesting for the Multipolar Theory due to the fact that it adequately describes the economic, political, and sociological algorithm of globalization. Wallerstein’s “World System” represents the global capitalist elite as huddling around “The Core”, even if its representatives come from the “periphery” countries. “The world proletariat” that gradually transits from a national identity to a class-based (international) one personifies the “periphery” not just geographically, but also socially. National states are no more than sites where one and the same mechanical process takes place. This is the enrichment of oligarchs and their integration in the supranational (global) “Core” and the pauperization of the masses, which gradually interfuse with the working class of other nations in the course of migration processes.

From the point of view of the Multipolar Theory, this analysis does not consider geopolitics or the cultural and civilizational factor. The latter is the disregard for the topic inherent in Marxism as a whole, which is first of all focused on the disclosure of the economic mechanics of society’s organization. In the present world, “The Second World” (i.e. regional integration formations or “Great Spaces”) is situated between “The Core” and “the Periphery”. Under I. Wallerstein’s logic, their existence changes nothing in the general structure of the world-system, and they merely represent a step in the direction of complete globalization – the integration of the elites in “The Core” and the “internationalization of the masses” occur more rapidly here than in the context of national states. But under the logic of the Multipolar Theory, the presence of “The Second World” radically changes it all. Between the elites and masses existing in the various integration structures within the limits of “The Second World”, there can arise a model of relations other than the liberal or Marxist analysis forecast. S. Huntington called it “modernization without Westernization”[6]. The essence of this phenomenon is that, while obtaining a Western education and mastering Western technologies, the elites of the periphery countries often act in the following way: they do not integrate into the global elite, but instead return to their society, confirm their socialization and collective identity within it, and put their mastered skills to service for their own countries, thereby not following the West, and even opposing it. The factor of cultural identity (often religion) and civilizational affiliation turns out to be stronger than the universalist algorithm presented in the technology of modernization and the very medium that begot it.

The process of societies’ stratification and the elite’s Westernization as described by Wallerstein definitely takes place, but a different process may also take place – “modernization without Westernization”. Together with regional integration without global integration, these processes represent a tendency which I. Wallerstein himself ignores, but which his analysis ironically allows one to be able to clearly see and describe. This becomes a very important element and program thesis for the Multipolar Theory.

As for the global horizon, all societies now have to confront most of the theories of globalization firsthand, and the Multipolar Theory can propose the following principles.

The true completeness and integrity of the world is objectively real, but it can only be properly perceived once one removes the surrounding banality which obscures his pure understanding of it. Heidegger called this the “authentic existing of Dasein”[7]. Grasping the world as a whole can be only possible through the modification of existence, not through the accumulation of ever new data, expressions, meetings, conversations, information, and knowledge. According to Heidegger, man is spurred on to study new places and landscapes in order to escape from genuine existence, and this concept is personified in the figure of Das Man, i.e. an impersonal and abstract, yet concrete, living form that finds various substitutes to replace the true experience of existing. Das Man, having an inauthentic existence, dissolves the concentration of his own consciousness through “curiosity” and “gossip”, two of the various forms non-authentic existence[8]. The simpler that communications in the global world are, the more senseless they become. The more saturated the information flows are, the less people are able to reason and decode their meaning. Therefore, globalization in no way contributes to one acquiring experience of the whole world, but on the contrary, misleads from it by dispersing the attention in an infinite series of meaningless puzzles where the parts are not attributes of the unified whole, i.e. they exist as unrelated fragments of existence. The global horizon is not reached in globalization – it is comprehended in a profound existential experience of a place.

Therefore, different societies do not collide in the global horizon, but with the challenge of globalism as an ideology and practice that attacks every society and challenges all local communities, they could find a common ground in rejecting the enemy that menaces all peoples and cultures without discrimination. The Multipolar Theory recognizes the universalism of this challenge, but holds that it must be repulsed just as universally in order to stave off a forthcoming catastrophe, disaster, or tragedy.

The horizon of globalism is conceived as something that must be defeated, overcome, and abolished. Each society will do it in its own way, but the Multipolar Theory suggests generalizing, consolidating, and coordinating all the forms of opposition to the globalization challenge. As global as the challenge of globalization is, so too must be its rejection, but the structure of this rejection, so as to be full-fledged, independent, and prospective, must be multipolar and suggest a clear and distinct project of what should be put in place of globalization.

3. From a Poison to a Cure

Saddling the Tiger of Globalization: the Multipolar Network

The construction of the Multipolar World demands the developing of a special attitude to all basic aspects of the globalization process. We have seen that although Multipolarism opposes unipolarity and globalization, the question is not simply about the rejection of all the transformations that surround modernity, but about selecting the multipolar format for these transformations, to influence them, and to guide the process to the pattern seen as being the most desirable and optimal. Therefore, Multipolarism in certain situations is not so much meant to directly oppose globalization as it is to recapture the initiative and allow the processes to go along a new trajectory, thereby turning “a poison into a cure” (“to saddle the tiger”[9], to use a traditional Chinese expression). Such a strategy repeats the logic of “modernization without Westernization”, but on a more generalized and systemized level. Some separate societies in a regional culture borrow Western technologies so as to reinforce themselves and repulse the pressure of the West at certain times. Multipolarism suggests comprehending such a strategy as a system that can serve as a general algorithm for most different non-Western societies.

Let us give some examples of such a reinterpretation of separate aspects of globalism through the multipolar perspective.

Let us take the network and network space phenomenon. By itself, this phenomenon is not neutral. It represents the result of a series of gradual transformations in the sociological understanding of space in the context of “The Sea Power” on the path of ever greater information medium dilution – from the sea through the air to the infosphere. Along with it, the network represents a structure that perceives the presence of relations between the system elements not in the organic, but in the mechanic, way. The network can be constructed between separate individual elements that initially are not connect with each other and have no common collective identity. As it evolves, the network phenomenon presents the prospect of overcoming humanity and entering into the post-human age. This is because the centrality of man becomes ever more and more relative (N. Luhmann, M. Castells, etc.) in the very functioning of self-organizing systems like the network. From this point of view, the network represents a reality that is cardinally “Sea”, Atlantist, and globalist.

In classical geopolitics, we can see that the positions of the Land and Sea are connected not so much by the presence of one element or another, but with the sociological, cultural, philosophical, and only then, strategic conclusions different societies make from their contact with the Sea. K. Schmitt emphasizes[10] that in spite of creating a global empire based upon navigation, Spanish society continued preserving its strictly land-based identity, which also particularly manifested itself in the social organization of the colonies and in the difference between the future destinies of Latin and Anglo-Saxon America. The presence of developed navigation does not necessarily make a power a sea one in the geopolitical sense of this term. Moreover, the objective of the Land Power and, in particular, of the Heartland, is to obtain access to the seas, break the financial blockade on the part of the thalassocracy, and begin to compete with it in its own element.

The situation with the network space is the same. The Multipolar camp needs to master the structure of the network processes and their technologies, learn the rules and regularities of network behavior, and then gain a possibility to realize its objectives and goals in this new element. The network space opens new possibilities for smaller actors: after all, the locations of a huge planetary level transnational corporation, a great power, or an individual minimally mastering programming skills are in no way different from each other, and in a certain sense, they appear to occur in similar conditions. The same can be said for social networks and blogs. Globalization banks that code diffusion into a multitude of network participants will one way or another install them in a context, whose basic parameters will be controlled by owners of physical servers, domain name registrars, providers, and hardware monopolists. But in the antiglobalist theories by Negri and Hardt, we have seen how leftist-anarchist theorists suggest coopting this circumstance for their interests while preparing a “rebellion of multitudes” that is called for to overthrow the control of the “empire”[11]. Something analogical can also be suggested in the Multipolar prospect, but the question is not about conducting a chaotic sabotage of the globalists plans through the use of the “multitudes”, but about constructing virtual network civilizations tied to a specific historical and geographical place and possessing a common cultural code. A virtual civilization can be considered a projection of the civilization as such in the network medium, assuming that the lines of force and the identification perceptions that are dominant in a corresponding cultural medium are consolidated there. This is already used by different religious, ethnic, and political forces that are in no way globalist or even antiglobalist, and they coordinate their activities and propagate their views and ideas with the help of different instruments of the Internet Network.

National domains and the development of network communications in local language systems are another form. With effective operation in this medium, this can contribute to the reinforcement of the youth’s cultural identity, as they are naturally predisposed to the allure of new technologies.

The example of the “Chinese Internet” (where access is legally and physical limited) can, according to the opinion of some Chinese governmental experts, damage the security of Chinese society. On the reverse, in the political, social, and moral fields, this example demonstrates that purely restrictive measures can also exercise some positive effect for the reinforcement of Multipolarism.

The global network can turn into a multipolar one, namely, into an aggregate of intersecting but independent “virtual continents”. Thus, instead of the singular network, there will appear many networks, each being a virtual expression of a specific qualitative space. All together, these continents can be integrated in a common multipolar network, differentiated and moderated on the grounds of the multipolar network paradigm. Eventually, the content of what is in the network will be a reflection of human imagination structures[12]. If actualizing these structures in a multipolar way (i.e. as those just making sense in a specific qualitative historical space), it is not difficult to imagine what the Internet (or its future analogue) could be in the Multipolar World.

On a practical level, under the present conditions, a network can already be considered as a means of consolidating active social groups, personalities, and societies under the aegis of promoting Multipolarism, i.e. gradual multipolar network construction.

Network Wars of the Multipolar World

Network wars are one more phenomenon of the globalization period. One should also be armed with the methodology of network wars – both in the common theoretical and application aspects – in constructing the Multipolar World. In this sense, the Network-centric Principle adapted during the reorganization of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation represents an absolutely justified decision, addressed to reinforce the Heartland’s positions and increase the performance of the army that constitutes one of the main elements in the multipolar configuration.

The Network-centric Principle of warfare has some technical and principal aspects to it. The equipping of separate units of the Russian Army with network attributes (tracking devices, operative two-way communication devices, interactive technical means, etc.) is a self-evident side of the issue, demanding no special geopolitical grounds. What is much more important is in considering another more common aspect of network warfare.

A network war, as it appears from its theorists’ actions, is constantly waged in all directions – against enemies, allies, and neutral forces. In the same way, network operations must be evolved in all directions and on the part of the center (or some centers) for the Multipolar World construction to succeed. If we assume that the actor pursuing a network war is not a state, but a non-state entity targeting the creation of the Multipolar World (like those that the US network war targets in order to establish the unipolar world), we will see that waging this war by different poles (e.g. Russia, China, India, Iran, etc.) will create interference and resonances and multiply the reinforcement and effectiveness of network strategies. By constructing the Multipolar World, each pole is interested in reinforcing the other poles, but also in weakening the hyperpower’s global hegemony. Thus, a network war waged by the Multipolar World can represent a spontaneous convergence of effort with structural ramifications that can be extremely effective. The reinforcement of China is beneficial for Russia, just as the security of Iran is beneficial for India. The independence of Pakistan from the US will positively redound upon the situation in Afghanistan and Central Asia, among other places.

By directing networks, information, and image flows that are associated with the multipolar idea in each and every direction, a network war can become extremely effective, as the securing of the interests of one Multipolar World actor automatically furthers the interests of another. In this case, coordination must only occur on the highest level – on the level of the countries’ representatives in the multipolar club (as a rule, these are heads of states) where the common multipolar paradigm will be exactly coordinated. Network war processes will bring this common strategy into life.

The second important part of the Network-centric War theory is in emphasizing the increased sensibility to initial conditions. These initial factors that affect the end result are the point in which the possible conflict starts, the position that other participating countries take up, and the information medium that broadcasts the conflict’s developments. Therefore, higher priority attention should be paid to preparing the medium – the local and global one. If the correlation of forces, a computation of the consequences of the various steps taken in the information field, and the preliminary preparation of image presentation are made correctly, this can make a conflict situation impossible by persuading a potential opponent of the hopelessness of resistance or armed escalation. This concerns traditional warfare as well as information wars, where the fight is waged for influence upon public opinion.

Therefore, the countries declaring their orientation to Multipolarism can and must actively use the theories and practices of network-centric operations for their interests. The theorists of network wars fairly consider them to be a crucial strategic instrument of waging a war in the Postmodernist conditions. Multipolarism undertakes the challenge of the Postmodern and begins a battle for its direction. Network-centric operations represent one of the most important territories to wage this battle.

Multipolarism and the Dialectics of Chaos

Another example where a strategy of turning “a poison into a cure” can be found is in the chaos phenomenon. Chaos ever more frequently figures into modern geopolitical texts[13], as well as in globalization theories. Proponents of the rigid unipolar approach (such as S. Mann[14]) suggest manipulating chaos in favor of “The Core” (i.e., the US). Antiglobalists and postmodernists welcome chaos in its literal sense – as anarchy and disorder. Other authors try to see buds of order in the chaotic reality.

The Multipolar Approach treats the problem of chaos as follows:

First, the mythological concept of “chaos” as a condition opposing “order” is predominantly a product of Greek (i.e. European) culture. This opposition is initially based upon the exclusiveness of order, and subsequently, as philosophy develops and order is identified with rationality, chaos has entirely turned into a purely negative concept, a synonym of irrationality, darkness, and inanity. It is also possible to approach this problem in another way, however, in a less exclusivist sense, and then chaos will discover itself to us as an entity not opposing order, but instead preceding its strained logical expression. Chaos is not nonsense, but a matrix from where sense is begotten[15].

In Western European culture, chaos is an unambiguous “evil”, but this is not the case in other cultures. Multipolarism refuses to consider Western European culture as being universal, and hence, chaos itself loses its unambiguous negative image, and the order correlated with it attains a positive image. Multipolarism does not reason in terms of chaos or order, but it demands explanations every time – what chaos and what order, and in what sense does a specific culture hold one or another term? We approximately know how chaos and order are comprehended by Western culture, but how does the Chinese one comprehend it, for example? Indeed, the idea of “Tao” that is crucial for Chinese philosophy (“The Way”) is described in many texts in terms that strikingly remind one of the descriptions of chaos. Therefore, the multipolar approach states that the understanding of chaos and order is relative to civilizations, and the Western conception is not universal by any means.

Firstly, globalists often understand “chaos” in the geopolitical sense as being anything that does not correlate with their perceptions of ordered sociopolitical and economic structures and that counters the establishment of their subjective global and “universal” values. In this case, everything that is valuable for the construction of the Multipolar World, including the insistence on other forms of identity, consequently bears within itself the seeds of the Multipolar Order and thus falls within the class of “chaos”. Per this example, “chaos” supports the construction of the Multipolar World and is its life-bearing origin.

Finally, chaos, in the manner that it is understood as being pure disorder or weakly organized spontaneous processes taking place in a society, can also be considered from the position of Multipolarism. Whenever a chaotic situation (conflict, disturbance, collision, etc.) arises in a natural or artificial way, it is necessary to learn to control it, i.e. master the art of chaos moderation. Being against ordered structures by their very nature, chaotic processes do not lend themselves to a straightforward logic, but it does not mean they do not have it at all. Chaos does have logic, but it is more complex and comprehensive than the algorithms of non-chaotic processes. At the same time, it lends itself to scientific research and it is actively studied by modern physicists and mathematicians. From the point of view of geopolitical application, it can well become one of the most effective instruments for constructing the Multipolar World.

 

Notes

[1] Alain de Benoist. Protiv liberalizma. SPb, 2009.

[2] Dugin A. “Protiv modernizacii.” Odnako, 2010. № 10 (26).

[3] Thurnwald R. Die menschliche Gesellschaft in ihren ethno-soziologischen Grundlagen, 5 B. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1931-1934.

[4] Dugin A. The sociology of the imaginary. The introduction into the structural sociology. M., 2010.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Huntington Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

[7] Dugin A. Martin Heidegger and philosopgiya drugogo nachala. M., 2010.

[8] Heidegger called globalism with the term “Planeter Idiotism” having in mind the original Greek meaning of the word idioteς that implies a polis inhabitant deprived of civil identity, i.e., of affiliation to a phyle, caste, trade, cult, etc. SeeDugin A. Martin Heidegger and philosopgiya drugogo nachala. Op. cit.

[9] Evola J. Cavalcare la tigre. R, 2001.

[10] Schmitt С. Die planetarische Spannung zwischen Ost und West (1959)/Schmittiana – III von prof. Piet Tommissen. Brussel, 1991.

[11] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000.

[12] Dugin A. The sociology of the imaginary. The introduction into the structural sociology. M., 2010.

[13] Ramonet I. Géo-politique du chaos. Paris: Galilée, 1997; Idem. Guerres du xxie siècle – Peurs et menaces nouvelles. Paris: Galilée, 2002.

[14] Mann St. R. “Chaos Theory and Strategic Thought.” Parameters. 1992. Autumn. № 55.

[15] Dugin A. Martin Heidegger and the possibilty of the Russian Philosophy. Op. cit.

 

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Dugin, Alexander. “The Multipolar World and the Postmodern.” Journal of Eurasian Affairs, vol.2, no.1 (May 2014). <http://www.eurasianaffairs.net/the-multipolar-world-and-the-postmodern/ >. (See this essay in PDF format here: The Multipolar World and the Postmodern).

Notes: The above essay is the English translation of a chapter from Dugin’s major work on the Theory of the Multipolar World, originally published in Russian as теория многополярного мира (Москва: Евразийское движение, 2012). This book is available in a French translation as Pour une théorie du monde multipolaire (Nantes: Éditions Ars Magna, 2013).

For a brief discussion of Dugin’s theories and also a listing of major translated works by him, see Natella Speranskaya’s interview with Dugin: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/civilization-as-political-concept-dugin/ >.

 

Althusius: First Federalist – Benoist

“The First Federalist: Johannes Althusius” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 94 KB):

The First Federalist: Johannes Althusius

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De Benoist, Alain. “The First Federalist: Johannes Althusius.” Telos, vol. 200, no. 118 (Winter 2000), pp. 25-58. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/the_first_federalist_althusius.pdf >.

Note: On the topic of this essay, see also Alain de Benoist, “What is Sovereignty?” Telos, vol. 1999, no. 116 (Summer 1999), pp. 99-118, <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_sovereignty.pdf >. We would also like to mention that excellent research articles in the Spanish language on this matter of sovereignty and federalism have been collected in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 37, “Federalismo Poliárquico Neoalthusiano” (Noviembre 2012), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2012/11/elementos-n-37-federalismo-poliarquico.html >. (We have made Elementos N° 37 available for download on our site: Elementos Nº 37 – Federalismo).

 

Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation – Levy

Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation

by David J. Levy

 

The work of Mircea Eliade has found a ready audience among thinking conservatives ever since it began to be widely known in the 1950’s. It may seem strange that a current of thought rooted as self-consciously as conservatism in the distinctive religious and cultural heritage of the West should be so stimulated by the writings of this student of oriental and archaic religions. To understand the reasons for this is to grasp not only the meaning of Eliade’s work in the context of our present cultural plight but an important point about any coherent conservative philosophy. Let me label that point, the postulate of permanence. It may be expressed as follows: that coherent conservatism rests on the belief that what is permanent in the human condition, that is to say in human nature and in the enveloping reality in which we participate, is more significant for political philosophy than what changes. Eliade’s lifelong vocation has been to grasp and communicate the meaning of the symbols, rites and myths of cultures remote from our own. His insistence that these cultural expressions can and must be understood as an integral part of the human response to the mysteries of existence strikes a responsive chord in the conservative consciousness; just as the conservative emphasis on the unchanging character of man’s nature and status in the order of being finds a ready echo in Eliade’s work. For underlying the stress which he places upon the abiding truth to be discovered in the symbols of oriental and archaic, or non-literate, religions is the recognition that there is an order of being which persists through history – an order to which man responds through the creation of symbols allowing him to discover and express the meaning of his existence. Eliade’s voluminous writings and wide-ranging scholarship introduce the reader to unfamiliar facets of this process. Yet the shock of unfamiliarity is only the prelude to recognition. Exploration prepares the way for anamnesis in that the encounter with an apparently exotic world of thought and beliefs can restore awareness of truths that have slipped from Western consciousness. This is an integral part of Eliade’s purpose. As he conceives it, the history of religions, of which he is our foremost practitioner, is both a journey into strange territory and a long path home. The encounter with other, religiously centered cultures is meant to reawaken us to the spiritual sources of our own.

Eliade is a Romanian, born in Bucharest in 1907. After graduating from Bucharest University in 1928 he was awarded a scholarship by the Maharajah of Kasimbazar which allowed him to spend the next four years studying in India. This period of immersion in Hindu culture was enormously important for the development of the young scholar’s thought. In his experience of Indian life and religion lies the source of Eliade’s belief that the central meaning of religion is to be found in man’s effort to transcend his status as a historical being subject to change and decay and reach a realm of changeless perfection. “It is difficult,” Eliade writes, “to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world, and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could arise without conferring meaning on man’s drives and experience.. . Through the experience .of the sacred, the human mind grasped the difference between that which reveals itself as real, powerful, rich and meaningful, and that which does not – i.e. the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous, meaningless appearances and disappearances.”[1] In Hinduism Eliade first saw something that he later found to be true of all religion – that the achievement of meaning in human existence and the experience of the sacred are intimately linked. Homo religiosus of whatever tradition catches and clings to intimations of the sacred in the profane course of events. What this means is not that the consciousness of religious man rejects the conditions of human existence as unworthy of his true spiritual nature, as the Gnostics would have us believe, but that he sees the world as itself symbolic, a universal cipher of a reality beyond. This according to Eliade is at the heart of every religious world view.

When he returned to Romania in 1932, Eliade found that his years in India   him a new capacity to sympathize with the popular the peasantry of his native land.Practices and beliefs that had earlier puzzled and even embarrassed him took on a fresh significance. He now understood, the religious function of the  icons so characteristic of Orthodoxy: “Before my stay in India,” he recalls, “I was rather disturbed by the fetishistic side of such an action, and I thought that ‘true religion’ was first of all contemplation and meditation, like any Christian who sees himself as an enlightened believer. But when I saw the extraordinary importance of symbolism for the Indian people, I realized that until then I had very much underestimated the existential scope of symbol and image.”[2] The power of the symbol, as object of veneration,to open the mind to awareness of the sacred was one of the most important lessons that Eliade learned in India.Another was the value of spiritual disciplines. For during his stay he not only learned Sanscrit and studied Hindu thought but spent some time practicing Yoga in the Himalayas under the noted master Swami Shivananda.

Yoga was the subject of the doctoral dissertation which Eliade presented in 1933. In the same year his first novel Maitreyi was published to great acclaim. The young university teacher became instantaneously a well-known figure on the Romanian cultural scene. Indeed, among his fellow countrymen his reputation as a novelist and teller of tales has always been at least as great as his name for scholarship. When a Festschrift, Myths and Symbols, was published in his honor in 1969 most of the Romanian contributors chose to write about his literary works which are, even now, scarcely known in the English speaking world.[3] In this they echoed Eliade’s own judgment of their importance. Reading his journal, it is clear that at times the demands of scholarship have seemed an almost intolerable distraction from the pursuit of his vocation as a novelist. Nor is this altogether surprising. Eliade comes from a culture in which the scholar, the poet, and the novelist were often one and the same. He sees the novel as a literary form occupying an essential place in modern Western consciousness. The novel is, we might say, the present incarnation of fable and, as such, a privileged ground for the survival of mythical themes and symbols which retain a compelling power over the human psyche. Eliade’s sense of the living force of symbol informs his literary no less than his scholarly work.

With the French publication of his book on Yoga in 1936 Eliade began to acquire an international reputation. In 1940 he was appointed cultural attaché to the Romanian legation in London, being transferred to Lisbon the next year. The years surrounding the war provide the setting for Eliade’s most ambitious novel The Forbidden Forest. It is a long book, almost six hundred pages in English translation, whose scope and manner invite comparison with Proust. Through the life of his central character, Stefan Viziru, Eliade explores a theme which is never far from his mind – man’s quest for an escape from time and “the terror of history.” The rise of Romanian fascism, the disastrous war against the Soviet Union and the subsequent communist invasion and takeover of the country form the terrifying backdrop to this epic of spiritual survival. Stefan Viziru is caught in the tragic rush of events and yet, as Virgil Nemoianu puts it, somehow distanced from them by his will “to capture or recapture a secret experience of ‘totality’ which partakes equally of an absolute love and of a revelation of the sacred in the profane. Ultimately this amounts to a stepping outside Time, which the individual has to attempt, not only for the sake of his personal redemption, but also as a matter of national concern: Romanians can survive only by boycotting History… , by evading its crushing hostility to them through some decisive ontological withdrawal.”

Nemoianu’s reference to Romanian history is appropriate. There is in every authentic thinker, every true philosopher or lover of wisdom, an intimate relationship between the challenge of life and the path of reflection. In Eliade’s case, the consciousness of Romania as a nation more often the victim than the maker of its destiny played an important, if largely covert part in the development of his thought, especially his opposition to every intellectual system that tries to identify ultimate reality with the course of history. If it was the Indian experience that formed Eliade’s conception of religion as man’s effort to achieve contact with an absolute reality beyond the ravages of time, then it was his consciousness of himself as a Romanian that opened his mind to such a view in the first place and later confirmed its truth in the harsh experience of personal exile and national defeat. Eliade knows as well as anyone that history cannot be ignored – the finger on the trigger is as real as the life it takes – and yet there is, he insists, something more, a realm of being revealed only in religious experience.

Since Eliade is sometimes accused of regarding history as unimportant it is worth quoting a passage in which he makes his position clear: “The expressions ‘history’ and ‘historic’ can occasion much confusion; they indicate, on the one hand, all that is concrete and authentic in a given human existence, as opposed to the unauthentic existence constituted by evasions and automatisms of every kind. On the other hand, in the various historicist and existentialist currents of thought, ‘history’ and ‘historic’ seem to imply that human existence is authentic only insofar as it is reduced to the awakened consciousness of its historic moment. It is to the latter, the ‘totalitarian’ meaning of history that I am referring when I take issue against ‘historicisms’. . . the authenticity of an existence cannot be limited to the consciousness of its own historicity.”[4] Eliade speaks of love, anxiety, melancholy and joy as fundamental experiences which together constitute the integral man “who neither denies himself to his historic moment, nor consents to be identified with it.” Historicism, as Eliade describes it, is mistaken because it identifies man’s essence with historical existence and does not see that history determines neither the nature of reality nor the consciousness which responds to it. Fundamental experiences of consciousness, love and anxiety, melancholy and joy, happen in history but they are not historically relative. Rather they represent permanent forms of human response. They are the precondition and not the product of history. While existing in the historical stream man never loses touch with that which is beyond history and it is the peculiar function of religious symbolism to express this relationship to the ground of his being – the ultimate reality that makes him what he is and gives meaning to his existence. Religious man, Eliade suggests, does not deny the truth of experience but seeks to grasp its covert meaning. Awareness of the sacred, the “wholly other” which may paradoxically manifest itself in the most familiar item of experience, is a matter of spiritual growth and not sensual atrophy. What Eliade calls “the dialectic of the sacred’ is the process by which a being or event becomes the cipher or symbol of something beyond without ceasing to be itself. Employing the vocabulary of Hinduism, Maya, the divine play or cosmic illusion of the passing world, is simultaneously Brahman, the sign of the absolute. As the Chandogya Upanishad put it, for the religious man, “Verily, this whole world is Brahman, from which he comes forth, without which he will be dissolved and in which he breathes. Tranquil, he should meditate on it.” Was Henri Bergson saying anything other when he declared in a lecture that enthralled the young Jacques Maritain: “it is in the absolute that we live and move and have our being”? As Eliade frequently points out, while the terms of religious discourse vary from place to place and time to time, the reality which they try to express is everywhere the same. The dialectic of the sacred expresses the mystery of the manifestation of eternal Being in time. It is small wonder if the effort to express it seems at times to break the bounds of what can be said. The inadequacy of expression to experience in the sphere of religion is a fact of life and quite beyond repair. We see through a glass darkly or not at all.

Eliade did not return to Romania after the war. He lived at first in Paris and then, since 1956, in Chicago where he succeeded Joachim Wach as Professor of the History of Religions. America is now his home but his sense of exile remains, giving a unique. personal tone to his continuing meditation on the meaning of religious experience in the frequently distressing course of life. This personal note comes out most clearly in the journal which Eliade kept between 1945 and 1969, a portion of which appeared in English translation under the title No Souvenirs. It is a work of the greatest interest to anyone wishing to understand the driving force behind his work, which is found in his belief in the enduring existential relevance of the material he studies. No Souvenirs records Eliade’s meetings with many of the significant figures in contemporary culture but, more than that, it provides a chronicle of his spiritual Odyssey through the postwar years. Eliade interprets his own fate and that of his nation in the light of his unequalled acquaintance with parallels and archetypes drawn from the full range of human experience. The tragic but not hopeless history of one man and people becomes exemplary for the understanding of permanent features of man’s being in the world.

“Every exile,” he wrote in 1960, “is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the ‘powers’ which decide historical, earthly destinies). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods in everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren’t there; if one sees them one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts.”[5] Behind this passage lies a whole philosophy of man, a philosophical anthropology which stresses the need to find meaning in existence while resolutely facing the fact that there is no reassurance to be found in the temporal order of events. In other words, Eliade introduces his readers to the dimension of meaning conveyed by ancient myth while rejecting the specifically modern, historicist myth, the superstition of “progress” and “the meaning of history” which identifies temporal succession with ontological and ethical order. The experience of the historical disasters of the twentieth century has already done much to undermine this view and Eliade believes that we are now more likely than were our grandparents to understand the Weltanschauung of men for whom history was no freeway to redemption but a time of trial and terror. Indeed, he suggests that it is only insofar as we are able to do this that we will avoid the cultural despair typical of recent Western thought and art.

But how can this be done? The cultures of other times and places exist for us as complexes of symbols whose meaning is not transparent but demands interpretation. The theory and practice of interpretation – hermeneutics as it is often called – thus lies at the center of the history of religions as it must in every area where the works of man are the object of study. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur points out that Eliade’s approach to symbols stands in stark contrast to the hermeneutics of suspicion as practiced by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. While the latter, each in his fashion, aim to demystify symbolic expression in order to expose the harsh and unacceptable reality that lies beneath – class interest, the will to power, and infantile sexuality respectively – Eliade conceives his task in terms of the recollection of meaning, the deciphering of the truth of being embodied in the symbol and culturally maintained in myths and rituals: “Symbolic thinking,” he writes, “…is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality – the deepest aspects – which defy other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfill a function, that of bringing to light the most hidden modalities of being.”[6]

This tendency to treat symbols as coded truths rather than irresponsible fantasies or indices of cultural immaturity is characteristic not only of Eliade’s work but of much of the most fruitful scholarship in the humanities. Eric Voegelin, for instance, speaks of an equivalence between experience and symbols, meaning the way in which a certain type of symbol appears in history as a response to certain identifiable circumstances. Eliade for his part says: “The greatest claim to merit of the history of religions is precisely its effort to decipher in a ‘fact,’ conditioned as it is by the historical moment and cultural style of its epoch, the existential situation that made it possible.”[7] To understand the meaning of a particular myth or rite involves setting it in its context. The specific insight of men like Eliade and Voegelin is that there is more to this context than the transient or merely historical. Whatever the course of events that an individual or group endures, the structure of existence remains the same. Birth, copulation and death, the fact of coming into being and passing away, must be faced in a way consistent with the no less universal need of the psyche to see life as possessing a certain meaning or order.

In Eliade’s case the attempt to recollect and communicate the truths expressed in the symbolism of archaic and oriental religions leads him to reject many of the assumptions of previous scholars. Explicitly or not, most of his predecessors in the field have approached the data with minds conditioned by belief in the self-evident superiority of modem Western thought forms. Eliade’s opposition to historicism and sensitivity to the coherence of non-Western world views produces a radical questioning of all such complacency. Referring to the author of The Golden Bough, he writes: “Where a Frazer could see nothing but ‘superstition,’ a metaphysic was already implicit, even though it was expressed by a pattern of symbols rather than by the interplay of concepts: a metaphysic – that is, a whole and coherent conception of Reality, not a series of instinctive gestures ruled by the same fundamental ‘reaction of the human animal in confrontation with Nature.’”[8]

Eliade calls the implicit metaphysic of religious symbolism “archaic ontology.” However this is in one sense a misleading phrase, for the conception of reality involved is not confined to the religious universe of archaic, or non-literate, peoples. Rather, it is the living core of the religious view of the world as such, one which neither Indian speculation nor Judaeo-Christian revelation definitively transcend. Archaic ontology embodies the effort to express awareness of an ultimate reality beyond history and change. There is nothing intellectually primitive about it. When the intelligible essence of myth, rite and symbol is grasped what we find is not a shoddy tissue of superstition but a creative interpretation of human existence as participation in universal, cosmological order. Simply put, the fundamental problem which man faces is how he may interpret his existence as meaningful in spite of the disasters that befall him in life. Somehow the order to which the psyche aspires must be matched to the experienced nature of the cosmos. As Eliade puts it, the terror of history must be overcome, for history tears the fabric of meaning by bringing everything to oblivion.

Insofar as there is a historical dimension to archaic ontology it is a “sacred history.” Sacred history, in the form of myth, recounts the origins of the cosmos or any part of it. It tells how the world was made as it is by the gods and of the exemplary deeds of mythical heroes. Through myth man accounts for his own existence and nature as well as that of the cosmos. Myths tell him what he is and why. They “preserve and transmit the paradigms, the exemplary models, for all responsible activities in which men engage. By virtue of these paradigmatic models revealed to men in mythical times, the Cosmos and society are periodically regenerated.”[9] Myth recounts origins, in illo tempore, and this mythical time can be reactualized through the ritual repetition of archetypal gestures and events. To recollect or repeat is to reactualize a time when everything was new and uncorrupted. It is to participate in the renewal of the world through repetition of the original act of creation by which the order of the cosmos was brought out of chaos. This theme of the regeneration of the world is difficult for the modem Westerner to grasp. The image of the arrow of time which expresses the irreversibility of the historical moment is deeply etched in our consciousness. Nevertheless it is not impossible to understand the significance which the repetition of archetypal events and gestures has for archaic man. Our own ceremonies and celebrations – Christmas, Passover, or Thanksgiving for instance – recall culturally or spiritually significant events, while in at least one case, the celebration of Holy Communion, what is involved is nothing less than the reactualization of an event which, in terms of historical time alone, belongs irredeemably to the past. The sacred time of the Mass and the ever presence of Christ’s sacrifice within it testifies to a continuity between Christianity and the most profound conceptions of archaic ontology.

Eliade’s analysis of archaic ontology in The Myth of the Eternal Return is remarkably successful as an attempt to communicate the meaning of ancient myth and ritual to the modern reader. The universality of the ontology he discovers, as well as the possibility of making it comprehensible to his audience, is rooted in the unity of man as a symbol making animal and the permanence of the fundamental cosmic structures to which the human mind responds. From the conjunction of the two – the creative meeting of psyche and cosmos – there is born a coherent interpretation of existence which, to a unique extent, provides man with answers to the questions that trouble him most deeply. The symbols of religion reveal a continuity between the structures of human existence and those of the cosmos. In doing isolation in a cold and heartless universe, to see himself as a partner in a world that manifests order. When archaic man interprets his life and destiny by analogy with the repetitive and cyclical rhythms of nature he lays claim to a unity between psychic and cosmic reality that assuages the fear of oblivion. He is never far from death but he knows that when the moon vanishes from the sky the darkness is only a prelude to its return. The barren surface of the winter landscape is no more than a mask before the promise of spring renewal. As part of the cosmos, archaic man sees his life as participating in the same rhythms. No end is final. No merely historical disaster is more than moment in a process which renews and restores. “The religious symbols which point to the structures of life… unveil the miraculous, inexplicable side of life, and at the same time the sacramental dimensions of human existence. ‘Deciphered’ in the light of religious symbols, human life reveals a hidden side: it comes from ‘another part,’ from far off; it is ‘divine’ in the sense that it is the work of the gods or of supernatural beings.”[10] Thus religious symbols do not only bind the structures of psyche and cosmos in a tight web of meaning but also serve to link the limited space of experienced reality with the mysterious unknown out of which it emerges and into which it passes. What happened in illo tempore provides the mind with sufficient reason for the world we know.

Eliade believes that the history of religions can provide the foundation for a new humanism. The reflection of the West upon its own past, the core of traditional humanism, must be supplemented with a dialogue between East and West and a widening of the historical and anthropological horizon to include archaic cultures. “More than any other humanistic discipline,” he claims, “… history of religions can open the way to a philosophical anthropology. For the sacred is a universal dimension and… the beginnings of culture are rooted in religious experiences and beliefs. Furthermore, even after they are radically secularized, such cultural creations as social institutions, technology, moral ideas, arts, etc., cannot be understood correctly if one does not know their original religious matrix, which they tacitly criticized, modified, or rejected on becoming what they are now: secular cultural values. Thus, the historian of religions is in a position to grasp the permanence of what has been called man’s specific existential situation of ‘being in the world,’ for the experience of the sacred is its correlate. In fact, man’s becoming aware of his own mode of being and assuming his presence in the world constitute a ‘religious’ experience.”[ 11]

This emphasis upon the discovery of the religious dimension as original to and formative of man’s discovery of the truth of his being is certainly a major reason for Eliade’s appeal to conservatives. Even among those whose thought is not anchored in Christian or Jewish belief there is a natural affinity for a religious conception of the unchanging conditions of human existence. At the same time the breadth of Eliade’s horizon, his incorporation of the widest possible range of data, poses a special challenge. The symbols we encounter are strange and do not yield their meaning easily. As Ricoeur puts it, “Le symbole donne à penser”: symbolism invites thought, the symbol provokes philosophical reflection which extracts a meaning not visible to the initial glance. If appreciation of the permanence of the human condition is a central feature of any coherent conservative philosophy we can learn as much from other cultures as from our own past. To do this, however, we must first learn to decipher the symbols in which the men of other times and places have articulated their response to the tensions of existence. The sympathy which Mircea Eliade has brought to this task makes him a model for us all.

Notes

[1] Mircea Eliade: The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 1.

[2] Encounter, Vol. LIV, No. 3 (March 1980).

[3] The University of Notre Dame has recently, published English translations of two of Eliade’s novels. These are The Forbidden Forest (1978) and The Old Man and the Bureaucrats (1979).

[4] Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (London: Harvill Press, 1961), pp. 171-2.

[5] Mircea Eliade: No Souvenirs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). pp. 84-5.

[6] 1mages and Symbols, p. 12.

[7] Mircea Eliade: “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism,” in The History of Religions, edited by Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 88.

[8] Images and Symbols. p. 176.

[9] The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press, 1954). p. xiv.

[10] “Methodological Remarks etc.” loc.cit., p. 98.

[11] The Quest, p. 9.

 

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Levy, David J. “Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation.” Modern Age, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring 1981), pp. 155-161. Retrieved from: <http://www.mmisi.org/ma/25_02/levy.pdf >.

Note: We also recommend to our readers the key excerpts from Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, made available on our site along with some information on further reading: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/sacred-profane-eliade/ >.

 

New Paradigm of Science – Dugin

New Paradigm of Science

Speech in the Tokyo University

By Alexander Dugin

 

We regard the science as a system of relations of a rational man with a mechanistically interpreted reality. Having arisen at the edge of the New Time in Europe, that system of relations includes both theory – the knowledge about that reality (which claims its own objective character, verifiability and indisputability) – and practice (technics) – the methods of affecting that reality.

The rational man, the man who bases his perception of the world on the “common sense” (“la bonne raison”, “bon sens” or “la bonne foi”) is the subject of the modern science, its self, its creator, its main developer. In the pre-scientific period such a subject did not exist purely or, at least, it did not claim for the rational approach as the only one to formulate the truths of the surrounding reality’s nature. Some certain superrational dogmas and myths always prevailed over the rational man. As to science, it set itself to emancipation from non-rational foundations from the very beginning. And this is just what one of its specific distinctive features consists in. Where this criterion is not observed, we cannot talk about the science in the strict (modern) sense of that word and should use other formulas, such as “pre-scientific conceptions”, “para-scientific method”, “pre-scientific” and in some situations even “post-scientific” approaches.

The mechanistic and atomistic interpretation of reality is the other necessary criterion of understanding science. Only the mechanistic nature, deprived of any faint resemblance of “its immanent-essential life” must be the object of the science. As regards this, Martin Heidegger wrote:

“The science establishes the Actual. It presses for the Actual to appear every time as a result of one or another action, in other words, to appear in the form of visible aftereffects of some causes, which give a good ground for them.”

Such objective-made reality functions completely according to cause-and-effect relationship and is subordinate to a mechanistic determinism. That reality is supposed to be “accessible to strict measurement” (as M. Plank said). As to M. Heidegger, he emphasizes that “any objectivation is calculation”. So then the outside world in the modern science is taken as the Absolute Object, lying before the Absolute Subject, the “Subjective Subject”, and they do not have any common mediating substance with each other. Hence follows the most important classic science principle of reducing “the organism to the mechanism”, the representation of an organism as a complicated, intricate version of a mechanism. In turn, from this emerged the Cartesian thesis of “the animals as mechanical apparatuses” and the radical Lamerti’s statement that “the man is nothing else but the machine”.

Such vision of the world and of the man attains prevalence (in Europe) only in New Time and just in the same period the concept of “science” is realized as describing some system of “exact” relations of two set-apart poles – of the “Subjective Subject” and of the “Objective Object”. In other epochs the term “science” was used in some other, more wide and less precise sense, since both the man and the Nature were perceived absolutely otherwise and their interrelations had fundamentally different character.

So, the main quality of a science as itself consists in striving to attach some autonomous character to the deterministic and mechanistic system of relations between the subject and the object, in purifying that system of relations from any collateral and unscientific, extrascientific factors (theology, traditions, myths, “superstitions” and so forth).

In turn, such an autonomous state, attained by the science, should have brought to ranking the scientific knowledge in its own opinion above the rest gnoseological patterns of pre-scientific and unscientific origin. This last point is extremely essential, since in a historical process the substance of the science was developed in dispute with comprehensive gnoseological systems, mostly related with religions and other topping institutes of a traditional society. The opposition of the science as specific gnoseological system, claiming independence and dominance, to other patterns of cognition and perception of reality, that are inherent in a traditional society, makes the science an ideologically concerned phenomenon.

Methodology of meta-paradigms (Sphere, Ray, Segment)

The main methodological instrument we employ is a principle of paradigms.

The Greek word “paradeigma” literally means “what predetermines the character of the manifested, but at the same time remains outside the manifested” (“para” signifies “over”, “above”, “by what”, “about what”, and “deigma” signifies “manifestation”). In the most broad sense, it is an initial pattern, a matrix, which prefers to act not directly, but through its own manifestations, having predetermined their structure. The paradigm is not manifested by itself and represents a structure-forming reality, which, being not accessible to direct introspection, always remaining “off screen”, establishes the main, basic, fundamental parameters of human thinking and human being. The specificity of paradigm consists in that gnoseological and ontological aspects in it are not divided yet and are subject to distinguishing only as our basic intuitions, having been sifted through the paradigmatic sieve, take form of one or another affirmation of gnoseological or ontological character.

The term “paradigm” was applied by the Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy schools for describing some supreme, transcendent example, predetermining the structure and form of material things. It was introduced in the science history methodology anew by G. Bergman, who interpreted it as some common principles and standards of the methodological research. T. Kuhn gave more wide interpretation (than by Bergman) of the term, summarizing in it the general context of the scientific conceptions, axioms, methods and certainties, which predetermine weltanshaaung orientations, shared by the scientific community in the given historical situation. Kuhn made the paradigmatic method of research a principle instrument for researching the structure of scientific-technical revolutions. Kuhn’s term “disciplinary matrix” was a specified synonym for “paradigm”.

Even more broad sense was implied in that term by Fritjof Capra, who proposed opposition of two paradigms: the old (classic, Cartesian-Newtonian) one and the new, named by him as “holistic” or “ecologic”, one, destined to replace the rational-discontinuous methodology of mainstream science of New Time.

We use the term “paradigm” in the most common sense, different from those of G. Bergman, T. Kuhn, F. Capra, in the sense of generalization universality. That’s why, to give a more accurate definition, we have had to introduce a concept of “metaparadigm”. We interpret it as a vast aggregate of non-manifest orientations that predetermine the manner itself of understanding and viewing reality’s nature and that, being formed, may give birth to manifold philosophical, scientific, religious, mythological, cultural systems and conceptions, which have some common denominator despite all their formal difference.

In other words, the paradigm is not a myth, but a system of myths and it is able to generate new mythological subjects and recombinations. The paradigm is not a theology, but a system of theologies, which, differing in their concrete affirmations, are reduced to the common proto-matrix. The paradigm is not an ideology, but some pre-ideological nebula, able to crystallize out of itself (as in Laplace’s hypothesis) uncertainly large system of ideologies. The paradigm is not an ideology, but an ultimately underlying reason for ideologies, able to reveal similarity in ideologies, not just different externally, but even opposite, and vice versa, show a fundamental differences in ideologies, very like formally.

In such a vision one cannot draw a strict distinction between a gnoseological ingredient and an ontological ingredient of a paradigm. Each of the global paradigms certainly sets up axiomatic structures, where the statuses of Being, Consciousness, Spirit, World, Origin and their interrelations are predetermined. As to empirical confirmations or refutations of those axiomatic structures, they do not even apply to the paradigms directly, since they affect intermediate levels of formal realization. The question of reflection on the paradigms themselves and their quality is put in special historical moments only, when transition from one paradigm to another occurs. But as soon as the change is accomplished, the possibility itself of such reflection is reduced to minimum. The paradigm predetermines how is what is, what is what is, and finally, how we cognize what is. It is a closed set. In some paradigms the ontology and the gnoseology are knowingly merged, in the others are separated. But it is not a property of level or degree of cognition, it is a result of a paradigmatic influence, which is expressed in multiform series of scientifical, philosiphical, mythological and cultural discourses.

As the most general paradigms we propose to take three paradigms – paradigms of Sphere, of Ray and of Segment. Each of these paradigms might underlie philosophy, science, mythology, theology, gnoseology, and so on. Each paradigm dictates its own model of association with the world, world’s general structure conception, world’s cognition aspects and models.

It is exactly the dialectical development of these paradigms, their interrelationship, and their change determine, in our opinion, the flow of human history, determine the emergence of science itself, its development, conditions of its coming into being. Each of the paradigms totally and radically changes the meaning of the terms and intellectual constructions, which in the formal and lexical way might look identical. The transition from one paradigm to another basically changes the main parameters of reality perception by a human, transforms the status of a human himself.

Each of the paradigms gains prevalence in certain historical periods. And at first sight, their evolution has the character of succession: for example, the paradigm of Sphere was peculiar to the ancient humankind and to traditional societies initially. It is primordial and is found in most ancient and modern (mostly Oriental) civilizations. In historical and geographical senses that paradigm is spread more widely than two others. It corresponds with basic, profound and deep strata of human’s psyche and therefore remains surprisingly stable even in the periods when on the surface it is displaced by other alternative paradigms. The paradigm of the Sphere is based on the fact that the Deity / proto-Principle / Origin is found inside the World, is cosubstantial to the World, inseparably and substantially linked with the World. This gives birth to conception of “cyclic time”, “eternal return”. This motive is a commonplace in all mythological and religious teachings except for Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam; but it is still present in those three in the form of mystical, esoteric trends, somewhat different from dogmatic norms.

The paradigm of the Ray is the next one both in logical and historical aspect. It is connected with the unique theology of those religious forms, that are called “religions of Revelation” or “monotheism”. The idea of world creation from nothing, “ex nihilo” underlies the paradigm of Ray. Such an approach momentarily breaks the continuity of the spherical world, evenly imbued by the Divine presence, the presence of proto-Principle. Here God-Creator seems to be external to the Universe, separated from the nature of Universe. The relation of the beings, present on Earth, to the Origin immediately changes. The reality becomes locked from one side, from the side of its emergence, its origin. The Ray paradigm gives birth to one-directional time, gives grounds for turning history into a “time arrow”. However, the religions of Revelation (though in varied forms) teach that in certain stages of humankind history the alienation, which underlies creation ex nihilo, will be overcome as a display of the “Divine mercy”. And starting from a certain moment the immanent created reality will be “atoned”, “saved” and elevated to the transcendent Origin. That epoch of atonement is called “eschatological” or “messianic”. The world to that moment discontinues being alienated from the Creator and transits to some other mode of being, which roughly reminds of the reality conceptions in the Sphere paradigm. Hence follows that the Ray (or the Hemisphere) is limited from one side, from the side of ‘world creation from nothing’ dogma, and is unlimited from the other side. This “unlimitedness” does not imply indefinitely long duration. The symbol of Ray is taken here metaphorically, just in order to stress the “half-indefinite” character of the model, beginning with the radical rupture and resulting in the blessed reconciliation and reunification. That messianic motive is to varied extent inherent in all monotheistic religions, but is especially clearly expressed in Judaism and Christianity, and in Christianity the eschatological aspect is accentuated unprecedentedly.

The Ray paradigm follows the Sphere paradigm both in logical and historical aspect. It is as if it dissects the Sphere, cutting off the half, that postulated the direct resulting from God (what is called “manifestationism” or “ex deo” creation).

Further, the Segment paradigm follows the Ray paradigm. Here the world’s limitedness from both sides is postulated. Such world appears from nothing and disappears in nothing. It has no direct Divine Origin and no hope for return to Deity. The Universe is conceived as God-abandoned objective reality, closed from all sides by non-existence and death. That paradigm is characteristic for New Time and underlies the modern science.

The Segment paradigm insists that no transition of immanent reality to the transcendent levels is possible, in its most complete forms that paradigm denies the existence of those levels at all. That’s why the Segment paradigm gravitates to atheism, rejecting the transcendent principle. In some cases, however, instead of atheism there is deism in it, which affirms a transcendent Creator, but denies messianism and eschatology. In the viewpoint of Segment paradigm, such deism does not differ from atheism and materialism in almost any way.

The Segment Paradigm gravitates to mechanistic conception of reality nature, to atomism and local situations’ priority. In that paradigm the General, the universal live interrelationship among objects, beings and phenomena is denied. The prevalent approach is discontinuity, divisibility, relativity.

The Segment paradigm follows the Ray paradigm as a result of its development. It is significant, that the Segment paradigm becomes established only where the Sphere paradigm was replaced by the Ray paradigm beforehand. There is a logical and symmetrical correspondence in that fact. With certain approximation and considering the fact that New Time is exactly characterized by the process of the Segment paradigm’s obtaining universal character and its extensive development, one may conceive the paradigm development process as a consequent transition from Sphere through Ray to Segment. In some reality aspects it is so.

So, the general process of paradigm evolution has a whole series of fine points, defining that process, as well as there is some dimensions, where the external successive transition from Sphere to Ray is compensated by the reverse phenomena, that shows ancient Sphere paradigm’ resistibility and stability as regards competing “innovative” paradigms.

We would like to solve the comprehension problem of “scientific epoch” as a whole and having an autonomous structure intellectual paradigm (the Segment paradigm) which exists along with other paradigms (the Sphere and Ray paradigm) which are based on the other premises, that are to the same extent well-grounded (or groundless) as “scientific dogmata”. Sometimes unscientific and even pre-scientific paradigms affect the evolution of the scientific orthodoxy itself, admixing to it and creating intermediate and quasi-homogeneous variants, that often evade looks of researchers who operate with conventional schemes and methodologies.

Apart from “critical rationalism” we are absolutely not sure that preserving modified norms of “classical rationality” is a self-evident truth and that giving the scientific orthodoxy up would bring to humankind’s intellectual degradation. We would like to show that the other, non-scientific paradigms also rest on quite harmonious and complete intellectual constructions, arranged otherwise (which does not mean certainly worse). On the other hand, the “epistemological anarchism” as mixture of all possible paradigms and giving up any general gnoseologic vectors at all can scarcely give really useful and correct intellectual results (though in some cases such an approach may be justified). As to theses of radical positivists, today they are not regarded as serious by anyone.

In our viewpoint, the method of “meta-paradigms” just may set one of the possible landmarks for the further scientific self-consciousness development and the evolution of the phenomenon that according some certain historical inertion (despite the obvious change of functions) is still common to call “science”.

 

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The text of this speech was originally published online at the official Fourth Political Theory website (n.d.): <http://www.4pt.su/el/node/708#sthash.Okm75fc6.dpuf >. (See this essay in PDF format here: New Paradigm of Science).

Note: Our research shows that the theory of paradigms discussed in this speech is based upon the ideas which Aleksandr Dugin expounded in more depth in his dissertation Эволюция парадигмальных оснований науки (Москва: Арктогея, 2002). On the relationship between science and religion and the idea of a reform of science from a religious perspective, related ideas to Dugin’s have been advanced by Mircea Eliade and Gilbert Durand (both of whom influenced Dugin’s thought). For Dugin’s studies on these matters, see also his book Социология Воображения (Москва: Академический проект, 2010), which is his most comprehensive sociological work.

Additional note: We also recommend that our audience read Alexander Dugin’s article on modern Japanese society and culture: ‘In the Country of Rising “Do”’, <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/on-japan-dugin/ >. According to Dugin’s description, Japan has a society in which the qualities of modernity and tradition are very well combined. The Japanese society of recent times (the late 20^th Century and early 21^st Century) is highly advanced technologically, scientifically, and economically, but it simultaneously possesses a rich and high-quality culture which is very religious, spiritual, conservative, and ethnically identitarian in nature. In other words, it is “revolutionary conservative” because it possesses a culture where the progress of modern science is fused with the spiritual qualities of traditional society. Thus, modern Japanese society can be seen as a source of inspiration and also as a model for European Conservatives and Identitarians, who aim to create a similar type of society for European nations.

 

Civilization as Political Concept – Dugin

Civilization as Political Concept

Interview with the leader of the International “Eurasian Movement”, a philosopher, and a professor at Moscow State University Alexander Dugin.

Interviewed by the Global Revolutionary Alliance’s own Natella Speranskaja (Natella Speranskaya).

 

Natella Speranskaja: The crisis of identity, with which we faced after the Cold War and the collapse of the communist world, is still relevant. What do you think is capable of lifting us out of this crisis – a religious revival or creation of a new political ideology? Which of the options are you inclined to yourself?

Alexander Dugin: After the collapse of communism came the phase of the “unipolar moment” (as Charles Krauthammer called it). In geopolitics, this meant the victory of unilateralism and Atlanticism, and because the pole was left alone, the West has become a global phenomenon. Accordingly, the ideology of liberalism (or more accurately, neo-liberalism) is firmly in place crushing the two alternative political theories that existed in the twentieth century – communism and fascism. The Global liberal West has now defined culture, economics, information and technology, and politics. The West’s claims to the universalism of its values, the values of Western modernity and the Postmodern era, has reached its climax.

Problems stemming from the West during the “unipolar moment” has led many to say that this “moment” is over, that he could not yet be a “destiny” of humanity. That is, a “unipolar moment” should be interpreted very broadly – not only geopolitical, but also ideologically, economically, axiologically, civilization wide. The crisis of identity, about which you ask, has scrapped all previous identities – civilizational, historical, national, political, ethnic, religious, cultural, in favor of a universal planetary Western-style identity – with its concept of individualism, secularism, representative democracy, economic and political liberalism, cosmopolitanism and the ideology of human rights. Instead of a hierarchy of identities, which have traditionally played a large role in sets of collective identities, the “unipolar moment” affirmed a flat one-dimensional identity, with the absolutization of the individual singularity. One individual = one identity, and any forms of the collective identity (for example, individual as the part of the religious community, nation, ethnic group, race, or even sex) underwent dismantling and overthrowing. Hence the hatred of globalists for different kind of “majorities” and protection of minorities, up to the individual.

The Uni-polar Democracy of our moment – this is a democracy, which unambiguously protects the minority before the face of the majority and the individual before face of the group. This is the crisis of identity for those of non-Western or non-modern (or even not “postmodern”) societies, since this is where customary models are scrapped and liquidated. The postmodern West with optimism, on the contrary, asserts individualism and hyper-liberalism in its space and zealously exports it on the planetary scale.

However, it’s not painless, and has caused at all levels its own growing rejection. The problems, which have appeared in the West in the course of this “uni-polar moment”, forced many to speak, that this “moment’s” conclusion, has not succeeded in becoming “the fate” of humanity. This, therefore, was the cost of the possibility of passage to some other paradigm…

So, we can think about an alternative to the “unipolar moment” and, therefore, an alternative to liberalism, Americanism, Atlanticism, Western Postmodernism, globalization, individualism, etc. That is, we can, and I think should, work out plans and strategies for a “post-uni polar world”, at all levels – the ideological and political, the economic, and religious, and the philosophical and geo-political, the cultural and civilizational, and technology, and value.

In fact, this is what I call multi-polarity. As in the case of uni-polarity it is not only about the political and strategic map of the world, but also the paradigmatic philosophical foundations of the future world order. We cannot exactly say that the “uni-polar moment” has finally been completed. No, it is still continuing, but it faces a growing number of problems. We must put an end to it – eradicate it. This is a global revolution, since the existing domination of the West, liberalism and globalism completely controls the world oligarchy, financial and political elites.

So they just will not simply give up their positions. We must prepare for a serious and intense battle. Multi-polarity will be recaptured by the conquered peoples of the world in combat and it will be able to arise only on the smoking ruins of the global West. While the West is still dictating his will to the rest, to talk about early multipolarity – you must first destroy the Western domination on the ground. Crisis – this is much, but far from all.

Natella Speranskaja: If we accept the thesis of the paradigmatic transition from the current unipolar world order model to a new multi-polar model, where the actors are not nation-states, but entire civilizations, can it be said that this move would entail a radical change in the very human identity?

Alexander Dugin: Yes, of course. With the end of the unipolar moment, we are entering a whole new world. And it is not simply a reverse or a step back, but it is a step forward to some unprecedented future, however, different from the digital project of “lonely crowds”, which is reserved for humanity by globalism. Multi-polar identity will be the complex nonlinear collection of different identities – both individual and collective, that is varied for each civilization (or even inside each civilization).

This is something completely new that will be created.

And the changes will be radical. We cannot exclude that, along with known identities, civilizations, and offering of new ways … It is possible that one of these new identities will become the identity of “Superman” – in the Nietzschean sense or otherwise (for example, traditionalist) … In the “open society” of globalism the individual is, on the contrary, closed and strictly self-identical.

The multi-polar world’s anthropological map will be, however, extremely open, although the boundaries of civilizations will be defined clearly. Man will again re-open the measurement of inner freedom – “freedom for”, in spite of the flat and purely external liberal freedom – “freedom from” (as in John Mill), which is actually, not freedom, but its simulacrum, imposed for a more efficient operation of the planetary masses by a small group of global oligarchs.

Natella Speranskaja: Alexander Gelevich Dugin, you are the creator of the theory of a multi-polar world, which laid the foundation from which we can begin a new historical stage. Your book The Theory of a Multi-polar World (Теория многополярного мира) has been and is being translated into other languages. The transition to a new model of world order means a radical change in the foreign policy of nation-states, and in today’s global economy, in fact, you have created all the prerequisites for the emergence of a new diplomatic language. Of course, this is a challenge of the global hegemony of the West. What do you think will be the reaction of your political opponents when they realize the seriousness of the threat posed?

Alexander Dugin: As always in the vanguard of philosophical and ideological ideas, we first have the effect of bewilderment, the desire to silence or marginalize them. Then comes the phase of severe criticism and rejection. Then they begin to consider. Then they become commonplace and a truism. So it was with many of my ideas and concepts in the past 30 years. Traditionalism, geopolitics, Sociology of imagination , Ethnosociology, Conservative Revolution , National Bolshevism, Eurasianism, the Fourth Political Theory, National-structuralism, Russian Schmittianism, the concept of the three paradigms, the eschatological gnosis, New Metaphysics and Radical Theory of the Subject, Conspiracy theories, Russian Heideggerianism, a post-modern alternative, and so on – perceived first with hostility, then partially assimilated, and finally became part of mainstream discourse in academia and politics of Russia, and in part, beyond.

Each of these directions has their fate, but the diagram of their mastering is approximately identical. So it will be also with the theory of a multipolar world It will be hushed up, and then demonized and fiercely criticized, and then they will begin to look at it closely, and then accepted. But for all this it is necessary to pay for it and to defend it in the fight. Arthur Rimbaud said that “the spiritual battle as fierce and hard, as the battle of armies.” For this we will have to struggle violently and desperately. As for everything else.

Natella Speranskaja: In the “Theory of a multipolar world,” you write that in the dialogue between civilizations the responsibility is born by the elite of civilization. Do I understand correctly, it should be a “trained” elite, that is, the elite, which has a broad knowledge and capabilities, rather than the present “elite”? Tell me, what is the main difference between these elites?

Alexander Dugin: Civilizational elite – is a new concept. Thus far it does not exist. It is a combination of two qualities – deep assimilation of the particular civilizational culture (in the philosophical, religious, value levels) and the presence of a high degree of “drive,” persistently pushing people to the heights of power, prestige, and influence. Modern liberalism channels passion exclusively in the area of economics and business, creating a preference for a particular social elevator and it is a particular type of personality (which is an American sociologist Yuri Slezkine called the “mercurial type”).

The Mercurial elite of globalism, “aviakochevniki” mondialist nomadism, sung by Jacques Attali, should be overthrown in favor of radically different types of elites. Each civilization can dominate, and other “worlds”, not only thievish, mercurial shopkeepers and cosmopolitans. Islamic elite is clearly another – an example of this we see in today’s Iran, where the policy (Mars) and economics (Mercury) are subject to spiritual authority, of the Ayatollah (Saturn).

But the “world” is only a metaphor. Different civilizations are based on different codes. The main thing is that the elite must be reflected in the codes themselves, whatever they may be. This is the most important condition. The will to power inherent in any elite, shall be interfaced with the will to knowledge; that is, intellectualism and activism in such a multipolar elite should be wedded. Technological efficiency and value (often religious) content should be combined in such an elite. Only such an elite will be able to fully and responsibly participate in the dialogue of civilizations, embodying the principles of their traditions and engaging in interaction with other civilizations of the worlds.

Natella Speranskaja: How can you comment on the hypothesis that the return to a bipolar model is still possible?

Alexander Dugin: I think not, practically or theoretically. In practice, because today there is no country that is comparable to the basic parameters of the U.S. and the West in general. The U.S. broke away from the rest of the world so that no one on their own can compete with them. Theoretically, only the West now has a claim to universality of its values, whereas previously Marxism was regarded as an alternative. After the collapse of the Soviet Union it became clear that universalism is only liberal, capitalist. To resist Western imperialism there can only be a coalition of large spaces – not the second pole, but immediately multiple poles, each of them with its own strategic infrastructure and with a particular civilizational, cultural and ideological content.

Natella Speranskaja: How real is the sudden transition to a non-polar model? What are the main disadvantages of this model?

Alexander Dugin: Passage to a non-polar model, about which leaders are increasingly talking of in the Council on Foreign Relations (Richard Haass, George Soros, etc.), means the replacement of the facade of a uni-polar hegemony, the transition from the domination based on military and strategic power of the United States and NATO (hardware) to dispersed domination of the West as a whole (software). These are two versions – hard-hegemony and soft-hegemony. But in both cases the West, its civilization, its culture, its philosophy, its technologies, its political and economic institutes and procedures come out as the standard universal model. Over the long term, this will indicate the transfer of power to a “world government”, which will be dominated by all the same Western elites, the global oligarchy. It will then discard its mask and will act directly on behalf of the transnational forces. In some sense, non-polarity is worse than uni-polarity, though it would seem hard to believe.

Non-polarity itself, and even more sharply and rapidly, will not yet begin. For this, the world must go through the turmoil and trials until a desperate humanity itself cries for the world elite with a prayer for salvation. Prior to that, to weaken the power of the United States, world disasters occur, and war. Non-polar world under the control of a world government, consisting of direct representatives of the global oligarchy, is expected by many religious circles as the coming “of the kingdom of the Antichrist.”

As for the “shortcomings” of such a model, I believe that it is just “a great parody of” the sacred world empire, which Rene Guenon warned of in his work The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times. This will be a global simulacrum. To recognize these “deficiencies” will not be so easy, otherwise opposition to “the Antichrist” would be too simple a matter, and the depth of his temptation would be insignificant.

The true alternative is a multi-polar world. Everything else – evil in the truest sense of the word.

Natella Speranskaja: The “counter-hegemony” by Robert Cox, who you mention in your book aims to expose the existing order in international relations and raise the rebellion against it. To do this, Cox called for the creation of counter-hegemonic bloc, which will include political actors who reject the existing hegemony. Have you developed the Fourth Political Theory as a kind of counter-hegemonic doctrine that could unite the rebels against the hegemony of the West?

Alexander Dugin: I am convinced that the Fourth Political Theory fits into the logic of building counter-hegemony, which Cox spoke of. By the way, also in the proximity of critical theory in the MO theory, and multi-polar world is a wonderful text by Alexandra Bovdunova, voiced at the Conference on the Theory of a Multipolar World in Moscow, Moscow State University on 25-26 April 2012.

4PT is not a complete doctrine, this is still the first steps toward the exit from the conceptual impasse in which we find ourselves in the face of liberalism, today rejected by more and more people around the world, in the collapse of the old anti-liberal political theories – Communism and Fascism. In a sense, the need for 4PT – is a sign of the times, and really cannot be disputed by anyone. Another matter, what will be 4PT in its final form. The temptation appears to build it as a syncretic combination of elements of previous anti-liberal doctrines and ideologies …

I am convinced that we should go another way. It is necessary to understand the root of the current hegemony. This coincides with the root of modernity as such, and it grows from the roots of modernity in all three pillars of political theories – liberalism, communism and fascism. To manipulate them to find an alternative to modernity and liberalism, respectively, and of the liberal hegemony of the West, is in my view, pointless. We must move beyond modernity in general, beyond the range of its political actors – individual, class, nation, state, etc.

Therefore 4PT as the basis of a counter-hegemonic planetary front should be constructed quite differently. Like the theory of a multipolar world 4PT operates with a new concept – “civilization”, but 4PT puts special emphasis on the existential aspect of it. Hence the most important, the central thesis of 4PT that its subject is the actor – Dasein. Every civilization, its Dasein, which means that it describes a specific set of existentials. On their basis, should be raised a new political theory generalized at the following level into a “multipolar federation of Dasein” as the concrete structure of counter-hegemony. In other words, the very counter-hegemony must be conceived existentially, as a field of war between the inauthentic globalization (global alienation) and the horizon of authentic peoples and societies in a multipolar world (the possibility of overcoming the alienation of civilizations).

Natella Speranskaja: When we talk about cognitive uprising, however, first of all, should our actions be aimed at the overthrow of the dictatorship of the West?

Alexander Dugin: The most important step is the beginning of the systematic preparation of a global revolutionary elite-oriented to multi-polarity 4PT. This elite must perform a critical function – to be a link between the local and global. At the local level we are talking about the masses and the clearest exponents of their local culture (religious leaders, philosophers, etc.). Often, these communities do not have a planetary perspective and simply defend their conservative identity before the onset of toxic globalization and Western imperialism.

Raising the masses and the traditionalist-conservatives to a realized uprising in the context of a complex union of a counter-hegemonistic block is extremely difficult. Simple conservatives and their supportive mass, for example, of the Islamic or Orthodox persuasion are unlikely to realize the necessity of alliances with the Hindus or the Chinese. This will be the play (and they are already actively playing it) of the globalists and their principle of “divide and conquer!” But the revolutionary elite, which is the elite, even within a particular traditionalist elite of society, should take the heartfelt deep and deliberate feelings of local identity and correlate it within a total horizon of multi-polarity, and the 4PT.

Without the formation of such an elite, the revolt against the post-modern world and the overthrow of the dictatorship of the West will not take place. Every time and everywhere the West has a problem, he will come to the aid of anti-Western forces, which, however, will be motivated by narrow bills to specific civilizational neighbors – most often, just as anti-Western as they are. So it will be and already is the instrumentalization of globalists of various conservative fundamentalist and nationalist movements. Islamic fundamentalists to help the West is one. European nationalists – is another. So a “unipolar moment” extends not only to exist in itself, but also playing the antagonistic forces against him. The overthrow of the dictatorship of the West will become possible only if this strategy will be sufficient enough to create or make appear a new counter-hegemonic elite. An initiative like Global Revolutionary Alliance – the unique example of really revolutionary and effective opposition to hegemony.

Natella Speranskaja: You have repeatedly said that Eurasianism is a strategic, philosophical, cultural and civilizational choice. Can we hope that the political course chosen by Vladimir Putin (establishment of a Eurasian Union) Is the first step towards a multipolar model?

Alexander Dugin: This is a difficult question. By himself, Putin and, especially, his environment, they act more out of inertia, without calling into question the legitimacy of the existing planetary status quo. Their goal – to win his and Russia’s rather appropriate place within the existing world order. But that is the problem: a truly acceptable place for Russia is not and cannot exist, because the “uni-polar moment”, as well as the globalists, stand for the de-sovereignization of Russia, eliminating it as an independent civilization and strategic pole.

This self-destruction seems to suit Dmitry Medvedev and his entourage (INSOR), for he was ready to reboot and go for almost all of it. Putin clearly understands the situation somewhat differently, and his criteria of “acceptability” is also different. He would most of all psychologically arrange a priority partnership with the West while maintaining the sovereignty of Russia. But this is something unacceptable under any circumstances to the unipolar globalists – practically or theoretically.

So Putin is torn between multipolarity – where he leads the orientation of sovereignty – and Atlanticism – where he leads the inertia and the tireless work of a huge network of influence that permeates all of the structure of Russian society. Here is the dilemma. Putin makes moves in both directions – he proclaims multi-polarity, the Eurasian Union, to protect the sovereignty of Russia, even spoke of the peculiarities of Russian civilization, strengthening vertical power, shows respect (if not more) to Orthodoxy, but on the other hand, surrounds himself with pro-American experts (eg, “Valdai Club”), rebuilds education and culture under the globalistic Western models, has a liberal economic policy and suffers comprador oligarchs, etc.

The field for maneuver Putin is constantly shrinking. The logic of the circumstances pushes him to a more unambiguous choice. Inside the country this uncertainty of course causes growing hostility, and his legitimacy falls.

Outside the country, the West only increases the pressure on Putin to persuade him towards globalism and the recognition of “unilateralism”, specifically – to cede his post to the Westerner Medvedev. So Putin, while continuing to fluctuate between multipolarity and Westernism, loses ground and support here and there.

The new period of his presidency will be very difficult. We will do everything we can to move it to a multipolar world, the Eurasian Union and 4PT. But we are not alone in Russian politics – against us for influence in Putin’s circles we have an army of liberals, agents of Western influence and the staff of the global oligarchy. For us, though, we have the People and the Truth. But behind them – a global oligarchy, money, lies, and, apparently, the father of lies. Nevertheless, vincit omnia veritas. That I have no doubt.

 

—————–

Dugin, Alexander. “Civilization as Political Concept.” Interview by Natella Speranskaja. Euro-Synergies, 13 June 2012. <http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2012/06/09/civilization-as-political-concept.html >. The text of this interview was also found at the official Fourth Political Theory website: <http://www.4pt.su/en/content/civilization-political-concept >. (See this article in PDF format here: Civilization as Political Concept).

Notes on further reading: On the topics discussed in the above interview, one of Aleksandr Dugin’s most  well-known books is Четвёртая политическая теория (Санкт-Петербург & Москва: Амфора, 2009), which is available in English translation as The Fourth Political Theory (London: Arktos, 2012), in Spanish translation as La Cuarta Teoría Política (Molins de Rei, Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013), in German translation as Die Vierte Politische Theorie (London: Arktos, 2013), in French translation as La Quatrième Théorie Politique (Nantes: Éditions Ars Magna, 2012), in Portuguese translation as A Quarta Teoria Política (Curitiba: Editora Austral, 2012), in Romanian translation as A Patra Teorie Politică (Chișinău: Editura Universitatea Populară, 2014), in Greek translation as Η τέταρτη πολιτική θεωρία (Αθήνα: Έσοπτρον, 2013), and in Serbian translation as Четврта политичка теорија (Београд: MIR Publishing, 2013).

Also of note in English is Dugin’s book Eurasian Mission: Program Materials (Moscow: International Eurasian Movement, 2005 [2nd edition: London: Arktos, 2015]). For those who know French, an important book by Alexander Dugin has been published as  Pour une théorie du monde multipolaire (Nantes: Éditions Ars Magna, 2013), the French translation of the Russian original: теория многополярного мира (Москва: Евразийское движение, 2012). There is also a Portuguese translation of this work known as Teoria do Mundo Multipolar (Iaeg, 2012). On the theory of the multi-polar world in German, see Dugin’s Konflikte der Zukunft: Die Rückkehr der Geopolitik (Kiel: Arndt-Verlag, 2014). Also worth noting in French is Dugin’s books Le prophète de l’eurasisme (Paris: Avatar Éditions, 2006) and L’appel de L’Eurasie (Paris: Avatar Éditions, 2013). A Spanish version of the latter has been published as ¿Qué es el eurasismo? Una conversación de Alain de Benoist con Alexander Dugin (Tarragona: Ediciones Fides, 2014). It should also be noted that a deeper clarification of the Fourth Political Theory has also been published by Dugin (in Russian), titled Четвертый Путь (Москва: Академический проект, 2014).

A good introduction to Dugin and his ideas in the Spanish language can be found in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 70, “Alexander Dugin y la Cuarta Teoría Política: La Nueva Derecha Rusa Eurasiática” (Mayo 2014), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2014/05/elementos-n-70-alexander-dugin-y-la.html >. (We have made Elementos Nº 70 available for download from our site here: Elementos Nº 70 – Dugin). For Spanish readers, the book ¿Qué es el eurasismo? (previously cited) also serves as a good introduction to Dugin’s thought, which augments the Elementos publication.

For more information, see the official Fourth Political Theory website: <http://www.4pt.su/ >.

 

Fourth Political Theory (Excerpts) – Dugin

Excerpts from The Fourth Political Theory by Alexander Dugin

 

To Be or Not To Be?

In today’s world, the impression is growing that politics has ended – at least the politics that we used to know. Liberalism stubbornly fought it out with its political enemies, which had offered alternative recipes – with conservatism, monarchism, traditionalism, fascism, socialism, and communism – and, finally, at the end of the 20^th century, it beat them all. It would have been logical to surmise that politics would become liberal, while all of liberalism’s opponents, having turned up on the periphery, would begin to rethink strategies and to form a new front: the periphery against the centre (Alain de Benoist). But at the beginning of the 21^st century everything followed a different script.

Liberalism, having always insisted upon the minimization of the political, decided after its victory to countermand politics altogether, possibly in order not to allow formation of political alternatives and to make its rule eternal, or from the completion of the political discussions of the day due to the lack of enemies, who are necessary, according to Carl Schmitt, for the proper constitution of a political position. In any case, liberalism drove the matter to the wrapping up of politics. At the same time it itself changed, having moved on from the level of ideas, political programs and declarations and entered into the very make-up of social reality, which became liberal, not in a political but in a natural, every-day manner. As a consequence of such a turn of history, all the political ideologies that feuded passionately with one another over the last century lost their currency. Conservatism, fascism and communism, together with their secondary variations, lost; but liberalism, having won, quickly mutated into a way of life: consumerism, individualism, and a post-modern style of fragmented and sub-political being. Politics became bio-politics, redeployed on an individual and sub-individual level. It turns out that not only the defeated political ideologies but politics as such left the scene – including the liberal variant. For that reason, the formulation of alternatives is proliferating. Those who do not agree with liberalism found themselves in a difficult situation: the victorious enemy dissolved and disappeared; they’re fighting with the air. How, then, is one to engage in politics, when politics is no longer?

There’s only one solution: to give up on the classical political theories – those that lost and those that won – and to strain the imagination, to grasp the reality of the new global world, to decipher correctly the challenge of post-modernity and to call into being something new, apart from the political fights of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Such an approach is an invitation to the development of the fourth political theory, opposite communism, fascism and liberalism.

In order to approach the development of this fourth political theory, it is necessary:

1. To rethink the political history of the last centuries from new positions, beyond the frameworks of the ideological cliches of the old ideologies;
2. To become aware of the deep structure of the global society appearing before our eyes;
3. To decipher correctly the paradigm of post-modernity;
4. To learn to oppose oneself not to political ideas, programs or strategies but to the objective situation of things, to the most social aspect of the apolitical, fractured (post-) society;
5. Finally, to build up an autonomous political model, which offers a way and a project in a world of blind alleys and the endlessly recycled “same old” (post-history; as in Baudrillard).

This book is dedicated precisely to such purposes, as an entrance into the development of a fourth political theory through the example of the three political theories and to the closely related theories of National-Bolshevism and Eurasianism. This is not a dogma, not a finished system, not a completed project. This is an invitation to political creativity, to the paraphrasing of intuitions and hunches; an analysis of new conditions; and an attempt at a rethinking of the past.

We think of the Fourth Political Theory not as a single work or author’s cycle, but as a tendency of a wide spectrum of ideas, researches, analyses, prognoses and projects. Everyone who thinks in this tendency can bring something of his own. One way or another, more and more intellectuals, philosophers, historians, scholars and thinkers respond to this appeal.

It is significant that the book by the successful French intellectual Alain de Benoist, Against Liberalism, coming out in Russian under the publisher Amfora, has the subtitle: To The Fourth Political Theory. Most likely, there is much to say on this theme to both the old Left and the old Right – yes, probably even to liberals, who are conceptualizing the qualitative change of their political platform, from which politics is vanishing.

For our country the Fourth Political Theory has, in addition to everything else, a large practical significance. The majority of Russians suffer integration into the global community dramatically, like a deprivation of their identity. The liberal ideology in the 1990s was almost entirely rejected by the populace. But together with that, it is intuitively understandable that the appeal to the illiberal political ideologies of the 20^th century, to communism and fascism, in our society is unlikely, since those very ideologies already proved themselves historically as failures in opposition to liberalism, to say nothing of the moral costs of totalitarianism.

Therefore, in order to fill the void, Russia needs a new political idea. Liberalism does not fit, but communism and fascism are unacceptable. Consequently, we need a fourth political theory. And if for someone this a question of free choice, the realization of political will, which can always be directed both to an assertion and its negation, then for Russia this is a question of life and death, a Hamlet-like question.

If Russia selects “to be”, then this automatically signifies the creation of a fourth political theory. In the opposite case there remains “not to be” and quietly to leave the historical arena, to dissolve into the global world, neither brought into being nor directed by us.

 

Introduction to the Fourth Political Theory

End of the 20^th Century – The End of the Epoch of Modernity.

The 20^th century ended, but we’re only now beginning to realize that. The 20^th century was the century of ideology. If in the previous century religions, dynasties, aristocracies and nation-states played a big role in the life of peoples and societies, then in the 20^th century politics redeployed into a strictly ideological region, reshaping the map of the world, ethnic groups and civilizations in a new mould. In part, political ideologies embodied in themselves previous, deeper civilizational tendencies; in part they were absolutely innovative.

All the political ideologies, having reached the peak of their dissemination and influence in the 20^th century, were the outcome of “the new time” [i.e. the Modern Era]; and embodied, although differently and by different signs, the soul of Modernity. Today we are freeing ourselves from this epoch in leaps and bounds. Thus, everyone speaks more and more often of “the crisis of ideology”, even of “the end of ideology”[1]. (Thus, in the constitution of the Russian Federation the existence of a government ideology is directly denied.) It is high time to occupy ourselves with this question more attentively.

The Three Main Political Theories and Their Fate in the 20^th Century

The three foundational ideologies of the 20^th century were:

1. Liberalism (right and left)
2. Communism (including together with Marxism both socialism and social-democracy)
3. Fascism (including National-Socialism and other variants of the “Third Way”, the National Syndicalism of Franco, Justicialism of Peron, the regime of Salazar, etc.)

They fought amongst themselves to the death, forming along the way the whole dramatic, bloody political history of the 20^th century. It is logical to assign to these ideologies (political theories) ordinal numbers according both to their meanings and to the order of their appearances, as was done above.

The first political theory is liberalism. It appeared first (back in the 18^th century) and turned out to be the most stable and successful, having beaten its opponents in the historical battle at last. By means of this victory it proved along the way its claim to the full inheritance of the Enlightenment. Today it is clear: precisely liberalism more exactly than any another political theory conforms to the epoch of modernity. Although, earlier, this was contested (for that matter, dramatically, actively, and sometimes convincingly) – by communism.

It is fair to call communism (together with socialism in all its variations) the second political theory. It appeared after liberalism, as a critical reaction to the establishment of the bourgeois-capitalist system, the ideological expression of which was liberalism.

And, finally, fascism is the third political theory. Laying claim to its interpretation of the soul of modernity (many researchers, in particular Hannah Arendt, rightly see totalitarianism as one of the political forms of modernity)[2] fascism turned together also to the ideas and symbols of traditional society. In some instances this resulted in eclecticism; in others, in the striving of conservatives to head a revolution rather than resisting it and bringing society into the opposite direction (Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, D. Merezhkovsky, etc.).

Fascism appeared after the other major political theories and disappeared before them. The alliance of the first political theory and the second political theory and the suicidal geopolitical calculations of Hitler defeated it at take-off. The third political theory died a violent death, not having seen old age and natural decomposition (in contrast to the USSR). That’s why this bloody, vampirical spectre, shaded with the aura of “world evil”, is so magnetically appealing for the decadent tastes of post-modernity and why it is still so scary to humanity.

Fascism, having disappeared, freed up space for a battle of the first political theory with the second. This took place in the form of the “Cold War” and threw up the strategic geometry of the “bi-polar world”, which lasted almost half a century. In 1991 the first political theory (liberalism) defeated the second (socialism). That was the decline of world communism.

And so, at the end of the 20^th century, of the three political theories capable of mobilizing many millions of masses in all areas of the planet, only one remained – liberalism. But when it was left alone, everyone in unison started speaking of “the end of ideology.” Why?

The End of Liberalism and Post-Liberalism

It happened that the victory of liberalism (the first political theory) coincided with its end. But this paradox is only apparent. Liberalism initially showed itself forth as an ideology; not as dogmatic as Marxism, but no less philosophical, well built and precise. It was ideologically opposed to Marxism and fascism, waging with them not only a technological war for survival, but also defending its right to a monopolistic formation of the way of the future. While other concurrent ideologies were alive, liberalism remained and grew stronger particularly as an ideology; that is, a totality of ideas, opinions, and projects peculiar to a historical subject. Each of the three political theories had its own subject.

The subject of communism was the class; the subject of fascism was the State (in the Italian fascism of Mussolini) or the race (in Hitler’s National-Socialism). In liberalism the subject was the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity, from all kinds of “attachments” (l’appartenance).

While the ideological fight had formal antagonists, entire narodi[3] and societies (at least theoretically) could select which subject to address themselves to; to the class-based, the racial (Statist), or the individual. The victory of liberalism answered that question: the normative subject at the limits of all humanity became the individual.

And soon appears the phenomenon of globalization, the model of a post-industrial society, the beginning of the epoch of post-modernity. From now on the individual subject is no more the result of a choice but some kind of compulsory given. A man is freed from “attachments”, the ideology of “human rights” becomes standard (at least in theory) and, in fact, compulsory.

Mankind, composed of individuals, is naturally drawn to universalism, becomes global and integrated. Thus is born the project of “world government” and “world rule” (globalism).

The new level of technological development allows people to reach independence from the class structures of industrial societies (post-industrialism).

The values of rationalism, science and positivism are recognized as “disguised forms of totalitarian repressive strategies” (big narratives) and are exposed to criticism – with a parallel glorification of complete freedom and independence of individual from any restraining factors, for that matter from reason, morality, identities (social, ethnic, even gender), discipline, and so on (post-modernism).

At this stage liberalism stops being the first political theory, but becomes the only political practice. “The end of history” comes; politics is replaced by economics (by the global market); government and nations are drawn into the melting pot of world globalization.

Having won, liberalism disappears, transforming into something entirely different: post-liberalism. It no longer has a political dimension; it is not a matter of free choice but becomes a peculiar kind of “fate” (from which comes the thesis of post-industrial society: “economics is fate”).

And so the start of the 21^st century coincides with the moment of the end of ideology, of all three ideologies. They all had various endings: the third political theory was destroyed in the period of its “youth”, the second died of decrepitude, the first was reborn as something entirely different, as post-liberalism, as a “global market society”. But in any case in that state in which the three political theories existed during the 20^th century they are no longer available, suitable or relevant. They explain nothing and do not help us understand what’s happening or to respond to the global challenge. From this statement there follows the necessity of moving to a Fourth Political Theory.

The Fourth Political Theory as Opposition to the Status-Quo

The Fourth Political Theory will not happen by itself. It might appear, but it might not. The premise of its appearing is disagreement: disagreement with post-liberalism as a universal practice, with globalization, with post-modernity, with “the end of history”, with the status quo, with the inertial development of the cardinal civilizational processes at the start of the 21^st century.

The status quo and inertia presuppose no political theories at all. The global world must operate with only economic laws and the universal morality of “the rights of man”. All political decisions are replaced by technological ones. Technique and technology displace all else (the French philosopher Alain de Benoist calls this “la gouvernance”, “governance”). Instead of politicians, who make historical decisions, come managers and technicians, optimizing the logistics of administrative leadership. Masses of people are compared to the mass of individual objects. Thus, the post-liberal reality (more precisely, virtuality, more and more displacing reality from itself) leads straight to the abolition of politics.

It could be objected that liberals “lie” when they speak of “the end of ideology”, that “in fact” they remain believers in their ideology and merely refuse the right of all others to exist. This is not entirely so. When liberalism from an ideological preference becomes the only content of the available social and technological reality, it is no longer “ideology”; it is a fact of life, an “objective” order of things, which to call into question is not only difficult but absurd. In the epoch of post-modernity, liberalism is transposed from the sphere of the subject to the sphere of the object. This, seen in perspective, will amount to the complete replacement of reality with virtuality.

The Fourth Political Theory is conceived of as an alternative to Post-Liberalism; not like an ideological attitude in relation to another ideological attitude, but like an idea set against material, like the possible, coming into conflict with the actual, like a not yet existing or being undertaken assault against the already existing.

At the same time, The Fourth Political Theory cannot be a continuation of the Second or Third one. The end of fascism, as well as the end of communism, was not simply an accidental misunderstanding, but the expression of the clear logic of history. They challenged the spirit of Modernity (fascism almost openly, communism in a veiled manner—see the studies of the Soviet period as a particular “eschatological” version of the traditional society in Agursky[4], or Kara-Murza[5]) and lost.

That means that the war with the post-modern metamorphosis of liberalism in the form of post-modernism and globalism must be qualitatively different, must be based on different principles and must offer new strategies.

Moreover, the starting point of this ideology – the possible one, but not guaranteed, not fated, not predetermined; issuing from the free will of man, from his soul, but not from impersonal historical processes – is precisely a rejection of the very essence of post-modernity.

However, this essence (as with the discovery of the earlier, unknown, hidden motives of Modernity itself, which so fully realized its content that it drained its inner possibilities and went over into a routine of the ironic recycling of prior stages) is something entirely new, previously unknown, and only intuitively and in part guessed at during the earlier stages of ideological history and the ideological struggle.

The Fourth Political Theory is a “Crusade” against:

1. Post-modernity
2. The post-industrial society
3. Liberal thought realized in practice
4. Globalism and its logistical and technological bases.

If the Third Political Theory criticized capitalism from the right, and the Second from the left, then in the new stage this old political topography no longer exists: in relation to post-liberalism it is impossible to determine where the left is and where the right. There are only two positions: agreement (centre) and disagreement (periphery). Both one and the other are global.

The Fourth Political Theory is a concentration in a common project and common impulse of everything that turned out to have been thrown away, toppled and degraded on the way to the erection of the “spectacle-society” (Post-Modernity). “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Mark 12:10). The philosopher Alexander Sekatsky rightly points out the importance of “marginalia” for the formation of a new philosophical zone, offering as a metaphor the expression “the metaphysics of garbage”.

The Battle for Post-Modernity

The Fourth Political Theory is concerned with the new rebirth of the old enemy. It disputes liberalism as did the Second and Third Political Theories of old, but it disputes it in a new condition. The principal novelty of this condition consists in the fact that, of the three great political ideologies, only liberalism won the right to the legacy of the soul of modernity and received the right to form “the end of history” on the basis of its premises.

The end of history could theoretically have been a different one: “the planetary Reich” (in the case of the victory of the Nazis), “world communism” (if the communists had been right). But “the end of history” turned out to be namely liberal (a fact that the philosopher Kojeve was one of the first to assess correctly[6], though his idea was later used by Fukuyama[7]). But since it turned out to be liberal, then any appeals to modernity and its variants, which in one or another degree the representatives of the Second (mostly) and Third political theories urged, lose their relevance. They lost the battle for modernity (the liberals won that). Therefore the theme of modernity (as, by the way, of modernization), is no longer the topic of the day. Now begins the battle for post-modernity.

And it is here that new perspectives open up for the Fourth Political Theory. That post-modernity, which today is realized in practice (post-liberal post-modernity), itself annuls the strict logic of modernity – after the goal has been reached, the steps toward it lose their meaning. The pressure of the ideological corpus becomes less harsh. The dictatorship of ideas is replaced by the dictatorship of things, “login-passwords”, bar codes. New holes are appearing in the fabric of post-modern reality.

As in their time the Third political theory and the Second political theory (understood as eschatological version of traditionalism) tried “to settle modernity” in its battle with liberalism (the first political theory), today there is a chance to complete something analogical with post-modernity, using precisely these “new holes”.

Against the straightforward ideological alternatives, liberalism worked out perfectly functioning means on which its victory was based. But precisely that carries in itself the greatest risk for liberalism. It is necessary only to find these new points of danger for the new global system, to decipher the access codes, to break the system. At least, to try. The events of 9/11 in New York demonstrate that this is possible even technologically. The network society can give something even to its convinced opponents. In any case it is necessary, first of all, to understand Post-modernity and the new situation not less deeply than Marx understood the structure of industrial capitalism.

In post-modernity, in the abolition of the Enlightenment program and the attack of the society of simulacra, the Fourth Political Theory must draw on its “personal enthusiasm”, understanding this as a stimulus to battle, but not as a fatalistic given. From that one can make a few practical inferences relating to the structure of the Fourth Political Theory.

Reconsideration of the Past and of Those Who Lost

The second and third political theories positioned themselves as contenders for the expression of the soul of modernity. And these contentions fell to pieces. Everything connected with these unwarranted intentions in the previous ideological theories is least interesting to the founders of the fourth political theory. But the very fact that they lost is worth attributing sooner to their virtues than to their vices. Since they lost, they proved by that very loss that they do not belong to the soul of modernity, which, in its turn, transformed into a post-liberal matrix. And precisely in that are their good qualities. Furthermore, this signifies that the representatives of the Second and Third political theories – consciously or unconsciously – stood on the side of traditionalism, although they did not make from this the necessary conclusions or were not admitting it at all.

It is necessary to rethink the Second and Third political theories, setting aside what should be thrown away, and what has some worth in itself. As finished ideologies, insisting on themselves literally, they are useless, both theoretically and practically – but some marginal elements, as a rule unrealized and remaining on the periphery or in the shade (reminding ourselves again of the “metaphysics of garbage”), can turn up unexpectedly as incredibly valuable and saturated with meaning and intuitions.

But in any case the Second and Third political theories must be rethought in a new key, from new positions, and only after the refusal to believe those ideological constructs on which were held their “orthodoxy”. Their orthodoxy – that is the most uninteresting and useless in them. A more productive approach would be a combined reading: “Marx through the positive views from the right” or “Evola through the positive views from the Left”. But such an engaging “National-Bolshevik” beginning (in the spirit of N. Ustryalov or E. Niekisch) is not enough by itself, since the mechanical joining of the Second political theory and Third political theory won’t get us anywhere by itself. Only retrospectively will we be able to delineate their common area, which was harshly opposed to liberalism. This methodological event is healthy as a warm-up before the full working out of the Fourth Political Theory.

Truly, the important and decisive reading of the Second and Third political theories is possible only on the basis of the already existing Fourth Political Theory, where the most important – although radically rejected as a value! – object is Post-modernity and its conditions: a global world, governance, the market society, the universalism of the rights of man, “the real domination of capital”, and so on.

A Return to Tradition and Theology

Tradition (religion, hierarchy, the family) and its values were overthrown with the dawn of modernity. Strictly speaking, all three political theories were thought of as the artificial ideological constructs of people, reflecting (in different ways) on “the death of God” (Nietzsche), “the demystification of the world” (Weber), and “the end of the sacred”. The heart of the modernity consisted in this: in the place of God came man; in the place of religion: philosophy and science; in the place of Revelation: rational, volitional, and technological constructs.

But if in post-modernity modernity is exhausted, then together with that ends the period of “theomachy”. To post-modern people, religion is not inimical but indifferent. Moreover, specific aspects of religion, as a rule, relating to the regions of hell (the demonic textures of the post-modern philosophers) are rather attractive. In any case, the epoch of the persecution of tradition has ended, although following the very logic of post-liberalism this will most likely result in the making of a new world pseudo-religion, founded on disconnected fragments of syncretic cults, unrestrained chaotic ecumenism and “tolerance”. And although such a turn of events is in some ways more frightening than straightforward and simple atheism and dogmatic materialism, the weakening of persecutions of faith has a chance if the carriers of the Fourth Political Theory will be consistent and uncompromising in defence of the ideals and values of tradition.

That which was put beyond the laws of the modern epoch one can bravely assert today in a political program. And this will no longer be seen as so ridiculous and absurd as it once was. Although that is perhaps because generally everyone in post-modernity looks ridiculous and absurd, including the most “glamorous” sides: it is no accident that the heroes of post-modernity are “freaks”, “monsters”, “transvestites”; this is a law of style. Against the background of world clowns, nothing and no one will look “too archaic”, even people of tradition, ignoring the imperatives of modern life. The justice of this arrangement shows not only the serious successes of Islamic Fundamentalism but also the revival of the influence of extremely archaic Protestant sects (Dispensationalists, Mormons, and so on) on the politics of the USA (Bush started the war in Iraq because, in his words, “God told me ‘Strike Iraq!’” — entirely in line with the soul of his Protestant teacher-Methodists).

Thus the Fourth Political Theory can calmly appeal to what preceded modernity and draw therefrom its inspiration. The acknowledgement of “the death of God” stops being “a categorical imperative” for those who want to remain relevant. The people of post-modernity are already so reconciled to these events that they can no longer understand: “Who, who do you say has died?” But for the developers of the Fourth Political Theory it is possible in the very same way to forget about these “events”: “We believe in God, but ignore those who teach of his death as we ignore the ramblings of madmen.”

Thus returns theology. And it becomes the most important element of the Fourth Political Theory. But when it returns, post-modernity (globalization, post-liberalism, the post-industrial society) is easily recognized as “the kingdom of the anti-Christ” (or its analogy in other religions – “Dadjal” for the Muslims, “Erev Rav” for the Jews, the “Kali-Yuga” for Hindus, and so on). And now this is mobilizing a mass of metaphors; this – the religious fact, the fact of the Apocalypse.

Myth and Archaics in the Fourth Political Theory

If for the Fourth Political Theory the atheism of the modern age stops being something obligatory, then also the theology of the monotheistic religions, which displaced in its own time other sacred cults, will also not be the truth in the final instance (more exactly: maybe, but maybe not). Theoretically, nothing limits the depths of the attention to ancient archaic values, which, correctly discerned and considered, can occupy a definite place in the new ideological construct. Free from the necessity of having to develop theology under the rationalism of modernity, the carriers of the Fourth Political Theory can neglect entirely those theological and dogmatic elements, which in monotheistic societies (especially in their late stages) were touched by rationalism, which, by the way, led to the ruin of Christian culture in Europe first in deism, and later in atheism and materialism, in the course of a phased development of the programs of the modern age.

Not only the highest and wisest symbols of faith can be taken up anew as a shield, but also those irrational moments of cults, rituals and legends, which confused divines in previous eras. If we dispose of progress as an idea characteristic of the modern epoch (which, as we see, has ended), then everything more ancient acquires for us a value and persuasiveness by the mere fact of being more ancient. More ancient means better. And the more ancient, the better.

The most ancient creation is heaven. The carriers of the Fourth Political Theory must strive to its new discovery in the future.

Heidegger and “the Event”

At last we can mark the deepest – ontological! – foundation of the Fourth Political Theory. Here it is recommended to turn not to theology and mythology, but to the depths of the philosophical experience of the thinker who made a unique attempt to build a fundamental ontology – the most summarizing, paradoxical, profound and piercing teaching about being. I am speaking of Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger’s conception, in short, is this. At the dawn of philosophical thinking, people (more exactly: Europeans; even more exactly: Greeks) put the question of being at the centre of their attention. But thematizing it, they risk being confused by the nuances of the difficult relationship between being and thinking, between pure being (Seyn) and its expression in things (Seiende), between human being (Dasein) and being in itself (Sein). This error occurs already in the teaching of Heraclitus about physis and logos; later it is seen clearly with Parmenides, and at last, with Plato, who put ideas between man and things, and who determined truth as correspondence (the referential theory of knowledge), it reaches its culmination. From here is born alienation, which gradually leads to the emergence of “calculating reason”, and later to the development of technology. Little by little man loses pure being from view and turns to the path of nihilism. The essence of technology (based on the technological relation to the world) expresses this constantly accumulating nihilism. In the modern age this tendency reaches its culmination; technological development (Gestell) finally displaces being and elevates “nothing” to the throne. Heidegger despised liberalism ferociously, reckoning it the expression of “the calculating beginning”, which lay at the base of “Western nihilism”.

Post-modernity, which Heidegger did not live to see, is in every sense the final oblivion of being, “midnight”, where nothing (nihilism) begins to ooze from every fissure. But his philosophy was not despairingly pessimistic. He supposed that nothingness itself is the opposite side of the purest being, which – in such a paradoxical manner! – reminds humanity of itself. And if the logic of the development of being is correctly deciphered, then thinking humanity can save itself, and with lightening speed, at that, in the very moment when the risk will be maximal. “There, where the risk is greatest, there lies salvation” quotes Heidegger from Hölderlin[8].

Heidegger calls this sudden return of being by a special term “Ereignis”, “the Event”. It occurs exactly in the middle of world midnight, in the darkest point of history. Heidegger himself constantly vacillated regarding the question of whether that point had been reached or “not quite yet”. The eternal “not quite yet”.

For the Fourth Political Theory, the philosophy of Heidegger can turn up as the most important axis on which everything else will be strung, from the rethinking of the Second and Third Political Theories to the return of theology and mythology.

In this way, at the centre of the Fourth Political Theory, as its magnetic centre, is placed the vector of approach to “Ereignis” (“The Event”) in which is embodied the triumphal return of being precisely in that moment when mankind finally and irreversibly will forget about it; yes, even as the last traces of it disappear.

The Fourth Political Theory and Russia

Today, many guess intuitively that there is no room for Russia in the “brave new world” of world globalism, post-modernity and post-liberalism. Never mind that world government and world administration are constantly countermanding all national governments. The problem is that all of Russian history is a dialectical argument with the West and Western culture, a battle for the assertion (sometimes grasped only intuitively) of its own Russian truth, its messianic idea, its version of “the end of history”, however that would express itself – through Muscovite Orthodoxy, the secular empire of Peter, or the world communist revolution. The best Russian minds saw clearly that the West is moving to an abyss, and today, looking at where neoliberal economics and the culture of post-modernity have brought the world, we can be entirely sure that that intuition, pushing a generation of Russian people into a search for alternatives, was absolutely well-founded.

Today’s world economic crisis – this is only the beginning. The worst is yet to come. The inertia of post-liberal processes is such that it is impossible to change course; “emancipated technology” (Spengler) will seek for the salvation of the West all the more effective but purely technical, technological means. This is a new stage of the dawn of Gestell, the spreading of the nihilistic spots of the world market over the entire planet. Going from crisis to crisis, from bubble to bubble (thousands of Americans demonstrate during the crisis with signs that read frankly: “give us another bubble!”) the globalized economy and the structure of post-industrial society make the night of mankind more and more black; so black that we gradually forget that it’s night. “What is light?” people ask themselves, never having seen it.

It is clear that Russia has to go another way. Its own way. But just here there is a question. To diverge from the logic of post-modernity in one “separately taken country” cannot easily succeed. The Soviet model collapsed. After that the ideological situation changed irreversibly, as did the strategic balance of power. In order for Russia to be able to save herself and others, it is not enough to think up some technical means or dishonest gimmicks. World history has its own logic. And “the end of ideology” is not an accidental falling-out-of-step, but the beginning of a new stage; by all signs, of the last stage.

In such a situation, the future of Russia depends directly on our efforts at working out the Fourth Political Theory. While locally looking over variants which a globalized regime offers us with but a superficial correction of the status quo, we will not go far; we will only lose time. The challenge of post-modernity is extraordinarily serious: it is rooted in the logic of the oblivion of being, in the retreat of man from his being-related (ontological) and soul-related (theological) sources. To respond to it with hat-throwing initiatives and PR substitutes is impossible. Consequently, in order to decide urgent problems – the global economic crisis, resistance to the unipolar world, the preserving and conserving of sovereignty, and so on – we must turn our attention to the philosophical bases of history, must make a metaphysical effort.

It is difficult to say how the process of working out this theory will unfold. Only one thing is obvious: this cannot be an individual matter or the undertaking of a limited circle of people. It must be a universal, collective effort. We can be helped greatly in this question by representatives of other cultures and peoples (both European and Asian), who also sharply perceive the eschatological tension of the present moment and who also seek desperately an escape from the global dead-end.

But first we can affirm that the Fourth Political Theory, founded on the rejection of the status-quo in its practical and theoretical dimensions, in its Russian version will be oriented to the “Russian Ereignis”, to that “Event”, sole and unrepeatable, which many generations of Russian people lived for and waited for from the beginnings of our people to the arrival of the last days.
Notes

[1] Daniel Bell. The End of Ideology. Harvard University Press, 1960.

[2] Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Moscow; CenterCom, 1996.

[3] [Translator’s note: this Russian term is usually translated as “people” or “nation”. On the recommendation of the author, I have decided to transliterate it, since the full significance of this term, as the author develops it in this and other works, is not well-captured by the usual translations. Narod is the singular, narodi the plural, narodni(e) the adjectival form.]

[4] Mikhail Agursky. The Ideology of National Bolshevism. Moscow; Algorithm, 2003.

[5] Sergey Kara-Murza. Soviet Civilization: From the Beginning to Our Times. Moscow; Algorithm, 2008.

[6] Alexandre Kojeve. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Read from 1933 to 1939 in the Ecole De Hautes Etudes. Saint Petersburg; Science, 2003.

[7] Francis Fukuyama. The End of History and the Last Man. Moscow; AST, 2004.

[8] Martin Heidegger. Country Path Conversations: Selected Essays of the Late Period. Moscow; Vysshaya Shkola (Higher School), 1991.

 

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From: Dugin, Alexander. The Fourth Political Theory (London: Arktos, 2012), pp. 11-31. Text retrieved from: <http://www.4pt.su/en/content/fourth-political-theory >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Excerpts from The Fourth Political Theory by Alexander Dugin).

Note: For a brief discussion of Dugin’s theories and also a listing of major translated works by him, see Natella Speranskaya’s interview with Dugin: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/civilization-as-political-concept-dugin/ >.

 

The Fourth Estate – Dugin

The Fourth Estate: The History and Meaning of the Middle Class

By Alexander Dugin

Translated by Michael Millerman

 

Science and Ideology: A Problem of Method

None of the words we use in the course of social and political discussions and analyses is ideologically neutral. Outside of ideology entirely, such words lose their meaning. And it is not possible to determine one’s attitude toward them unambiguously, since the content of any expression is shaped by context and semantic structures, a kind of operational system. When we live in a society with an obvious ideology, openly maintained as the dominant one, things are clear enough.

The significance of words flows directly from the ideological matrix, which is instilled through upbringing, education, and instruction and is supported by the active ideological apparatus of the state. The state forms a language, defines the meaning of discourse, and sets — most often through repressive measures, broadly understood — the limits and moral tint of the basic collection of political and sociological concepts and terms.

If we lived in a society in which communist ideology dominates, concepts such as “bourgeoisie,” “fascism,” “capitalism,” “speculation,” etc. acquire not only strictly negative connotations but specific meanings, with which capitalists, fascists, and speculators would categorically disagree. The disagreement concerns not only signs, but the very significance of words. The way a communist sees a fascist, or a capitalist seems to the fascist, might seem to a different party to be little more than a caricature or a distortion. And this, of course, works the other way around: fascism seems natural to the fascist, and communism, utterly evil.

For a capitalist, communism and fascism are equally evil. The capitalist most often does not think of himself as bourgeois. Speculation is for him a form of the realization of natural economic rights, and the system he defends he usually regards as a “free” society, an “open” society. Neither the Marxist analysis of the appropriation of surplus value, nor the fascist critique of the web of interest obligations and payments, and the international financial oligarchy, which usurps power over peoples and nations, ever convince him of anything.

Ideologies are similar to religions; hence Carl Schmitt speaks of “political theology.” Each believes sacredly in his own values and ideals, and criticism of or apology for alternative values most often has no effect (except for a few cases of confessional change, which occurs in the history of religion and in the history of political teachings).

Consequently, before speaking seriously about one or another term, it is necessary to determine in which ideological context we will be considering it. Someone will surely object: science must take a neutral position. That is impossible. In this case, science would pretend to the status of a meta-ideology, i.e. a kind of “true ideology,” of which all other ideologies are relative forms. But nobody will agree with this, even it should come into someone’s head to flaunt such ambitions.

In the religious sphere, syncretic teachings periodically arise, claiming that they are the expression of “absolute truth” and that all other historical religions are its relative manifestations. But as a rule, such tendencies do not enjoy great popularity, remaining the property of rather small circles and denied by major confessions as “heresies.” Science, likewise, cannot claim the status of a meta-ideology and remain relevant. But it differs from ordinary ideology by three features:

1. It reflects distinctly upon the structures of the ideological paradigm it considers. (Ordinary people do not even suspect that what seems to them their “personal opinion” is a secondary or even tertiary product of ideological processing, the mechanisms of which are entirely hidden from them.)
2. In the course of analysis of ideological discourse, it uses the techniques of classical logic (Aristotle’s laws and Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason).
3. It is able to build a comparative matrix of the correspondences between diverse ideologies, juxtaposing structures in their foundations and establishing symmetries and oppositions between separate discourses and their elements.

Thus, in considering any concept or term, it is possible to proceed in two ways: either to interpret it from the position of one or another ideology, not digging into its foundations and not comparing it with other interpretations (this is the level of propaganda and low-quality applied analysis/journalism), or to attend to the scientific method, which does not free us from adherence to an ideology, but forces us to reason, observing the three above-mentioned rules of the scientific approach (paradigm, logic, comparison).

We propose to consider the concept of the “middle class” in precisely this scientific spirit.

From Caste to Class

The concept of the “middle class” is crucial for the liberal-capitalist ideology. Although it appeared later than the Marxist theory of class struggle and the famous communist doctrine of the two antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the very meaning of the term “middle class” has a much longer history and has its roots in the period of bourgeois revolutions and the rise of the Third Estate, which claimed henceforth a monopoly in political and economic spheres.

Before considering the “middle class,” let’s turn to the concept of “class” as such. Class is a concept of the social organization of modernity. Ancient orders and social-political systems were built on the caste principle. “Caste” should be understood as the doctrine that the inner nature of different people differs qualitatively: there are divine souls and earthly (feral, demonic) souls. The caste reflects precisely this nature of the soul, which man is not able to change during his life. The caste is fatal. The normal society, according to this conception, must be built so that those of a divine nature (the elite) are above, and those of an earthly (feral, demonic) nature remain below (the masses). That is how the Indian Varna system is arranged, as were ancient Jewish, Babylonian, Egyptian, and other societies.

This caste theory was replaced by a more flexible estate theory. The estate also proposes a difference in people’s natures (the existence of higher and lower), but here the fact of birth in one or another estate is not considered a final and natural factor in the determination of belonging to a certain social status. Estate can be changed if the representative of a lower estate accomplishes a great feat, demonstrates unique spiritual qualities, becomes a member of the priesthood, etc.

Here, alongside the caste principle, is the principle of meritocracy, that is, rewards for services. The meritocratic principle extends also to the descendants of the one who accomplished the feat (ennobling). Estate society was predominant in Christian civilization right to the end of the Middle Ages. In estate society, the highest estates are the priesthood (clergy) and the military (aristocracy), and the lowest is the Third Estate of peasants and craftsmen. Precisely the same way, in a caste society, priests and warriors (Brahma and Kshatriya) were highest, and lowest were peasants, artisans, and traders (Vaishya).

Modernity became the era of the overthrow of estate society. Europe’s bourgeois revolutions demanded a replacement of the estate privileges of the higher estates (the clergy and the military aristocracy, the nobility) in favor of the Third Estate. But the bearers of this ideology were not the peasants, who were connected with traditional society by the specific character of seasonal labour, religious identity, etc., but the more mobile townspeople and burghers. “Bourgeois” is itself formed from the German word “Burg” meaning “town.” Hence, modernity gave first priority to precisely the townsfolk-citizen-bourgeois as a normative unit.

The bourgeois revolutions abolished the power of the Church (clergy) and aristocracy (nobility, dynasties) and advanced the model of building society on the basis of the domination of the Third Estate, represented by the townsfolk-citizen-bourgeois. This is, essentially, capitalism. Capitalism, in its victory, replaces estate distinctions, but preservesmaterial ones. Thus, the notion of class arises: class signifies an indicator of the measure of inequality. The bourgeoisie abolish estate inequality, but preserve material inequality. Consequently, precisely modernity’s bourgeois capitalistic society is a class society in the full sense of the word. Previously, in the Middle Ages, belonging to an estate was one’s primary social attribute. In modernity, the entire social stratification was reduced to the attribute of material riches. Class is thus a phenomenon of modernity.

Class War

The class character of bourgeois society, however, was perceived most distinctly not by the ideology of the bourgeoisie, but by Marx. He elaborated his revolutionary teaching on the basis of the concept of class. At its foundation was the idea that class society and the material inequality characteristic of it, elevated to the highest criterion, exposes the essence of the nature of society, man, and history. In Marx’s class picture, there are always rich and poor, and the rich always get richer, and the poor, poorer. Consequently, there are two classes, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, and their struggle is the motor and meaning of history.

All of Marxism is built on this idea: when we speak of classes, we speak of two antagonistic classes, the difference between which is not relative but absolute, since each embodies in itself two irreconcilable worlds: the world of Exploitation and the world of (honest) Labor. There are two classes: the class of Labor (the proletariat) and the class of Exploitation (the bourgeoisie). In the capitalist system, the class of Exploitation dominates. The class of Labor must become conscious of itself, arise, and overthrow the class of Exploiters. They must create, at first, the Government of Labor — socialism. Then, after the last remnants of bourgeois society have been destroyed, communist society will appear, now fully classless. According to Marx, a classlessness is possible only after the victory of the proletariat and the radical destruction of the bourgeoisie.

For Marx, a “middle class” simply cannot exist. This concept has no independent semantics in Marxist ideology, since everything that is between the bourgeoisie and proletariat (for instance, the petty bourgeoisie or prosperous peasantry) relates essentially either to the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. For Marxists, the “middle class” is a fiction. It doesn’t exist, and the concept itself is nothing but an instrument of the ideological propaganda of capitalists, trying to fool the proletariat, promising a future integration into the class of the bourgeoisie (which, according to Marx, cannot happen, since the appropriation of surplus value prevents the proletariat’s enrichment).

We can draw the following conclusion: the term “middle class” is a fiction for Marxists, an artificial figure of bourgeois ideology, called upon to conceal the real picture of society and the processes occurring in it. At the same time, Marxists admit the fact of a transition from estate society to class society and, consequently, agree with the bourgeoisie that a society of material inequalities (class society) is “more progressive” than a society of estate inequality; they disagree with the bourgeoisie in that, for communists, this is not the “end of history,” but only the beginning of a full-fledged revolutionary struggle. Liberals, on the other hand, insist that material inequality is entirely moral and justified and maintain that the communists’ striving for material equality is, by contrast, amoral and pathological. For liberals, “the end of history” begins when everyone becomes “middle class.” For communists, it begins when the proletariat finally destroy the bourgeoisie and build a communist society of total equality.

The Middle Class within Liberalism

The concept of a middle class is implicitly present in liberal ideology from the very beginning. That said, it only receives full implementation in the course of the establishment of sociology, which endeavors to combine many avant-garde theses of Marxism (in particular, the centrality of the concept of class) and bourgeois conditions. Sociology is thus a hybrid form: ideologically, it is between communism and liberalism; methodologically, it emphasizes a scientific, analytic approach. We can distinguish two poles in sociology, the social (the school of Durkheim, the theories of Sorokin, etc.) and the liberal (Weber, the Chicago and “Austrian” Schools in the United States, etc.)

In any case, the specific character of the liberal understanding of class is the conviction that, in the standard bourgeois society, there is only one class, and all differences between the depths and the heights are relative and conditional. If, for Marx, there are always two classes, and they exist in implacable enmity, for liberals (Adam Smith, for instance) there is always ultimately one class — the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie nominally embraces the entire capitalist society. The poorest layers of this society are, as it were, incompletely bourgeois. The richest, on the other hand, area super-bourgeois. But the social nature of all people is qualitatively identical: all are given equal starting opportunities, setting out from which the bourgeois can either reach a certain level of success, or fail to reach it and tumble down into the incompletely bourgeois.

Hence, Adam Smith takes as a standard situation the following classical liberal narrative:

The baker hires a worker, who has recently come to the city for work. After working as an assistant to the owner, the hired worker learns to bake bread and observes the organization of processes of interaction with suppliers and customers. After some time, the hired worker borrows credit and opens a bakery. After first working independently, he eventually hires a helper, who has come to the city for work, and the cycle repeats itself.

In this model, we see the following. Not only is society thought of as middle class, but there exists the already-middle-class and the not-yet-middle-class. In this picture, the hired worker does not form a peculiar type, but represents the potentially bourgeois, while the ready baker is actually bourgeois (though even he, coming to ruin, can theoretically be in the position again of the hired worker, the not-yet-bourgeois).

According to Marx, the quantity of riches in society is a fixed quantity, and the presence of two classes is based on precisely this: those who have riches will never share them with the poor, since life in capitalist society is a zero-sum game. For Smith, on the other hand, richesconstantly increase. As a result, the boundaries of the middle class continuously expand. Capitalism is based on the presumption of the constant growth of riches for all members of society; ideally, all humanity must become middle class.

At the same time, there are two approaches to the middle class in liberal ideology. The first corresponds to left liberals: they demand that the super-bourgeois (the big capitalists) consciously share a part of the profits with the middle class and petty bourgeoisie, since this will lead to the stability of the system and to an acceleration of the growth of the middle class globally.

The second approach is characteristic of right liberals: they object to the burden placed on the super-bourgeoisie by taxation and welfare projects; they believe these contradicts the spirit of “free enterprise” and slows the dynamics of the development of the capitalist system, since the super-bourgeoisie stimulates the growth of the middle-bourgeoisie, which, in turn, urges on the petty bourgeoisie and the not-yet-bourgeoisie.

Accordingly, the concept of the middle class becomes, for left liberals, a moral value and ideological slogan (as in, “We must build a stronger middle class!”). For right liberals, on the other hand, the growth of the middle class is a natural consequence of the development of the capitalist system and does not demand special attention or elevation to a value.

Class as Social Strata in Sociology

In sociology, this basic ideological attitude of liberalism concerning the primacy of the middle class manifests itself in the relativization of the model of stratification. Sociology divides society into three classes: upper, middle, and lower (to this is sometimes added the underclass of pure marginals and social deviants). These classes are not identical to Marxist, nor to strictly liberal class concepts (since liberalism knows only one class, the middle class, while the others are thought of as its variations). This division fixes the dimension of individuals along four indicators: material sufficiency, level of fame, position in administrative hierarchy, and level of education. On the basis of strictly qualitative criteria, any person can be related to one of three social strata.

Here, the concept of class does not have a direct ideological content, but, as a rule, it is applied to bourgeois society, where sociology as a science appeared. This sociological classes, identified with social strata, should be distinguished from Marxist classes and from standard liberal conceptions about the middle class as the universal and single class.

In this case, in a bourgeois framework, the struggle for the rights of the underclass or support of the lower class (in a sociological sense) can be thought of as a left continuation of the liberal approach: attention to the lower layer of bourgeois society stipulates striving to facilitate its integration into the middle class, i.e. to pull them up the level of the bourgeois. For right liberals, such an effort is “amoral,” since it contradicts the main principle of social freedom: initiative and honest competition (the strong win, the weak lose, but such are the rules of the game; all should endeavor to become strong). The extreme version of right or even far-right liberalism is the “objectivism” of Ayn Rand.

The Middle Class and Nationalism

There is one other ideological system of modernity, which we have yet to consider — nationalism. Nationalism is a variation of bourgeois ideology, which insists that the standard horizon of bourgeois society should not be humanity (the “cosmopolitanism” and “globalism” of classical liberals) but society as defined by the borders of a nation-state. The nation or people is taken as the maximal unit of integration. The market is open within the boundaries of the nation. But in the inter-state system, economic activity transitions to the level of the state, not private actors. From here, there arises the legitimization of such instruments as tariffs, protectionism, etc.

Nationalism thinks of the middle class not abstractly but concretely, as the middle class of a given national formation of the state. Nationalism also, like liberalism, accepts as a standard figure of society the townsperson-citizen-bourgeois, but puts the accent precisely on citizen, and what’s more, the citizen of a given national state.

The “nation” as a political formation becomes a synonym of bourgeois society. For nationalists, beyond this society, there exists only a zone of national and social risk. The nation is thought of here as a community of the middle class. And the task consists in integrating the lower layers into the national whole, often with the help of welfare measures. That is why nationalism can possess numerous socialist features, though the ideological basis here is different: pulling the economically weak to the level of the middle class is a task ofnational integration, not a consequence of orientation towards justice and material equality. We see something similar with left liberals, who consider integrating the under-class into broader society as a condition for the stability of the development of the capitalist system.

Nationalism, as a rule, relates negatively to national minorities and especially to immigrants. This is connected with the fact that in the eyes of nationalists, these elements disturb the homogeneity of the national middle class. Moreover, some national minorities are blamed for concentrating in their hands too much material wealth, in other words, those who challenge the national middle class “from above.” Nationalist feelings of injustice are expressed in antagonism towards “oligarchs” and, often times, as “economic anti-semitism,” a sentiment that was not foreign to Marx himself. In turn, other non-nationals (usually immigrants) are blamed for increasing the numbers of the lower strata and underclass, the integration of which is complicated by national differences. A variant of anti-immigrant nationalism consists in the charge that the increase of cheap labor slows the process of enriching the “native” population and the “harmonious” (for nationalists) growth of the middle class.

The Problem of the Middle Class in Contemporary Russia

After making these necessary methodological refinements, we can finally raise the question: what is the middle class for Russia? What are its prospects? Is it important for us or, on the contrary, are discussions about it optional and secondary?

It is impossible to answer this without turning to one of the three classical ideologies (including the versions contained in each through the polarities of left and right).

If we take the position of right liberalism, the answer is this: we should not pay attention to the middle class; the most important thing is to secure maximum economic freedom (that is, complete removal of government from business, taxes approximating zero, etc.), and everything will fall into place. Right liberals and consistent globalists are convinced that the growth of the middle class in Russia is not the goal; it is a consequence of the nation’s integration into the global economy, the opening of internal markets for external competition, and the prompt dismantling of an overbearing state.

If we take the position of left liberalism, then our attitude changes substantially. The broadening of the middle class is the number one task for our society, since the successful establishment of capitalism in Russia depends on precisely this, as does its integration into the international community. A small and weak middle class facilitates the degradation of society into “lumpens” and “oligarchs” and indirectly helps nationalistic and socialistic anti-liberal tendencies capture the minds of the population. Social injustice and inequality, the volume of the underclass, and the slow growth of the middle class demand special attention and the execution of goal-directed policies, since the fate of capitalism in Russia is at stake. Again, the struggle for the middle class is a slogan of left liberals. And they are the ones who would most likely focus this topic, since it is the core of their ideological positions.

If we are contemporary Marxists by inertia or conscious choice, then any mention of a middle class must evoke our rage, since this is the ideological platform of the sworn enemies of communism — bourgeois liberals. For communists, the following is correct: the narrower the middle class, the sharper the social contradictions and the more acute the imperative of the class struggle of proletariat against bourgeoisie. Thus, the communist perceives a large lower social strata and underclass against the background of prospering oligarchs as the ideal social picture. For communists, the middle class is a lie, an evil, and its absence or underdevelopment is a chance and window of opportunity for revolution. If some “communist” thinks otherwise, then he is not a communist, but a revisionist and compromiser with the bourgeoisie.

If we are nationalists, then the middle class acquires for us an additional dimension. It is thought of as the skeleton of national society in opposition to the “immigrant underclass” and “foreign-born oligarchy.” This is the peculiar notion of the middle class in the nationalist framework. And the cutting edges of this conception of the middle class are directed against oligarchs (the upper class) and immigrants (the lower class and underclass); the middle class itself is regarded as the national class, i.e. as the Russian class, which includes Russianentrepreneurs, Russian proprietors, the Russian bourgeoisie, etc.

It is impossible to speak of the middle class as such, without adhering (consciously or not) to an ideological position. But since in Russia, according to the constitution, there is no state ideology, theoretically we can interpret the middle class however we want. The fact that this concept has become the center of discussions attests to the fact that in contemporary Russia, by the inertia of the ‘90s and early 2000s, a liberal paradigm prevails. In the absence of a state ideology, liberals nevertheless strive to impose on us their paradigm as dominant.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment: a discussion about the middle class is taking place in a socially significant platform, for instance on one of Russia’s major television stations. Representatives of all possible ideologies of modernity are participating: Russian liberals, Russian communists, and Russian nationalists.

The first, a Russian liberals, would say:

The growth of the middle class and elevation of the level of wealth for the citizens of Russia is the main task of our society and government.

The second, a Russian communist:

Illegal privatization in the ‘90s put national property in the hands of oligarchs; look how our people live in the provinces in poverty and squalor!

The third, a Russian nationalist:

Illegal immigrants are taking jobs from Russians, and they’re all led by Jewish and Caucasian oligarchs. That is a catastrophe for the Russian middle class!

Despite the fact that the viewers might like all three positions, the jury and “respected experts” will, undoubtedly, grant victory to the liberals. For ultimately, we still find ourselves in the condition of the ideological dictatorship of liberalism. This would happen despite the fact that society, recognizing the right of liberal discourse, fully and persistently denies its supremacy and absolute right. (In contrast, for the political elite, liberal dogmas remain sacred and unshakeable.)

From this, we can draw a conclusion: the middle class and discussion about it reflect the ideological order of liberals among Russia’s political and economic elite. If we do not share liberal axioms, then we might not consider this topic at all, or else offer an interpretation (Marxist, nationalistic, etc.) that liberals will vigorously reject.

The Fourth Political Theory: Beyond Class

In conclusion, we can conduct an analysis of the middle class in the context of the Fourth Political Theory. This theory is built on the imperative of overcoming modernity and all three political ideologies in order (the order has tremendous significance): (1) liberalism, (2) communism, (3) nationalism (fascism). The subject of this theory, in its simple version, is the concept “narod,”roughly, “Volk” or “people,” in the sense of “peoplehood” and “peoples,” not “masses.”

In its complex version, the subject of this theory is Heidegger’s category of Dasein. We can say, as an approximation, that narod must be thought of existentially, as the living, organic, historical presence of Russians in a qualitative spatial landscape, in the expanses of Great Russia. But if the subject is the narod and not the individual (as in liberalism), not two antagonistic classes (as in Marxism), and not the political nation (as in nationalism), then all the obligatory elements of the modern picture of the world change. There is no longer materialism, economism, recognition of the fatefulness and universality of the bourgeois revolutions, linear time, Western civilization as a universal standard, secularism, human rights, civil society, democracy, the market, or any other axioms and buzzwords of modernity. The Fourth Political Theory proposes solutions and horizons knowingly excluded by liberalism, communism, and nationalism. (More on this is found in my book The Fourth Political Theory and my new book The Fourth Way [Четвертый Путь].)

On the whole, The Fourth Political Theory, when applied to the problem of the “middle class” says the following:

The transition from caste to estate and from estate to class is not a universal law. This process can occur as it did in modern Western Europe, or it can fail to occur or occur partially, as is happening today in non-Western societies. Hence, the very concept of class as applied to society has a limited applicability. Class and classes can be identified in modern Western European societies, but whether they can replace the caste inequality of the soul and human nature is not at all obvious. Western societies themselves are confident that classes do so. But an existential approach to this problematic can call this into question.

The most important thing is how the human relates to death. There are those who can look it in the face, and those who always have their backs turned to it. But the origins of the social hierarchy, the fundamental distinction between people and the superiority of some to others consists in precisely this. Material conditions are not decisive here. Hegel’s interpretation of Master and Slave is based on this criterion. Hegel thinks that the Master is the one who challenges death, who steps out to encounter it. Acting in this way, he does not acquire immortality, but he acquires a Slave, one who runs from death, lacking the courage to look it in the eye. The Master rules in societies where death stands at the center of attention. The Slave acquires political rights only where death is bracketed and removed to the periphery. So long as death remains in society’s field of vision, we are dealing with rule by the wise and heroic, philosophers and warriors. This is caste society or estate society. But not classsociety. Where class begins, life ends, and the alienated strategies of reification, objectivation, and mediation prevail.

Hence, the Fourth Political Theory thinks that the construction of society on the basis of the criterion of property is a pathology. The fate of man and narod is history and geography — but in no way economics, the market, or competition.

The Fourth Political Theory rejects class as a concept and denies its relevance for the creation of a political system based on the existential understanding of the narod. Even more so does it reject the concept of the “middle class,” which reflects the very essence of the class approach. The middle class, like the middle (that is, average) person, is a social figure situated at the point of maximal social illusion, at the epicenter of slumber. The representative of the middle class corresponds to Heidegger’s figure of das Man, the generalized bearer of “common sense,” which is subject to no verification or examination. (Das Man is often translated into English as “The They,” in the sense of “They say so-and-so will win the election this year…) Das Man is the greatest of illusions.

The middle, average person is not at all the same as the normal person. “Norm” is a synonym for “ideal,” that to which one should strive, that which one should become. The middle person is a person in the least degree, the most ex-individual of individuals, the most null and barren quality. The middle person isn’t a person at all; he is a parody of a person. He is Nietzsche’s “Last Man.” And he is deeply abnormal, since for a normal person, it is natural to experience horror, to think about death, to acutely experience the finitude of being, to call into question — sometimes tragically insoluble — the external world, society, and relations to another.

The middle class doesn’t think; it consumes. It doesn’t live; it seeks security and comfort. It doesn’t die, it blows out like a car tire (it emits its spirit, as Baudrillard wrote in Symbolic Exchange and Death). The middle class is the most stupid, submissive, predictable, cowardly, and pathetic of all classes. It is equally far from the blazing elements of poverty and the perverted poison of incalculable wealth, which is even closer to hell than extreme poverty. The middle class has no ontological foundation for existing at all, and if it does, then only somewhere far below, beneath the rule of the philosopher-kings and warrior-heroes. It is the Third Estate, imagining about itself that it is the one and only. This is an unwarranted pretension. Modernity and capitalism (in the sense of the universality of the middle class) is nothing more than a temporary aberration. The time of this historical misunderstanding is coming to an end.

Thus, today, when the agony of this worst of possible social arrangements still continues, you must look beyond capitalism. At the same time, we must value and take interest in both what preceded it, the Middle Ages, and in that which will come after it and that which we must create — a New Middle Ages.

 

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Dugin, Alexander. “The Fourth Estate: The History and Meaning of the Middle Class.” The Radix Journal, 9 June 2014. <http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2014/6/9/the-fourth-estate >.

This article was also found at the Fourth Political Theory website: <http://www.4pt.su/en/content/fourth-estate >.

The original Russian version of this article can be found at the EURASIA website: <http://evrazia.org/article/2535&c=1 >. It was also found at the website Oднако: <http://www.odnako.org/almanac/material/sredniy-klass-i-drugie-ideologiya-semantika-ekzistenciya/ >.

Note: For a brief discussion of Dugin’s theories and also a listing of major translated works by him, see Natella Speranskaya’s interview with Dugin: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/civilization-as-political-concept-dugin/ >.

 

Schubart on Russia – Tulaev

The Russian Dreams of a German Philosopher

by Pavel Tulaev

One of the central issues to Russian contemporaneous historiography is the matter of the relations between the East and the West. It is from here that the interest on the subjects arises in the classics like: Russia and Europe, by N. Y. Danilevskii; Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler; or, Europe and Humankind, by N. S. Trubetskoy. One of the most important works on the subject is the book by the German Philosopher Walter Schubart (1897-194?) Europe and the Soul of the East, published for the first time in Switzerland in 1938. The importance of this work lies in the fact that it is the only one that deals with the universal vocation of the Russian civilization.

The main idea of the treaty is the “natural contradiction between the western man and the eastern man”.

The author considers that the West has fallen prisoner of the materialist civilization and lives a time of a profound crisis. The West cannot save itself on its own, the new awakening has to come from the East, from Russia. Schubart bases his analysis in the Russian Literature, in the Philosophy and in the key moments of Russian History. In any case, Schubart’s book does not deal just with Russia, but rather with “Europe as seen from the East”.

Following the different periods of history, the author analyzes the contradictions between the West and the East, he dives into the depths of the Russian soul, and tries to understand the meaning of the Russian national idea. He places the Russians in the same level as the Germans, Spanish, French and English. He also deals with philosophical matters, like faith and atheism, fear and courage, egoism and fraternity. For instance, he tries to understand the reason why the Germans are badly seen by other peoples; why is it that the Anglo-Saxons are so entrepreneurs; what makes the French to be so rationalistic whereas the Russians are so nationalistic and are so much into self-sacrifice. He is interested, above all, in the degradation of the western individual.

Schubart finds the answer to those questions in the geographical, religious and cultural factors.

The West, for Schubart, is divided into a few key nations, and then he continues analyzing the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons and the French.

The Germans, according to Schubart, are the ones who stand out most in the prometeic culture (i.e., bearer of a will to know the truth and to change the course of things) in the West. They are disciplined, they love working, they carry the mark of the Nordic soul. They love the combat and are natural soldiers. A typical characteristic of the Germans is some degree of arrogance and even cruelty in their treatment to others. But this does not mean that the German is cruel; on the contrary, inside his own family circle he is affectionate and warm.

With regards to the Anglo-Saxons, the fact of living in an island has influenced them like no other factor in their idiosincracy. The English is pragmatic, practical, and he makes an effort in being successful in his enterprises. Spiritually, he is a liberal; vocationally, he is a merchant.

The French, unlike the English, are less pragmatic. They are good analysts and rationalists, but more dreamers. The French is sentimental and searches for beauty and order in everything. If the Germans fights attracted by his warring soul, the French is ready to die for his dear motherland.

The Russians –to whom Schubart dedicates over the first half of the book–, differently to their western cousins, they posses a great interior freedom. Due to their profound religiosity, the Russian is not subject to the material things, he doesn’t try, like the German, to conquer the world; nor does he wish, like the English, to always achieve material benefits; he does not try, like the French, to understand what cannot be understood, although he possesses an immense universalist vocation.

From the Geopolitical point of view, the Russian is a born imperialist; he thinks in wide spaces and continents, which is why Dostoievski was right to speak of the “Pan-European” vocation of the Russian, and also was Napoleon when he asserted that “Russia is a power that goes towards world domination with giant steps.”

The author of Europe and the Soul of the East calls the Russians who live in the open plains of Eastern Europe, the “sons of the steppe”. Even if living in the cities, the Russians “keep the life style proper of the nomad people”. And though the ancient Scandinavians named Russia as Gardarika (“country of cities), the fact is that there has always been a vocation to live outside the urban limits, a need to return to the ways of the rural life, to the harsh tasks of the work in the land.

In any case, it seems as if to analyze the central characteristics of the Russian nation, Schubart based himself in the Russian Literature and Thought, instead of the evidenced historical facts.

One of the most interesting observations from Schubart is the list of similarities that he finds in the national trajectories of Russia and Spain:

Both nations emerge as powers as a result of the struggle against non-Christians. In 1476, Ivan III refused to pay the yearly tribute to the Tatar Khanate, and in 1492 Fernando of Aragon conquers the last Moorish reduct in Granada and expels the Jews, finishing this way the Reconquista. Both nations build powerful empires and both peoples fought against Napoleon like no other and defeated his armies. A fact that is key for both nations, according to Schubart, was the entry of the prometeic ideas which, already in the 20th century made that both Russia and Spain lived revolutions and civil wars.

“The Spanish national idea is more similar to the Russian national idea than any other –asserts Schubart– since both share the same longing for transcendence, of returning to the world its ‘lost soul’.”

“Russian civilization –continues Schubart– struggles for the triumph of the prometeic culture in its lands, but the day will arrive when this struggle will come out of its frontiers to attack the western soul in its own terrain. From this will depend the destiny of humanity: Europe was a source of disgraces for Russia, but Russia can get to be a source of happiness for Europe.”

The assessment of Schubart’s book that we are doing here should not make us forget that it is not possible to agree with many of the assertions done by the author. Some of the facts must be discussed.

Schubart speaks of the Russian soul and of the spiritual characteristics of other peoples in an abstract mode, without taking into account the very important fact that every time and every historical context is different from the one preceding it. It is not the same to speak of the Russian mentality based on the Christian Orthodoxy than to speak of the one based on Bolschevism. Another critique refers to what the author understands by “East”: Russia, in relation to Germany is obviously in the East. But in relation to China and Central Asia it is the West. Russia is, for its racial and cultural origins, an European nation. The country expanded from the North-West to the South-East, but that does not mean that we stop being Christians and White colonizers and we turn into Asians or Muslims.

The German philosopher calls our country “the Eastern Continent” and to the Russians “the sons of the steppe”. In fact the geographical determinism happens to be one of Schubart’s weakest points: it seems as if for him the “landscape” is one of the main factors to know the destiny of a people; when it has been evidenced that a good Blood can exist in a highly technified environment.

Since his work was released, the global relations have change already twice: in 1945 and in 1991. There is no more a III Reich nor a USSR. We live in the time of the technocracy, of the post-industrial civilization, the “New World Order”. There is little space left for the profecies of Schubart to become reality.

There is only left the trust in ourselves, to listen to our heart and to our soul; only this way we will be the owners of our Destiny.

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Article by Pavel Tulaev, published on the issue #7 of the Russian Identitarian magazine Nasledye Pred’ Kov (‘The Heritage of the Forefathers’), Summer 2000.

Translated from Russian to Spanish by Josep Oriol Ribas i Mulet, and published on the issue #12 of the Spanish Identitarian magazine Tierra y Pueblo (‘Land and People’), May 2006.

 

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Tulaev, Pavel. “The Russian Dreams of a German Philosopher.” Euro-Synergies, 11 June 2008. <http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2008/06/11/the-russian-dreams-of-a-german-philosopher.html >.

This article is also available on Tulaev’s personal website: <http://tulaev.ru/html.php?152 >.