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).

 

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Territory & Ethno-Cultural Stability – Krebs

Territory and Ethno-Cultural Stability

(Excerpt from Fighting for the Essence)

By Pierre Krebs

 

The Key Idea of Territory

Any talk about people and culture boils down to dealing with the fundamental question of territory. It is a cardinal question that is impossible to avoid, since it opens and closes every debate on identity. In effect, territory is to a people what air is to our lungs. If it happens to disappear, the cultural and biological life of an ethnic group is threatened with asphyxiation (in a very real sense) in a short span. All the discussions that relate to identity cannot ignore the notion of territory if they do not wish to sink into the ridiculous. [29] ‘The human being is a territorial being,’ reminds Professor Otto Koenig. [30] The preservation of territorial integrity is the condition sine qua non [31] of ethnic existence, as Eibl-Eibesfeldt has persistently explained. The cohabitation of different communities within a state is possible only when the territorial integrity of each community is clearly defined and its sovereignty strongly guaranteed, as in the case of Switzerland, a model of ethnic cooperation which evidently has nothing to do with the multiracial society ‘that Heiner Geissler imagines.’ [32]

The Maintenance of Peace is Closely Dependent upon the Maintenance of Territorial Integrity

In his most recent work, the ethologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt returns to this major point: ‘The best way to maintain peaceful cooperation between peoples consists in guaranteeing to each of them a territory that each people has the right to administer in its own way, and in which it is permitted to develop itself culturally as it sees fit.’ [33] The multicultural society, de facto, creates the conditions of a permanent state of conflict as soon as the different ethno-cultural groups engage in the (legitimate) defence of their interests, needs, and aspirations, as soon as they are naturally led to affirm their identity in order to escape the cultural or ethnic suicide of assimilation. Any state of peace in society is inevitably overturned in a state of crisis provoked by ethnic rivalries: ‘To the degree that a people accept the implantation of minorities in their territories, they open the door to inter-ethnic competition in their own house.’ [34]

It clearly emerges from the empirical observations of modern ethology that the demarcation of a territorial border does not come about through chance, but purely and simply from genetically programmed dispositions: ‘It is imperative to know that human beings are hereditarily endowed with programmes of behaviour that determine their perceptions, reflections and actions in a decisive manner.’ [35] Territorial demarcation equally responds to a need dictated by evolution: ‘In the case of competitions with other individuals, the entrance en bloc of a closed group is as important as its number… Another advantage consists in the fact that the formation of well-defined groups that are mutually demarcated in relation to other foreign groups favours evolution, insofar as mutation emerge only in small groups and develop only through the competitive struggles that oppose on group to another.’ [36] Erlung Kohl refers to Konrad Lorenz to demonstrate that the cultural life of an ethnic group is tightly bound to the territorial demarcation of a space that guarantees it a separate development that it imperatively needs to know and affirm itself: ‘Relatively compact barriers… that are erected between two cultural cores which are divergent in development are characteristic of all cultures, and are clearly indispensable to their evolution.’ [37] Respect for territorial integrity quite simply demands the maintenance of peace: ‘Peaceful collaboration between different peoples is possible on the condition that each ethnic group possesses its own territory and can regulate its own affairs without exposing itself to any repressive domination or to territorial amputations.’ [38]

All these observations allow one to measure to what degree of stupidity and blindness the militants of multiracialism have sunk, as their model of society leads inevitably to war! Immigrants ‘who settle permanently take possession of the most precious resource that a people possess – namely, their territory. It is for this reason that they are perceived as invaders, and this situation then automatically triggers a desire for territorial defence among the natives… Taking into account our hereditary reflexes, the multicultural model that Geissler wants to introduce in Central Europe would automatically lead to conflicts.’ [39] Heiner Geissler himself warns of the danger of a civil war (even if he places the responsibility for it on the shoulders of his compatriots!), which he believes can be defused through social measures. This reduction of the human paradigm to the economic paradigm reveals to what extent the current political discourse is linked to the models of liberal thought and to its archetype, the Homo occidentalis: ‘I predict civil wars in Germany if we do not grant immigrants who lives among us full citizenship – even if they have a different skin colour and are not of Germanic origin.’ This famous ‘equality of rights’ naturally supposes strict conformity to the principles defined by human rights. These foreigners will become ‘German citizens… who recognise our Constitution.’ [40] Apart from the fact that the appellation ‘German’ is absurd insofar as multiracial discourse empties it of its real ethno-cultural significance, human nature does not allow itself to be locked within techno-commercial thought. The humanity of a human being does not allow itself to be reduced to its basest needs – unfortunately for Geissler (but what was true here of a Geissler is also exactly true of the present, completely brainless President, Christian Wulff)[41] – and fortunately for men – human nature does not allow itself to be locked within techno-commercial thought, the humanity of the human being does not allow itself to be reduced to its needs. The aesthetic sense, the historical sense and the religious sense are other paradigms of human infinitely richer and more complex than the liberal theoreticians wish to admit.

Fighting for the Essence

The originality and the richness of the human heritages of this world are nourished by their differences and their deviations, which surprise and fascinate as soon as one passes from the culture of one people to another. These originalities can find protection, in turn, only in the homogeneous ethno-cultural space that is proper to them. The defenders of multiracialism are the primary destroyers, consciously or unconsciously, of this elementary right. To resist the aggressive ideology of human rights, the doctrinal alibi of the totalitarian Western society, it is urgent to draw up a new Declaration of the Rights of Peoples in concert with all the movements that fight on this Earth for the respect of their ethno-cultural identities. The sensibly will of the identitarian being should be able to thwart the senseless will of its eulogists and the will of a blind egalitarianism which is the source of the totalitarian levelling of things and persons: ‘The unconditional uniformity of all kinds of humanity of the Earth,’ further observes Heidegger, ‘under the rule of the will to will makes clear the meaninglessness of human action which has been posited absolutely.’ [42]

It is certain that the actions of the politicians today – whether they are absurd or criminal – are not at all reflective of any responsibility by those who decide on them! Their political responsibility last (if at all) only for the period of the parliamentary mandate. It is therefore useless to hope to see them one day before tribunals – to make them answer for their acts – politicians who are today planning of the chaos and wars of tomorrow through their decisions. As Professor Koening bitterly affirmed, ‘no political man bears the responsibility of his when there are no immediate consequences. He has nothing to fear and is responsible for nothing.’ [43]

To pose the question of identity again is to appeal to the wisdom of Knowledge. It is to take into consideration once again the benefits of the life-sciences (which have fallen into discredit, and for a reason) if one wishes to put an end to the ideological blindness of egalitarianism. ‘The biological sciences have revealed to us the most previous of secrets – the laws of the development of our body and of our consciousness. This knowledge has brought to humanity the means of renovating itself.’ [44] What is at stake are peoples and the life of their cultures, of a life of which the living peoples are still the conscience and locus, of a life of which the people are also shepherd. Europe will be reborn from itself, ‘from the re-appropriation of its own origins,’ [45] or it will not be reborn. Julien Freund shares the same opinion: ‘It is not from others that the Europeans can expect their civilisation, but from themselves, on the condition that they wish it, and put into effect the necessary means to ensure it.’ [46] For Sigrid Hunke, too, there is no doubt ‘Europe will unveil its truth when it becomes itself once again, when it determines itself once again, when it is able to reaffirm itself as itself, and to protect itself from foreign pretensions, and when it has found again the strength to realise itself in its own renewed history.’ [47] The spirit that inhabits the being of our people still comes from the same source, from the same blood. [48] So, everything can be born again, everything can begin again for the Europeans ‘as long as the hereditary qualities of the race remain present, the strength and the audicity of his forefathers can be resurrected in modern man by his own will.’ [49]

Let us make sure that the peoples remain the protectors of their values and their truth, in order to continue to gift to the world their singular genius, each in the mysterious expression of their style, their manner, their pride – we who, like Nietzsche, know today much than yesterday, that the writing that springs from a mind always bears the signature of its blood, which is unalterable for all eternity.

Notes

[29] We shall take as a characteristic sample of certain approaches that glimpse an awakener of identities in the multiracial in Stefan Ulbrich (ed.), Multikultopia (Vilbiburg: Arun, 1991). Alongside excellent texts (Rolf Kosiek, ‘Die Wirklichkeit des Volkes in der modernen Welt,’ Robert Steuckers, ‘Verortung in Raum und Zeit,’ etc.), those of the editor of the publication, sprinkled with contradictions, attest to a regrettable dilettantism. One will also notice the lowbrow character that the editor demonstrates in the interview that Mrs. Martiny gave him, or lese this declared adept of the New Right has not understood of the New Culture (to begin with, the label ‘New Right,’ which was invented by the System), or lese he has, perhaps, deliberately chosen to bury himself in an ideological dead-end to please the censors of the System. At best, if we can forgive a certain childishness, we still cannot easily excuse a cheap opportunism. Moreover, the reception of the book seems to have proven the old truth: one who wishes to get into his enemy’s good graces mostly reaps nothing but his contempt.

[30] ‘Wir stehen am Beginn einer Völkerwanderung,’ ‘Gespräch mit Prof. Otto Koenig,’ in R. Eder and A. Mölzer (eds.), Enwanderungsland Europa?, p. 82.

[31] Latin: ‘essential element.’ -Ed.

[32] Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, ‘Zukunft multikultureller Gesellschaft,’ in ibid., pp. 136-137.

[33] Wider die Mißtrauensgesellschaft, p. 157.

[34] Ibid., p. 158.

[35] Eder and Mölzer (eds.), Einwanderungsland Europa?, p. 130.

[36] Ibid., p. 134.

[37] Erlung Kohl, ‘Vom Wert der Mannifaltigkeit: Ethnologische Grundlagen jeder Bevölkerungspolitik,’ p. 16.

[38] Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Wider die Mißtrauensgesellschaft, p. 157.

[39] Ibid., p. 130.

[40] Heiner Geissler, ‘Kein Grund zur Angst,’ in Der Spiegel 41, 1991, p. 23. This former student of the Jesuits is a past-master in the art of distorting responsibilities. If a conflict should break out in the multiracial society that is in progress, the responsibility does not fall upon the politicians who initiated this process. It falls upon the victims, who are incapable of understanding quickly enough the advantages of rejuvenation through miscegenation: ‘It is not the influx of foreigners but is, on the contrary, the incapacity for rejuvenation and adaptation of the Germans, combined with their aversion to immigration, that represents the real danger for our future’ (in Der Spiegel, art. cit.). But instead of fulfilling the role for which he has been elected – to prevent and remove the danger that threaten his community – it is for the exacerbation of these dangers that Heiner Geissler quietly works when he quite calmly announces an escalation of the immigration process: ‘In the future, the Germans will not have to live with just five million foreigners – as today – but with seven, perhaps ten million’ (ibid.). These words will at least have the advantage of reinforcing the plans of the former leader of the Turkish state, Süleyman Demirel. In fact, during a reception given at the Zentrum für Türkeistudien (TAM), Demirel made no secret of the strategic aims of Turkish immigration into Germany. Calling on his emigrant compatriots to demand double nationality, he added: ‘I have been responsible for immigration into Europe, in the 1960s and ’70s, of around 60 to 70 percent of three million Turks, for I have always been a supporter of the establishment of a lobby in Europe’ (in Junge Freiheit, 29 Apirl 1994).

[41] Christian Wulff (b. 1959) was elected President of Germany in 2010 and is a member of the Christian Democratic Union party. Wulff famously charactertised Islam as a ‘part of Germany’ and has called for greater tolerance for Muslim immigrants. -Ed.

[42] Martin Heidegger, ‘Overcoming Metaphysics,’ p. 110.

[43] Otto Koenig, ‘Wir stehen am Beginn ekiner Völkerwanderung,’ in Einwanderungsland Europa?, p. 98. Eibl-Eibesfeldt also issues a serious warning to the politicians forgetful of their duties and their commitments: ‘….I think that the politicians and journalists – whose actions and speeches influence opinion – give evidence of irresponsibility when they attempt to persuade their people that the important thing is not to perpetuate oneself through one’s own descendants. I think that these attempts at persuasion are similar to those that suggest an ethnic suicide… The politicians who act in this way, at least in Germany, violate the oath that they have made to defend the interests of their people. On the other hand, it would be really superfluous to enter into long debates to understand that the suppression of an ethnic group by another is always done at the expense of the first, even when this so-called peaceful process is considered to have taken place through immigration,’ in Wider die Mißtrauensgesellschaft, p. 136.

[44] Carrel, Man, the Unknown, p. 273.

[45] Jean Parvulesco, Le soleil rouge de Raymond Abellio, p. 79.

[46] Julien Freund, La décadence, p. 384.

[47] Sigrid Hunke, Vom Untergang des Abendlandes zum Aufgang Europas, p. 321.

[48] ‘Observed from a biological and anthropological angle, there is no doubt that the Europeans of today constitute a very homogenous population… The common cultural history of the Europeans also links peoples who are genetically very close,’ again affirms Eibl-Eibesfeldt unequivocally, in ‘Zukunft multikultureller Gesellschaft?’, in Eder and Mölzer (eds.), Einwanderungsland Europa?, p. 138. And besides: ‘The European nations are characterised by a language and customs, in short, by a common culture and history, and, to conclude, the Europeans belong to a biological and anthropological type which is also uniquely characteristic,’ in Wider die Mißtrauensgesellschaft, p. 162.

[49] Carrel, Man, the Unknown, p. 273.

 

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From: Krebs, Pierre. Fighting for the Essence: Western Ethnosuicide or European Renaissance? London: Arktos Media, 2012, pp. 85-91.

Note: Read more about Pierre Krebs’s work at F. Roger Devlin’s review of Fighting for the Essence: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/europe-vs-the-west-devlin/ >.

 

Main Principles of Eurasist Policy – Dugin

Main Principles of Eurasist Policy

By Alexander Dugin

Translated by Martino Conserva

 

1. Three patterns (Soviet, pro-Western, Eurasist)

In modern Russia there exist three basic, reciprocally conflicting patterns of state strategy both in the sphere of foreign policy, and in the field of domestic policy. These three patterns form the modern system of political co-ordinates in which any political decision of the Russian government, any international step, any serious social, economic or juridical problem is decomposed.

The first pattern represents the inertial cliché of the Soviet (mainly later Soviet) period. It has somehow taken roots in the psychology of some Russian managing systems, often unconsciously, pushing them into adopting such or such decision on the basis of the precedents. This pattern is supported with the “relevant” argument: «It worked earlier, it will work also now». It concerns not only those political leaders who consciously exploit the nostalgic complex of the Russian citizens. The Soviet reference pattern is much wider and deeper than the structures of the KPFR [Communist Party of the Russian Federation], which now stands at the rim of executive power, far from the decisional centres. Everywhere politicians and officials, formally not identifying themselves in any way with communism, are guided by it. It is an effect of education, life experience, formation. In order to understand the substance of the undergoing processes in Russian politics, it is necessary to admit this “unconscious sovietism”. The second pattern is the liberal-democrat, pro-American one. It started taking shape with the beginning of “perestroyka” and became some kind of dominant ideology in the first half of the 1990s. As a rule, the so-called liberal-reformers and the political forces close to them identify themselves with it. This pattern is based on choosing as system of reading of the American socio-political device, copying it on the Russian ground and following US national interests in international issues. Such pattern has the advantage to allow to lean on the quite real “foreign present”, as against the virtual “domestic past” around which the first pattern gravitates. The argument here too is rather simple: «It works for them, it will work for us too». Here it is important to stress that we are not simply talking about “foreign experience”, but about the orientation towards the US, as to the flagship of the successful Western capitalist world.

These two patterns (plus their manifold variations) are diffusely represented in Russian politics. Since the end of the 1980s all basic world-view conflicts, discussions and political fights takes place between the bearers of these two views.

The third pattern is much less known. It can be defined as “eurasist”. We are dealing here with much more complex operations, than simply copying the Soviet or American experience. This pattern refers both to the domestic past and to the foreign present in terms of differentiation: it derives something from our political history, something from the reality of modern societies. The Eurasist pattern recognises that Russia (as a State, as a people, as a culture) is an autonomous civilisation value, that she should save its uniqueness, independence and power in that that became, having put at the service of this purpose any doctrine, system, mechanism and political technique which can to this encourage. Eurasism, in this way, is an original “patriotic pragmatism”, free from any dogmatics – be it Soviet or liberal. But at the same time, the wideness and flexibility of the Eurasist approach do not prevent this theory from being conceptually systematic, possessing all the marks of an organic, consequent, internally consistent world-view.

As the two former orthodox patterns show their unfitness, Eurasism becomes more and more popular. The Soviet pattern operates with obsolete political, economic and social realities, it exploits nostalgia and inertness, it lacks a sober analysis of the new international situation and the real development of world economic trends. The pro-American liberal pattern, in turn, cannot be realised in Russia by definition, being an organic part of another civilisation, alien to Russia. This is well understood in the West too, where nobody disguises their preference to see not a prospering and safe Russia, but, on the contrary, a weakened Russia, submerged in the abyss of chaos and corruption.

Therefore today the Eurasist pattern becomes most urgent, most demanded by the society.

So we must take a closer look at it.

2. Eurasism and Russian foreign policy

Let us formulate the basic political principles of modern Russian Eurasism.

We shall start from foreign policies.

As in every political field, also in foreign policy Eurasism proposes to follow the third path – neither sovietism, nor americanism. It means that Russian foreign policies should not directly reconstruct the diplomatic profile of the Soviet period (rigid opposition to the West, recovering a strategic partnership with “rogue countries” – North Korea, Iraq, Cuba etc.) while at the same time it must not blindly follow the American advisors. Eurasism offers its own foreign policy doctrine. Its essence can be summarised as follows.

Contemporary Russia can be saved as an autonomous and independent political reality, as a valuable subject of international policy, only in the conditions of a multipolar world. Consenting to the unipolar American-centred world is impossible for Russia, since in such world she could be but one of the objects of globalisation, inevitably losing her independence and originality. The opposition to unipolar globalisation, the assertion of the multipolar pattern is the major imperative of contemporary Russian foreign policies. This condition must not be put into doubt by any political forces: and from this follows that the propagandists of American-centred globalisation inside Russia must be (at least morally) delegitimized. The construction of the multipolar world (vital for Russia) is feasible only through a system of strategic alliances. Russia alone cannot cope with this problem, not disposing of sufficient resources for complete autarchy. Therefore her success in many respects depends on the adequacy and activity of her foreign policy.

In the modern world there are some geopolitical subjects which, due historical and civilisation reasons, also are vitally interested in multipolarity. In the situation now taking shape these subjects represent Russia’s natural partners.

They are divided in some categories.

The first category: powerful regional formations (countries or group of countries), whose relations with Russia can be conveniently expressed by the term “complementary”. It means that these countries own something vital for Russia, while Russia owns something extremely indispensable for them. As a result, such strategic exchange of potentials strengthens both geopolitical subjects. To this category (symmetrically complementary) belong the European Union, Japan, Iran, India. All these geopolitical realities can quite reasonably claim to a role of autonomous subjects in conditions of multipolarity, while American-centrism deprives them of this possibility, reducing them to mere objects. As the new Russia cannot be presented as an ideological enemy (that which ensured the US their major argument for drawing Europe and Japan into their orbit, and confounded the USSR into being pulled together with Islamic Iran in the “cold war” period), the imperative of complete subordination of these countries to American geopolitics is practically no more substantiated with anything (except for historical inertia). Hence, the contradictions between the US and the powers reciprocally complementary to Russia will be continuously aggravated.

If Russia will prove to be active and will substantiate with her potential the multipolar trend, finding for each of these geopolitical formations the right arguments and differentiated conditions for strategic alliance, the club of the supporters of multipolarity can become mighty and influential enough to efficiently achieve the realisation of its own project of future world system.

To each of these powers Russia has what to offer – resources, strategic potential of weapons, political weight. In exchange Russia will receive, on the one hand, economic and technological sponsorship on behalf of the European Union and Japan, on the other hand – political-strategic partnership in the South on behalf of Iran and India.

Eurasism conceptualises such foreign-policy course and substantiates it by the scientific methodology of geopolitics.

The second category: geopolitical formations being interested in multipolarity, but not being symmetrically complementary to Russia. These are China, Pakistan, the Arab countries. The traditional policies of these geopolitical subjects have an intermediate character, but strategic partnership with Russia is not their major priority. Moreover, the Eurasist alliance of Russia with the countries of the first category strengthens the traditional rivals of the countries of the second category at the regional level. For example, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have serious contradictions with Iran, as China with Japan and India. On a broader scale, the relations of Russia with China represent a special case, complicated by demographic problems, by the heightened interest of China to the scarcely populated territories of Siberia, and also the by absence at China of a serious technological and financial potential able to positively solve the major problem for Russia of technological assimilation of Siberia.

All the countries of the second category are delivered before necessity to manoeuvre between America-centred unipolarity (which does not promise anything good for them) and Eurasism.

With regard to the countries of this category Russia must act with the utmost caution – not including them in the Eurasist project, but at the same time aiming at neutralising as much as possible the negative potential of their reaction and actively countering their active inclusion in the process of unipolar globalisation (for which there are enough reasons).

The third category represents the countries of the Third World which do not possess enough geopolitical potential to claim even to the status of limited subjects. Concerning these countries Russia should follow differentiated policies, contributing to their geopolitical integration in zones of “common prosperity”, under the control of the mighty partners of Russia within the Eurasian bloc. This means that in the Pacific zone it is convenient for Russia to favour the strengthening of the Japanese presence. In Asia it is necessary to encourage the geopolitical ambitions of India and Iran. It is also necessary to contribute to expanding the European Union influence in the Arab world and Africa as a whole. The same states which are included into a traditional orbit of Russian influence must naturally remain there or be brought back into it. To this effect the policy of integration of the countries of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] to the Eurasian Union is directed.

The fourth category: the US and the countries of the American continent laying under US control. The international Eurasist policies of Russia must be oriented to show by any means the US the inconsistency of the unipolar world, the conflicting character and irresponsibility of all process of American-centred globalisation. Rigidly and actively (using to this purpose, first of all, the instrument of the Eurasian alliance) opposing such globalisation, Russia should on the contrary support the isolationist tendency in the US, saluting with favour the limitation of US geopolitical interests to the American continent. The US, as the strongest regional power, whose circle of strategic interest is disposed between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, can even be a strategic partner for an Eurasist Russia. Moreover, such America will be extremely desirable for Russia, as she will limit Europe, the Pacific region, and also the Islamic world and China, in case their aspiration were to follow a path of unipolar globalisation on the basis of their own geopolitical system. And if unipolar globalisation will keep being staged, it is Russia’s interest to back the anti-American mood in Southern and Central America, using, however, a much more flexible and wider world-view and geopolitical device than Marxism. In the same channel lays the policy of priority work with anti-American political circles in Canada and Mexico. Possibly also using in this direction the lobbyist activity of the Eurasian diasporas in the US.

3. Eurasism and domestic policy

Eurasism in domestic policy means following some major directions.

The integration of CIS countries into a united Eurasian Union is the major strategic imperative of Eurasism. The minimal strategic volume indispensable for starting a serious international activity to the creation of a multipolar world is not the Russian Federation, but the CIS taken as a single strategic reality, fastened by a single will and a common civilisation purpose.

The political system of the Eurasian Union in the most logical way is founded on the “democracy of participation” (the “demotia” of the classical Eurasists), the accent being not on the quantitative, but on the qualitative aspect of representation. The representative authority should mirror the qualitative structure of the Eurasian society, instead of the average quantitative statistical indicators based on the efficiency of pre-election shows. Special attention should be given to the representation of ethnoses and religious confessions. The “democracy of participation” must be organically integrated with a definite fraction of individual responsibility as much as possible expressed in strategic areas. The Supreme Leader of the Eurasian Union must concentrate the common will to the achievement of power and prosperity of the state.*

The principle of the social imperative should be combined with the principle of personal freedom in a proportion essentially differing as much from liberal-democratic recipes, as from the impersonal collectivism of the Marxists. Eurasism supposes here the preservation of a definite balance, with a significant role of the public factor.

In general, the active development of the social principle is a constant feature of the Eurasian history. It is shown in our psychology, ethics, religion. But as against the Marxist patterns the social principle should be affirmed as something qualitative, differentiated, linked with the concrete national, psychological, cultural and religious setting. The social principle must not suffocate, but strengthen the private principle, giving it a qualitative background. The qualitative understanding of the social factor allows precisely to define the golden mean between the hyper-individualism of bourgeois West and the hyper-collectivism of socialist East.

In the administrative system Eurasism insists on the model of “Eurasist federalism”. This supposes choosing as the basic category for building the Federation not the territories, but the ethnoses. Having separated the principle of ethno-cultural autonomy from the territorial principle, Eurasist federalism will forever liquidate the same reasons for separatism. So as a compensation the peoples of the Eurasian Union receive the possibility of maximal development of ethnic, religious and even, in some definite issues, juridical independence. The undoubted strategic unity in Eurasist federalism is accompanied by ethnic plurality, by the emphasis on the juridical element of the “rights of the peoples”. **

The strategic control of the space of the Eurasian Union is ensured by the unity of management and federal strategic districts, in whose composition various formations can enter – from ethno-cultural to territorial. The immediate differentiation of territories into several levels will add flexibility, adaptability and plurality to the system of administrative management in combination with rigid centralism in the strategic sphere.

The Eurasian society should be founded on the principle of a revived moral possessing both common features and concrete forms linked to the specificity of the ethno-confessional context. The principles of naturalness, purity, restraint, respect for the rules, liability, healthy life, righteousness and truthfulness are common to all traditional faiths of Eurasia. These undeniable moral values must be given the status of state norms. Scandalous social vices, impudent and public violation of moral foundations should be ruthlessly rooted out.

The armed forces of Eurasia and the power ministries and offices must be considered as the strategic skeleton of the civilisation. The social role of the militaries should increase, it is necessary to restore their prestige and public respect.

On the demographic plan is indispensable to achieve the “proliferation of the Eurasian population”, morally, materially and psychologically encouraging having many children, making of it the Eurasian social standard.

In the field of education it is necessary to strengthen the moral and scientific education of youth in the spirit of faithfulness to historical roots, loyalty to the Eurasist idea, liability, virility, creative activity.

The activity of the informational sector of the Eurasist society must be based on the strict observance of civilisation priorities in making light upon domestic and foreign events. The principles of formation and intellectual and moral education should be set above the principles of entertainment or commercial benefit. The principle of freedom of speech must be combined with the imperative of liability for the freely spoken words.

Eurasism supposes the creation of a society of a mobilisation kind, where the principles of creation and social optimism should be the standard of human life. The world-view should uncover the potential possibilities of the man, enabling everyone – overcoming (internal and external) inertia and limitation – to express his unique personality in the service of society. At the basis of the Eurasist approach to the social question lays the principle of a balance between state and private. This balance is defined by the following logic: all scale, related to strategic sphere (military-industrial complex, education, safety, peace, moral and physical health of a nation, demography, economic growth etc.) is controlled by the State. Small and medium production, the sphere of services, personal privacy, the entertainment industry, the sphere of leisure etc. are controlled not by the State but on the contrary by personal and private initiative (except for those cases when the latter conflicts with the strategic imperatives of Eurasism in the global sphere).

4. Eurasism and the economy

As against liberalism and Marxism, Eurasism considers the economic sphere to be neither autonomous nor determining for socio-political and state processes. According to the Eurasists’ belief, economic activities are only a function of various cultural, social, political, psychological and historical realities. We might express the Eurasist relation to the economy, rephrasing the Gospel truth: “not the man for the economy, but the economy for the man”. Such relation to the economy can be called as qualitative: the thrust is done (made) not on formal digital indexes of economic growth, a significantly wider spectrum of indexes is allowed, in which the economic force is clean is considered in a complex with others, predominantly having social character. Some economists (in particular Joseph Schumpeter) already tried to introduce qualitative parameters into economics, separating the criteria of economic growth from those of economic development. Eurasism sets the issue from an even wider perspective: what matters is not only economic development, but economic development combined with social development.

The Eurasist approach to the economy can be expressed as a simplified scheme in this way: state regulation of the strategic branches (military-industrial complex, natural monopolies and similar) and maximal economic freedom for medium and small business.

The major element of the Eurasist approach to the economy is the idea of the decision of a significant number of Russian national-economic problems within the framework of the Eurasist foreign policy project. It is in view of what is present. Some geopolitical subjects vitally interested in the multipolarity of the world – first of all, the European Union and Japan – have a huge financial-technological potential, whose engaging can sharply change the Russian economic climate. At the present stage it is regretfully necessary to acknowledge that there are no sufficient resources in Russia for (even relative) autarchy. Therefore investments and other kinds of interaction with the advanced economic regions is vitally necessary to us. This interaction should be initially plotted on the logician by more volumetric, rather than is narrow economic relations – investment, credits, import-export, energy deliveries etc. All this should be set in the wider context of common strategic programs – such as the joint assimilation of fields or the creation of unified Eurasian transport and information systems.

In some sense Russia must lay the burden of the revival of its economic potential to the partners of the “club of supporters of multipolarity”, actively using to this purpose the possibility to offer extremely convenient joint transport projects (the “Trans-Eurasian main”) or vital energy resources for Europe and Japan.

A relevant problem is also the return of capital to Russia. Eurasism creates very serious reasons to this purpose. The confused Russia of the period of liberal reforms (beginning in the 1990s), completely turned to the West, referring to herself with distaste, immersed in the psychosis of privatisation and corruption, and the Eurasist, patriotic, state-oriented Russia of the beginning of the XXI century are diametrically opposite political realities. Capital fled a weak and collapsing Russia. In a Russia set on a path of strength and recovery, capital must return.

In the Western countries most of the capitals taken out from Russia can neither be saved nor increased. In the beginning of the 1990s, the West looked with approval at Russian capital flight (mainly of criminal origin), considering – according to the “cold war” logic – that the weakening of post-communist Russia would play in the hands of NATO countries. Now the situation has sharply changed, and in the present conditions serious problems will arise (they already have, indeed) for the owners of illegal capitals in the West

The Eurasist logic means the creation of the most favourable conditions to the return of these capitals to Russia, which in itself will provide a serious impulse to the development of the economy. Contrary to some purely liberal abstract dogmas, capital moves back faster to a state with strong, accountable authority and precise strategic orienting points, rather than to an uncontrollable, chaotic and unstable country.

5. Eurasian path

Eurasism is the pattern most precisely responding to the strategic interests of modern Russia. It gives the answers to the most difficult questions, offers an exit to the most entangled situations. Eurasism combines openness and attitude to dialog with fidelity to historical roots and consequent assertion of national interests. Eurasism offers a consistent balance between the Russian national idea and the rights of the many peoples inhabiting Russia and more widely Eurasia.

Some definite aspects of Eurasism are already being used by the new Russian authorities oriented to a creative solution of the difficult historical problems Russia has to face the in new century. And every time this happens, efficiency, effectiveness, serious strategic results speak for themselves. The integration processes in the CIS, the creation of the Eurasian Economic Commonwealth, the first steps of the new foreign policy of the Russian Federation concerning Europe, Japan, Iran and the countries of the Near East, the creation of a system of Federal districts, the strengthening of the vertical line of power, the weakening of the oligarchic clans, the policy of patriotism and statehood, the increase of responsibility in the work of the mass media – all these are relevant and essential elements of Eurasism. For the time being these elements are intermingled by the inertial trends of the other two patterns (liberal-democrat and soviet). And yet it is perfectly clear that Eurasism is steadily moving to its zenith, whereas two other patterns conduct only “rear-guard fight”.

Enhancing the role of Eurasism in Russian politics is an evolutionary and gradual process. But the time has already come for a more attentive and accountable learning of this really universal theory and philosophy, whose transformation into political and world-view practice is under our eyes.

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Added Notes:

* On democracy and demotia, Dugin also wrote elsewhere (“Milestones of Eurasism”) the following: “Western democracy was formed in the particular conditions of ancient Athens and through the centuries-old history of insular England. Such democracy mirrors the peculiar features of the ‘local European development.’ Such democracy does not represent a universal standard. Imitating the rules of the European ‘liberal-democracy’ is senseless, impossible and dangerous for Russia-Eurasia. The participation of the Russian people to the political rule must be defined by a different term: ‘demotia,’ from the Greek ‘demos,’ people. Such participation does not reject hierarchy and must not be formalized into party-parliamentary structures. ‘Demotia’ supposes a system of land council, district governments or national governments (in the case of peoples of small dimensions). It is developed on the basis of social self-government, of the “peasant” world. An example of ‘demotia’ is the elective nature of church hierarchies on behalf of the parishioners in the Muscovite Rus.” He further explains that “The thesis of ‘demotia’ is the continuation of the political theories of the ‘organic democracy’ from J.-J. Rousseau to C. Schmitt, J. Freund, A. de Benoist and A. Mueller van der Bruck. Definition of the eurasist concept of ‘democracy’ (‘demotia’) as the ‘participation of the people to its own destiny’.”

** On his concept of federalism, Dugin further wrote in another article (“The Eurasian Idea”) the following: “Eurasianism rejects the center-outskirt model of the world. Instead, the Eurasian Idea suggests that the planet consists of a constellation of autonomous living spaces partially open to each other. These areas are not nation-states but a coalition of states, reorganized into continental federations or “democratic empires” with a large degree of inner self-government. Each of these areas is multipolar, including a complicated system of ethnic, cultural, religious and administrative factors.”

 

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Dugin, Aleksandr. “Main Principles of Eurasist Policy.” Международное Евразийское Движение, 21 June 2001. <http://evrazia.info/article/421 >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Main Principles of Eurasist Policy).

This article was also republished at the official Fourth Political Theory website: <http://www.4pt.su/mk/node/30HYPERLINK “/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=421” >. The original Russian version (titled “Основные принципы евразийской политики”) can be found here: <http://evrazia.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=43 >.

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/ >.

 

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.

 

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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/ >.

 

State and Society – Faye

State & Society

By Guillaume Faye

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

A nation, a people can have deficient state institutions while continuing to produce a great creative civilization. The example of France — among others — is quite eloquent. In many periods of its history, this country has experienced an unstable political state organization which cannot master endemic crises. However, society continued to function and create in all domains despite the ongoing crisis of the state. Because the society was the fertile population of vital people, who were never discouraged.

Take the case of the period from 1815-1848 (the Restoration and July Monarchy ) and that of the Third Republic (1875-1940). State institutions (the “constitutions” in Tocqueville’s words) were particularly fragile, poorly supported, and challenged by permanent crises. But, at the same time, in the arts, sciences, industry, the quality of education, economic and cultural influence, etc. the country was creative and effective. How to explain this paradox?

First of all, the sustainability and genius of a nation depends on the relationship between a masculine and organizing principle, the State, and a feminine and vitalistic principle, which gives birth to forms, Society. Stateless, Society becomes sterile, since a people without a state sink into folklore and lethargy. And without a structured and homogeneous Society, a State (even if very well-organized) becomes powerless and ineffectual: this is happening today, to which I’ll come back later.

Second, in the past, during countless crises of the State and its institutions, France still had a State, however imperfect. Crises of the “regime” were superficial and superstructural, but it was still a state and political infrastructure that framed and aided the creativity of society.[1]

Third, roughly likening the State to the brain and Society to the organic body, as in an individual, if the former can suffer a headache while the latter remains perfectly healthy, the Nation as a whole may continue to function. However, if Society disintegrates in its organic foundation, the best state can neither govern nor save the Nation. State crises are much less severe than Societal crises. Similarly, an individual who has an excellent brain but whose body collapses will end up paralyzed and powerless.

The “historical capital” of a nation, that is to say, its creative accumulated production (cultural and material) depends on the interaction between the State and Society, but also the awareness that it is a ethno-historical unity.[2]

Now let’s deal with some shocking facts. Currently, we can not say that the French State apparatus functions poorly compared to everything we have experienced in the past. The problem is that French Society, the organic and productive force of the nation, is slowly disintegrating. The responsibility is partly — but only partly — the State’s, which has allowed it and failed to correct it. But the sickness of Society precedes that of the State, since the latter originates as a biological production of the organic body of Society, just as man is born of woman. From a holistic and interactive perspective, Society produces the state which, in turn, regulates, directs, and protects Society.

Today, the entire French Nation (like many others in Europe) suffers from extremely serious pathologies that put its survival in the medium term in question, and which have nothing to do with “institutions.” To enumerate: the aging of the indigenous population and its demographic decline, a massive immigration invasion from below (caused by or accepted with fatalism or hostility but in no way imposed by force from the outside), domestication (the psycho-behavioral source of egotism), refusal of effort (lethargy), criminal sentimentality, emasculation, passive hedonism, indifference to one’s ancestors and lineage (the germen), etc.

Some offer explanations based on external political or ideological causes: the long-term influence of Christian morality, the Freemasons, the “Jewish spirit” of Americanism, consumerism , etc. The internal explanation, which has the support of sociobiology, is that the peoples, biological groups, age just like individuals and lose their vital energy and their collective will. In the long term, they become less capable of withstanding their environment, ideological or otherwise. The external reasons are sources of irresponsibility, the internal ones of fatalism.

Nobody will ever decide. But one should not be deterministic. One must always act as if fate is surmountable and as if quiet desperation is stupid.

There are four principles (or conditions) that determine the health and creativity of a Society:

1. Ethnic homogeneity in the broadest sense, with strong anthropological kinship.
2. Values, a culture, a shared historical consciousness without inner communitarianism — that is to say, the unity of Society and the State .
3. Internal solidarity beyond economic class differences, a sense of belonging more carnal than intellectual.
4. Its own genius, that is to say, intrinsic qualities, innate creativity in a large proportion of members. This is not the prerogative of all peoples.

The political role of the state is thus to organize this ensemble and to plan for the future, that is to say, for history. But the French republican ideology (taken over by Soviet communism) imagines, from Robespierre to the hallucinating Terra nova leftists who inspire the Socialist Party, that the State, equipped with its idealism (“make France!”) can harmoniously organize a society composed of anyone from anywhere. Utopianism torpedoes all common sense. Aristotle explained that the body of a city (that is to say Society) cannot be based on chance. The State needs a well-chosen Society as the sculptor needs quality marble. Society and the State must assemble and resemble one another, and weaker of the two is the state. Why?[3]

Conclusion: If the disintegration, the ethnic chaos of French Society continues, the State, which is its projection, will eventually collapse in turn. France will disappear. But the sun will continue to shine.

Notes:

1. Montaigne believed that if the head of the State apparatus disappeared, the country would continue to operate normally. In other words, Society has its own autonomy.

2. The very original concept of “historical capital” has been formulated by the Breton nationalist movement Emsav and theorist Yann-Ber Tillenon. It describes the interaction of Society and state to build, over time, the heritage, both material and spiritual, of a Nation.

3. Because Society finances the State. Even the physical force of the state (law enforcement coercion) depends on the financial consent of Society. So the balance of power is complex. The collapse of a nation always comes from breaking the pact Society/State. And Society always generates a new State, while the State cannot create a Society.

Source: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2014/01/14/temp-2b6c3bf3a2b4d6cd4bd1be800b8d2a2f-5271290.html

 

—————

Faye, Guillaume. “State and Society.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 28 January 2014. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/01/state-and-society/ >.

The original French publication of this article, “État et Société”, can be found at Guillaume Faye’s official website (posted 13 January 2014): <http://www.gfaye.com/etat-et-societe/ >.

 

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.

 

————

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/ >.

 

Othmar Spann – Tudor

Othmar Spann: A Catholic Radical Traditionalist

By Lucian Tudor

 

Translations: Português

Othmar Spann was an Austrian philosopher who was a key influence on German conservative and traditionalist thought in the period after World War I, and he is thus considered a representative of the intellectual movement known as the “Conservative Revolution.” Spann was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Vienna, where he taught not only scientific social and economic theories, but also influenced many students with the presentation of his worldview in his lectures. As a result of this he formed a large group of followers known as the Spannkreis (“Spann Circle”). This circle of intellectuals attempted to influence politicians who would be sympathetic to “Spannian” philosophy in order to actualize its goals.[1]

Othmar Spann himself was influenced by a variety of philosophers across history, including Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, J. G. Fichte, Franz von Baader, and most notably the German Romantic thought of Adam Müller. Spann called his own worldview “Universalism,” a term which should not be confused with “universalism” in the vernacular sense; for the former is nationalistic and values particularity while the latter refers to cosmopolitan or non-particularist (even anti-particularist) ideas. Spann’s term is derived from the root word “universality,” which is in this case synonymous with related terms such as collectivity, totality, or whole.[2] Spann’s Universalism was expounded in a number of books, most notably in Der wahre Staat (“The True State”), and essentially taught the value of nationality, of the social whole over the individual, of religious (specifically Catholic) values over materialistic values, and advocated the model of a non-democratic, hierarchical, and corporatist state as the only truly valid political constitution.

Social Theory

Othmar Spann declared: “It is the fundamental truth of all social science . . . that not individuals are the truly real, but the whole, and that the individuals have reality and existence only so far as they are members of the whole.”[3] This concept, which is at the core of Spann’s sociology, is not a denial of the existence of the individual person, but a complete denial of individualism; individualism being that ideology which denies the existence and importance of supra-individual realities. Classical liberal theory, which was individualist, held an “atomistic” view of individuals and regarded only individuals as truly real; individuals which it believed were essentially disconnected and independent from each other. It also held that society only exists as an instrumental association as a result of a “social contract.” On the other hand, sociological studies have disproven this theory, showing that the whole (society) is never merely the sum of its parts (individuals) and that individuals naturally have psychological bonds with each other. This was Othmar Spann’s position, but he had his own unique way of formulating it.[4]

While the theory of individualism appears, superficially, to be correct to many people, an investigation into the matter shows that it is entirely fallacious. Individuals never act entirely independently because their behavior is always at least in part determined by the society in which they live, and by their organic, non-instrumental (and thus also non-contractual) bonds with other people in their society. Spann wrote, “according to this view, the individual is no longer self-determined and self-created, and is no longer based exclusively and entirely on its own egoicity.”[5] Spann conceived of the social order, of the whole, as an organic society (a community) in which all individuals belonging to it have a pre-existing spiritual unity. The individual person emerges as such from the social whole to which he was born and from which he is never really separated, and “thus the individual is that which is derivative.”[6]

Therefore, society is not merely a mechanical aggregate of fundamentally disparate individuals, but a whole, a community, which precedes its parts, the individuals. “Universalists contend that the mental or spiritual associative tie between individuals exists as an independent entity . . .”[7] However, Spann clarified that this does not mean that the individual has “no mental self-sufficiency,” but rather that he actualizes his personal being only as a member of the whole: “he is only able to form himself, is only able to build up his personality, when in close touch with others like unto himself; he can only sustain himself as a being endowed with mentality or spirituality, when he enjoys intimate and multiform communion with other beings similarly endowed.”[8] Therefore,

All spiritual reality present in the individual is only there and only comes into being as something that has been awakened . . . the spirituality that comes into being in an individual (whether directly or mediated) is always in some sense a reverberation of that which another spirit has called out to the individual. This means that human spirituality exists only in community, never in spiritual isolation. . . . We can say that individual spirituality only exists in community or better, in ‘spiritual community’ [Gezweiung]. All spiritual essence and reality exists as ‘spiritual community’ and only in ‘communal spirituality’ [Gezweitheit]. [9]

It is also important to clarify that Spann’s concept of society did not conceive of society as having no other spiritual bodies within it that were separate from each other. On the contrary, he recognized the importance of the various sub-groups, referred to by him as “partial wholes,” as constituent parts and elements which are different yet related, and which are harmonized by the whole under which they exist. Therefore, the whole or the totality can be understood as the unity of individuals and “partial wholes.” To reference a symbolic image, “Totality [the Whole] is analogous to white light before it is refracted by a prism into many colors,” in which the white light is the supra-temporal totality, while the prism is cosmic time which “refracts the totality into the differentiated and individuated temporal reality.”[10]

Nationality and Racial Style

Volk (“people” or “nation”), which signifies “nationality” in the cultural and ethnic sense, is an entirely different entity and subject matter from society or the whole, but for Spann the two had an important connection. Spann was a nationalist and, defining Volk in terms of belonging to a “spiritual community” with a shared culture, believed that a social whole is under normal conditions only made up of a single ethnic type. Only when people shared the same cultural background could the deep bonds which were present in earlier societies truly exist. He thus upheld the “concept of the concrete cultural community, the idea of the nation – as contrasted with the idea of unrestricted, cosmopolitan, intercourse between individuals.”[11]

Spann advocated the separation of ethnic groups under different states and was also a supporter of pan-Germanism because he believed that the German people should unite under a single Reich. Because he also believed that the German nation was intellectually superior to all other nations (a notion which can be considered as the unfortunate result of a personal bias), Spann also believed that Germans had a duty to lead Europe out of the crisis of liberal modernity and to a healthier order similar to that which had existed in the Middle Ages.[12]

Concerning the issue of race, Spann attempted to formulate a view of race which was in accordance with the Christian conception of the human being, which took into account not only his biology but also his psychological and spiritual being. This is why Spann rejected the common conception of race as a biological entity, for he did not believe that racial types were derived from biological inheritance, just as he did not believe an individual person’s character was set into place by heredity. Rather what race truly was for Spann was a cultural and spiritual character or type, so a person’s “racial purity” is determined not by biological purity but by how much his character and style of behavior conforms to a specific spiritual quality. In his comparison of the race theories of Spann and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (an influential race psychologist), Eric Voegelin had concluded:

In Spann’s race theory and in the studies of Clauss we find race as the idea of a total being: for these two scholars racial purity or blood purity is not a property of the genetic material in the biological sense, but rather the stylistic purity of the human form in all its parts, the possession of a mental stamp recognizably the same in its physical and psychological expression. [13]

However, it should be noted that while Ludwig Clauss (like Spann) did not believe that spiritual character was merely a product of genetics, he did in fact emphasize that physical race had importance because the bodily racial form must be essentially in accord with the psychical racial form with which it is associated, and with which it is always linked. As Clauss wrote,

The style of the psyche expresses itself in its arena, the animate body. But in order for this to be possible, this arena itself must be governed by a style, which in turn must stand in a structured relationship to the style of the psyche: all the features of the somatic structure are, as it were, pathways for the expression of the psyche. The racially constituted (that is, stylistically determined) psyche thus acquires a racially constituted animate body in order to express the racially constituted style of its experience in a consummate and pure manner. The psyche’s expressive style is inhibited if the style of its body does not conform perfectly with it.[14]

Likewise Julius Evola, whose thought was influenced by both Spann and Clauss, and who expanded Clauss’s race psychology to include religious matters, also affirmed that the body had a certain level of importance.[15]

On the other hand, the negative aspect of Othmar Spann’s theory of race is that it ends up dismissing the role of physical racial type entirely, and indeed many of Spann’s major works do not even mention the issue of race. A consequence of this was also the fact that Spann tolerated and even approved of critiques made by his students of National Socialist theories of race which emphasized the role of biology; an issue which would later compromise his relationship with that movement even though he was one of its supporters.[16]

The True State

Othmar Spann’s Universalism was in essence a Catholic form of “Radical Traditionalism”; he believed that there existed eternal principles upon which every social, economic, and political order should be constructed. Whereas the principles of the French Revolution – of liberalism, democracy, and socialism – were contingent upon historical circumstances, bound by world history, there are certain principles upon which most ancient and medieval states were founded which are eternally valid, derived from the Divine order. While specific past state forms which were based on these principles cannot be revived exactly as they were because they held many characteristics which are outdated and historical, the principles upon which they were built and therefore the general model which they provide are timeless and must reinstituted in the modern world, for the systems derived from the French Revolution are invalid and harmful.[17] This timeless model was the Wahre Staat or “True State” – a corporative, monarchical, and elitist state – which was central to Universalist philosophy.

1. Economics

In terms of economics, Spann, like Adam Müller, rejected both capitalism and socialism, advocating a corporatist system relatable to that of the guild system and the landed estates of the Middle Ages; a system in which fields of work and production would be organized into corporations and would be subordinated in service to the state and to the nation, and economic activity would therefore be directed by administrators rather than left solely to itself. The value of each good or commodity produced in this system was determined not by the amount of labor put into it (the labor theory of value of Marx and Smith), but by its “organic use” or “social utility,” which means its usefulness to the social whole and to the state.[18]

Spann’s major reason for rejecting capitalism was because it was individualistic, and thus had a tendency to create disharmony and weaken the spiritual bonds between individuals in the social whole. Although Spann did not believe in eliminating competition from economic life, he pointed out that the extreme competition glorified by capitalists created a market system in which there occurred a “battle of all against all” and in which undertakings were not done in service to the whole and the state but in service to self-centered interests. Universalist economics aimed to create harmony in society and economics, and therefore valued “the vitalising energy of the personal interdependence of all the members of the community . . .”[19]

Furthermore, Spann recognized that capitalism also did result in an unfair treatment by capitalists of those underneath them. Thus while he believed Marx’s theories to be theoretically flawed, Spann also mentioned that “Marx nevertheless did good service by drawing attention to the inequality of the treatment meted out to worker and to entrepreneur respectively in the individualist order of society.”[20] Spann, however, rejected socialist systems in general because while socialism seemed superficially Universalistic, it was in fact a mixture of Universalist and individualist elements. It did not recognize the primacy of the State over individuals and also held that all individuals in society should hold the same position, eliminating all class distinctions, and should receive the same amount of goods. “True universalism looks for an organic multiplicity, for inequality,” and thus recognizes differences even if it works to establish harmony between the parts.[21]

2. Politics

Spann asserted that all democratic political systems were an inversion of the truly valuable political order, which was of even greater importance than the economic system. A major problem of democracy was that it allowed, firstly, the manipulation of the government by wealthy capitalists and financiers whose moral character was usually questionable and whose goals were almost never in accord with the good of the community; and secondly, democracy allowed the triumph of self-interested demagogues who could manipulate the masses. However, even the theoretical base of democracy was flawed, according to Spann, because human beings were essentially unequal, for individuals are always in reality differentiated in their qualities and thus are suited for different positions in the social order. Democracy thus, by allowing a mass of people to decide governmental matters, meant excluding the right of superior individuals to determine the destiny of the State, for “setting the majority in the saddle means that the lower rule over the higher.”[22]

Finally, Spann noted that “demands for democracy and liberty are, once more, wholly individualistic.”[23] In the Universalist True State, the individual would subordinate his will to the whole and would be guided by a sense of selfless duty in service to the State, as opposed to asserting his individual will against all other wills. Furthermore, the individual did not possess rights because of his “rational” character and simply because of being human, as many Enlightenment thinkers asserted, but these rights were derived from the ethics of the particular social whole to which he belonged and from the laws of the State.[24] Universalism also acknowledged the inherent inequalities in human beings and supported a hierarchical organization of the political order, where there would be only “equality among equals” and the “subordination of the intellectually inferior under their intellectual betters.”[25]

In the True State, individuals who demonstrated their leadership skills, their superior nature, and the right ethical character would rise among the levels of the hierarchy. The state would be led by a powerful elite whose members would be selected from the upper levels of the hierarchy based on their merit; it was essentially a meritocratic aristocracy. Those in inferior positions would be taught to accept their role in society and respect their superiors, although all parts of the system are “nevertheless indispensable for its survival and development.”[26] Therefore, “the source of the governing power is not the sovereignty of the people, but the sovereignty of the content.”[27]

Othmar Spann, in accordance with his Catholic religious background, believed in the existence of a supra-sensual, metaphysical, and spiritual reality which existed separately from and above the material reality, and of which the material realm was its imperfect reflection. He asserted that the True State must be animated by Christian spirituality, and that its leaders must be guided by their devotion to Divine laws; the True State was thus essentially theocratic. However, the leadership of the state would receive its legitimacy not only from its religious character, but also by possessing “valid spiritual content,” which “precedes power as it is represented in law and the state.”[28] Thus Spann concluded that “history teaches us that it is the validity of spiritual values that constitutes the spiritual bond. They cannot be replaced by fire and sword, nor by any other form of force. All governance that endures, and all the order that society has thus achieved, is the result of inner domination.”[29]

The state which Spann aimed to restore was also federalistic in nature, uniting all “partial wholes” – corporate bodies and local regions which would have a certain level of local self-governance – with respect to the higher Authority. As Julius Evola wrote, in a description that is in accord with Spann’s views, “the true state exists as an organic whole comprised of distinct elements, and, embracing partial unities [wholes], each possesses a hierarchically ordered life of its own.”[30] All throughout world history the hierarchical, corporative True State appears and reappears; in the ancient states of Sparta, Rome, Persia, Medieval Europe, and so on. The structures of the states of these times “had given the members of these societies a profound feeling of security. These great civilizations had been characterized by their harmony and stability.”[31]

Liberal modernity had created a crisis in which the harmony of older societies was damaged by capitalism and in which social bonds were weakened (even if not eliminated) by individualism. However, Spann asserted that all forms of liberalism and individualism are a sickness which could never succeed in fully eliminating the original, primal reality. He predicted that in the era after World War I, the German people would reassert its rights and would create revolution restoring the True State, would recreate that “community tying man to the eternal and absolute forces present in the universe,”[32] and whose revolution would subsequently resonate all across Europe, resurrecting in modern political life the immortal principles of Universalism.

Spann’s Influence and Reception

Othmar Spann and his circle held influence largely in Germany and Austria, and it was in the latter country that their influence was the greatest. Spann’s philosophy became the basis of the ideology of the Austrian Heimwehr (“Home Guard”) which was led by Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. Leaders of the so-called “Austro-fascist state,” including Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg, were also partially influenced by Spann’s thought and by members of the “Spann circle.”[33] However, despite the fact that this state was the only one which truly attempted to actualize his ideas, Spann did not support “Austro-fascism” because he was a pan-Germanist and wanted the German people unified under a single state, which is why he joined Hitler’s National Socialist movement, which he believed would pave the way to the True State.

Despite repeated attempts to influence National Socialist ideology and the leaders of the NSDAP, Spann and his circle were rejected by most National Socialists. Alfred Rosenberg, Robert Ley, and various other authors associated with the SS made a number of attacks on Spann’s school. Rosenberg was annoyed both by Spann’s denial of the importance of blood and by his Catholic theocratic position; he wrote that “the Universalist school of Othmar Spann has successfully refuted idiotic materialist individualism . . . [but] Spann asserted against traditional Greek wisdom, and claimed that god is the measure of all things and that true religion is found only in the Catholic Church.”[34]

Aside from insisting on the reality of biological laws, other National Socialists also criticized Spann’s political proposals. They asserted that his hierarchical state would create a destructive divide between the people and their elite because it insisted on their absolute separateness; it would destroy the unity they had established between the leadership and the common folk. Although National Socialism itself had elements of elitism it was also populist, and thus they further argued that every German had the potential to take on a leadership role, and that therefore, if improved within in the Volksgemeinschaft (“Folk-Community”), the German people were thus not necessarily divisible in the strict view of superior elites and inferior masses.[35]

As was to be expected, Spann’s liberal critics complained that his anti-individualist position was supposedly too extreme, and the social democrats and Marxists argued that his corporatist state would take away the rights of the workers and grant rulership to the bourgeois leaders. Both accused Spann of being an unrealistic reactionary who wanted to revive the Middle Ages.[36] However, here we should note here that Edgar Julius Jung, who was himself basically a type of Universalist and was heavily inspired by Spann’s work, had mentioned that:

We are reproached for proceeding alongside or behind active political forces, for being romantics who fail to see reality and who indulge in dreams of an ideology of the Reich that turns toward the past. But form and formlessness represent eternal social principles, like the struggle between the microcosm and the macrocosm endures in the eternal swing of the pendulum. The phenomenal forms that mature in time are always new, but the great principles of order (mechanical or organic) always remain the same. Therefore if we look to the Middle Ages for guidance, finding there the great form, we are not only not mistaking the present time but apprehending it more concretely as an age that is itself incapable of seeing behind the scenes. [37]

Edgar Jung, who was one of Hitler’s most prominent radical Conservative opponents, expounded a philosophy which was remarkably similar to Spann’s, although there are some differences we would like to point out. Jung believed that neither Fascism nor National Socialism were precursors to the reestablishment of the True State but rather “simply another manifestation of the liberal, individualistic, and secular tradition that had emerged from the French Revolution.”[38] Fascism and National Socialism were not guided by a reference to a Divine power and were still infected with individualism, which he believed showed itself in the fact that their leaders were guided by their own ambitions and not a duty to God or a power higher than themselves.

Edgar Jung also rejected nationalism in the strict sense, although he simultaneously upheld the value of Volk and the love of fatherland, and advocated the reorganization of the European continent on a federalist basis with Germany being the leading nation of the federation. Also in contrast to Spann’s views, Jung believed that genetic inheritance did play a role in the character of human beings, although he believed this role was secondary to cultural and spiritual factors and criticized common scientific racialism for its “biological materialism.”

Jung asserted that what he saw as superior racial elements in a population should be strengthened and the inferior elements decreased: “Measures for the raising of racially valuable components of the German people and for the prevention of inferior currents must however be found today rather than tomorrow.”[39] Jung also believed that the elites of the Reich, while they should be open to accepting members of lower levels of the hierarchy who showed leadership qualities, should marry only within the elite class, for in this way a new nobility possessing leadership qualities strengthened both genetically and spiritually would be developed.[40]

Whereas Jung constantly combatted National Socialism to his life’s end, up until the Anschluss Othmar Spann had remained an enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism, always believing he could eventually influence the Third Reich leadership to adopt his philosophy. This illusion was maintained in his mind until the takeover of Austria by Germany in 1938, soon after which Spann was arrested and imprisoned because he was deemed an ideological threat, and although he was released after a few months, he was forcibly confined to his rural home.[41] After World War II he could never regain any political influence, but he left his mark in the philosophical realm. Spann had a partial influence on Eric Voegelin and also on many Neue Rechte (“New Right”) intellectuals such as Armin Mohler and Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner.[42] He has also had an influence on Radical Traditionalist thought, most notably on Julius Evola, who wrote that Spann “followed a similar line to my own,”[43] although there are obviously certain marked differences between the two thinkers. Spann’s philosophy thus, despite its flaws and limitations, has not been entirely lacking in usefulness and interest.

Notes

1. More detailed information on Othmar Spann’s life than provided in this essay can be found in John J. Haag, Othmar Spann and the Politics of “Totality”: Corporatism in Theory and Practice (Ph.D. Thesis, Rice University, 1969).

2. See Othmar Spann, Types of Economic Theory (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930), p. 61. We should note to the reader that this book is the only major work by Spann to have been published in English and has also been published under an alternative title as History of Economics.

3. Othmar Spann as quoted in Ernest Mort, “Christian Corporatism,” Modern Age, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer 1959), p. 249. Available online here: http://www.mmisi.org/ma/03_03/mort.pdf.

4. For a more in-depth and scientific overview of Spann’s studies of society, see Barth Landheer, “Othmar Spann’s Social Theories.” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 39, No. 2 (April, 1931), pp. 239–48. We should also note to our readers that Othmar Spann’s anti-individualist social theories are more similar to those of other “far Right” sociologists such as Hans Freyer and Werner Sombart. However, it should be remembered that sociologists from nearly all political positions are opposed to individualism to some extent, whether they are of the “moderate Center” or of the “far Left.” Furthermore, anti-individualism is a typical position among many mainstream sociologists today, who recognize that individualistic attitudes – which are, of course, still an issue in societies today just as they were an issue a hundred years ago – have a harmful effect on society as a whole.

5. Othmar Spann, Der wahre Staat (Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle und Meyer, 1921), p. 29. Quoted in Eric Voegelin, Theory of Governance and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1921–1938 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), p. 68.

6. Spann, Der wahre Staat, p. 29. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, p. 69.

7. Spann, Types of Economic Theory, pp. 60–61.

8. Ibid., p. 61.

9. Spann, Der wahre Staat, pp. 29 & 34. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, pp. 70–71.

10. J. Glenn Friesen, “Dooyeweerd, Spann, and the Philosophy of Totality,” Philosophia Reformata, 70 (2005), p. 6. Available online here: http://members.shaw.ca/hermandooyeweerd/Totality.pdf.

11. Spann, Types of Economic Theory, p. 199.

12. See Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” p. 48.

13. Eric Voegelin, Race and State (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 117–18.

14. Ludwig F. Clauss, Rasse und Seele (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1926), pp. 20–21. Quoted in Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), p. 307.

15. For an overview of Evola’s theory of race, see Michael Bell, “Julius Evola’s Concept of Race: A Racism of Three Degrees.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Winter 2009–2010), pp. 101–12. Available online here: http://toqonline.com/archives/v9n2/TOQv9n2Bell.pdf. For a closer comparison between the Evola’s theories and Clauss’s, see Julius Evola’s The Elements of Racial Education (Thompkins & Cariou, 2005).

16. See Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” p. 136.

17. A more in-depth explanation of “Radical Traditionalism” can be found in Chapter 1: Revolution – Counterrevolution – Tradition” in Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, trans. Guido Stucco, ed. Michael Moynihan (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002).

18. See Spann, Types of Economic Theory, pp. 162–64.

19. Ibid., p. 162.

20. Ibid., p. 226.

21. Ibid., p. 230.

22. Spann, Der wahre Staat, p. 111. Quoted in Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna, Red Vienna: The Struggle for Intellectual and Political Hegemony in Interwar Vienna, 1918–1938 (Ph.D. Dissertion, Washington University, 2010), p. 80.

23. Spann, Types of Economic Theory, pp. 212.

24. For a commentary on individual natural rights theory, see Ibid., pp.53 ff.

25. Spann, Der wahre Staat, p. 185. Quoted in Wassermann, Black Vienna, Red Vienna, p. 82.

26. Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” p. 32.

27. Othmar Spann, Kurzgefasstes System der Gesellschaftslehre (Berlin: Quelle und Meyer, 1914), p. 429. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, p. 301.

28. Spann, Gesellschaftslehre, p. 241. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, p. 297.

29. Spann, Gesellschaftslehre, p. 495. Quoted in Voegelin, Theory of Governance, p. 299.

30. Julius Evola, The Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009), p. 190.

31. Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” p. 39.

32. Ibid., pp. 40–41.

33. See Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, Alexander Lassner, The Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Era in Austria: A Reassessment (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), pp. 16, 32, & 125 ff.

34. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Sussex, England: Historical Review Press, 2004), pp. 458–59.

35. See Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” pp. 127–29.

36. See Ibid., pp. 66 ff.

37. Edgar Julius Jung, “Germany and the Conservative Revolution,” in: The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 354.

38. Larry Eugene Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung: The Conservative Revolution in Theory and Practice,” Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association, Vol. 21, No. 02 (1988), p. 163.

39. Edgar Julius Jung, “People, Race, Reich,” in: Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870–1940, edited by Alexander Jacob (Lanham, MD, USA: University Press of America, 2002), p. 101.

40. For a more in-depth overview of Jung’s life and thought, see Walter Struve, Elites Against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1973), pp. 317 ff. See also Edgar Julius Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, 2 vols. (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1995).

41. Haag, Spann and the Politics of “Totality,” pp. 154–55.

42. See our previous citations of Voegelin’s Theory of Governance and Race and State; Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932 (Stuttgart: Friedrich Vorwerk Verlag, 1950); “Othmar Spann” in Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, Vom Geist Europas, Vol. 1 (Asendorf: Muth-Verlag, 1987).

43. Evola, Path of Cinnabar, p. 155.

 

—————-

 

Tudor, Lucian. “Othmar Spann: A Catholic Radical Traditionalist.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 19 March 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/03/othmar-spann-a-catholic-radical-traditionalist/>.

Note: This essay was also republished in updated form in Lucian Tudor’s From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).

 

German Conservative Revolution – Tudor

The German Conservative Revolution & its Legacy

By Lucian Tudor

 

Translations: Suomi, Română

During the years between World War I and the establishment of the Third Reich, the political, economic, and social crises which Germany suddenly experienced as a result of its defeat in the First World War gave rise to a movement known as the “Conservative Revolution,” which is also commonly referred to as the “Conservative Revolutionary Movement,” with its members sometimes called “Revolutionary Conservatives” or even “Neoconservatives.”

The phrase “Conservative Revolution” itself was popularized as a result of a speech in 1927 by the famous poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was a Catholic cultural conservative and monarchist.[1] Here Hofmannsthal declared, “The process of which I am speaking is nothing less than a conservative revolution on such a scale as the history of Europe has never known. Its object is form, a new German reality, in which the whole nation will share.”[2]

Although these phrases give the impression that the Conservative Revolution was composed of people who shared the same worldview, this was in fact not the case because the thinkers and leaders of the Conservative Revolution often had disagreements. Furthermore, despite the fact that the philosophical ideas produced by this “new conservatism” influenced German National Socialism and also had links to Fascism, it is incorrect to assume that the people belonging to it are either Fascist or “proto-Nazi.” Although some Revolutionary Conservatives praised Italian Fascism and some also eventually joined the National Socialist Movement (although many did not), overall their worldviews were distinct from both of these political groups.

It is difficult to adequately summarize the views held by the Revolutionary Conservatives due to the fact that many of them held views that stood in contradistinction to certain views held by others in the same movement. What they generally had in common was an awareness of the importance of Volk (this term may be translated as “folk,” “nation,” “ethnicity,” or “people”) and culture, the idea of Volksgemeinschaft (“folk-community”), and a rejection of Marxism, liberalism, and democracy (particularly parliamentary democracy). Ideas that also were common among them was a rejection of the linear concept of history in favor of the cyclical concept, a conservative and non-Marxist form of socialism, and the establishment of an authoritarian elite. [3]

In brief, the movement was made of Germans who had conservative tendencies of some sort but who were disappointed with the state into which Germany had been put by its loss of World War I and sought to advance ideas that were both conservative and revolutionary in nature.

In order to obtain an adequate idea as to the nature of the Conservative Revolution and its outlook, it is best to examine the major intellectuals and their thought. The following sections will provide a brief overview of the most important Revolutionary Conservative intellectuals and their key philosophical contributions.

The Visionaries of a New Reich

The most noteworthy Germans who had an optimistic vision of the establishment of a “Third Reich” were Stefan George, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Edgar Julius Jung. Stefan George, unlike the other two, was not a typical intellectual but a poet. George expressed his Revolutionary Conservative vision of the “new Reich” largely in poetry, and this poetry did in fact reach and affect many young German nationalists and even intellectuals; and for this he is historically notable.[4] But on the intellectual level, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (who popularized the term “Third Reich”) and Edgar Julius Jung had a deeper philosophical impact.

1. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

Moeller van den Bruck was a cultural historian who became politically active at the end of the First World War. He was a founding member of the conservative “June Club,” of which he became the ideological leader.[5] In Der preussische Stil (“The Prussian Style”) he described what he believed to be the Prussian character, whose key characteristic was the “will to the state,” and in Das Recht der jungen Volker (“The Right of Young Peoples”) he presented the idea of “young peoples” (including Germany, Russia, and America) and “old peoples” (including England and France), advocating an alliance between the “younger” nations with more vitality to defeat the hegemony of Britain and France.[6]

In 1922, he contributed, along with Heinrich von Gleichen and Max Hildebert Boehm, to the book Die neue Front (“The New Front”), a manifesto of the Jungkonservativen (“Young-conservatives”).[7] A year later, Moeller van den Bruck produced his most famous work which contained a comprehensive exposition of his worldview, Das Dritte Reich, translated into English as Germany’s Third Empire.[8]

In Germany’s Third Empire, Moeller made a division between four political stances: Revolutionary, Liberal, Reactionary, and Conservative. Revolutionaries, which especially included Communists, were unrealistic in the sense that they believed they could totally brush aside all past values and traditions. Liberalism was criticized for its radical individualism, which essentially amounts to egotism and disintegrates nations and traditions. Reactionaries, on the other hand, were criticized for having the unrealistic position of desiring a complete revival of past forms, believing that everything in past society was positive. The Conservative, Moeller argued, was superior to the former three because “Conservatism seeks to preserve a nation’s values, both by conserving traditional values, as far as these still possess the power of growth, and by assimilating all new values which increase a nation’s vitality.”[9] Moeller’s “Conservative” was essentially a Revolutionary Conservative.

Moeller rejected Marxism because of its rationalism and materialism, which he argued were flawed ideologies that failed to understand the better side of human societies and life. “Socialism begins where Marxism ends,” he declared.[10] Moeller advocated a corporatist German socialism which recognized the importance of nationality and refused class warfare.

In terms of politics, Moeller rejected republicanism and asserted that true democracy was about the people taking a share in determining its destiny. He rejected monarchy as outdated and anticipated a new form of government in which a strong leader who was connected to the people would emerge. “We need leaders who feel themselves at one with the nation, who identify the nation’s fate with their own.” [11] This leader would establish a “Third Empire, a new and final Empire,” which would solve Germany’s political problems (especially its population problem).

2. Edgar Julius Jung

Another great vision of a Third Reich came from Edgar Julius Jung, a politically active intellectual who wrote the large book Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, translated into English as The Rule of the Inferiour,[12] which has sometimes been called the “bible of neo-conservatism.”[13] This book presented a devastating critique of liberalism and combined ideas from Spann, Schmitt, Pareto, and other thinkers.

Liberal democracy was rejected by Jung as the rule of masses which were manipulated by demagogues and also the rule of money because it had inherent tendencies towards plutocracy. The French Revolutionary ideas of “liberty, equality, fraternity” were all rejected as corrosive influences harmful to society and sources of individualism, which Jung viewed as a key cause of decay. Jung also rejected Marxism as a corrupt product of the French Revolution. [14] The Conservative Revolution for Jung was, in his words, the

Restoration of all those elementary laws and values without which man loses his ties with nature and God and without which he is incapable of building up a true order. In the place of equality there will be inherent standards, in the place of social consciousness a just integration into the hierarchical society, in the place of mechanical election an organic elite, in the place of bureaucratic leveling the inner responsibility of genuine self-government, in the place of mass prosperity the rights of a proud people. [15]

In the place of liberal and Marxist forms, Jung envisioned the establishment of a New Reich which would use corporatist economics (related to the medieval guild system), would be organized on a federalist basis, would be animated by Christian spirituality and the power of the Church, and would be led by an authoritarian monarchy and an elite composed of selected qualified members. In Jung’s words, “The state as the highest order of organic community must be an aristocracy; in the last and highest sense: the rule of the best. Even democracy was founded with this claim.”[16]

He also critiqued the materialistic concept of race as “biological materialism” and asserted instead the primacy of the cultural-spiritual entity (it was on this basis, rather than on biology, that the Jewish Problem was to be dealt with). Furthermore, he rejected nationalism in the normal sense of the term, supporting the concept of a federalist, supra-national, pan-European Empire, while still recognizing the reality and importance of Volk and the separateness of ethnic groups. In fact, Jung believed that the new Reich should be formed on “an indestructible volkisch foundation from which the volkisch struggle can take form.”[17]

Edgar Jung, however, was not content with merely writing about his ideas; he had great political ambitions and actively worked with parties and conservatives who agreed with him in the 1920s up until 1934.[18] The necessity of battle was already part of Jung’s philosophy: “If the German people see that, among them, combatants still live, then they become aware also of combat as the highest form of existence. The German destiny calls for men who master it. For, world-history makes the man.” [19]

During his political activity, he came to dislike the National Socialist movement due to a personal dislike for Hitler as well as his view that National Socialism was a product of modernity and was ideologically linked with Marxism and liberalism. Jung was highly active in his opposition to the NSDAP and was eventually responsible for writing Papen’s Marburg address which criticized Hitler’s government in 1934, which resulted in Jung’s death on the Night of the Long Knives.[20]

Theorists of Decline: Spengler and Klages

1. Oswald Spengler

The most famous theorist of decline is Oswald Spengler, the “doctor-prophet” who predicted the fall of the Western High Culture in his magnum opus, The Decline of the West. According to Spengler, every High Culture has its own “soul” (this refers to the essential character of a Culture) and goes through predictable cycles of birth, growth, fulfillment, decline, and demise which resemble that of the life of a plant.[21] To quote Spengler:

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. [22]

There is an important distinction in this theory between Kultur (“Culture”) and Zivilisation (“Civilization”). Culture refers to the beginning phase of a High Culture which is marked by rural life, religiosity, vitality, will-to-power, and ascendant instincts, while Civilization refers to the later phase which is marked by urbanization, irreligion, purely rational intellect, mechanized life, and decadence. Spengler particularly focused on three High Cultures which he made comparisons between: the Magian, the Classical, and the present Western High Culture. He held the view that the West, which was in its later Civilization phase, would soon enter a final imperialistic and “Caesarist” stage – a stage which, according to Spengler, marks the final flash before the end of a High Culture.[23]

Perhaps Spengler’s most important contribution to the Conservative Revolution, however, is his theory of “Prussian Socialism” which he expressed in Prussianism and Socialism, and which formed the basis of his view that conservatives and socialists should unite. In this short book he argued that the Prussian character, which was the German character par excellence, was essentially socialist. For Spengler, true socialism was primarily a matter of ethics rather than economics.[24]

This ethical, Prussian socialism meant the development and practice of work ethic, discipline, obedience, a sense of duty to the greater good and the state, self-sacrifice, and the possibility of attaining any rank by talent. Prussian socialism was differentiated from Marxism and liberalism. Marxism was not true socialism because it was materialistic and based on class conflict, which stood in contrast with the Prussian ethics of the state. Also in contrast to Prussian socialism was liberalism and capitalism, which negated the idea of duty, practiced a “piracy principle,” and created the rule of money.[25]

2. Ludwig Klages

Ludwig Klages was a less influential, although still noteworthy, theorist of decline who focused not on High Cultures, but on the decline of Life (which stands in contrast to mere Existence). Klages’s theory, named “Biocentrism,” posited a dichotomy between Seele (“Soul”) and Geist (“Spirit”); two forces in human life that were in a psychological battle with each other. Soul may be understood as pure Life, vital impulse, and feeling, while Spirit may be understood as abstract intellect, mechanical and conceptual thought, reason, and Will.[26]

According to Biocentric theory, in primordial pre-historic times, man’s Soul and body were united and thus humans lived ecstatically in accordance to the principle of Life. Over time, human Life was interfered with by Spirit, which caused humans to use conceptual (as opposed to symbolic) thought and rational intellect, thus beginning the severing of body and Soul. In this theory, the more human history progresses, the more Life is limited and ruined by the Spirit in a long but ultimately unstoppable process which ends in completely mechanized, over-civilized, and soul-less people. “Already, the machine has liberated itself from man’s control,” wrote Klages, “it is no longer man’s servant: in reality, man himself is now being enslaved by the machine.”[27]

This final stage is marked by such things as a complete disconnection from Nature, the destruction of the natural environment, massive race-mixing, and a lack of true Life, which is predicted to finally end in the death of mankind due to damage to the natural world. Klages declared, “. . . the ultimate destruction of all seems to be a foregone conclusion.”[28]

Spann and the Unified State

Othmar Spann was, from 1919 to 1938, a professor at the University of Vienna in Austria who was influential but who, despite his enthusiastic support for National Socialism, was removed by the Third Reich government due to a few ideological disagreements.[29] He was the exponent of a theory known as “Universalism” (which is entirely different from universalism in the normal sense of the term). His Universalist view of economics, politics, society, and science was expounded in numerous books, the most important of which was his most memorable work, Der wahre Staat (“The True State”).[30]

Spann’s Universalism was a corporatist theory which rejected individualism. To understand Spann’s rejection of individualism it is necessary to understand what “individualism” is because different and even contradictory definitions are given to that term; individualism here refers to the concept that the individual is absolute and no supra-individual reality exists (and therefore, society is nothing more than a collection of atoms). The reader must be aware that Spann did not make a complete denial of the individual, but rather a complete denial of individualist ideology.[31]

According to Universalist theory, the individual exists only within a particular community or society; the whole (the totality of society) precedes the parts (individuals) because the parts do not truly exist independent from the whole.[32] Spann wrote, “It is the fundamental truth of all social science . . . that it is not the individuals that are the truly real, but the whole, and that the individuals have reality and existence only so far as they are members of the whole.”[33]

Furthermore, society and the State were not entirely separable, because from the State comes the rights of the individual, family, and other groups. Liberalism, capitalism, democracy, and Marxian socialism were all rejected by Spann as individualist or materialist and corrupt products of French Revolutionary ideas. Whereas in past societies the individual was integrated into community, modern life with its liberalism had atomized society. According to Spann, “Mankind can reconcile itself to poverty because it will be and remain poor forever. But to the loss of estate, existential insecurity, uprootedness, and nothingness, the masses of affected people can never reconcile themselves.”[34] As a solution to modern decay, Spann envisioned the formation of a religious Christian, corporatist, hierarchical, and authoritarian state similar to the First Reich (the Holy Roman Empire).[35]

A lesser-known Revolutionary Conservative academic, Hans Freyer, also held similar views to Spann and challenged the ideas and results of the “Enlightenment,” particularly secularism, the idea of universal reason, the concept of a universal humanity, urbanization, and democratization. Against modern society corrupted by these things, Freyer posed the idea of a “totally integrated society” which would be completed by a powerful, non-democratic state. Culture, Volk, race, and religion would form the basis of society and state in order to restore a sense of community and common values. Freyer also joined the National Socialists believing that the movement would realize his aims but later became disappointed with it because of what he saw as its repressive nature during the Third Reich.[36]

Zehrer and Elitist Theory

Hans Zehrer was a notable contributor to and editor of the “neoconservative” magazine Die Tat, and thus eventually also a founding member of a group of intellectuals known as the Tat-Kreis (“Tat-Circle”). Zehrer held the view that “all movements began as intellectual movements of intelligent, well-qualified minorities which, because of the discrepancy between that which is and that which should be, seized the initiative.”[37] His theory was somewhat related to Vilfredo Pareto’s concept of a “circulation of elites” in that he believed that intellectuals, in most cases gifted and intelligent men emerging from any social class, were crucial in determining the succeeding social order and its ideas.

In Germany at that time, the middle class, which made up a large segment of society and of which Zehrer was a member, was facing a number of economic problems. It was Zehrer’s dream that a new political order could be established by young intellectuals of the middle class which he attempted to reach. This new order would result in the abolishment of the insecure Weimar republic and the establishment of an authoritarian elite made up largely of such intellectuals. This elite would not be subject to control by the masses and would choose its own members based on the criterion of personal quality and ability without regard to social class or wealth.[38]

Zehrer’s vision was not fulfilled due to a series of failures to establish a new state by a “revolution from above” as well because of the rise of the NSDAP, which he attempted to influence in the early 1930s despite his disdain for party rule and, after being unsuccessful, retreated from political activity. However, although most Revolutionary Conservative thinkers did not envision an elite composed almost solely of intellectuals, it is notable that they shared with Zehrer the view that an authoritarian elite should have its membership open to qualified individuals of all classes and ranks.[39]

Sombart and Conservative Socialism

Socialists with nationalist and conservative leanings such as Paul Lensch, Johann Plenge, Werner Sombart, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Oswald Spengler to the rise of a new, national, conservative socialism. Of course, it should be remembered that non-Marxist socialism already had a long history in Germany, including such people as the Kathedersozialisten (“socialists of the chair”), Adolf Stöcker, and Ferdinand Tönnies.[40] Werner Sombart himself began as a Marxist, but later became disillusioned with Marxist theory, which he realized was destructive of the human spirit and organic community much in the same way capitalism was.

Sombart is for the most part remembered for his work on the nature of capitalism, especially his works linking the materialistic character of the Jews with capitalism. The obsession with profit, ruthless business practices, indifference to quality, and “the merely rationalizing and abstracting characteristics of the trader” which were key products of capitalism, destroy any “community of labor” and disintegrate bonds between people which were more common in medieval society.[41] Sombart wrote, “Before capitalism could develop, the natural man had to be changed out of all recognition, and a rationalistically minded mechanism introduced in his stead. There had to be a transvaluation of all economic values.”[42]

Sombart’s major objections to Marxism consisted of the fact that Marxism aimed to suppress all religious feelings as well as national feelings and the values of rooted, indigenous culture; Marxism aimed not at a higher mankind but mere base “happiness.” In contrast to Marxism and capitalism, Sombart advocated a German Socialism in which economic policies would be “directed in a corporative manner,” exploitation would be ended, and hierarchy and the welfare of the whole state would be upheld.[43]

Radicalism and Nationalism: Jünger and Niekisch

1. Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger is well-known for his work on what he saw as the positive effects of warfare and battle, with himself having experienced these in World War I. Jünger rejected the bourgeois civilization of comfort and security, which he saw as weak and dying, in favor of the hardening and “magnificent” experience of action and adventure in war, which would transform a man of the bourgeois world into a “warrior.” The warrior type battled “against the eternal Utopia of peace, the pursuit of happiness, and perfection.”[44] Jünger believed that the crisis and restlessness of Germans after the World War was essentially a good thing.

In his book Der Arbeiter, the “warrior” was followed by the “worker,” a new type which would become dominant after the end of the bourgeois order. Jünger had realized that modern technology was changing the world; the individual man was losing his individuality and freedom in a mechanized world. Thus he anticipated a society in which people would accept anonymity in the masses and obedient service to the state; the population would undergo “total mobilization.”[45] To quote Jünger:

Total Mobilization is far less consummated than it consummates itself; in war and peace, it expresses the secret and inexorable claim to which our life in the age of masses and machines subjects us. It thus turns out that each individual life becomes, ever more unambiguously, the life of a worker; and that, following the wars of knights, kings, and citizens, we now have wars of workers. The first great twentieth-century conflict has offered us a presentiment of both their rational structure and their mercilessness.[46]

Ernst Jünger’s acceptance of technology in the “worker” stage stands somewhat in contrast to the position taken by his brother, Friedrich Georg Jünger, who wrote critiques of modern technological civilization (although Ernst would later in life agree with this view).[47] Ernst Jünger later changed in his attitudes during World War II, and afterwards nearly inverted his entire worldview, praising peace and individualism; a change which had not come without criticism from the Right.[48]

2. Ernst Niekisch

Another notable radical nationalist in the Conservative Revolution was Ernst Niekisch, who began as a Communist but eventually turned to a seemingly paradoxical mixture of German nationalism and Russian communism: National Bolshevism. In accordance with this new doctrine, Niekisch advocated an alliance between Soviet Russia and Germany in order to overcome the Versailles Treaty as well as to counter the power of the capitalist and anti-nationalist Western nations. However, this deviant faction, in competition with both Communists and anti-Communist nationalists, remained an unsuccessful minority.[49]

Political Theory: Schmitt and Haushofer

1. Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt was a notable Catholic philosopher of politics and jurist who was a major influence on political thought and who also supported the Third Reich government after its formation. His most famous book was The Concept of the Political, although he is also the author of numerous other works, including Political Theology and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy.

The “political,” for Schmitt, was a concept distinct from politics in the normal sense of the term, and was based on the distinction between “friend” and “enemy.” The political exists wherever there exists an enemy, a group which is different and holds different interests, and with whom there is a possibility of conflict. This criterion includes both groups outside of the state as well as within the state, and therefore both inter-state war as well as civil war is taken into account. A population can be unified and mobilized through the political act, in which an enemy is identified and battled.[50]

Schmitt also defended the practice of dictatorship, which he distinguished from “tyranny.” Dictatorship is a form of government which is established when a “state of exception” or emergency exists in which it is necessary to bypass slow parliamentary processes in order to defend the law. According to Schmitt, dictatorial power is present in any case in which a state or leader exercises power independently of the approval of majorities, regardless of whether or not this state is “democratic.” Sovereignty is the power to decide the state of exception, and thus, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”[51]

Schmitt further criticized parliamentary or liberal democracy by arguing that the original basis of parliamentarism — which held that the separation of powers and open and rational dialogue between parties would result in a well-functioning state — was in fact negated by the reality of party politics, in which party leaders, coalitions, and interest groups make decisions on policies without a discussion. Another notable argument made by Schmitt was that true democracy is not liberal democracy, in which a plurality of groups are treated equally under a single state, but a unified, homogenous state in which leaders’ decisions express the will of the unified people. In Schmitt’s words, “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second – if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”[52]

2. Karl Haushofer

Karl Haushofer was another philosopher of politics who is well-known for his theoretical work on “geopolitics” which aimed to advance Germany’s understanding of international politics and geography. Haushofer asserted that nations not only had the right to defend their land, but also to expand and colonize new lands, especially when experiencing over-population. Germany was one nation in such a position, and was thus entitled to Lebensraum (“living-space”) for its excess population. In order to overcome the domination of the Anglo-American power structure, Haushofer advocated a new system of alliances which particularly involved a German-Russian alliance (thus Haushofer can be viewed as a “Eurasianist”). Haushofer joined the National Socialists but his ideas were eventually rejected by Third Reich geopoliticians because of their hostility to Russia.[53]

The Influences of the Conservative Revolution

The thinkers of the Conservative Revolution had not only an immediate influence in Germany during the early 20th Century, but also a deep and lasting impact on right-wing (and in some cases even left-wing) thought up to the present day. Aside from the obvious influence on National Socialism, and if we assume that Otto Strasser cannot be included as part of the Conservative Revolution, then Strasserism was still clearly influenced by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Oswald Spengler.[54]

Francis Parker Yockey, the author of Imperium, also revealed influence from Spengler, Schmitt, Sombart, and Haushofer.[55] Julius Evola, the famous Italian traditionalist, is yet another writer who was affected by Revolutionary Conservative intellectuals, as is clear in such major works as Men Among the Ruins[56] and The Path of Cinnabar.[57]

More recently, the European New Right shows a great amount of inspiration from Revolutionary Conservatives. Armin Mohler, who may himself be considered a part of Germany’s Conservative Revolution as well as the New Right, is well-known for his seminal work Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932.[58] In addition, Tomislav Sunic also draws many intellectual concepts from Revolutionary Conservatives in his highly important book, Against Democracy and Equality, including Schmitt, Spengler, and to a lesser extent Spann and Sombart. [59]

Yet another intellectual in league with the New Right, Alexander Jacob, is the translator of Jung’s The Rule of the Inferiour and is also responsible for multiple works on various Revolutionary Conservatives.[60] When one considers these facts, it becomes apparent that much can be learned by studying the history and ideas of the German Conservative Revolution. It is a source of philosophical richness which can advance the Conservative position and which leaves its mark on the thought of the Right even today.

 

Notes

[1] On Hofmannsthal’s political views, see Paul Gottfried, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Interwar European Right.” Modern Age, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Fall 2007), pp. 508–19.

[2] Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation (Munich, 1927). Quoted in Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism; Its History And Dilemma In The Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 9.

[3] Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932 (Stuttgart: Friedrich Vorwerk Verlag, 1950).

[4] Robert Edward Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

[5] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 102–111.

[6] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 156–159.

[7] Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, p. 329.

[8] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire (New York: Howard Fertig, 1971).

[9] Ibid. p. 76.

[10] Ibid. p. 245.

[11] Ibid. p. 227.

[12] Edgar Julius Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, trans. Alexander Jacob (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1995).

[13] Larry Eugene Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung: The Conservative Revolution in Theory and Practice,” Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association, vol. 21, Issue 02 (June 1988), p. 142.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Edgar J. Jung, Deutsche uber Deutschland (Munich, 1932), p. 380. Quoted in Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 121–22.

[16] Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, p. 138.

[17] Jung, “Sinndeutung der konservativen Revolution in Deutschland.” Quoted inJones, “Edgar Julius Jung,” p. 167. For an overview of Jung’s philosophy, see: Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung,” pp. 144–47, 149; Walter Struve, Elites Against Democracy; Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890-1933 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1973), pp. 317–52; Alexander Jacob’s introduction to Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870–1940 (Lanham, MD, USA: University Press of America, 2002), pp. 10–16.

[18] Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung,” pp. 145–48.

[19] Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, p. 368.

[20] Jones, “Edgar Julius Jung,” pp. 147–73.

[21] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol. 1: Form and Actuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926).

[22] Ibid. p. 106.

[23] Ibid. For a good overview of Spengler’s theory, see Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (Third Edition. London: Arktos, 2010), pp. 91–98.

[24] Oswald Spengler, Selected Essays (Chicago: Gateway/Henry Regnery, 1967).

[25] Ibid.

[26] See: Joe Pryce, “On The Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages,” Revilo-Oliver.com, 2001, http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/Ludwig_Klages.html, and Lydia Baer, “The Literary Criticism of Ludwig Klages and the Klages School: An Introduction to Biocentric Thought.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan., 1941), pp. 91–138.

[27] Ludwig Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, trans. Joe Pryce, 14 May 2001, http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/515.html, 453.

[28] Ibid., http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/100.html, 2.

[29] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 204–5.

[30] Othmar Spann, Der Wahre Staat (Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle und Meyer, 1921).

[31] Barth Landheer, “Othmar Spann’s Social Theories.” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Apr., 1931), pp. 239–48.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Spann, quoted in Ernest Mort, “Christian Corporatism.” Modern Age, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer 1959), p. 249. http://www.mmisi.org/ma/03_03/mort.pdf.

[34] Spann, Der wahre Staat, p. 120. Quoted in Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality, pp. 163–64.

[35] Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna, Red Vienna: The Struggle for Intellectual and Political Hegemony in Interwar Vienna, 1918–1938 (Saint Louis, Missouri: Washington University, 2010), pp. 73–85.

[36] Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). The single book by Hans Freyer to be translated into English is Theory of Objective Mind, trans. Steven Grosby (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998).

[37] Hans Zehrer, “Die Revolution der Intelligenz,” Tat, XXI (Oct. I929), 488. Quoted in Walter Struve, “Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Jul., 1965), p. 1035.

[38] Struve, “Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist.”

[39] Ibid.

[40] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 57–58. On Tönnies, see Christopher Adair-Toteff, “Ferdinand Tonnies: Utopian Visionary,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 58-65.

[41] Alexander Jacob, “German Socialism as an Alternative to Marxism,” The Scorpion, Issue 21. http://thescorp.multics.org/21spengler.html.

[42] Werner Sombart, Economic Life in the Modern Age (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. 129.

[43] Jacob, “German Socialism as an Alternative to Marxism.”

[44] Ernst Jünger, ed., Krieg und Krieger (Berlin, 1930), 59. Quoted in Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, p. 183. See also Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, trans. Basil Greighton (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929) and Copse 125 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930).

[45] Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, pp. 185–88.

[46] Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilization,” trans. Joel Golb, in The Heidegger Controversy (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), p. 129. http://anarchistwithoutcontent.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/junger-total-mobilization-booklet.pdf.

[47] Alain de Benoist, “Soldier Worker, Rebel, Anarch: An Introduction to Ernst Jünger,” trans. Greg Johnson, The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 2008), p. 52.

[48] Julius Evola, The Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009), pp. 216–21.

[49] Klemens von Klemperer, “Towards a Fourth Reich? The History of National Bolshevism in Germany,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Apr., 1951), pp. 191–210.

[50] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded edition, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

[51] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 1.

[52] Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. E. Kennedy, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 9.

[53] Andrew Gyorgy, “The Geopolitics of War: Total War and Geostrategy.” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Nov., 1943), pp. 347–62. See also Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, p. 474.

[54] Otto Strasser, Hitler and I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1940), pp. 38–39.

[55] Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (Sausalito, Cal.: Noontide Press, 1962).

[56] Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002).

[57] Evola, The Path of Cinnabar, pp. 150–55.

[58] See note #3.

[59] See Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality, pp. 75–98, 159–64.

[60] See Jacob, Europa; “German Socialism as an Alternative to Marxism”; Introduction to Political Ideals by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005).

 

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Tudor, Lucian. “The Conservative Revolution of Germany & its Legacy.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 August 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/08/the-german-conservative-revolution-and-its-legacy/ >.

 

On the French Right – Interview with Benoist

On the French Right – New and Old: An Interview with Alain de Benoist by Frank Adler (PDF – 54.8 KB):

On the French Right – New and Old

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De Benoist, Alain. “On the French Right – New and Old: An Interview with Alain de Benoist.” Interview by Frank Adler. Telos, Vol. 2003, No. 126 (Winter 2003), pp. 113-131. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/on_the_french_right_new_and_old.pdf >.