The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

Let us start with the simpler part: Russia. Here, Tucker Carlson has become a focal point for two polar opposites within Russian society: ideological patriots and elite Westernisers who nonetheless remain loyal to Putin and the Special Military Operation. For patriots, Tucker Carlson is simply ‘one of us’. He is a traditionalist, a right-wing conservative, and a staunch opponent of liberalism. This is what twenty-first-century emissaries to the Russian tsar look like.

In 1924, the leaders of the Soviet state, including Stalin himself, were still fully convinced that the success of the USSR was only the first step of a pan-European revolutionary process. Already in May 1924, Stalin wrote in the pamphlet “The Foundations of Leninism”:

In America, the birthplace of pragmatism, pragmatism has vanished. The globalists, especially under the Biden regime, represent an extreme form of a globalist dictatorship, severing ties with the typically American tradition established by Charles Peirce and William James. 

In Russia, the year 2024 has been proclaimed the Year of the Family. Clearly, in this area, things are quite dire for us. The alarming rates of divorce, abortion, and declining birth rates represent a national catastrophe. If we take the Year of the Family seriously, relying on the classics (but not the liberal or communist ones, as they are likely to advise something that will only hasten the disintegration of the family), we should simultaneously return to our roots and take a step forward.

We turn to the topic of Soviet-Marxist philosophy.

Chaadaev’s philosophical, spiritual emigration was developed and embodied in the poetry and personal fate of an even more extreme Westernizer, the ideal archetype for this movement, Vladimir Sergeevich Pecherin (1807–1885). Pecherin was a Westernizer from his earliest youth. Here is how he wrote about this himself in correspondence with Fedor Vasilyevich Chizhov:

At the moment of the Baptism of the Lord in the River Jordan, the Old Testament ends and the New Testament begins.

The main issue in 2024 remains the same fundamental problem as before: the confrontation between two waves — the waning wave of a unipolar world order with US hegemony and the collective West, and the rising wave of a multipolar world, embodied in BRICS-10.

This year, the West is anticipating revolutions.

Another Russian thinker belonging to the late Slavophiles was Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky (1822-1885). Danilevsky came from a line of high-ranking aristocrats. His father was a general. He was not a professional philosopher, focusing primarily on natural science, in particular, botany. In his fundamental work Russia and Europe,17 Danilevsky approaches the fundamental position of the plurality of civilizations or, as he puts it, “cultural-historical types.”

The Fourth Political Theory, upon recognising its preliminarily outlined structures, could become more systematic and detailed by examining some fundamentally important doctrines, schools, and figures for political philosophy. For instance, let us consider Hegel.

The starting point in their theories should be recognized precisely as the thought of Sophia - sophiology. You could even say that they considered Orthodoxy through sophiology, and not vice versa. This is fundamental; it allows you to clearly identify in their motivation the archaic principle itself, breaking through to the surface from under the tightening and painful fetters of focus B, imitating European rationalism.

Seriously speaking, liberal hegemony in the country is still very strong. Since 1991, virtually all major tenets disseminated in education, the humanities, and culture have been built strictly according to liberal templates.

Another key point of Solovyov’s reflections is the thesis of “all-unity.” It also represents an echo of the deep archaic intuition about the “cohesiveness”5 of all oppositions and differences.

In Hegel’s political philosophy, there is a fundamentally important transition concerning the establishment of the state (der Staat). In his notes on a course about Hegel, Heidegger focuses on the terminology of Staat — stato — status. The Latin root is stare — to stand, to establish, to set up. In the Russian language, the state (gosudarstvo) comes from the word государь (gosudar), meaning lord or master.

PRAV's Editor-in-Chief speaks out on the "message" of Daria Platonova Dugina's life and death and on her book *Eschatological Optimism*.

The themes related to the movements of the inner search for Being on the part of the Being-us, i.e. of the Dasein, which has realized in itself the consciousness of the reality of Being and seeks to attain it, to experience it in itself or to welcome it through its inner openness, to transfer to it, to identify with it, or otherwise, these are multiple themes that for the most part are not clearly identifiable and often, like the air one breathes but cannot see, fail to be crystallized in a critical reflection, as they lack the reality of being an experienced induction before becoming a reflexive deduction.

Certainly, there are those who voluntarily and consciously went to war, already possessing an ideology. There are the convinced rightists (Orthodox, monarchists, imperialists). There are the leftists (Stalinists, anti-globalists). There are left-rightists — National Bolsheviks. By the way, Prigozhin articulated, in many respects, exactly the left-right discourse — justice and strength.

The appearance in the first quarter of the 19th century of Russian conservatives (the so-called “Russian party”: Shishkov, Rastopchin, Glinka, etc.) and Slavophiles especially can be represented in this diagram as an achievement of the “haughty” Eurocentric ellipse expanding its reach to the points of Focus A (Figure 2) and the first intelligible and conscious intuitions of the Russian intellectual and political elite regarding the fact that Russia is a distinctive and original culture and civilization, not just a “European country.”