The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

This is the story of an idea. The political concept of Eurasia, or “Eurasianism,” refers to the spiritual linking of the European and Asian peoples in the history and future of Russia. The idea behind the Eurasia movement derives from the works of Prince N. S. Trubetskoi, P. N. Savitski, G. V. Vernadski, and several others. Trubetskoi believed that the inter- connection of Eastern Slavs and the Turkic and Uralo-Altaic steppe peoples — or Turanian peoples — is one of the main building blocks of Russian history. In the 1920s, this theoretical concept found many followers among Russian émigrés dispersed in Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Germany, France, and Czechoslovakia who were searching for a new theory to combat the ideological thrust of the Marxist- Leninist revolution in Russia. A small “Eurasianists” movement developed, yet Eurasianism put down only weak roots and rapidly declined.

Neo-Eurasianism, inspired by the earlier movement, gained traction and considerable popularity in Russia during the years leading up to and following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lev Gumilev, often cited as the founder of the Neo-Eurasianist move- ment, developed a theory of ethno- genesis holding that the peoples of the Eurasian steppe included not just the Russians but also the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Gumilev regarded Russians as a “super-ethnos” kindred to Turkic peoples of the Eurasian steppe, including the Tatars, Kazakhs, and even the Chingizid Mongolians. With this theoretical synthesis, Gumilev and his followers concluded that Russia is not a natural part of “the West,” that it is instead culturally closer to Asia than to Western Europe. Neo-Euransianism thus resonates with many Russian intellectuals and politicians who fear the West and are divorced from its values.

This article is a brief introduction to the life and central ideas of the controversial Italian thinker Julius Evola (1898-1974), one of the leading representatives of the European right and of the « Traditionalist movement » (1) in the twentieth century. This movement, together with the Theosophical Society, played a leading role in promoting the study of ancient eastern wisdom, esoteric doctrines, and spirituality. Unlike the Theosophical Society, which championed democratic and egalitarian views, (2) an optimistic view of progress, and a belief in spiritual evolution, the Traditionalist movement adopted an elitist and antiegalitarian stance, a pessimistic view of ordinary life and of history, and an uncompromising rejection of the modern world. The Traditionalist movement began with René Guénon (1886-1951), a French philosopher and mathematician who converted to Islam and moved to Cairo in 1931, following the death of his first wife. Guénon revived interest in the concept of Tradition, i.e., the teachings and doctrines of ancient civilizations and religions, emphasizing its perennial value over and against the « modern world » and its offshoots: humanistic individualism, relativism, materialism, and scientism. Other important Traditionalists of the past century have included Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, and Julius Evola.

Alexander Dugin is a popular, well-connected, and academically respected professor at Moscow State University. Unlike his North American and Western European counterparts, his ideas are not censored by Russia’s mainstream media, and he more or less enjoys the favor of Putin’s Russian government. While he’s indubitably the most prominent New Right thinker in Russia, his domestic influence and his ambitious efforts to build international partnerships and relationships have made him arguably the most prominent New Right thinker in the world. 

Have secret societies and occult brotherhoods been active behind the scenes of world events for thousands of years? Do these guardians of secret wisdom shape the growth of human consciousness and influence the destiny of nations? Are hidden masters of occult knowledge empowering and infiltrating certain political, cultural, spiritual and economic movements, in fulfilment of an ancient plan? Could it be that man’s great upheavals, wars, and revolutions, as well as his pioneering discoveries in science, literature, philosophy and the arts, are the result of a ‘hidden hand’? Can we decode history and find the mysterious interface between politics and occultism, thereby uncovering the real movers and shakers in our modern world?

The Fourth Political Theory is a book that is clearly not short on ambition. I haven’t actually read it, but I already know more or less what is in it from past writings by its author Professor Alexander Dugin, as well as the lengthy video presentation he gave of his ideas at the Identitarian Ideas conference held earlier this year in Stockholm.

Dugin believes there have been three great ideologies in modern history – Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism/National Socialism – and that we are now seeing the formation of the Fourth, which is still waiting to be properly christened and so is known by an ordinal. In the footsteps of Locke, Marx, and Mussolini, we now have Dugin.

I greatly respect and like Dugin. With his Tolstoyan beard and aura of an old church father, he’s a personable and reassuring presence. But I also know how the academic world works, and how it finds all sorts of clever ways to serve different masters, and Professor Dugin is certainly well-connected to a lot of people in the Russian establishment. Is it a coincidence that his ideas support the existence of the Russian Orthodox Church or the multi-ethnic imperialism that is the unavoidable basis for a strong Russian state?

Based on this fact, I have put forward the following idea: since there are two types of people with polar ideologies, the conservatives and the liberals, in our society, we, as the conservatives, in order to influence the educational and information policy, need to have at our disposal half of the broadcast instruments, half of the educational institutes and half of media expert Community. We, the conservatives, are actually a large part of society, but in the media environment we are the minority, and this discrepancy,  injustice, and usurpation of the powerful discourse concerning the principles and values by the liberals should be eliminated. My ideas were  approved  by everyone in the Club. Someone started to say that we need more than 50%, others - that we need to somehow appear in the  field of ideology and information, but the general direction was totally supported. All agreed that we, conservatives, have to go to the counter.

Metapolitics is not politics by other means. It is neither a "strategy" to impose intellectual hegemony, nor an attempt to discredit other possible attitudes or agendas. It rests solely on the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in collective consciousness and, more generally, in human history. Through their works, Heraclitus, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx all triggered decisive revolutions, whose impact is still being felt today. History is a result of human will and action, but always within the framework of convictions, beliefs and representations which provide meaning and direction. The goal of the French New Right is to contribute to the renewal of these sociohistorical representations.

Even more now, this metapolitical impulse is based on a reflection about the evolution of Western societies in view of the coming 21st century. On the one hand, there is the growing impotence of political parties, unions, governments, classical forms of conquest and the exercise of political power, and, on the other, the rapid obsolescence of all antitheses (first and foremost, Left and Right) that have characterized modernity. Moreover, there is an unprecedented explosion of knowledge, which spreads with little regard for its consequences. In a world where closed entities have given way to interconnected networks with increasingly fuzzy reference points, metapolitical action attempts, beyond political divisions and through a new synthesis, to renew a transversal mode of thought and, ultimately, to study all areas of knowledge in order to propose a coherent worldview. Such has been the aim for over thirty years.

This manifesto summarizes all of this. The first part (Predicaments) provides a critical analysis of the present; the second part (Foundations) outlines a view concerning man and the world. Both are inspired by a multidisciplinary approach that challenges most of today’s intellectual antitheses. Tribalism and globalism, nationalism and internationalism, liberalism and Marxism, individualism and collectivism, progressivism and conservatism oppose each other with the same complacent logic of the excluded middle. For a century, these artificial oppositions have occluded what is most essential: the sheer size of a crisis that demands a radical renewal of modes of thought, decision and action. It is thus futile to seek this radical renewal in what has already been written. Yet, the French New Right has borrowed ideas from various theoretical sources. It has not hesitated to reappropriate what seems valuable in all currents of thought. This transverse approach has provoked the ire of the guardians of thought, concerned with freezing ideological orthodoxies in order the paralyze any new threatening synthesis.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, adjustments had to be made to the purely economic logic of society’s regulation and reproduction. These adjustments were less the result of conservative resistance than of the internal contradictions of the new social configuration. Sociology itself arose from real society’s resistance to political and institutional changes as well as those who invoked a “natural order” to denounce the formal and artificial character of the new mode of social regulation. For the first sociologists, the rise of individualism hatched a double fear: of “anomie” resulting from the disintegration of social bonds (Émile Durkheim) and of the “crowd” made up of atomized individuals suddenly brought together in an uncontrollable “mass” (Gustave Le Bon or Gabriel Tarde, both of whom reduce the analysis of social facts to “psychology”). The first finds an echo among counter-revolutionary thinkers in particular. The second is mainly perceptible among the bourgeoisie concerned above all with protecting itself from the “dangerous classes.”

While the nation-state supported and instituted the market, antagonism between liberalism and the “public sector” grew in tandem. Liberals never cease fulminating against the welfare state, without realizing that it is precisely the market’s extension that necessitates ever-increasing state intervention. The man whose labor is subject solely to the market’s play is indeed vulnerable, for his labor might find no takers or have no value. Modern individualism, moreover, destroyed the organic relations of proximity, which were above all relations of mutual aid and reciprocal solidarity, thus destroying old forms of social protection. While regulating supply and demand, the market does not regulate social relations, but on the contrary disorganizes them, if only because it does not take into account demands for which one cannot pay. The rise of the welfare state then becomes a necessity, since it is the only power able to correct the most glaring imbalances and attenuate the most obvious distresses.

The status quo of the West’s liberal hegemony has become global. It is a Westernization of all of humanity. This means that its norms, such as the free market, free trade, liberalism, parliamentarian democracy, human rights, and absolute individualism have become universal. This set of norms is interpreted differently in the various regions of the world, but the West regards its specific interpretation as being both self-evident and its universalization as inevitable. This is nothing less than a colonization of the spirit and of the mind. It is a new kind of colonialism, a new kind of power, and a new kind of control that is put into effect through a network. Everyone who is connected to the global network becomes subjected to its code. It is part of the postmodern West, and is rapidly becoming global. The price a nation or a people has to pay to become connected to the West’s globalization network is acceptance of these norms. It is the West’s new hegemony. It is a migration from the open hegemony of the West, as represented by the colonialism and outright imperialism of the past, to an implicit, more subtle version.

To fight this global threat to humanity, it is important to unite all the various forces that would, in earlier times, have been called anti-imperialist. In this age, we should better understand our enemy. The enemy of today is hidden. It acts by exploiting the norms and values of the Western path of development and ignoring the plurality represented by other cultures and civilizations. Today, we invite all who insist on the worth of the specific values of non-Western civilizations, and where there other forms of values exist, to challenge this attempt at a global universalization and hidden hegemony.