The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

In this monograph, Dugin provides an overview of the primary foreign and Russian sources and schools that influenced the establishment of ethnosociology as an independent and original scientific discipline. Dugin offers a profoundly philosophical approach to the categories of the “ethnos,” “narod,” “nation” and “society,” providing clear definitions of these concepts, and expounding a broader ethnosociological taxonomy. For the first time in the field, this work brings a consistent approach to a broad spectrum of knowledge, as well as elucidating various methodologies of ethnosociological analysis, bringing everything together into a single, easily applicable system.

This volume is an invaluable manual for those specializing in sociology, philosophy, political science, cultural studies, ethnology, international relations, state, and law, as well as being of interest to those who follow the current developments in the humanities.

This volume is an invaluable manual for those specializing in sociology, philosophy, political science, cultural studies, ethnology, international relations, state, and law, as well as being of interest to those who follow the current developments in the humanities.

The Fourth Political Theory treats the concept “narod” as an independent legal and philosophical category, beyond its interpretations in the context of the three political theories of Modernity. But the “narod” is understood existentially, as Dasein. Heidegger’s formula “Dasein existiert völkisch” is key. The Fourth Political Theory understands the narod, the populus, as Dasein, Volk als Dasein. That makes the phenomenon of populism not indistinct, chaotic, and spontaneous, but deeply grounded, philosophical, and avant-garde. In this case, the Fourth Political Theory can be regarded as a “metaphysics of populism,” explaining its appearance and supplying the blind protest of humanity against the satanic elite that has seized power over it with a strategy, consciousness, thought, a system, and a plan of struggle.

To conclude this preface to the Italian edition, I want to emphasize: the Fourth Political Theory appeals to everyone – to traditionalists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, persons with convictions and persons without convictions. It is an invitation to think, and not the imposition of ready-made judgments or models. Our goal is to awaken in Italian society an interest towards political philosophy, towards ideas and towards an acute – truly Italian – perception of reality.

Modern European civilization is the historical continuation of Mediterranean civilization. The Indo-European element is predominant in this continuity, as the Indo-European tradition makes up Europe’s main linguistic and cultural matrix. If we recall Dumézil’s reconstruction of the trifunctional system here, then we immediately obtain a sociological map of Europe, the social structure of which is dominated by a constantly reproduced principle of three prevailing castes: priests, warriors, and producers. Indeed, we encounter none other than this stratification of European societies at the most different historical stages and under different names and titles.

The classic expression of this order was the ancient epoch of Mediterranean societies beginning with the Achaean conquests and Homeric Greece. Such a system was characteristic of Ancient Greece and Rome with the exception of periods of decline distinguished by a strengthening of the political positions of “urban dwellers”, who represented a mixture of higher castes with uprooted peasants that gave birth to a new type of merchant hitherto alien to classical Indo-European societies. This type of merchant could have taken shape through the degradation and materialization of the warrior caste (which Plato describes in his Republic as the phenomenon of timocracy), or from below through a specific deviation from social type on the part of former peasants or urban artisans. It cannot be ruled out that this was the result of influences that were altogether foreign to the Indo-European cultural circle, such as Phoenician or, more broadly, Semitic cultures, for whom trade was a widespread social occupation. In the city-states of Greece, “urban dwellers” and “citizens”, i.e., “townspeople”, formed a specific social milieu in which the three classical functions of Indo-European society found parodical manifestation. In the very least, this is what Aristotle presented in his Politics. The authority of king-priests (the sacred monarchy) transformed into tyranny. The domination of the warrior aristocracy gave way to domination by a financial oligarchy. The organic self-government of ethnically homogeneous and solidary communities (polity) became “democracy”, or the power of the sporadic and disparate crowd unified only by territory of urban residence.

e are talking about ideologies such as Chavismo in Venezuela, undoubtedly patriotic socialist doctrine, based on the political creativity of Hugo Chavez, who managed to forge a Fourth Way in relation to liberal-capitalism, communism and chauvinistic nationalism, reconciling its Peronist and Velasquist influences with perspective of a Communal State based on the productive autonomy of the workers. Your purpose? As outlined in his Plan de la Patria, establishing a multipolar and pluricentric world order and effectively building a socialism based on patriotic values ​​in Venezuela.

The pure individual must be a carrier of physical immortality, as there will be nothing in him that could die. There should be no hint of structure or filiation in him. He should be fully liberated of all forms of collective identity and also of existence. This is the ‘end of economics’, the ‘death of the person’, while at the same time being the flowering of chrematistics and the immortality of the (post-human) individual.

The seed of the human rots, but in its place there is no resurrected life, but a simulacrum, an electronic Antichrist. Capital is etymologically related to head (the Latin caput), i.e. capital has historically been a preparation for the coming of artificial intelligence.

So what does the economic aspect of the Fourth Political Theory, which challenges liberalism in its final (terminal) stage, consist of?
We must theoretically affirm a radical return to the integral worker, to the economic person against the disintegrated capitalist ‘order’ (organized chaos to be more precise) and the chrematistic individual. This means radical de-urbanisation and a return to agricultural practice, to the creation of sovereign farmer’s communities. This is the 4PT economic program: the resurrection of economics after the dark night of chrematistics, the rebirth of the economic person from the abyss of individualism.

The sequel to the bestseller The Fourth Political Theory, expanding further on the fourth political theory. All the political systems of the modern age have been the products of three distinct ideologies: the first, and oldest, is liberal democracy; the second is Marxism; and the third is fascism. The latter two have long since failed and passed out of the pages of history, and the first no longer operates as an ideology, but rather as something taken for granted. The world today finds itself on the brink of a post-political reality — one in which the values of liberalism are so deeply embedded that the average person is not aware that there is an ideology at work around him. As a result, liberalism is threatening to monopolise political discourse and drown the world in a universal sameness, destroying everything that makes the various cultures and peoples unique. According to Alexander Dugin, what is needed to break through this morass is a fourth ideology — one that will sift through the debris of the first three to look for elements that might be useful, but that remains innovative and unique in itself.

The Ways of the Absolute was written in 1989. Its main task was presenting the foundations of Traditionalism, exhibiting how Tradition understands the most important metaphysical problems, and on what philosophical principles the sacred worldview is built. We considered the present work to be a kind of introduction to Traditionalism, as transmitting into the Russian context the main lines of such eminent modern Traditionalists as René Guénon (the founding father of this tendency), Julius Evola, etc. We pursued an altogether definite purpose, and it predetermined the topics selected, the methods of presentation, and the emphases. It was extremely important for us to at once put Traditionalist through in its proper context, and show its radical non-conformism, its rigid alternity to academic, “humanitarian” and profane philosophical trends in modern culture. Traditionalism is not a history of religions, not a philosophy, not a structural sociological analysis. It is more of an ideology or meta-ideology that is totalitarian to a considerable extent and places rather harsh demands before those who accept and profess it. Either man breaks with the totality of the worldview cliches of modernity diffused throughout his environment, completely revises his views and positions, investigates the profane genesis and then rejects them all at once in order to accept the norms of Tradition with perfect confidence and strict conviction, or he will remain essentially outside of it, outside the sacred fence, in the Eleusinian swamps of the modern world in which there is no fundamental difference between highbrow professors, philosophers, and the obedient, absolutely unreflective mass of laymen, including even those intellectuals who for “academic” reasons are interested in various “extravagant” subjects, such as theology, rituals, symbolism, traditional societies, etc.

In Wirth’s view, the main key to understanding this language, and all existing languages and traditions, is the year. The year and man, the year and God, the year and nature, the year and time, the year and space are, in Wirth’s view, synonymous concepts. Man is the embodiment of condensed time. Time in and of itself is a divine manifestation.

The northern, polar cycle is the highest knowledge and, as follows, everything else is to be explained through the calendar. Special attention should be paid to the natural features of the North Pole. We know that a day there lasts not 24 hours, but six months, as does a night. For example, such a notion as the “midnight sun”, which is addressed in many of the Dionysian mysteries and is a generally important element in multiple sacred theories, acquires an entirely natural sense in Arctida – natural-magical meaning. This is the sun that shines at midnight at the North Pole during the summer solstice. Indeed, there is sun, and there is midnight. The memory of this midnight sun, like the memory of the primordial homeland of our ancestors, has been preserved in traditional models and been passed down from generation to generation in the form of legends and stories.