My 2014 Review of book by Putin's favorite philosopher, Alexander Dugin

20220227 extra

Book is entitled “The Fourth Political Theory.”

The fact that Vladimir Putin takes this man seriously is dangerous.  There is nothing here.

It is not that this philosopher says anything particularly objectionable. It is that how he says it is entirely unintelligible. He talks about the fourth political theory. There is no theory. That is the essence of the book. It is not there, and yet, there is a great need for a theory. Liberalism, as he correctly points out, does not work. Neither did Communism or Fascism. There needs to be a path forward.

This book doesn't even deign to dance around the question of a coherent philosophy. It is simply vapid, empty, nothing here.

Handing Putin this empty vessel, this vapor in which he can see whatever he chooses, is as dangerous as giving Hitler the German philosophers and romantics such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner to draw on.  The philosophical underpinning of his aggression against Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic States seems to be a concept called Eurasianism, one of Dugin's pets.

Nonetheless, in the grand tradition of deconstructionism, reading between the lines, trying to make sense out of a text which makes no sense, I am writing a lengthy review.  I am doing this in two parts. This review itself is an overview, a collection of opinions about the work. Because I'm afraid it will be rather tedious, I include chapter summaries as a series of comments.

Dugin's writing style is definitely postmodern. Postmodernists do not believe that the text alone can carry meaning, but rather, it has to be deconstructed. They devalue text. Dugin's text certainly should be devalued. It flows on endlessly, without really saying much.

To add to the confusion, he employs the common philosopher's trope of pretending that a concept can only be well represented in its original language, which he happens to know, and he will attempt for the sake of the unwashed to explain.  In German he uses the word Dasein, in Russian narod.  Dasein means being, and narod means people.  There are nuances in the languages, but let me assure you as a writer who knows German, Russian and French quite well, more is lost in the obscurity of using the foreign words than could possibly be gained through understanding the nuances.  In this case, language obfuscates rather than clarifies. It does cultivate a certain reverence for the author's erudition, which I suspect is the major purpose.  My English words for the practice include pretense, sophistry, pedantry and rhetoric.  The French poseur and the German Luftmensch would not be amiss.

Dugin's bibliography is very extensive. If ever there were an occasion to dismiss dead white males, this is it.  They are mostly philosophers.  The sociologists and anthropologists he cites did their best work in the 19th century.

Such a narrow limitation might be justified in some contexts. If I were writing a cookbook, you would expect that most of the bibliography would consist of other cookbooks.  However, the subject here is the condition of man. Dugin is writing about political orders, how should we manage our lives. The science of what people are, how people act, and how we became the way we are is extraordinarily relevant. Yet, all of the people he cites are other philosophers, people few have ever heard of.

More strongly, Dugin expressly says that he does not believe in science. The opening of Chapter Two begins "Being a supporter of cyclical development, and an opponent of Francis Bacon and his theory of knowledge...."

Francis Bacon was the father of the scientific method - empiricism. The idea is that in science you form a hypothesis, and then you formulate one or more devices to test to see if the hypothesis is true. Using the scientific method, it is possible to immediately disprove some hypotheses, such as "bricks always float."  If you cannot disprove it, you increasingly act on the assumption that it might be true, or is probably true, gaining confidence as it stands the test of time.

If you reject Bacon, you not only reject a body of knowledge, you are left without a theory of how you know the things you know.  You are free to make it up.  This book is an exercise in making it up.  Just like Marxism.

Like most pure philosophers, Dugin is working in the realm of nice-sounding but untested hypotheses. Marx had a number of theories about how society is organized (rigid social classes) and how people operate (altruistically).  He never put them to a test. When Communism was implemented, it was found that he was radically, gravely wrong on both. Fascists likewise discovered that people don't always put the interest of the state first.  Democracy makes the naïve assumptions that people are equal in ability and that they know what is good for themselves.  All are wrong in matters of degree.  There was ample opportunity for Dugin to say something useful, but he missed it.

Never putting his ideas to the test, Dugin, for instance, is able to believe that racism is bad but ethnos, believing in your own people, is good.  His Eurasia theme is based on the notion that peoples within a "civilization" have common interests and should be mutually supportive.  A quick mental survey of the real world reveals this to be nonsense.  His arguments beg for examples, none of which he provides.

The great danger and Dugin is this his work might be taken as the foundation for political philosophy by the likes of Vladimir Putin. It has never been tested - it is only a collection of ideas that might look good on paper. To rush them into practice without testing them is the heart of folly. Yet, it is exactly that kind of folly which ushered in Communism and Fascism in the 20th century, and almost every lame brained school reform in history. One must be wary.

It is as if a vast number witch doctors all wrote books on how to cure patients of their various ills. They all reference one another's increasingly fantastic descriptions of incantations and potions, but none of them reference actual patient cases, and none have a track record of curing anything.  So why should we believe philosophers who do nothing except quote other philosophers? Philosophy has to be tied to real life.

Dugin doesn't have a thing to say about the evolutionary psychologists, sociobiologists, geneticists and other living scientists who are investigating what man is and how he came to be the way he is.  Dennett, Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Pinker, Ridley and Nicholas Wade are nowhere to be found. These are the scientists have earned their wings expanding the realm of human knowledge and gone on to write a bit of philosophy. They earned their place on the podium from which they can talk with authority about the nature of man.  Moreover, the average literate person has actually heard of some of them.

Contrast this with the pure philosophers of our age, people like Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and now Dugin. They refer mainly to each other. Each has a hard core of advocates - it would not be amiss to call them nuts, like Marx' Bolsheviks - who absolutely revere them. However, the mainstream thinkers, and academics, don't know or care who they are. This obscurity is merited. These people haven't contributed anything lasting to the world of ideas. They contribute conflicting opinions, but opinions without substance, opinions that cannot be validated, but can only be argued in coffee houses amongst the navel-gazing circle of philosophers.

What about the ideas in the book?  Here are some of the major themes.

The world has seen three major political theories since the Enlightenment: liberalism, Communism and Fascism.  They appeared in that order and are disappearing in reverse order.  Dugin sweepingly writes that liberalism exalts the individual, Communism the social class, and Fascism the state.  Even in theory that is an oversimplification.  In actuality, with which Dugin rarely troubles himself, the latter two have only been implemented as dictatorships.  His definition of liberalism embraces every manifestation from Hayek and Friedman's libertarianism to modern state socialism.

The key features of liberalism, per Dugin, are that it is all about the individual, not the state, the people, or presumably family.  Tribes and races are irrelevant, and have no claim on the individual.  People own private property, and they are bound, even in government, by contract.  Free markets dominate.

Liberalism has expanded into globalization.  Dugin universally condemns globalization.  To me this means a global marketplace for goods, both tangible and intangible, services, media and cultural artefacts.  I searched the book in vain for a similar description by Dugin.  Anyhow, to him it is bad.  It is bad mainly because it is driven by the archfiend of the unipolar world (two of his words), America.

This is one of many areas in which I long to agree with Dugin, but find nothing concrete to which I can say, "Yes!"  I resent that the traditional fairy tales have been replaced by Disney; that my neighbors' kids are learning English by watching the awful TV show Monster High; that manufacturing is having a hard time getting a foothold in Ukraine because the Chinese do it so cheaply, and Western banks make credit difficult.  Why couldn't Dugin come up with such a list himself, to illustrate the ills of globalization?

Dugin celebrates the narod (народ - Russian for people, folk, ethnicity, any of which terms would work just fine) and the civilization.  Here he uses Huntington's categorization of civilizations: Western (US, Canada, Western Europe), Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, Indian, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and African.  His vaunted Eurasia, the counterweight to America and the EU, has the Slavic-Orthodox civilization at its center.  He forces himself into two tight spots.

First, he posits that there is a commonality of interest within each civilization.  He fails to notice that the one civilization which seems to have united, the European Union, is fraying badly.  He also ignores the fact that the other unions seem stillborn.  Arab countries are wary of each other.  Latin American countries still nurse grudges dating back to the 19th century War of the Pacific and War of the Triple Alliance.  The Chinese and Vietnamese are at each other's throats, and his own Eurasia is having great difficulty pulling itself together even as a weak customs union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia.

Ukraine has made it abundantly clear it wants no part of Russia, especially not being part of Russia.  That has been done before, and it was miserable. Perhaps as a sop to Putin, Dugin writes "The Western border of the Eurasianist civilisation goes somewhat more East of the Western border of the Ukraine , making that newly-formulated government a fortiori fragile and not viable." 

Most of Ukraine speaks Russian, it is true.  Just like English in Ireland, it was forced on them.  Many Ukrainians were exiled to the Russian Far East, where they had to speak it.  Quite a few Russians were resettled in Ukraine.  Moreover, Russian is a world language, like it or not. 

Language is not a reliable measure of the people's sentiment.  Their national symbols are a better indication.  Ukraine's symbol is the Cossack, fighting against all odds to be free.  Russia's is the bear, smothering everything in its tyrannical embrace.  Russia's attempts to Russify Ukraine first by charm, then starvation and then dilution have all failed.  Today, even the eastern oblasts, what Putin wants to call "New Russia," are showing little enthusiasm for Putin's attempt to force it into Russia proper through the terrorism of the "little green men," Russian soldiers without insignia and mercenaries he has smuggled over the border.  No, the border of Eurasia, if such exists, runs along Ukraine's eastern border.

One of Dugin's intellectual comrades in arms, and a man who has written something intelligible, is Alain de Benoist.  I give a good review to his [[ASIN:1907166165 The Problem of Democracy]].  Tellingly, de Benoist supports the opinion that Ukraine is its own country and ought to be left alone.

The second point he misses is that the named civilizations map more or less to races, which he would like to pretend don't exist.  [[ASIN:1594204462 Nicholas Wade]], tracing the evolution of man, says that all other races split from the Africans 50,000 years ago; Europeans from Asians 30,000, Amerindians from Asians 15,000 years back, and Indians and Semitic peoples from Europeans about the time of the agricultural revolution, the Japanese from Chinese somewhat more recently.  Per [[ASIN:0465020429 Harpending and Cochran]], evolution has been especially rapid in the last 10,000 years, resulting in differences in physiognomy, temperament and other mental qualities among the different "civilizations."  If you catch the drift of the previous sentence, I can narrow down which civilization you might belong to.  If you are offended, I know exactly which one.  Anyhow, peoples, however you choose to label them, think differently.

The book ends with a whimper.  Without ever saying what he is for, Dugin lamely concludes the book with a paragraph about what he is against:  "But there are some who think otherwise. Who are aligned against such a project? Those who want to impose uniformity, the one (American) way of life, One World. And their methods are force, temptation, and persuasion. They are against multipolarity. So they are against us."

As promised, I will add comments detailing the chapters.