The Fourth Political Theory

The fourth political theory is a book created by Alexander Dugin and published by Arktos Media Ltd. with a Forward by Alain Soral. The book, published in 2012 discusses the justification and the theoretical basis for creating a new political theory. It is heavily inspired by Postmodernists, Conservative Revolutionary, and Sociological Marxist Literature, texts, and theory while attempting to break free from the main modernist ideologies that have sought to maintain the monopoly on Modernism. This included Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism. It attempts to "break into a 'new hermeneutic cycle'" of these ideologies in order not to fall into the same ideological pitfalls that they provided. It takes from, and inspired by the works of Georg Lukács, Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetskoy, Georges Sorel,René Guénon,Guy Debord,Gilles Deleuze, some of Lenin, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Nikolai Berdyaev, Nietzsche, Hegel, Nikolai Danivsky, Frans Boas, Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Alain de Benoist, Julius Evola, Nikolai Ustrialov, Ernst Niekisch, Alexander Zinoviev, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Jünger, Lev Gumilev, Gennady Zyuganov, Michel Foucault, and many others. The book was vague in describing the doctrine of the political theory but instead took the approach for leaving the foundations on which to form the theory, mainly describing in Chapter 12 to break away from the object-subject dualism of practice and theory and thus merge it (hinting at the philosophical works of Kitaro Nishida).

Chapters

Forward

A short by Alain Sorel. It explains that Dugin attempts to look into traditional forms of spirituality in the pre-modern in order to oppose the post-modern society and spectacle of today. He references his own book . He said some good words of Dugin and said the book is "A genuine manual for cultural guerrilla warfare".

The Birth of the Concept

He brought up the three main Ideologies that signified the Modernist era. The modernist era has taken up the term "apolitical" and determined that Ideology is dead. These three Ideologies from chronological order of appearance is Liberalism which has brought upon the Left and right spectrum, Communism which has brought up the issue of classes, and Fascism which was a reaction to the other two. Liberalism, claimed Dugin, has established itself "the Justification of its claim to the entire legacy of the enlightenment" and ultimately won out of the two other ideologies within the 20th century. The subject of Fascism is the state, the subject of Communism is class, and the subject of liberalism is the individual without any collective identity. Liberalism has taken the form of post-liberalism and thus the sub-individual is taken as a subject. This has co-insided with the post-industrial era. Reason, scientism, and positivism were once regarded in liberalism as positive but are now considered oppressive as they interfere with the individuals total freedom from any kind of limits. Limits such as Morality, identity, reason, and discipline. It is what Fukuyama claimed was "the end of history". The other two ideologies have sought to have undermined modernity in covert or overt fashion. The fourth political theory opposes "Postmodernity, The post industrial society, liberal thought realized in practice, and globalization". Hence "The Fourth political theory is the amalgamation of a common project and arises from a common impulse to everything that was discarded, toppled, and humiliated during the course of constructing 'the society of the spectacle'". The important distinction that makes this book differ from historically National Bolshevik movements have been in this quote, "a Mechanical addition of the second political theory to the third will not, by itself, lead us anywhere. Only in retrospect can we delineate their commonalities, which were staunchly opposed to liberalism.". Whether the interpretation of historical nationalist Bolshevik as correct in this case is another matter. Dugin uses Tradition as a concept that should be borrowed from the pre-modern as "a set of transcendental metaphysical principles which lies at the heart of all authentic religions".

Dasein as an actor

The four hypothesis in order to find the historical subject

• Abandoning all types of contenders for role of historical subject, assume it's a compound subject of individual, class, state, nation, race at the same time. (contradictory?)
• Use phenomenology to deduce the Historical subject, where history has a pre-subject, and considering history without a subject. Consider Deleuzes hypothesis about the rhizome.
• Use phenomenology to "rush several steps ahead. Consider Heidegger's Dasein
• Use your imagination. (Gaston Bachelard )

It is stressed that fourth political theory must enter into new hermeneutic cycle. Reject the historical subjects of the previous political theories, individual, class, state/race. With Fascism and national socialism Dugin rejects racism, said it was the reason for its collapse, both historically and philosophically. Dugin claims the ideology of progress racist "in its structure... discriminates against the past and the present... a violation of the rights of the dead". Reject the

Popular Misconceptions of the fourth political theory

It's Racist

The fourth political theory explicitly proclaims itself to be non-racist but reject the term anti-racist due to the implication of western racism associated with that term and included in it a standpoint theory approach it it's rejection.

"It is doubtful that one society is capable of comprehending another society at the same level as it is comprehended its own members. Such a possibility presupposes the existence of meta-society, the society-God, which could operate with the ultimate depths of consciousness in the same manner as consciousness operates with awareness, noesis, intentionality, logic, time, and finally with the world. Obviously, Western society is particularly afflicted with such an ethnocentric approach and 'universal' pretensions rooted in its racist and colonialist past. But in the 20th century this was proven to be completely unfounded and false. Structuralists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, postmodernists, phenomenologists, linguists, existentialists, and so on, have all deployed convincing arguments demonstrating that the inner nature of such an attitude is rooted in the will to power and paranoid imposition of One's own identity on the Other. This illness is called Western Racism." -- The fourth political theory

Rejection of the race theories of Nazism

" If we begin with fascism and National Socialism (having "ripping them out of its own 'hermeneutic cycle'"), then here we must definitively reject all forms of racism. Racism is what caused the collapse of National Socialism in the historical, geopolitical, and theoretical sense... Racism is based on the belief of the innate objective superiority of one human race over another."

"

and rejection of other forms of Racism

"cultural (asserting that there are high and low cultures), civilizational (dividing people into those civilized and those insufficiently civilized), technological (viewing technological development as the main criterion for the value of a society), social (stating, in the spirit of the protestant doctrine of predestination, that the rich are the best and the greatest compared to the poor), economic (in which all of humanity is ranked according to the degree of material well being), and evolutionary (for which it is axiomatic that human society is the result of biological development, in which the basic processes of evolution of species-Survival of the fittest, natural selection - continue today) " Shortly after that quote Dugin criticizes the witch hunts that so called "anti-racists" have made and defended the character of Dieudonné M'bala M'bala from the aforementioned.

It's [blank]-phobic

Transphobia

In the fourth political theory they reject the Liberal individualist mindset and the post-liberal (post-modern) mindset of Sub-individuality and the fetishation of the sub-individual (the cyborg of Donna Haraway?). Questionable quotes has been highlighted here. "It's not by chance the hero's of post modernity are 'freaks' and 'monsters' ,'transvestites' and 'degenerates' -- this is the law of style. Against the backdrop of the world's clowns, nothing and no one could look 'too archaic', not even the people of tradition who ignore the imperatives of modern life." In the chapter on gender it is stated that instead of looking for the hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine ideal like fascism does, or the "total equality" and "no qualitative difference" concept of Marxism, or the Singular propertied "man" and disregard for all below of the social status of man of liberalism (or the everyone is a man assertion of late liberalism/ liberal feminism). Instead they look to the idea of the androgyne and the theory of Lévy-Brühl, also into the sociology of the non-White societies as taken from the Anthropological studies of Lévi-Strauss. They do accept the Sociological conception of Gender as having any meaning to the real world and are idealists in this regard.

It's just fascism with red garb

The links to fascism is some philosophers like Evola and Heidegger and attributing and incorporating some of their philosophical ideas such as ethnos into the fourth political ideology is the closest that one can claim the ideology of Dugin's fourth political theory being "fascist" or "fascist adjacent". The claim that Revolutionary Conservatives such as Paetel and Niekisch (who was beaten blind by the Gestapo) is fascist is unfounded and explicitly rejected the "corporatist fascist" state and it's capitalist characteristics . Argument by by association is a fallacy .

External Links

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