The Ethnosociological and Existential Dimensions of Alexander Dugin’s Populism

If in 2004 Canovan could write that, “few political theorists believe that populism deserves their attention,” by 2017, as White and Ypi observe, “contemporary political theory has made the question of the ‘people’ a topic of sustained analysis.”[1] Even so, “what a people is…is a matter of enduring dispute.”[2] One of the disputed definitions of what a people is comes from the domain of right-wing populism.[3] While the political relevance of right-wing populist challenges to liberal democracy is widely recognized, the theoretical bases of right-wing populism are rarely the targets of sustained analysis. Yet, what Spektorowski writes about the New Right perhaps applies also to right-wing populisms more generally: their importance “lies […] in [their] theoretical innovation.”[4] This paper is meant to be a contribution to the general study of the theoretical innovations of right-wing populism. Specifically, it focuses on Alexander Dugin’s populism. First, I briefly introduce the place of the “people” in Dugin’s fourth political theory. Second and third, comprising the bulk of the essay, I provide an overview of the ethnosociological and existential dimensions of Dugin’s populism. Fourth, I briefly outline an additional, “noological” aspect before concluding. 

Often, scholars critical of populism tend to collapse right-wing populism into a species of fascism or racism and lambaste it for failing to meet a number of criteria of ethical legitimacy, such as openness to otherness and pluralism.

But since theorists of right-wing populism are not usually studied adequately on their own terms as theorists, criticisms against them often read like superficial screeds, rote operations, consisting in the mere imposition of liberal or social-democratic principles onto phenomena worth studying in their own right.[5] Yet the common equation “anti-liberal = fascist = nationalist = racist = Nazi” might distort the phenomena, preventing an adequate understanding of things.[6]Gregor, for instance, argues that fascists were neither nationalists nor racists, calling the common equation between fascism and nationalism “part of the folk wisdom of political science.”[7] Gregor argues that we gain a better understanding by attending to the actual political theory of fascism, according to which the nation is a product of the state. On that view, fascism is better called statism than nationalism. Such adjustments, based on distinctions drawn from the actual theoreticians of fascism, provide a sounder starting point for understanding than does the folk wisdom of the field. In trying to understand right-wing populism, we should move away from folk wisdom toward conceptual precision.

There are three reasons why theorizing about right-wing populism should include the effort to take right-wing theorists themselves seriously on their own terms: (1) if those theorists are regarded as enemies of a given political position, the injunction to “know thy enemy” justifies a more thorough exercise in comprehension than hasty subsumption under the labels of fascism or racism offers; (2) if an analyst champions an ethic of openness to otherness, the challenge posed by right-wing anti-liberal populist theory can be seen as an invitation to extend the ethic of openness not just to the good others (whoever they may be), but to those assumed to be bad others, too, as a matter of fidelity to the ethic of openness, or to probe the limits of that ethic; (3) without maintaining either a position of frank enmity or a political ethic of openness, i.e. one that is by default open to a certain notion of the “the good other” and closed to that of “the bad other,” an analyst may simply want to access the broadest spectrum of relevant theoretical alternatives from a desire to understand, as a sort of exercise in the liberal arts, meant to liberate thought to the extent possible under the circumstances from the strict confines of a worldview or ideology, whether liberal, social-democratic, or anything else. 

The Narod as the Subject of the Fourth Political Theory

We must begin from the fact that Dugin’s populism is part of his so-called “fourth political theory.” The basic idea of the fourth political theory consists in its claim to reject what it sees as the three dominant political theories or ideologies (Dugin uses the terms interchangeably, for the most part) of the twentieth century:

• liberalism,
• communism, and
• third way approaches, including fascism and Nazism. 

Negatively defined, the fourth political theory is the intellectual space constituted by a rejection of the basic axioms of those ideologies. Dugin demonstrates one meaning of this rejection when considering the “subject” of each political theory. The subject in liberalism is the individual, in communism the class, in Nazism the race, and in fascism the state. The fourth political theory rejects each alternative. That leaves open the question of who is its subject or primary unit of analysis. Although in some writings he explores various other candidates, his most radical answer is that the subject of the fourth political theory is “the people” (narod, in Russian). Of course, that doesn’t tell us much until we have a better understanding of what “the people” means for Dugin and how it is distinct from the individual, the class, the race, and the state. To get a handle on what he means by the people, we have to look to his theory of ethnosociology and writings on Heidegger.

Ethnosociology

In his textbook called Etnosotsiologiya (Ethnosociology), Dugin both presents an overview of what he regards as the most basic field of sociological studies and makes what he thinks is his distinct contribution to it.[8] Ethnosociology is the most basic field of sociological studies, for Dugin, because “ethnic society” is “basic and fundamental,” so that “the discipline of ethnosociology,” recognizing this fact, “does not become an incidental and instrumental branch of general sociology, but is rather revealed as the most important and principal part of sociological knowledge.”[9] Ethnosociology is the study of social forms as functions of the simplest social form, the ethnos.

Ethnic society is “a simple society, organically (naturally) associated with a territory and bound together by common mores, customs, and a symbolic system.”[10] Ethnoses are concrete and particular, hence plural. Even more important than territoriality is language, for “commonality of language constitutes the unity of a common terrain in the sphere of the spirit.” Every ethnos has a belief in a commonly shared ancestor or a common origin, which Dugin acknowledges as a “myth.” “What is important,” he writes, “is not whether this ancestor in fact existed or not: nobody knows. Something else is important: how, with what degree of intensity, the ethnos is aware of and experiences its common origin.” Belonging to an ethnos is thus in part a function of intensity of belief in the founding myth. Ethnic society, as conceived of in ethnosociology, is therefore not merely natural. The ethnos is an “open community,” because “one can change ethnoses,” if one changes one’s language and the target and intensity of one’s beliefs. 

In Dugin’s model, the ethnos is not the race. Race and racial methods, he emphasizes, “have absolutely nothing to do with the way the ethnos is understood in ethnosociology”:

For example, a person considers himself Russian. It is entirely possible that from a racial point of view he may belong to an anthropological type altogether uncharacteristic for the main population of Eastern Slavic-Great Russians. But from an ethnic point of view, there can be no doubt that he will be Russian if he considers himself Russian, speaks Russian, thinks in Russian, and is a co-participant in Russian culture. His biological or racial belonging may be extremely vague. But from the point of view of ethnosociology we are undoubtedly dealing with a member of the Russian ethnos.

There can be an overlap between ethnic identity and biological “cohesion,” but there need not be, and “ethnosociology does not ascribe any substantial or semantic indication to physical resemblance.” Dugin’s insistence on the distinction between ethnos (and hence people, as we shall see) and race clearly distinguishes the fourth political theory from racial political theories.[11] Indeed, elsewhere in the text he advances eight reasons why racial approaches are inadmissible in ethnosociology. Moreover, Dugin’s emphasis on the openness of the ethnic community shows that Wolkenstein is wrong that among right-wing populists, “the question of who belongs to [the] cultural nation is treated as pre-politically settled and not open to contestation,” and that membership is established only by “natural characteristics.”[12] At any rate, Dugin does not quite fit that characterization.

            He also distinguishes the ethnos from the (civic) “nation” and hence from (civic) nationalist political theories. The ethnos as a social form does not refer to citizens in a state, for it is a basic social phenomenon, not limited, like the “nation,” to that modern form of political organization called the state. 

            Ethnic society is minimally differentiated. It gives rise to differentiated, hierarchical structures but is not itself such a structure. Dugin likens it to a geometrical point, which gives rise to the plane but itself lacks dimension. Yet, in practice, as he notes, points do have dimension, and the concrete ethnic society “will have a minimum stratification and division into social groups.” On this basis, the ethnos can be redefined as “society, the differentiation of which is minimal and tends toward zero or (theoretically) is altogether absent.” It is the “indivisible origin that lies at the basis of society.” Ethnosociology is the study of this most simple social form in itself and as the foundation for more complex social forms. The people or narod is one of those more complex social forms. 

But before turning to discuss it, it is worth repeating that in Dugin’s ethnosociology, the ethnos in practice, phenomenologically, is not strictly speaking homogenous or dimensionless, as it is in theory. True, it is organic and holistic, but it is still differentiated, however minimally, and Dugin’s textbook devotes more than a little space to a discussion of kin groups or lineages, for every ethnos is minimally comprised of two such groups. Any talk of homogeneity as a distinguishing feature of right-wing populist thinking needs, therefore, to be qualified accordingly.[13]

The “People” in Ethnosociology

Dugin is aware of the fact that the English word “people” is semantically multivalent. It is a principle of his ethnosociological approach to establish “a strict semantic structure” and to give “each term only one concrete meaning.” I thus propose to use the Russian term narod (which I will not italicize from now on) instead of the word people more often than not. The narod should also be distinguished from the nation or natsiya, which has the specific meaning in ethnosociology mentioned above: nation and nationality refer to state citizenship. In ethnosociology, the forms of society from simplest to most complex are ethnos, narod, nation, civil society, global society, and post-society. In the simplest social form, ethnic identity is in the foreground. As we move along the spectrum towards increasingly complex social forms, ethnic identity becomes gradually submerged, until in post-society it is eradicated.

            The narod, characterized by radical division, is the next stage of complexity after the ethnos. It no longer operates with cyclical time, but shifts to a linear temporality instead. Myths and rituals begin to reflect caste distinctions. Patriarchy becomes the norm. A distinction between elites and masses takes shape. The collective identity of the ethnos is supplemented by the emergence of individual identity, “as a prerogative of heroes, chiefs, outstanding personalities.” 

Dugin calls the study of the phase transition of the ethnos to the narod, from the perspective of the ethnos, “ethnokinetics” (distinct from ethnostatics, the study of the ethnos as constant, and ethnodynamics, the study of the inner processes of the ethnos that aim at maintaining it in its integrity). Prior to this transition the ethnos and its life-world have no distinct and definitive other. If anything at all is regarded as threatening, the threat is overcome internally in ethnodynamic processes (“sacrifices, potlatches, initiations, marriage ceremonies, the circulation of gifts, burial rites and mythologies of rebirth, economic activity, linguistic intercourse, myths and rituals”). Ethnokinetic processes occur, by contrast, with encounters with the “other” that cannot be simply integrated and overcome, and that therefore force a “splintering” and “splitting” of the “ethnocentrum,” the life-world of the ethnos. In this case, “the ethnos encounters something that rejects and denies its being and its thought and it begins to fortify its defensive positions, to transform the ethnocentrum, previously open in all directions, into a fortress, with defensive installations and clear borders.” 

This gives rise, for the first time, to ethnocentrism: “Here, the ethnocentrum transforms into ethnocentrism, i.e. into the consolidation of one’s own (auto-stereotype) and the demonization of the other (hetereo-stereotype).” The friend-enemy distinction belongs here, too, as do war and slavery, for the slave “is an un-integrated ‘other’” (the most often met case arises from the nomadic conquest of an agrarian ethnic society). The narod is always internally poly-ethnic, and it always stands against an other (whether ethnos, narod, civil society, etc.).     

            Unlike the ethnos, the narod has taken on a historical mission. It is caught between “past paradise” and “eschatology in the future.” It has lost the integrity of the ethnos and seeks to obtain integrity as its fate. The narod is “tragic”: it wants what it can never have, the integrity of the ethnos. Its nature is therefore to be restless and discontent. It is also militant: “The narod sees the restoration of integrity only in the destruction of the ‘other’ as an external enemy.” In the narod, the gods, or the element of the divine, is also not integrated, as was the case in the ethnos: “distance is established between humans and gods.” Distance arises in the realm of thought, too, as doubt. 

            The tension in the bow of the narod gives rise, in the ethnosociological model, to a politeia [gosudarstva, politeiai], religion, civilization, or some combination thereof. It always produces at least one of them. That means, for Dugin, that you can infer a narod from the presence of one of them, and you can also infer that where there is neither civilization, nor religion, nor politeia, there is also no narod. Each form has its own hero: the prince, the prophet, and the philosopher. “The philosopher,” for instance, “makes the world problematic; he thematizes it; calls it into question. He disturbs thereby the usual views of the ethnocentrum and opens up the ‘other’ side everywhere, in the things that are at first glance most simple.” The philosopher establishes a hierarchy between the one and the many, a political act reproducing the schismatic character of the narod. The politeia produced by the narod is also hierarchical. It is militant, and its center is the city, “a camp, station, or place, from which soldiers perpetrate raids and where they take defense from enemies.” The city and its soldiers need servants, and those servants are the demos. The demos becomes central in the nation phase of ethnosociology; it is peripheral in the narod phase. The narod’s religion is eschatological and messianic. Its elites see time as eschatological. In the ethnosociological model, the masses remain closer to ethnic religious forms, and hence to closed, cyclical time and the integrative shamanic functions characteristic of the ethnos. Civilizations can be nested in religious or state structures or can develop independently first as “complex cultural systems,” as in the case of Ancient Greece, India, and China.

Populism, Nationalism, and Beyond

            Populism is not nationalism, because the people (narod) and the nation are different in the ethnosociological model. Indeed, the nation is the next type of society after the narod in that model. They are not at all synonymous. The narod precedes the politeia, which can be its product, and the politeia need not be a state, but can be an empire, for instance. The nation, by contrast, is related to a specific type of politeia, the modern state. The narod is a structurally pre-modern phenomenon. Nations formed in modernity, together with states. The narod does know an us-versus-them logic, but that logic is not identical to the us-versus-them divisions of nations. The latter divisions, unlike the former, are best understood are artificial constructs serving ends instrumentally. Even less are nations ethnoses, and it is to the credit of the ethnosociological model that it does not collapse or confuse terms into a jumbled mess. In nationalism, the “other” is used to mobilize the masses. The elites of a narod, by contrast, “are constitutively grounded in the asymmetric and dramatic striving to confrontation with an ‘other’, who is a fundamental figure for them, determining their being.” Their hatred of the other is sincere, rather than instrumental. 

In the ethnosociological mode, patriotism is a feature of nationalism, instrumentally deployed for political or economic reasons by the ruling classes. It can reflect underlying ethnic or popular (i.e. characteristic of the narod) pressures, but it is commonly an instrument of the state and its elite.

Xenophobia can likewise be analyzed in three registers (ethnos, narod, nation), but it always deals with an imagined view of the other. Chauvinism is patriotism accompanied by the narrow cultural conceit of the bourgeoisie. Racism is an entirely modern, bourgeois phenomenon, another instrument of the modern state. It is a worldview based on the idea of the superiority of one’s own race and the inferiority of other races. The point of mentioning these things is that for Dugin, none of them is appropriate to populism properly understood, i.e. to the narod and its productions. Patriotism, xenophobia, chauvinism, and racism are primarily characteristic of the second derivative of the ethnos, the nation, and not of the first derivative of the ethnos, the narod.

Dugin also distinguishes big and small nationalism: big nationalism is the nationalism of the ethnic majority. And big nationalism can itself be divided into conservative nationalism, which “insists on preserving the impulse on which the nation-state was built in the form of a ‘social myth’, vital enough to fasten together the autonomous individual citizens of an industrial society, but ‘conditional’ enough not to provoke ‘excess’ enthusiasm in them,” and radical nationalism, which embraces excessive means to reach a similar end of national homogeneity. Small nationalism consists of autonomization and separatism, and includes anti-colonial movements. Irredentism is also a sort of nationalism. In his political theory, Dugin is not a nationalist, and Russian nationalists distinguish themselves from Eurasianists like Dugin.[14]

Beyond the nation, in Dugin’s model, lies civil society, which he accuses classical sociologists of mistaking for society as such, correcting their error, as we have seen, by making sociology a subspecies of ethnosociology (i.e. by treating civil society as a derivative of ethnic society). Civil society is the ethnosociological home of liberal ideology in Dugin’s model. It aims to overcome both collective identity and social stratification, raising the principle of individual sovereignty to an apex. It abhors militancy. Its logic is contractual and economic. Its hero is the idiotes, i.e. one who presents himself to others as lacking any group identity (“a person cannot but be the member of an ethnos, narod, or nation” in itself, which is why at issue is the being-for-others or presentation of the idiotes). If the ethnic principle remained on the periphery of the nation, under civil society, even the periphery is embraced in “a single informational space” that uproots the collectivity and reconstitutes it as individuals. The ethnic impulse is henceforth transformed into a “general vector of opposition to the global strategies of civil society”:

All major communist and labor movements and parties in the countries of the “poor South” combine anti-capitalist motifs of war against economic imperialism, globalization, and the universalization of the “Western way of life” with ethnic, religious, cultural, and civilizational themes.

Thus, even as civil society becomes global society, it does not eradicate, but only displaces in various ways, the structurally pre-modern elements of the ethnos and narod.[15]

The preceding remarks have provided a brief overview of Dugin’s understanding of the discipline of ethnosociology, as well as the place of the narod therein. The narod, recall, was posited more broadly as subject of the fourth political theory. It was necessary to turn to the text on ethnosociology for initial clarification of what that might entail. The fourth political theory’s selection of the narod is, as we have seen, a rejection of the individual, the class, the race, and the state as subjects, simply by virtue of the negative logic of rejecting the first, second, and third political theories (liberalism, communism, and third-way theories like fascism and Nazism). Ethnosociological analysis provides further confirmation that the narod is neither the bourgeois individual citizen of the nation nor the idiotes of civil and global society, and it establishes that the populism that may be associated with a narod-centric theory is distinct from state-centric and racist political theories.[16] Whereas the fascist political theory of Giovanni Gentile, for instance, is, as right-Hegelianism, state-centric, the fourth political theory of Alexander Dugin, although it may be regarded as a sort of right-wing populism, is, by contrast, quite distinct from both fascism and Nazi racial political theories (indeed, American white-nationalists have criticized Dugin’s models for lacking a racial dimension). 

It is not my claim that the ethnosociological model is the correct model for understanding simple and complex social forms in themselves and in their phase transitions. The purpose of the preceding overview was to examine the theoretical place of “the people” in Dugin’s system, to better understand how some “right-wing populists” interpret their own populism. In Dugin’s case, that required zeroing in on the notion of the narod. Ethnosociology comprises a major part of Dugin’s account of the narod. But we will not have a robust picture of Dugin’s populism if we do not supplement the ethnosociological account of the narod with the existential account.

The Metaphysics of Populism

In Dugin’s political theory, the narod is understood not only ethnosociologically, but also philosophically.[17] Heidegger is the master philosopher for this approach, for Dugin. Dugin does not treat Heidegger’s philosophy as a species of the third political theory (fascism/Nazism). Rather, he thinks Heidegger offers resources for a fourth-political-theoretic conception of the “people.” The key idea in a nutshell is that Dasein exists völkischly or als Volk. The notion of the people (Volk, narod) is thus placed in the broader context of Heidegger’s philosophy, which includes both the existential analytic of Dasein and the idea that history is the history of being, or rather, to use the proper jargon, of “beyng” (Seyn,Seynsgeschichte). For Dugin, the Heideggerian interpretation of the people serves as a sort of “metaphysics of populism,” providing the inchoate longings of anti-liberals with “strategy, consciousness, thought, a system, and a plan of struggle.”[18]

            In Dugin’s telling, a Platonic metaphysics of populism distinguishes between the body, soul, and spirit of the people.[19] The body is “the space it occupies, and also population, quantity, demography, production, and economy [as well as] wars and peace agreements, trade and handicrafts.” The soul comprises “tradition, religion, culture, customs, mores, [and] ethics,” while those like philosophers and leaders “directly responsible for the fate of the narod and the state” constitute its spirit. A Heideggerian metaphysics of populism, however, eschews the tripartite division into body, soul, and spirit. Instead, it interprets the people in terms of the “existentials” or existential structures of Dasein as Volk. “What we call ‘the body of the narod’ or the economy (Wirtschaft) and production,” Dugin explains, “ceases in this case to be a separate domain, defined by the material factor. Henceforth it is the domain of care [or concern] (Sorge).” “To wish that the narod would not create anything artificially, would not involve itself in the element of τέχνη, is the same as depriving it of intentionality (Sorge). But that just is Dasein, which cannot but be concerned.” Unlike in Marxist philosophy, the soul and the spirit of the people are therefore not regarded as superstructures on the material basis, but rather as different expressions of the existential of care. 

            Philosophers and those who face their being-toward-death authentically are existentially delineated as “single ones,” who nevertheless are not other than the narod/Dasein. But Dasein can also exist inauthentically, in which case not leaders and philosophers, but “deputies,” “commissioners,” “jesters” and “clowns” appear, as the many faces of das Man (the expression of everyday, inauthentic Dasein). For Dugin, liberalism, communism, fascism, Nazism, and indeed all of modernity express inauthentic Dasein. Accordingly, the notions of peoplehood represented by those theories are also inauthentic. Dugin thus presents his populism as the expression of the free choice for authentic existence made by Dasein als Volk. Understood existentially, the Volk or narod is “the true existential foundation” for alienated forms of society. As in the case of ethnosociologically theory, Dugin’s existential populism expressly rejects racism and statism as alienated, inauthentic expressions of Dasein (“The state is the name of das Man in the Third political theory”). Existential populism is neither racist nor statist, and hence is conceptually distinct from Nazism and Fascism.[20]

            Dugin uses Heidegger’s analysis of the “project” (Entwurf) and “decision” (Entscheidung) as a basis for talking about the political project of authentic existence. It is neither elites nor masses that make the decision for the project of authentic existence, but Dasein itself as a whole: “the project of authentic society is adopted synchronously and fully by the narod as Dasein.” Yet, it is the single ones (the philosophers, historians, and leaders who lead the people to its destiny) who carry out that project. A people only truly has a destiny when it chooses to live authentically, in which case “[its] cares – labors, concerns, inclinations, moods – acquire a basis in being and are brought to the roots.” 

            Heideggerian populism is not necessary “pagan” in the sense of repudiating Christianity or monotheism.[21] “God (or gods),” Dugin writes, 

is the truth of the narod (die Wahrheit des Volkes). But it is also its being, the being that it itself is, in its inner source, in its identity, in its Selbst. It is not important whether we are dealing with polytheistic or monotheistic versions, whether we assert creation or manifestation.

But Heideggerian populism is marked by some intensive relationship to the divine, for “[if] it [the narod] decides to exist, it decides to have God and, accordingly, to be had by God, to belong to him.” Yet, the God or gods of the authentically existing people must be “an antithesis of his institutionalized simulacrum, the Grand Inquisitor.” 

Why Populism?

Why should a political theory embrace precisely the category and social order of the narod? After all, on the ethnosociological model it would seem that a choice could be made in favor of the nation (i.e. civic-state models), civil society, global society, or even post-society, with its embrace of post-humanism, cyborgs, chimera, and other fantastic features. Why does the fourth political theory align itself with the narod in particular?

            First, according to the ethnosociological model, it is in the social form of the narod that the political as the distinction between friends and enemies first appears. In the narod, the other is no longer incorporated through ethnodynamic processes. The real possibility of war characterizes the narod first of all. That does not mean that narod’s populism is preferred because it is martial. But it might mean that the fourth political theory, to the extent that it is political, chooses to operate with the unit of analysis it regards as most properly political, or in which the political first appears. It would be a commitment to overcoming or distancing the political that would select a different unit, such as the ethnos or global society.

            There is a second reason. The fourth political theory is in its own self-understanding eminently philosophical. It privileges philosophical thought above all other human activities. In one of his books, Dugin invokes the tripartite Platonic metaphysics discussed above and applied it to the fourth political theory, writing that the body, soul, and spirit of his theory are geopolitics, ethnosociology, and theology, respectively. At first glance, that suggests that ethnosociology is subordinate to theology. A narod has its place and its god (or gods), and as we saw above, the latter is “the truth of the narod.” But when asked in an interview how his Heideggerianism fits into that picture of the fourth political theory, he responded that Heidegger is “the heart, the existential core, the relation to death of all these three levels of analysis.”[22]Heidegger is the philosopher, for Dugin. He is “the philosopher of another beginning” or inception of philosopher, coming after the end of the long history of the first inception, which started before Plato and ended with Nietzsche.[23] As Dugin sees it, to master Heidegger is at present and in the near future “the main strategic task of the Russian people and Russian society,” and Heidegger is “the key to the Russian tomorrow.”[24] It is impossible to get a comprehensive understanding of the Western hermeneutic circle, impossible to free Russia for the possibility of its own philosophical awakening, without Heidegger. And everything hinges on proper philosophical comprehension and awakening: 

Attempts to advance a “Russian doctrine,” a “Project Russia,” a “National Idea,” and so on…all lack much value, since all initiatives to develop such general systems can under present circumstances give no results and only sow the seeds of an empty and conceited dogmatism. It is much more constructive to honestly admit that there is something we don’t know, that something is missing, that we need something, and to try to learn about it, to acquire it, to discover it, rather than pretend that everything is in order and that only some purely external factors, “evil forces” or “competitors,” hinder the realization of self-evident steps and plans. There are no such steps and plans. There is no Russian philosophy. There is no Russian national idea. And there won’t be until we take upon ourselves the task of beginning by digging to the fundament, which we tried to do by studying Russian Dasein.[25]

There is no possibility of Russian philosophy unless it is rooted in the source of philosophical activity, and that source is the narod als Dasein. To think about Dugin’s populism adequately, then, it is not only necessary to become familiar with the rich theoretical content of his ethnosociological models; it is also necessary to understand the existential dimension of the narod in his thought and to grasp why precisely the narod, and not, say, civil society or the ethnos, takes center stage. For both political and philosophical reasons, the ethnos does not provide enough by itself for a political theory, and the nation-state already presupposes too much. The narod, the first derivative of the ethnos, is the locus both of the political and the philosophy. That is why it is at the heart of Dugin’s “populist” (i.e. narod-based) political philosophy. 

From The Plural Anthropology of Peoples to Noomahia

The narod is at the heart of Dugin’s populism. Which narod, however? Is Dugin simply a Russian populist, concerned to argue for the importance of a narod-based Russian political philosophy? Although as we have seen he does argue forcefully for precisely that, he is also concerned to develop a general approach able to elaborate the political-philosophical-ethnosociological features of any narod and its products: civilization, politeia, and religion. In part, that is just what the Ethnosociology book does. It is not about Russian ethnosociology, but about ethnosociology as such. Similarly, Dugin has a generalized existential approach to the narod, too. That approach is based on the thesis of the existential plurality of Daseins.[26] To say that Dasein is existentially plural means as follows. There may not be a single ontological “human reality” (Corbin’s translation of the word “Dasein”) from which cultural differences and other differences stem as accidents of history. Rather, there may be more than one fundamental ontological structure underlying cultural and other differences, such that we cannot execute a philosophically adequate cultural (or religious, civilizational, political) analysis without correlating it somehow to that underlying structure. In other words, culture A and culture B might differ not only on the surface of things, but in their very existential constitution. In The Possibility of Russian Philosophy, Dugin develops that thesis respect to Russia, arguing for the existence of a Russian Dasein as the key to the possibility of Russian philosophy. I’ve described the complex hermeneutic operation he performs to that end elsewhere.[27] Here, the important thing to note is that he is willing to generalize that operation and to suggest that any civilization, politeia, or religion can be examined through the hypothesis of the existential plurality of Daseins. 

Moreover, Dugin welcomes the possibility that a plurality of Daseins-peoples, awakened to their authentic existence, might meet for dialogue; i.e. it does not necessarily follow from his populism that peoples must always be at war with one another or out for each other’s destruction.[28] As he writes elsewhere, “dialogue between civilizations is possible to the same extent as conflict”:

The dialogue at issue cannot be reduced to competition, to the establishment of hegemonic relations, to convincing others of one’s rightfulness, etc. The dialogue of civilizations is an irreducible, fractal field of free and spontaneous history, not programmed and unpredictable, since the future in this case is considered a constituted horizon of thought and will. Thought concerns the area of competence of the civilization’s intellectual elite; will, the strategic pole and the point of decision. Together, these two principles comprise the hologram of the civilization, its living, symbolic mediastinum, the solar plexus of the civilizational nervous system. Neither authority, nor economy, nor material resources, nor competition, nor security, nor interests, nor comfort, nor survival, nor pride, nor aggression is the basic motivation of the historical being of civilizations in a multipolar world, but precisely the process of spiritual dialogue, which can on any bend or under any circumstances acquire a positive and peaceful or aggressive and martial character.[29]

Authentically existing peoples – narod als Dasein – may choose to enter into the “fractal field of free and spontaneous history” for a dialogue that need not reflect any “negative” features of political populism. Such a meeting could provide a deep foundation for cooperation and respect. 

It could be a sign of the willingness to secure that foundation and foster such outcomes if the representative of a given culture or civilization were to make it his business to conduct a careful, sympathetic study of the existential dimension of other cultures or civilizations. That is just the task that Dugin sets himself in his multi-volumed work Noomahia: Wars of the Intellect, a series “dedicated to exploring the existential identities of different civilizations.”[30] It would take us too far afield to attempt anything like a comprehensive overview of that project and its meaning for Dugin’s populism. However, a few brief remarks about its method are in order.

            Dugin’s project in Noomahia is ambitious.

The goal is to explore the world’s civilizations existentially. The thesis of the existential plurality of Daseins is one tool for the task. That tool directs the researcher to examine the target culture with an eye to its existentials, just as Heidegger did in his analytic of Dasein, revealing such structures as –being-in-the-world and being-towards-death. The first methodological volume of Noomahia, however, complicates the picture.[31]There, Dugin does not say that he will conduct an analysis of civilizations using a Heideggerian arsenal, as he did for Russia in his book on the possibility of Russian philosophy. Instead, he posits as a tool for the task the thesis of three logoi – the logos of Apollo, the logos of Dionysus, and the logos of Cybele – all three of which, he hypotheses, are found universally, in whatever combinations and proportions, among all civilizations of the world. At some level, and from some perspectives, the these logoi are all expressions of one nous. On another level, and from another perspective, they are distinct and incompatible and represent the true philosophical sense in which “war is the father of all things.” On Dugin’s account, the “light” logos of Apollo is classically expressed in Platonism and neo-Platonism. The “dark” logos of Dionysus expresses itself in Aristotle, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism.[32] The logos of Cybele, for its part, is reflected in the materialism and atomism of Lucretius and Democritus. Each logos, accordingly, is internally typologicaly differentiated (there are myriad forms each logos can take, as shown by the fact that Aristotle and Gnosticism both express the dark logos). Dugin’s noological approach puts logos and mythos on equal footing, such that he can correlate philosophical arguments to mythic stories and vice versa, as he does in the case of titanomachy and gigantomachy, and as the very formula he uses of the logos of a mythical figure (logos of Apollo, for instance) suggests. The three logoi are the vertical aspect of his method. The horizontal aspect comprises geosophy. An example of geosophy in the neo-Platonic tradition is Proclus’s correlation in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus of Athens and Atlantis with the Olympians and Titans (myth) and with various philosophical dualities (rational and irrational, same and different, rest and motion).[33]Dugin obliquely suggests a relation in his methodological works between these vertical and horizontal dimensions, on one hand, and Dasein, on the other.[34] So it will be necessary for a complete picture of his populist theory eventually to add to the ethnosociological and existential dimensions also the noological one and to correlate the three. 

Conclusion

The main purpose of the preceding reflections was to suggest that Dugin’s populism is a complex theoretical construction. To return to the introductory arguments of this paper, if we operate with a conceptual chain linking right-wing populism to fascism, racism, nationalism, paganism, homogeneity, and so on, we will miss much that is of interest in Dugin’s populism and mischaracterize the remainder. It is not impossible that rather than applying our concepts of populism to Dugin’s theory, we might benefit from using that theory to generate concepts of populism that improve on the misguided “folk wisdom of the field,” for instance through ethnosociological, existential, or noological methods. At any rate, it is time to move beyond misleading characterizations of his political thought towards characterizations rooted in his complex theoretical constructions. Analysis is not apologetics. To want to understand a thinker on his own terms is not to argue that those terms are the only terms or the best ones. Even the perfect comprehension of Dugin’s populism, which I do not possess, does not exclude a total rejection of his positions. However, an adequate understanding is to be preferred to unfounded distortions, which may lead to suboptimal policies, contradict ethical principles of openness to the other, and prohibit basic learning.