This is not an easy book to interpret, as there are strong preconceived notions about it in the public space and on top of that I am not immune to my own biases.

First, and most common in journalist circles, and therefore in media coverage, is the idea that the author, Aleksandr Dugin, is evil, a monster. The modern western rejection of Aleksandr Dugin goes so far that it is not always easy to acquire this book. The author has been deplatformed and sanctioned in many spaces in the west, sanctioned in the EU and in the USA – and since 2014 he is also deplatformed in Russia. Hated by everyone.
Despite all that his books are still legally on the market — I was able to simply buy this one, and not in a dark back alley out of the trunk of a rusty car, but rather in a very normal bookstore in broad daylight.
On the market, but not exactly marketed freely — often only available second-hand or directly via the publishing house; not, for example, via Amazon. But at least they are not burned on a large pyre in front of the Ministry of Truth.
Obviouisly the troubling infamy of the author was in the back of my head while reading his book. How did that influence my reading? I tried to go about it as neutral as possible, but who knows how much it coloured my perception?

Second, I am not usually interested in political theory, as I have found pretty quickly that among political science pieces, normative-ontological thought fails to convince me every time. Explanatory models and ideals in the form of “-isms” appear to provide limits to thought, funnelling ideas in pre-approved ways. I am much more drawn to empirical-analytical writings.

• Normative-ontological
• and empirical-analytical:

What do these two terms mean?

To make it brutally brief, normative thought does try to invent a “how it should be” and looks for an “ideal” state of affairs; it tries to create a foundation for a system of order that explains the world and an ideal way of societal organisation. Meanwhile, empirical approaches look at “what is” and try to explain why it is as it is, what a certain organisation does well and where it fails.
As an example, Platon and Marx are normative: They had an idea how society should be organised; they described that and ways to get there. In the case of Plato, his ideal involves a steep hierarchy with philosophers ruling over warriors ruling over the working man, with families dissolved in favour of a national indoctrination system and women being just birthing machines.
(Simplified, yes, but that is the core of Plato’s “ideal state”)

Whoever wants to tell you how you should live your life follows a normative path. This is what Aleksandr Dugin attempted with this book.

Platon’s pupil Aristotle is often cited as the father of empirical thought, as he radically deviated from his teacher’s path and made the first big list of various governmental systems in Ancient Greece and ordered them into defined systems, like Oligarchy, Aristocracy, Tyranny, Monarchy, etc.

Empirical analysis is less sexy. It is most visible directly after elections, when votes are counted and reasons explored. It is also employed in comparative political analysis, to look at, say, Canada and the UK, and identify how the two political systems or processes differ and what the results of those differences are.

Whoever wants to explain to you how you actually do live your life follows an empirical path.

So here comes my bias that makes it hard for Dugin to convince me: I am incredibly doubtful of “ideal states” – even though most “ideal states” are not like Plato’s. I fear that the moment you start to imagine how people shoud be and start to impose your ideas on a system and make millions of people do as you want them to, you are well on your way to Plato-territory, no matter how good your intentions were when you started.

Three Failed Political Theories

Why did he write it?

Aleksandr Dugin claims that his motivation comes from the plight of a majority of Russians who lost part of their identity as Russians when they were pushed into a globalised economy. This same plight he senses in other peoples as well, and therefore regards the formation of a Fourth Political Theory a necessity to overcome the current state of affairs.

Fair enough, we all did trade part of our identity for being a happy cog in a much larger machine than ever seen before. It is, obviously, not a one-sided affair: before they became sucked up by Liberalism the Russians were bent under the yoke of Socialism, and before that we all were bent under the yoke of Monarchies. (Sorry, Socialists, sorry, Monarchists – I know every political system has people who like it. But let us return to the book at hand.)

Another influence is an author called Alain de Benoist, who also wrote books about a Fourth Political Theory and whom Dugin holds in high regard; however, de Benoist remains a less prominent figure than Dugin, and his writings are not circulated as widely.

So. What did Dugin write?

Aleksandr Dugin proposes that the 20th century has seen three large theories rise and, finally, fall, or at least, peter out and transform. 

• The first, oldest, but most successful and most long-lived, has been Liberalism, which won out against every other model and went on to rule the world, largely through America’s military, but also through cultural might. Hollywood, Jeans and Coca Cola shaped a global norm, the big guy. Certainly true: Globalism is that, as it offers American Lifestyle as the global norm, where all other cultural options can only stand as “alternatives”, never as norms of their own devising. But Dugin says it carried the seed of its own destruction within itself and turned into post-liberalism or post-modernism, which is, as he thinks, chaos and barbarism.
• The second one was Socialism, which rose to prominence in worker’s unions and in the Soviet Union, but ultimately failed as the USSR collapsed.
• The third one was Fascism, which is mostly known through WW2 Germany and failed rather quickly.

In the first half of the book Dugin goes ahead and takes this trio apart to list their many weaknesses, errors, and failures. (Mostly Liberalism. The other two are dead and Dugin does not mourn them; so his focus is on Liberalism, which he tries to counter.)

I have to say, Dugin’s analysis starts out pretty sharp. He would have made a good empirical analyst. He takes long and detailed looks at all three of them, discusses their main ideas and points out their weaknesses:

• Socialism was about Class, but failed due to unnatural oppression of healthy instincts. In this, Dugin recognises a strength of Liberalism in the form of Capitalism.
• Fascism was mostly about Race and self-evidently failed due to Racism as it disregarded and squandered the potential of embracing diversity. In this, Dugin recognises a strength of Liberalism in the form of Globalism, although he is quick to point out that Liberalism embraces only a fake-diversity, as it tries to iron out the differences and arrive at a global norm, rather than actually accepting differences.
• Which is odd, because at its core, Liberalism is all about the unique Individual, and it is failing because … this is where Dugin offers various ideas but no definite answer.

He describes Liberalism as a failure that killed itself because humans, fractured down to individuals, are drawn to new identities, which dissolve community: so Liberalism carried the seed of its own destruction. At the same time, he describes it as the enemy that needs resisting. It cannot be both, or at least not at the same time. It can start out as a powerful enemy, but then dissolve and make way for a fractured postmodernism, made up of hollow pseudo-identities manipulated by a technocratic system. Man replaces God, philosophy and science replace religion. Then there is a logical break where he expects a resurgence of theology thanks to the Fourth Political Theory – but we are not there yet.

Did Liberalism even die? Or is postmodernism just a natural development of a healthy Liberalism? All this remains vague as Dugin leaves the realm of theory and critizises the global American hegemony.

Where is the reason?

Aleksandr Dugin posits that we need a “Fourth Political Theory” to oppose the global dominance of Liberalism and/or its follow-up world views like Postliberalism and Postmodernism, and offshoots of those. And nothing that we already have does the job: Socialism and Fascism are both failures that died deservedly. Older theories have faded. There is only Liberalism and its offshoots, which are busy dismantling their only remaining foe, religions of all stripes. So Aleksandr Dugin describes the “Fourth Political Theory” as a “crusade” against postmodernism, postindustrial societies, liberal thought and globalisation, which he aligns with the Antichrist, and which must be opposed.

(Here we have the interesting part: He and his enemies both regard each other as the ultimate moral abhorrent.)

However, his reasoning misses two important aspects:
1) a stringent argument for his Antichrist-theory. On the one hand, let us admit that yes, Liberal thought is certainly anti-religious. But is the same not also true for both of the others? Socialism as well as Fascism were stiffly opposed to Religion and tried to repress and replace it, one with “Reason” and the other with a Führer-Kult and a sort of retro-germanistic mythology. Liberalism was just more successful because a) it lived longer and b) it did not attack religion head-on but rather starved it over the course of generations.

What makes Liberalism so special? Or are all three political theories of the Antichrist? This remains unexplained.

Also, Dugin drafts a commonality of all world religions to oppose Liberalism; but is such a commonality realistic? Would Hindus and Muslims join hands with Jews and Christians to oppose global Americanism? We cannot answer this question any more than Dugin can, but we can entertain doubts.

So 2) he posits that Liberalism defeats itself. So why exactly do we need to oppose it, and especially why do we need to oppose it so directly, as if forging a tool intentionally shaped to resist Liberalism/Postmodernism. And if not the theory but real and material American dominance is the problem, will another theory stop it?

“Dasein”

Next to religion, Aleksandr Dugin draws from the works of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. I must admit I am not fully informed about Heidegger’s ideas. Dugin focuses especially on a concept of Existing, which is “being in the world”, but not the unique Individual, more the Reality of Being, as opposed to Nihilism.

The Anti-Theory

In this vein Aleksandr Dugin starts to draft his Fourth Political Theory, which he intends to name just that: “The Fourth Political Theory”, as he intuitively understands that his other ideas to name it will not work, especially because they are either misleading (“Conservativism” being something else altogether, which he does not even accept: for Dugin, Conservativism as we know it is more like a Liberalism that wants to stop the train) or are riddled with inconsistencies (“National Bolshevism” sounds like a misshapen combination of the failed theories 2 and 3, “Eurasism” is geographically limiting and can only work for a Russian implementation, not a full-grown theory) Frankly, the whole theory suffers from either inconsistencies or unfinished thoughts, especially missing a clear end game.

Three examples: 

He posits that Globalism and Postmodernism are enemies of nation states as they transcend borders and dissolve national identities. To counter them, therefore, he promotes the nation state; and at the same time, a brotherhood of all nation states globally.

He also posits the Eurocentric, “racist” norms inherent to the globalist export of western societal norms all over the globe. Pushing “Liberal Democracy” and capitalist economies onto every continent and every culture is, in Dugin’s eyes (not unlike the views of many anticolonialist thinkers) arrogant and out of line, and must be countered by embracing the celebration of diversity – not in the liberal sense by quotas and making everyone into a copy of the white man, but by truly accepting the different cultures, not with the classic liberal view of South Asia and Africa as societies that are simply on their way to one day become like the USA. Dugin recognises “Progressivism”, the idea that every society needs to fulfill its potential by becoming like the the “West”, as another form of racism. He wants to counter it with a new-ish, basically retro-Bolshevik view that regards the Cambodian and the Ugandan as a sibling of the Italian, the Brit, or the Russian, endowed with the same value, and each free of the desire to change any of the others.

These two ideas certainly have valid cores, but their practicality – especially in the context of a unified political theory – remains as unconvincing as the aforementioned global brotherhood of religions. Nation states are not natural, they were “invented” in the 18th century, building on the ancient tribes; but at the same time they stamped out what was left of tribal cultures, in order to replace them with the new model – very like Globalism on a scale one step larger. And they represent a division of the world, so it remains a mystery why or even how they should form something like a global movement against globalism.

Third idea, Dugin rejects the idea of the Individual and would replace it by Heidegger’s “Existence”. This I cannot evaluate without a thorough understanding of Heidegger.

Core

At its core, this Fourth Political Theorey is about a return to better times: a return to a smaller community, a nation or maybe even a tribe in some cases. A return to faith and God. A return to a more natural, sustainable life. A return to values. And then, however, all of these on a global scale, to bring the necessary weight to oppose the heartland of Liberalism, the Amero-European conglomerate.

Those who fear Dugin may see his ideas made flesh in the form of BRICS or the G77, but in fact these are rational, real-political actors trying to win freedom from western dominance, and there are no religions or values at the wheel.

An active Conservativism that is not a “soft liberalism” or “soft progressivism” but rather a deliberate rewinding of the clock to return (?) to a more ideal, value-driven mindset, (conscious of the fact that this never truly existed)

Dugin is strongly anti-racist, rejecting in very clear terms any form of devaluing of people on whatever basis, be it ethnicity, skin-colour, or even technological advancement, value-systems, or education level. He describes racism as a very modern concept that only developed when nationalities were invented. At the same time he regards himself in direct opposition to “progressives” who also define themselves as anti-racist, because they want to impose their values on others — a practice that Dugin calls one form of racism: a colonialism.

In short: The Fourth Political Theory is Anti-Modernism. Thus it is symbolised by the Moorcock-Star of Chaos in the logo — signifying the deconstruction of destruction of modern .

Conclusion

All things considered, the Fourth Political Theory is less an actual theory and more a call for resistance against western, especially western technocratic dominance of the world. It is the desire for a more traditional-minded ideal world. Its enemies believe that it is the cause for new global power dynamics in the theatre of Realpolitik; the author hopes that it is a decisive strike against the omnipresent pressure of modernity.

From reading it, I believe it is neither.

What he calls the “Fourth Political Theory” does not (yet?) stand on its own feet: it defines itself in opposition to the world; it fails to propose a convincing alternative, as it tries to attack Atlantic Culture from multiple, frankly disconnected angles – it throws ideas against the wall and hopes that they stick.

That is not how a solid theory is built. A theory must attempt to describe the world in its essence and formulate a model to explain it. Take Socialism: It described the world, all of it! The whole of history! As an eternal struggle of the haves against the have-nots, where the haves unfairly live the good life while the have-nots suffer and toil. And it claimed that this struggle could be won by the have-nots by realising that the power was theirs all along.

Take Feminism: It describes the world, all of it, as an eternal power struggle between the sexes, where men unfairly live the good life while women suffer and toil. And it claims that this struggle can be won by the women by doing what men do, and stop doing what women did.

Both of these are working theories: they present a worldview that explains everything, and they propose a way to change things and form an ideal society.

Now this Fourth Political Theory claims that Liberalism and its children destroy societies, and that this can be stopped by … yes, and that where it becomes murky, because neither does it describe exactly how Liberalism destroys societies, nor how exactly the resistance can win.

It is not a stable theory at this point, more of a long rant with footnotes. A work in progress, but I don’t have high hopes for it. As it is, it fails to answer core questions — and it still has to untangle its internal contradictions.

There is a follow-up book from 2024: “The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory” – I don’t know if that patches up the unfinished business of part 1, but I have doubts.