This review has in mind St Cheetos the Prophet.
The phrase that best sums up Dugin’s approach is “Negating the Logic of History.” Dugin begins by listing the three most common (and modern) ideologies:
- Liberalism: the individual is the normative subject
- Fascism: race or nation is normative subject
- Communism: Class
The second and third options failed, leaving liberalism in charge.
- 4th political theory: Dasein is the acting subject.
Liberalism is the broad, architectonic worldview that hinges on several assumptions (the challenging of which will entail a drone strike). Classical Liberals defined freedom as “freedom from.” There should be no ties on an individual’s will. It is these individuals, acting alone but taken as a whole, who form the circle of liberal action.Lacking a telos by definition, liberalism is hard-pressed to explain what we have freedom for.
Against this Dugin posits Heidegger’s Dasein as the acting subject of the 4th Political Theory. Dasein is a way to overcome the subject-object duality. It is inzwichen, the “between.”
One valuable insight of Dugin’s is his pinpointing the bigotry of Western liberals. All societies must accept liberalism in its current manifestation. What if you don’t want to? Well, if you don’t have natural resources you are probably okay. Otherwise, look out.
Liberal ideology is necessarily evolutionary. The concept of progress takes one from barbarism to technologism and the more refined way of life of the markets. This is what Dugin calls “The Monotonic Process:” he idea of constant growth, accumulation, steady progress by only one specific indicator (60). In other words, in a system only one value (x) grows. Only one thing (or a small group of things) accumulates. Applied to either machines or biological life, this is death.
Modern political options have all seen progress and time in a linear fashion. Even more so, because of time there must naturally be progress. By contrast, Dugin suggests that
T1: Time is a social phenomenon with its structures arising from social paradigms (68).
By this he wants to safeguard the idea that there can be “interruptions” and reversals in the flow of time. History does not simply teach the march of capitalism upon earth (borrowing and adapting Hegel’s phrase).
Nevertheless, and perhaps unaware, Dugin remains close to the linear view. He does note that time is “historical” (70) and from that draws a very important, Heideggerian conclusion: it cannot be objective.
Why not? The acting subject, the historical observer (whom we will call “Dasein,” but this is true also of the individual in liberalism) is finite. He doesn’t have a god’s-eye view on history. Of course, that’s not to say it can’t be real or reliable per the observer, but we don’t have the Enlightenment’s dream of a god’s-eye application of reason to reality.
Dugin then analyses how Leftist and Conservatism evolved in the 20th century.
Finally, he ends with a dense and staggering discussion on the nature of time. Kant denied that by mere perception we have access to the thing-in-itself. Therefore, if the being of the present is put in doubt, then all three moments (past, present, future) become ontologically unproveable. From the perspective of pure reason, the future is the phenomenon, and hence, it is (157).
Kant puts time nearer to the subject and space nearer to the object. Therefore, time is subject-ive. It is the transcendental subject that installs time in the perception of the object.
I am the King's Man 