Russia in the Wake of the Cold War by Horsfield Dorothy;

Author:Horsfield, Dorothy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

As suggested above, it is difficult to assess how Heidegger might have responded to Dugin’s expansive use of his philosophy.

Though claiming Heidegger as its primary source of inspiration, The Fourth Political Theory includes a whistle-stop intellectual tour through European and American thought since the eighteenth century, a short index of which includes Hume, Bentham, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Weber, Huntington, and Fukuyama out of dozens of other influential thinkers at an average rate of two or three per page. Thematically it seizes upon the continuing great debates of the post-Enlightenment about the meaning and possibility of progress; the disenchantment of the world[74] without the comforts of religious certainties; the meaning of liberty; and the dark Nietzschean pessimism that particularly from the late nineteenth century has been a feature of interpretations of modernity. Such streams of ideas and argument invariably serve as a miscellaneous confirmation of Dugin’s trenchant views about the decadence of the West. In particular, for Dugin, liberalism is a political and economic philosophy and ideology that is a disgusting, human-hating doctrine. By way of explanation, chapter 9 of The Fourth Political Theory provides what he calls “a stricter definition” of “the principles which lie at the base of historic liberalism.”[75] There are nine of them, and together they condemn liberalism as selfish, greedy, excessively egalitarian, a leveler of the distinctions between “races, peoples and religions,”[76] and the destroyer of governmental and religious institutions. Drawing on conceptualizations of positive and negative liberty by John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Constant (whom he mistakenly refers to as “Constance”), Dugin adds that in practice liberals such as Locke, Adam Smith, Kant, and Bentham, then “right up to the neo-liberal school of the Twentieth century, such as Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper,”[77] dogmatically propose we should be free from: “Government and its control over the economy, politics and civil society; Churches and their dogmas; Any form of common areas of responsibility for the economy; Ethnic attachments; Any collective identity whatsoever. . . ”[78]

More obscurely, though presumably in reference to what he believes is liberalism’s fundamentalist antipathy to socialist and communist ideologies, they apparently oppose: “Any attempt to redistribute, with one or another government or social institutions, the results of material or non-material labour. . . .”[79] With the apparent conviction of an Old Testament hell-raiser, Dugin concludes: “‘Freedom from’ is the most disgusting formula of slavery, inasmuch as it tempts man to an insurrection against God, against traditional values, against the moral and spiritual foundations of his people and his culture.”[80]

It looks a redoubtable undertaking to unravel Dugin’s deeper reasoning and terminological confusions in compiling such a list. A more immediate reaction might suggest that his crude, distorted compression of more than 300 years of philosophical discussion and contextualization of interpretations of liberalism is ill-informed and incoherent. Perhaps, a highly recommended response could be to take around the hat and enrol him in Western Political Theory 1.01. Nonetheless, Dugin writes, the triumph of liberalism during the twentieth century over the competing ideologies of

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