by Paul Cudenec

Russian thinker Alexandr Dugin (1962-) is often presented in Western media as being “the most dangerous philosopher in the world”, a radical critic of modernity.

For that reason alone, I thought it would be useful to get some idea of who he is and what he is talking about.

But having started my research with a reasonably open mind, I have come away with a highly negative impression of the man sometimes regarded as Vladimir Putin’s eminence grise.

From his unsatisfying public utterances to his associations with the globalist system he claims to oppose, the founder of the “Fourth Political Theory” is not the man he wants us to think he is.

i. A confused ideology

As an anarchist, I very much oppose Dugin’s state-imperialist outlook and I am further repelled by his apparent involvement in some kind of Satanism.

In addition, looking at his philosophy, as represented in some recent English-language posts, I find it full of contradictions, such as with a rather obscure question regarding reality which I will explain in a footnote.*

I do find some apparent common ground in an opposition to modernism.

Dugin writes that “progress is a highly questionable thing” and he explains: “In the West, a war has been declared on all kinds of traditional values. This means that any collective group is being dismantled; any sense of the sacred is being rejected; everything is subjected to relativisation, and the individual is prioritised above all else”.

However, it is not for nothing that W.D. James places us in two opposing “anti-modernist” traditions, mine being of the “egalitarian” variety that has a very different interpretation of “traditional values” to that espoused by Dugin.

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