Critiquing Alexander Dugin’s 4PT

by Zoltanous

Introduction

In modern anti-liberal thinkers who aim to move beyond liberalism, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin stands out as an exceptionally knowledgeable and influential person. Dugin has crafted a political ideology known as the “Fourth Position” or the “Fourth Political Theory,” which offers an ideology for humanity, or “Dasein” in Heideggerian terms, to reject liberalism and escape the confines of capitalist realism. The Fourth Political Theory (4PT) distinguishes itself from the three preceding political ideologies: capitalism or liberalism (the first political theory), communism or Marxism (the second political theory), and fascism/Nazism (the third political theory, 3PT). Rather than entirely dismissing these prior ideologies, the 4PT seeks to transcend them by creating a new path that incorporates their positive aspects while discarding the negative ones.

Many who align with Third Positionist views may find common ground in Dugin’s work, particularly in his sharp critiques of liberalism, which he targets most intensely among the three ideologies. However, Third Positionists often encounter widespread misinformation about the 3PT, both in academia and beyond. The campaign against the 3PT has persisted since its inception, evolving in different forms. Unfortunately, Dugin has also perpetuated some of these narratives. This is perhaps unsurprising, considering most individuals have been exposed to such propaganda from an early age through education and media. Regrettably, this influence extends even to intellectuals of Dugin’s stature.

Dugin’s Critique of The 3PT

Dugin’s overarching critique of fascism, broadly speaking, is that it shares in the same bankruptcies of all the other modernist ideologies (i.e., liberalism and Marxism) such as a belief in unidirectional or monotonic progress, historicism, as well as being a “globalist” ideology. Specifically, Dugin levies the charge that the National Socialists were looking to establish a “global Aryan government,” and he denounces their racism and links it to the same ideology that underpins liberalism (liberals are the real racists, apparently).

One glaring flaw in Dugin’s analysis is his lack of a historical and philosophical understanding of the fascistic movements he is criticizing. For instance, he makes the mistake of thinking that the personal opinions and writings of Alfred Rosenberg were the ideological viewpoints of the Third Reich and the dogma of National Socialism.

“In German National Socialism, the historical subject is the ‘Aryan race’, which, according to racists, ‘carries out the eternal struggle against the subhuman races’.”

— Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

He continues:

“[Carl] Schmitt’s National Socialism fundamentally differs from the National Socialism of Hitler or Rosenberg precisely in that Schmitt thinks in the category of peoples, not of one people, the German, or the notorious “Aryan Race,” by which ignorant Nazis understood only Germans themselves.”

— Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

There are several issues at play here. First, let’s note that Rosenberg’s Myth of The Twentieth Century was never the official view of the Third Reich. In fact, it’s doubtful that Hitler or any other high-ranking members of the Third Reich ever read it. Hitler himself privately described the book as “mysticism” and “nonsense,” and he explicitly stated that it was not official Nazi doctrine. Many party leaders made fun of the book, and it was not treated as binding dogma despite its popularity and Rosenberg’s position. Rosenberg aside, Dugin has little understanding of what was meant by the term “Aryan.” For “Aryan” doesn’t refer to any specific race of people in the narrow sense Dugin implies, nor is it a substitute for “Blonde hair and blue-eyed Germans” or anything of the like. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explicitly states that Aryan is not a genetic or racial categorization in the reductive way often portrayed:

“It would be futile to attempt to determine which race or races were the original standard-bearers of human culture, and were thereby the real founders of all that we understand by the word ‘humanity.’ … Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science, and technical skill that we see today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.”

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

If Hitler meant the word “Aryan” to be synonymous with “German” then why wouldn’t he outright equate Aryan with German instead of maintaining agnosticism about which races are Aryan? Rosenberg, likewise, has a similar view of what Aryan means. In professor James Whisker’s 1980 introduction to Rosenberg’s book (a mainstream American historian), he writes:

“The one Aryan seeks out his superior counterpart in other lands and recognises him not from his physical appearance but from the nature of his civilisation and culture.”

— James B. Whisker, Introduction to Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of The Twentieth Century

Whisker further notes that Rosenberg saw Aryans existing among the Chinese and Japanese as well. A solid refutation to the idea that the National Socialists only saw Aryans existing amongst Germans. Thus, the historical subject of German National Socialism was not the “Aryan Race” – as claimed – but rather, which is painfully obvious reading any official NSDAP literature, it was the German volk, or narod to borrow from Dugin’s terminology. Aryan, from the view of the NSDAP, simply means the people who create culture – the original culture bearer, as opposed to those who simply express it without creating culture and those who destroy culture (degenerates/Jews). While biological elements and hierarchies existed in Nazi policy and propaganda, the foundational emphasis in Hitler’s own writings and the 25 Points remained on the volk as the concrete historical actor, with “Aryan” functioning more as a civilizational-creative designation than a rigidly biological category.

Another notion of Dugin’s to be debunked is his assertion that “fascism, too, is an evolutionary movement” and that the:

“National Socialists adapted a racial interpretation of this idea [i.e., of Nietzscheanism]: that the white race is ‘more developed’ than the black, yellow or any other kind, and on this basis, has the ‘right’ to rule the world.”

— Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

This is more ahistorical nonsense. There is no legitimate claim that can be made to argue that the NSDAP wanted to “rule the world.” They were trying to institute multipolarity and carve out, in the words of Hitler, a “German Monroe Doctrine,” a phrase Hitler made use of as early as 1923, over a decade before Carl Schmitt formalized his theory of Großraum (large spaces) in 1939, which drew directly from Hitler’s articulation of a German-led sphere free from external (especially Anglo-American) interference.

If, as Dugin makes it seem to be, the National Socialists were so marred with ideology as to bring about its destruction (more on this later), then why did they make alliances with various non-white peoples of the world such as the Palestinians, the Indians, and the Japanese? This also makes Dugin’s claim that Hitler wished to establish a “global Aryan government” also fall apart.

We have already established that the historical subject for German National Socialism was the German volk, and not the “Aryan race” generally speaking, for Hitler was a pan-Germanist who wanted to unite the Germanic people under one Reich at a time when large portions of Germans lived in various post-WWI nation-states that actively repressed their German minorities. This is made very clear from the first point of the 25-point program of the NSDAP:

“We demand the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany, on the basis of the principle of self-determination of all peoples.”

— NSDAP, 25-Point Program (Point 1)

But Hitler was also a pan-European, second to his pan-Germanism, and wanted to unite continental Europe into a behemoth empire, or more accurately, great space or large space, to counter the Leviathan sea powers of the Anglo-American bloc.

Another critique Dugin has of German National Socialism is that its ideology of “racism” (whatever merit we wish to give to that) was the cause of its downfall in the “historical, geopolitical, and theoretical sense.” Specifically, Dugin cites the anti-Slavic attitude of the Reich leadership for causing Germany to declare war against Russia and thus be erased from History. Dugin’s views on this issue are again lacking proper context and are a massive oversimplification. The idea that Hitler and the Third Reich generally had anti-Slavic attitudes as the primary driver is more and more falling out of favor in the historical mainstream as the sole or decisive factor. Rather, to the extent it actually existed in rigid form, anti-Slavic sentiments often functioned as a propagandistic afterthought to justify aggression towards Slavic nations that occurred for geopolitical reasons — Lebensraum as strategic necessity against the Soviet colossus and Anglo-American encirclement, not pure racial exterminationism in every instance.

To further extinguish this notion, look no further than the German-Russian alliance (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), the Bulgarian-German alliance, the Slavic volunteers in the German military (including in the Waffen-SS), the fact that Slavic Ruthenians asked to be annexed by the Third Reich, and Hitler supporting Polish territorial claims in central Europe early on. Moreover, wouldn’t this logic also mean that the Russian invasion of Poland in WW2 proves that the Soviet Union was motivated by anti-Slavness? Or does geopolitical shrewdness, imperialism, and opportunism better explain the reasoning? My hunch here is that Dugin is writing more propagandistically than not. Consider his 1997 article Fascism – Borderless and Red wherein he gives a more honest analysis (yet he’s still wrong)

Dugin’s Overlap With Third Positionism

We should now point out the irony in Dugin condemning the pan-Germanic irredentism of Hitler and the Third Reich for being “globalist” when the geopolitical ambitions of Dugin’s Russia trump those of National Socialist Germany! Dugin proposes for Russia – with the Russian volk at its core – to be at the center of a Eurasian “large space” or civilization. This would, in part, include Russia taking Mongolia, parts of Northern China, Eastern Europe, Finland, the Caucuses and total domination of the “World Island”. A much more ambitious project than simply uniting the Germanic peoples and Europe at large into one Reich.

When it comes to Dugin’s geopolitical views it seems as if he is blurring some is/ought distinction when it comes to the way he uses his various geopolitical influences. For instance, he cites Samuel Huntington, an American neo-conservative, and (from his neo-conservative viewpoint) his pessimistic Clash of Civilizations which posits the west as one civilization among many in the post Cold war era. In some instances it’s unclear if Dugin is saying civilizational based multipolarity is how the world simply is or perhaps becoming and Russia is going to take the role of assuming the center of the Eurasian civilization, or if he is saying this is how the world should be. Dugin relies on various thinkers of the “Realist School” of international relations such as Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer to critique the idea of the possibility of a unipolar world, especially that espoused by the Institutional Realism (IR) theorists following the liberal tradition. He critiques the possibility of a bi-polar world from a practical perspective of no single country/region being able to single handedly able to challenge the US-led Atlantacist pole one-on-one and from the perspective of no single ideology or idea being able to unify large, diverse parts of the world as Marxism did to be able to muster the resources to challenge the west.

Since unipolarity and bipolarity are deemed both practically impossible and unwanted ideologically, a system that can unite the various regions of the world around a single pole of power must be created. While the Westphalian nation states might remain, they will not be the sovereign actors on the world stage since it is impossible for one single nation state to muster enough power to maintain its geopolitical sovereignty as was formerly the case in Europe. One influence upon Dugin in this regard Huntington who after the end of the cold war spoke not of American and liberal polarity but a rising civilizational war emerging as the future geopolitical actors. Dugin then establishes the idea of a civilization as “autonomous substance” and “ontologically prior” with the help of thinkers such as Carl Jung, Leibnitz, his own Ethnosociological theory (where a civilization would equate to the first derivative away from the ethnos as volk/narod), and perhaps most importantly from his Heideggerianism where Dugin equates “the plurality of Daseins … to the plurality of civilizations.” Here Dugin’s Eurasianism comes where he draws upon the Eurasian tradition to flesh out his own civilization’s specifics and peculiarities (the Orthodox and Russian ethnos at the center of the civilization). But, he asserts, just because these civilizations have ontological priority it does not mean that they are fully actualized or present currently.

One thinks of Oswald Spengler’s idea of pseudomorphosis such as Petrine and Bolshevik Russia not being the real Russian civilization. Citing Carl Schmitt and his IR, Dugin says that a civilization is a preconcept which is a “political idea having a supranational scale and not yet fixed in legal codes, but capable under certain circumstances and a concrete balance of powers of acquiring legal status.” Once actualized, the preconcept turns into simply a concept and its spatial actualization is called a large space, sometimes translated as great space. He thus calls the future civilizational based multipolar order “the order of large spaces.”

It should be noted here that for Carl Schmitt the original preconcept he was pushing that was the impetus of creating the idea of large spaces was the idea of the “German Monroe Doctrine,” an idea coined in 1923 by Adolf Hitler himself, so in this respect one of the cruxes of Dugin’s geopolitical ideas is based directly on the thought of Hitler himself.

“Hitler’s idea of a German Monroe Doctrine–which he had first mentioned more than a decade earlier [in 1923]–was picked up by the lawyer Carl Schmitt, who elaborated it into an entire theory of ‘large spaces.’”

— Brendan Simms, Hitler: A Global Biography

Thus for Dugin the basis of the future world order should be epistemological empires which each have their own mission and allow their people to enter into history on their own terms. Dugin envisions this multipolar to be very Schmittian in that the civilizations will affirm the friend-enemy distinction amongst each other but also in that he doesn’t necessarily envision these empires to be traditional empires like the Roman or Islamic empires. While certain places (such as China, and India) more or less fit this definition of one-state, one-empire, other civilizations will be “large spaces” or “Great spaces” akin to America’s “Monroe Doctrine” and will be a various collection of political entities that share larger goals through transnational organizations like the European Union, a Eurasian Union or maybe an African Union.

While Dugin explicitly name drops Schmitt and credits him for his theory of large spaces, it should be noted that Hitler is the true progenitor of the Large Space concept. Schmitt first fleshed out his theory of Large Spaces in a lecture on April 1, 1939 and expanded his ideas in print in various places in the years following. According to Hitler’s intellectual biographer, Brendan Simms, Hitler publicly articulated the idea of a Monroe Doctrine for Germany as early as 1923 in an interview with an American newspaper. Simms goes on to say that Hitler’s idea of a German Monroe Doctrine, which he had first mentioned more than a decade earlier, was picked up by the lawyer Carl Schmitt, who elaborated it into an entire theory. So the entire core of Dugin’s geopolitical theory is rooted in Hitler himself. While Schmitt did expand upon the idea of a “large space”, throughout his writings Dugin conveniently leaves out Schmitt’s intellectual debt to Adolf Hitler and other National Socialists (not Conservative Revolutionary thinkers). Even going back to the 1990s we can see Dugin flirting with National Socialism.

When we read into what Dugin has in mind for his Eurasianism (which is Dugin’s political project he seeks for Russia that falls under the umbrella of the 4PT) we see that it more and more begins to resemble the third position. In the second volume of the Fourth Political Theory he writes:

“The first principle of the philosophy of Eurasianism is erotic patriotism. According to it, the narod [volk] appears as an absolute.”

— Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

This shows that Dugin has no particular problem with making a volk (say, the German volk) at the center of a political ideology. With this in mind, we see that once we truly understand the National Socialist project as being about the German volk – as any cursory glance at official NSDAP writings will tell you – it starts to more and more resemble what Dugin has in mind with the 4PT.

“The Third Reich presented itself in terms of a popular dictatorship, since power was in the hands of a single individual lacking any superior chrism, drawing the principle of its ‘legitimacy’ uniquely from the Volk and its consensus. This is the essence of the so-called Führerprinzip... For Hitler, the Volk alone was the principle of legitimacy. He was established as its direct representative and guide, without intermediaries, and it was to follow him unconditionally. No higher principle existed or was tolerated by him.”

— Julius Evola, Notes on The Third Reich

This resemblance deepens when one examines Dugin’s documented engagements with European fascist and Third-Position thinkers. In the early 1990s, during his formative trips to Europe and the development of National Bolshevism, Dugin drew influence from figures such as the French fascist writers Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, both known for their literary advocacy of a regenerative, anti-liberal European fascism fused with social and national renewal. He also engaged deeply with the Belgian pan-European nationalist Jean Thiriart, whose vision of a unified “Europe from Dublin to Vladivostok” against American and Soviet dominance directly prefigures aspects of Dugin’s Eurasian “large space” and multipolar order. In the early 1990s Dugin personally met and conducted the last major interview with Belgian Rexist leader and Waffen-SS veteran Léon Degrelle, publishing it in his journal. Degrelle’s fusion of radical nationalism with anti-liberal revolutionary zeal clearly left a mark on Dugin’s early thought. Furthermore, Dugin has openly acknowledged ideological proximity to the Otto Strasser, presenting his “left-wing” National Socialist current, emphasizing anti-capitalist economics alongside volkish nationalism — as a more authentic “anti-Hitlerite” strand within the broader Third-Position tradition. These connections reveal that Dugin’s 4PT does not cleanly transcend the 3PT but selectively absorbs and refines its European variants, particularly those emphasizing civilizational particularism, anti-Atlanticist geopolitics, and the narod/volk as an absolute subject.

Dugin’s deep affiliation with the Conservative Revolutionary tradition only reinforces the sense that he is essentially rebranding elements of the Third Position rather than truly transcending it. The Conservative Revolution was itself an outgrowth and intellectual tendency within broader third-way — often representing its more anti-fascist or non-Hitlerian strand that rejected liberalism and Marxism while maintaining a critical distance from the statist and racial dogmas of official National Socialists and Italian Fascists. By positioning 4PT as a continuation of Conservative Revolutionary thought (drawing heavily on figures like Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, Otto Strasser, Ernst von Salomon, Ernst Niekisch, Oswald Spengler, Karl Otto Paetel, and Ernst Jünger), Dugin is not breaking new ground so much as updating and re-labeling longstanding Third-Positionist anti-fascist impulses under a Russian form.

The only defense I have found in his writings that would counter this point would be his remark:

“Nazi orthodoxy blocked the organic development of the ethno-sociological subject area [e.g., the volk] with its racist dogma.”

— Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

Here, Dugin is referring to his work he has done with ethnosociology, wherein, drawing on Boasian anthropology, one of his points is that ethnosociology is not based on race and genetics. Rather the ethnos, from his view, can be defined as a group of people who meet three criteria:

1. Speak the same language

2. Acknowledge a single origin

3. Have complex customs and traditions

While point two is presented as a way to show that race doesn’t matter since it’s only about acknowledging a single origin which is often spiritual or mythical without necessarily having a real single origin, there is no reason, under an ethnosociological understanding, why the acknowledgment of a single origin can’t be based in some scientific claim. In fact, racial and genetic claims are precisely the acknowledgement of “single origin,” and uses science to reify the validity of this origin. The very Greek root of the concept — ethnos (ἔθνος), the ancient term for “nation” or “people” — originally carried strong connotations of shared blood kinship, descent, and common origin by birth, not merely cultural or linguistic agreement. Nations have always been designated in terms of genetics and blood relation just as much as these other things Dugin considers valid. Dugin’s firewall here is more rhetorical than absolute; his own elevation of the Russian narod as ontological center parallels the volk-centric core of 3PT once the caricatured “global Aryan” strawman is removed. However, it soon becomes obvious when you look under the surface Nazis held a similar viewpoint:

“They managed to conquer the world because they never encountered a worthy opponent. … The English were unshakably confident in their belief that Great Britain’s world domination was a sign of divine providence. Those who attempted to resist, or defend themselves against the empire were ruthlessly suppressed, using the occasional low blow when it was necessary.”

— Joseph Goebbels, Children with their Hands Chopped Off speech, June 24, 1939

“If profit is the driving force for production in the democracies—a profit that industrialists, bankers, and corrupt politicians pocket—then the driving force in National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy is the realization by millions of laborers that, in this war, it is they who are being fought against. They realize that the democracies, if they should ever win, would rage with the full capitalist cruelty, that cruelty of which only those are capable whose only god is gold, who know no human sentiments other than their obsession with profit, and who are ready to sacrifice all noble thought to this profit instinct without hesitation. […] This struggle is not an attack on the rights of other nations, but on the arrogance and avarice of a narrow capitalist upper class, one which refuses to acknowledge that the days are over when gold ruled the world, and that, by contrast, a future is dawning when the people will be the determining force in the life of a nation.”

— Adolf Hitler, New Year’s Proclamation to the National Socialists and Party Comrades, January 1, 1941

Even his critiques of “white” biological racism or racial hierarchy in National Socialism echo similar reservations found among the Traditionalist thinkers he admires, such as Julius Evola (who rejected Nazis materialistic biologism in favor of spiritual aristocracy).

“He has no suspicion of the fact that a ‘healthy racism’ has nothing to do with the prejudice of ‘white skin’; it is essentially a matter of a hierarchy of values, according to which we say ‘no’ to Negroes, to all that pertains to them and to all Negro contamination (the Negro races, in this hierarchy, are just above Australian primitives, and according to a well-known morphology correspond mainly to the type of ‘nocturnal’ and ‘telluric’ races, as opposed to the ‘diurnal’ type), while on the other hand, given what the white race has been reduced to in the age of colonial mercantilist expansion, we would certainly be willing to concede superiority over ‘whites’ to the higher Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese types, and to some Arab strains, despite the fact that they do not have white skin.”

— Julius Evola, Negrified America

This is the real beginning point of where Dugin acquired his anti-White views:

“What means to be White? Almost nothing except physical look. No sacred values, no religion, no roots. Just economical success and capitalist greed. There is no more reason to be white. The globalism is created and implemented by Whites.”

“Whites? They are destroyed the world and themselves. To be white means to be nihilist. It is self hatred race. It caused so meany troubles to others and to itself. It lost the right to be something. No arguments to support their existence.”

“I am more white than (almost) all of you. I am indo-European (Aryan) and proud to be it. You are wrong Aryans. Liberal, weak, pervert. You are modern. This kind of whiteness is shame. Real whites are Iranians, Indians, evolians. All the rest is a thrash.”

— Alexander Dugin, various quotations taken from his X/Twitter account

Dugin himself openly acknowledges the deep similarities between his Eurasianism with the Third Position. He explicitly asserts that the transition from the third way to the Fourth Political Theory is merely a single further step in Eurasian Mission, the mirror image of the step the Conservative Revolution itself took by asserting tradition. In this light, Dugin’s 4PT often functions less as a radical break from the Third Political Theory and more as a selective refinement of its underlying anti-liberal, civilizational, and volk-centered Conservative Revolutionary Third Positionism. Nothing Dugin is saying here is new or original, it’s just the Conservative Revolution.

Dugin’s Attacks on Giovanni Gentile

Dugin carries his critique of the 3PT into the philosophical arena by launching a sustained attack on the Hegelian foundations of Italian Fascism, centering his attacks on Giovanni Gentile’s Actual Idealism as a flawed and ultimately incomplete appropriation that supposedly remained mired in liberal residues. In Dugin’s reading, Fascism failed to deliver the full dialectical leap beyond capitalism and civil society into a genuine ethical totality, undermined by its pragmatic compromises with the monarchy, the Church, and bourgeois economic forms that left the state short of Hegel’s concrete realization of freedom and the historical will of the people. He positions the 3PT as coming closer to an authentic Hegel than either liberalism or Marxism, yet still distorting the system at its core. Dugin writes:

“Hegelianism had a significant influence on all three political theories of Western modernity—liberalism (the First Political Theory), communism (the Second Political Theory), and fascism (the Third Political Theory)—but in each of the three it was fundamentally distorted, sometimes to the point of unrecognisability.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

He reinforces this assessment of partial success laced with failure when addressing the 3PT specifically:

“The interpretation of Hegel within the context of the Third Political Theory was much closer to the original than in liberalism or communism. However, even here, Hegel’s system and his understanding of the state and people were fundamentally distorted.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

Dugin is particularly blunt about what he sees as the regime’s structural shortcomings:

“Fascism continued the tradition of Risorgimento, started by liberal-left nationalists, and included a compromise with the monarchy and Catholicism. However, capitalism during the Fascist twenty-year period (Ventennio) was not overcome, nor was civil society transformed into a people (Volk). Hence, after the American occupation, the Italians easily reverted to the liberal paradigm.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

He doubles down on the persistence of liberal economic and individualist elements. Dugin further criticizes the handling of monarchical structures as falling short of Hegel’s rational ideal. And he highlights what he views as juridical vagueness in leadership:

“True power lay in the hands of Benito Mussolini, whose role was not dogmatically and constitutionally clearly defined.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

Yet these charges rest on a selective and historically compressed engagement with Gentile’s Actual Idealism and the concrete achievements of the Fascist state. Gentile radicalized Hegel’s dialectic into a philosophy of the pure act, pensiero pensante — where reality itself unfolds solely through the ongoing, self-creating process of thought, rejecting any frozen or external abstractions. In this ontology the individual has no meaningful existence or liberty apart from the ethical totality of the State, which serves not as an imposed apparatus but as the living, immanent expression of the nation’s spiritual and historical becoming.

“The authority of the State was not a product, but a presupposition. It could not depend on the people, in fact, the people depended on the State… The Fascist state, on the other hand, is a popular state, and, in that sense, a democratic State par excellence.”

— Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism

This was far from abstract speculation; it furnished the philosophical architecture for the Corporate State, the 1927 Carta del Lavoro, and the sweeping nationalizations overseen by the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), which by the late 1930s had brought steel production, shipping, armaments, and major segments of heavy industry under direct public direction, subordinating private capital to the higher synthesis of national purpose. Far from preserving liberal civil society intact as Dugin alleges, these institutions enacted the very dialectical overcoming of bourgeois fragmentation that Dugin insists Fascism never achieved, folding class and sectoral interests into organs of the ethical community. The Leggi Fascistissime constituted a genuine destruction of parliamentary liberalism rather than a half-hearted extension of Risorgimento compromises. Mussolini and Gentile articulated this totalizing vision plainly in the regime’s foundational document:

“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

— Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism

To fault the retention of the monarchy as philosophical failure is itself inconsistent, given that Hegel assigned the monarch a symbolic unifying function within the rational state; Gentile and Mussolini actualized that function through sovereign decisionism and charismatic leadership, with Mussolini embodying the living apex of the ethical will rather than hereditary formality. Dugin’s critique unravels further when one recognizes how Gentile’s system already anticipated and in key respects surpassed the volk-centered and civilizational ideas Dugin later claims as unique to the 4PT. Gentile viewed the nation not as a static biological given but as a dynamic spiritual and historical creation perpetually renewing itself through the State’s ethical praxis — the precise sort of concrete historical actor (whether volk, narod, or ethical totality) that Dugin elsewhere elevates as ontologically prior. The Fascist Corporate State thus functioned in practice as an institutional expression of the narod-as-absolute that Dugin praises in Eurasianism, fusing anti-liberal economics, anti-materialist ontology, and a regenerative national mythos in ways that prefigure his multipolar civilizational blocs.

By attacking Gentile’s Hegelianism while drawing on the same Conservative Revolutionary lineage that dialogued with Fascist thought, Dugin repeats a selective pattern evident across his writings: absorbing the anti-liberal, state-as-ethical-subject core of Third Position philosophy while distancing 4PT through overstated claims of modernism. The deeper irony is that Dugin’s own Heideggerian turn toward plural Daseins and civilizational ontology mirrors the “modernist” and Fascist emphasis on the nation as a spiritual organism always in fieri, never trapped in liberal abstractions. This engagement only reinforces the central observation: Dugin’s 4PT operates less as a radical break from the 3PT and more as a selective Eurasianist refinement of its underlying anti-liberal, civilizational, and volk-centered impulses — quietly incorporating the concrete historical actor (whether the German volk, the Italian Ethical State, or the Russian narod) while rhetorically distancing itself from the very traditions that supplied its foundational myth.

“It is certain that in things, in history, understood as something external and independent of us, there is neither meaning nor law; but it is always we who see a history with a meaning, with a law according to which we think it moves; it is always we, in short, who shape history and the law that governs it.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

The 4PT Is Conservative Revolutionary 3PT

What makes Dugin’s assault on the 3PT particularly revealing is how deeply it draws from the same third-way traditionalist critique pioneered by Julius Evola, who dismissed official Fascism and Nazism as insufficiently transcendent and overly modernist, statist, and contaminated by biological materialism and totalitarian centralization. Evola instead championed a radical aristocratic and initiatic path as a superior alternative, advocating an organic, differentiated corporatism rooted in Tradition that allowed zones of partial autonomy rather than the total regimentation of the Fascist state.

“The traditional state is organic, but not totalitarian. It is differentiated and articulated, and admits zones of partial autonomy. It coordinates forces and causes them to converge without suffocating them or leveling them out.”

— Julius Evola, Fascism Viewed From The Right

Dugin’s depiction of Fascism as a failed revolution that never escaped modernity and its capitalist residues mirrors Evola’s own diagnosis. Yet this is no isolated borrowing. Dugin’s real rejection of the 3PT in terms of its corporate state and totalitarian nature is, at bottom, simply an assertion of the longstanding Conservative Revolutionary tendency toward decentralization within the corporate state — a key point of contention between Hitlerism and Strasserism. Otto Strasser leveled this exact criticism against the Fascist model:

“Fascism has not found its way between capital and labor. It hasn’t even searched for it, it limits itself to containing social struggles by maintaining the all powerlessness of capital over labor. Fascism is not the overcoming of capitalism. On the contrary, until now in any case, it has maintained the capitalist system in its power…”

— Otto Strasser quoted in Hitler vs Strasser: The Historic Debate of May 21st and 22nd 1930

Dugin himself has long framed fascism in similar terms, rejecting the “extremely right-wing” label in favor of a deeper Conservative Revolutionary synthesis:

“This phenomenon is much more precisely characterized with the paradoxical formula ‘Conservative Revolution.’ It is a combination of a ‘right-wing’ cultural-political orientation—traditionalism, faithfulness to the soil, roots, national ethics—with a ‘left-wing’ economic program—social justice, limitation to the market forces, deliverance from ‘credit slavery,’ prohibition of stock market speculation, monopolies and trusts, and primacy of honest work.”

— Alexander Dugin, Fascism – Borderless and Red

Dugin has always maintained a certain vagueness about the precise institutional form his own post-liberal economic order would take under the 4PT. However, scattered statements across his work allude to something resembling guild socialism, feudal socialism, or distributism as the proper antidote to modernist centralization and liberal atomization (this is just Strasserism).

“We must return to the land, to the community, for no one can survive alone. Only a communal economy, a community of people who produce their goods, can protect themselves from thieves and bandits. So we have to create self-sufficient communities on the land with protection, with production.”

— Alexander Dugin quoted in Alexandre Douguind: Philosophie politique: Euro-Synergies (http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2026/05/06/alexandre-douguine-philosophie-politique.html)

Even setting aside those hints, when we examine his political history with National Bolshevism, itself a clear outgrowth of the Conservative Revolutionary tendency — we already have a clear picture of what this corporate state would look like in practice. National Bolshevik corporatism, as developed in the Russian National Bolshevik party’s 1994 Programme, is a genuine organic economic system that structures the national economy around tiered, functional forms of ownership serving the strength and welfare of the nation rather than private profit or class conflict. It rejects both liberal capitalism and crony big-business dominance, establishing “Russian Socialism” through progressive nationalization: small enterprises (up to 5 workers) can remain private, medium ones become collective, larger regional, and the biggest fully state-owned. The programme demanded an “economic dictatorship” in transition, full autarky, state monopoly on strategic exports, state ownership of land, fixed prices on essentials, and strong social protections for workers.

This model builds on the foundational economic ideas of earlier National Bolshevik thinkers. The Russian Conservative Revolutionary National Bolshevik, Nikolai Ustryalov advocated harnessing Bolshevik centralized planning and state-directed economy for Russian national revival and imperial power, transforming revolutionary structures into tools of national greatness. Ernst Niekisch, in his Prussian Bolshevism, pushed for radical economic mobilization, planned economy inspired by Soviet achievements like the Five-Year Plans, and the complete sacrifice of the existing liberal economic order if needed for national independence. Like Mussolini’s Corporate State, it organizes economic life into coordinated bodies subordinated to national sovereignty and collective justice, infused with Bolshevik militancy. Far from neo-liberal state-corporate fusion, it treats the economy as an integrated national organism where scaled ownership and production serve national solidarity and power.

Dugin’s 4PT therefore functions as a reworking of longstanding Traditionalist third-way impulses — the very currents that have defined the anti-fascist or non-totalitarian strands within the broader Conservative Revolutionary tradition. By positioning 4PT as a continuation of that tradition, Dugin aligns with their shared tendency to reject liberalism and Marxism while maintaining critical distance from the more concrete statist, racial, and mass-political expressions of official fascism. These thinkers often embodied an anti-fascist edge within the third-way milieu, prioritizing spiritual depth and anti-capitalist volkish principles over the perceived “bourgeois accommodations” and totalitarian rigidities of Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany. In this light, Dugin’s project emerges not as a genuine transcendence but as an updated vessel for these longstanding Conservative Revolutionary energies, rebranded under a Russian coat of paint.

“It is growing crystal-clear that National Bolshevism is not only a metaphysical verity, but has also been vindicated by its founders’ absolute historical prescience. The only political discourse of the 1920s and 30s that has maintained relevance to this day is to be found in the texts of the Russian Eurasianists and the German ‘Left’ Revolutionary Conservatives. National Bolshevism is the last refuge of the ‘enemies of the open society’ if these latter wish not to insist upon their obsolete, historically inadequate, and utterly ineffective doctrines. If ‘far-leftists’ refuse to be mere appendages of an opportunistic and prostitute social-democracy, if ‘far-rightists’ want to avoid serving as a breeding ground for the extremist wing of the liberal repression apparatus... — they are left with only one way out: National Bolshevism.”

— Alexander Dugin, Templars of The Proletariat

Conclusions

In the end, Alexander Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory reveals itself less as a bold philosophical breakthrough than as a sophisticated rebranding of longstanding Conservative Revolutionary ideas, repackaged for Eurasianist imperialism. Eurasianism stands in direct continuity with German imperial theory: the Russian continuation of the Dreikaiserbund, the logical extension of a Moscow-Berlin Axis against Anglo-liberalism, and Dugin has openly declared himself an heir of German Conservative Revolutionary thought. Far from transcending the Third Political Theory, Dugin has absorbed its anti-liberal core, its emphasis on the volk/civilizational subject as the concrete actor in history, its economic “Russian socialism” (much like German socialism), its geopolitics of large spaces, and its organicist vision of the nation as a spiritual organism in fieri. What he discards are precisely the elements that proved most effective in practice: the totalitarianism, centralization, and unapologetic particularism of actual existing 3PT.

This selective amnesia is not intellectual innovation; it is propaganda. Dugin builds directly upon the ideas of his predecessors — from the Conservative Revolutionary National Bolsheviks like Niekisch to the unacknowledged debts owed to Hitler’s 1923 German Monroe Doctrine, while rhetorically distancing himself through caricatures of “globalist” racism and modernist excess. The East German case merely illustrates the pattern on a smaller scale: behind the “anti-fascist” facade, the DDR integrated former Wehrmacht generals into its military and state apparatus and practiced “socialism with German characteristics” that delivered the highest living standards in the Soviet bloc. The same German strategic DNA Dugin publicly disavows simply continued under a red flag. On the grander Eurasian canvas, he does exactly the same thing, only now tailored for the Russian narod.

His influence stems not primarily from the intrinsic truth or originality of 4PT, but from its utility to the Russian state. It furnishes Putin’s government with a pseudo-ideological justification for its conservative-revolutionary posture: a civilizational defense against Western decadence that channels post-Soviet trauma and the immense sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War into a unifying national myth. In this sense, 4PT functions as psychic cement for Russian cohesion; a necessary narrative for a people scarred by the 20th century, not because it represents some deeper truth, but because it sustains opposition to the Atlanticist order.

The deeper disgust lies here: Dugin condemns Fascism and National Socialism as demonic while advancing a parallel project tailored for the Russian narod. He weaponizes modernist Heideggerian pluralism and civilizational ontology against the very traditions that first articulated them in political form. As Giovanni Gentile understood, history has no external laws independent of us — it is we who shape it through our collective will. Dugin knows this as well as any fascist thinker, yet chooses obfuscation over honesty. True anti-liberalism deserves better than this selective amnesia.

Actual existing fascism remains the more coherent and historically grounded path. They never required Evola’s mythical “traditional” order that “never existed”; they required power, discipline, and the unapologetic particularism that Dugin keeps for Russia while denying it to others. Only in what Roger Griffin has called the palingenetic core of generic fascism do we find a genuine alternative to liberal modernity — one that actually held power and built something that worked. Those seeking to move beyond the anti-fascist caricatures of this 3PT would do well to return to the original sources rather than accept Dugin’s convenient rebranding.